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. 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. Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World
War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. 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? 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.
In The Bomber Mafia Gladwell asks Was it worth it?” Things might have gone differently had
LeMay’s predecessor General Haywood Hansell remained in charge. 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. The Bomber Mafia
is a riveting tale of persistence innovation and the incalculable wages of war.
