The Bomber Mafia: Morals vs Expediency

Commutes suck. We are blessed with 24 hours in a day, and spending one of them driving back and forth from a place we likely don’t want to be in the first place is a drag. Luckily, there are ways to fill that time. Podcasts have served that role for me, and that has led to dabbling in audiobooks. For those that know me and my reading habits, this is almost blasphemous. But the pull to amuse myself during the soul-crushing slouching from domicile to work and back requires sacrifice. That leads me to The Bomber Mafia, an audiobook by Malcolm Gladwell.

The Bomber Mafia is two things: designed to be listened to rather than read, and a tale about morals vs expediency in war. It’s also fantastic, so apparently it’s three things. Even if you have no interest in World War Two, the story Gladwell weaves is relatable to anyone who admires larger than life characters. Much of the book centers around two generals in the Army Air Corps, Haywood Hansell and Curtis LeMay. Hansell was the dreaming high-priest of precision bombing, while LeMay was the grounded realist of 1940s capabilities. Both had their chance to prove their way of thinking, and both left tremendous impacts on the United States Air Force.

While better historians than me have argued over the efficacy of LeMay’s tactics, it’s obvious that Hansell’s were a failure. High-altitutude precision bombing just couldn’t work with 1940s technology. The moral philosophy behind it, however, is timeless. If you can drop a single bomb on a single target and destroy a capability without wiping out the city block around it, that should always be your choice. LeMay saw the city block as a bonus.

I left the book with two thoughts (ok, maybe three). First, that it’s amazing how we as human beings can rationalize away our morality. The Americans started WW2 aghast at British carpet bombing campaigns, then went on to do far worse to Japan and later in the Korean War. It wasn’t an overnight shift, but a gradual one until firebombing civilian targets became the norm. Little choices result in seismic consequences in all our lives, even if death isn’t on the line.

Second, LeMay is one of the most fascinating historical figures I’ve studied. My opinion on him has shifted several times. He is my class exemplar from the Air Force Academy, and I voted for him proudly based on his leadership. Later, I turned to thinking he was a monster as I learned more about the firebombing campaigns against Japan. This has vacilated back and forth over the years as I try to balance the leader with the monster.

The Bomber Mafia doesn’t definitively answer the question, but I don’t think any of us can. The firebombing campaigns were objectively horrendous, but his leadership and brilliant tactical developments of bomber utilization saved thousands of Airmen and likely brought the war to a close sooner than it otherwise would have. How does one measure lives taken against potential lives saved? It’s an impossible task, and one best left to the Lord.

The third thing I took away was a story about LeMay told in the book. LeMay had a tremendous amount of accomplishments throughout his life, enough for a dozen men. Yet the mural he chose to have in his foyer was of the botched Schweinfurt-Regensburg Raid in WW2. Planned by Hansell, LeMay was the lead for the diversionary portion designed to draw off German defenders. It didn’t work, and hundreds of Airmen died for no gain. When asked about why he had that displayed, his response was that he had lost a lot of good boys that day.

Those are the words of a leader, not a monster. But just because you’re a leader doesn’t mean you aren’t capable of doing monstrous things.