The Bomber Mafia
Malcolm Gladwell 2021
West Slope Library 940.5449 GLADWELL
- xii Roberta Wohlstetter Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision 1962
- PSU Basement D767.92.W6 (perhaps also ebook)
- xiii ... drawn to obsessives. I like them. ...
003 worlds largest airport 004 Tinian North Field, 4 8500 foot runways 005 21st Bomber Command B29s
008 Curtis LeMay replaces Haywood Hansell
013 Carl Norden Born Holland, Retired Switzerland
014 Stephen L. McFarland Books
The Legendary Norden Bombsight Albert L. Pardini 1999
- 016 Norden cranky perfectionist
019 Donald Wilson What if we just fought wars from the air?
025 bombsight officially Mark XV, 55 lb analog computer on a gyroscope-stabilized platform
026 six month training films
- 033 Air Corps Tactical School Langley Virginia - stables, pilots expected to learn how to ride
- 034 "the Bomber Mafia" not complement, outcasts
- 037 tenets "The Bomber Will Always Get Through" "Attack by Daylight" "Accurate Bombsight" "30Kft, above AA"
042 Air Force Academy Cadet Chapel - plastic over leaky glass
046 1936 Pittsburgh Flood, propeller spring factory flooded, no variable pitch propellers, aircraft industry halted
- 049 bomb weakest links, such as New York aqueduct and electric grid - 17 bombs would disable New York City
051 Air War Plans Division AWPD-1 document
054 Ira Eaker Precision daylight bombing vs British night civilian bombing
- 059 Eaker convinces Churchill to try daylight bombing
- 062 German bombing, British leadership expected panic, 43K killed, 1M buildings damaged or destroyed, population shrugged it off
064 Churchill advisor Frederick Lindemann believer in Dehousing, disbeliever in V-2
- KL note Lindemann also eugenicist, hated working class, homosexuals, and blacks
- KL would WW2 be over sooner without Lindemann misdirecting British war efforts?
082 1943 Regensburg-Schweinfurt ball bearings
- 088 flashback 377 rounds to take down a bomber, hence fly straight in so bombardiers can aim
092 flashback 1937 Air corps test of bombing technique, LeMay scores
097 LeMay practices blind takeoffs in fog
099 LeMay departs (in fog) on time, Schweinfurt mission launches hours late, after German fighters return to the air
- 101 230 bombers, 2000 bombs, eighty hits
- 102 mass produced Norden bombsight performed poorly
- 104 Kugelfischer ball bearing only partly undamaged, up and running in weeks, ball bearing total production reduced only 30%, costing Allies sixty planes and 552 airmen
- 106 second raid similar poor results 108 "Home of the 367th Clay Pigeon Air Force"
110 Leon Festinger When Prophecy Fails 259p 1955 book online
114 Hansell delusional LeMay "swivel-chair target analysts 116 LeMay house entryway, murals of Regensburg and Schweinfurt
- 128 1944 Nov 17 first attempt ... extra fuel, overweight, headwind needed, then typhoon, then nothing for a week
- 130 had they launched, the typhoon would have prevented a return
132 LeMay from Kolkata to refuel at Chengdu to southern tip of Japan, 700 planes lost
- 133 worse, the fuel at Chengdu brought by air, 12 gallons to deliver one gallon
- 134 India 1944 June 13, 92 B-29s launched, 7 planes and 55 men lost, 47 arrived, 15 saw target, one bomb delivered
- 138 Saipan 1944 Dec 140 mph jet stream winds
146 National Defense Research Committee NDRC 1939 incendiary bombs
148 Dupont divinylacetylene, Harvard's Louis Fieser investigates
153 incendiary gels, rubber and gasoline better, aluminum napfthenate plus aluminum palmitate -> napalm
160 model villages, 24 residences with 2 in tatami mats and shoji sliding screens, M69 bomblet in groups of 38
- 162 100% in violation of "bomber mafia" principles
165 Historian Stephen L. McFarland says Hansell was not a combat officer, not a great leader.
166 commanded to napalm Nagoya, only 3 acres, Norstat replaced LeMay for Hansell, sent home to run Arizona training school
- 167 footnote: Hansell final mission Jan 29 1945, 62 B-29s destroy entire Kawasaki factory, 90% production loss, no B-29s lost.
169 LeMay dines with Nimitz, palatial Navy dinner; Nimitz dines with LeMay, C rations in Quonset hut. "I get your point", Nimitz sends more construction materials
- 171 come in under clouds and jet stream, at night, no precision, hence napalm
- 172 only tail gunner, leave ammunition and other gunners behind
179 LeMay: best way of minimizing it (killing) is getting the war over as quick as possible
- 180 Operation Meetinghouse 1945 March 9 night attack on Tokyo
- 182 12 sq. mi. central Tokyo . p184 1665 tonnes of napalm, everything burned . p185 smell of burning flesh permeates aircraft
- 187 67 cities over half a year
191 Stilwell: "LeMay ... it finally dawned on me what you were talking about ... and it didn't dawn on me until I saw Yokohama."
194 Truman fretted about atomic bombs, young (38yo) field commander LeMay improvised without oversight
- 195 March to August surrender ~5 months
196 Historian Conrad Crane" told by Japanese historian "...we must thank you ... we surrendered in August"
197 by surrendering in August, MacArthur's imported food avoided starvation in the winter of 1945
197 1964 LeMay awarded https://en.wikipedia.org/Order_of_the_Rising_Sun
199 planned landings 1945 November, expected cost 500K American soldiers
201 LeMay "bomb them back into the Stone Age" invented by biographer Warren Kozak, LeMay didn't read that far
- 202 Air House at Fort Meyer 204 Afghanistan precision guided bombs take out 3 attackers twenty meters around US position
- 205 target single chimney and one individual in a room below
206 "High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.