THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'A parable written for the age of technological disruption . . .
brilliantly told' Sunday TimesThe international bestselling author returns with an exploration
of one of the grandest obsessions of the twentieth century 'The Bomber Mafia is a case study in
how dreams go awry. When some shiny new idea drops from the heavens it does not land softly in
our laps. It lands hard on the ground and shatters.' In the years before the Second World War
in a sleepy air force base in central Alabama a small group of renegade pilots put forth a
radical idea. What if we made bombing so accurate that wars could be fought entirely from the
air? What if we could make the brutal clashes between armies on the ground a thing of the past?
This book tells the story of what happened when that dream was put to the test. The Bomber
Mafia follows the stories of a reclusive Dutch genius and his homemade computer Winston
Churchill's forbidding best friend a team of pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard a brilliant
pilot who sang vaudeville tunes to his crew and the bomber commander Curtis Emerson LeMay
who would order the bloodiest attack of the Second World War. In this tale of innovation and
obsession Gladwell asks: what happens when technology and best intentions collide in the heat
of war? And what is the price of progress?
