THE BOMBER MAFIA

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.