We crawled together through the remnants of an old World War II fortification. My father once took me and my brothers to a beach overlooking the English Channel. When my mother heard about my story, she admonished me: someone who had lived through the war might not enjoy a plotline about Hitler's return. I sent it to my grandmother, the one in Kent who'd had the unexploded bomb in her back garden. The first short story I wrote as a kid was about the idea that Hitler was actually still alive and coming for England again. If you went to London, you could still tell where the bombs had landed-wherever a hideous brutalist building had sprouted up on some centuries-old block.īBC Radio was always on in our house, and in those days, it seemed like every second interview was with an old general or paratrooper or prisoner of war. Reminders of what the country had gone through were still everywhere. We were living in England then, in Southampton. No, that an unexploded German bomb in your backyard would be the most extraordinary experience imaginable for a five-year-old was my interpretation when my father told me the story of the bomb, when I was five years old. Rather, it was like Latin, or French-something one could study and understand but never fully master. And an Englishman, which is to say that the language of emotion was not his first language. Not that my father described it that way. It just sat there, half buried in the ground-and I think it fair to say that if you were a five-year-old boy with an interest in things mechanical, a German bomb sitting unexploded in your backyard would have been just about the most extraordinary experience imaginable. One day, a stray bomb landed in my grandparents' back garden. It was not uncommon, in those years, that if a bomber missed its target or had bombs left over, it would simply drop them anywhere on the return trip. Kent was called Bomb Alley by the British, because it was the English county that German warplanes would fly over on their way to London. My father was born in 1934, which meant he was five when the Second World War broke out. This was in England, in Kent, a few miles south and east of London. Then, in the small hours of the morning, heading back to Germany. Read ExcerptĪs a little boy, lying in his bed, my father would hear the planes overhead. The Bomber Mafia is a riveting tale of persistence, innovation, and the incalculable wages of war. Hansell believed in precision bombing, but when he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II. Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?” In contrast, the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared even more by averting a planned US invasion. But a small band of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” asked: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal? Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell weaves together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard to examine one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history. Dive into this “truly compelling” ( Good Morning America) New York Times bestseller that explores how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war-from the creator and host of the podcast Revisionist History.
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