A dream. A temptation. The longest night of the Second World War — Malcolm Gladwell's gripping account of the biggest moral dilemma in the history of air power.
In the 1930s, a small band of renegade pilots at an air base in Alabama — nicknamed the “Bomber Mafia” — nursed a radical dream: what if precision bombing could make war itself almost bloodless? What if you could cripple an enemy by dropping a bomb down a smokestack, destroying factories without touching the people around them?
Then the Second World War came, and the dream collided with reality — with clouds, wind, human error, and the terrible mathematics of the Pacific. In the story of General Haywood Hansell, the true believer, and General Curtis LeMay, the pragmatist who replaced him, Gladwell traces how the most idealistic idea in military history ended in the firebombing of Tokyo — the deadliest single night of the war — and asks the question that still haunts every conflict since: what price progress? What cost victory?
Told with Gladwell's trademark storytelling — obsessive characters, Dutch chemists inventing napalm, proximity fuzes and moral reckonings — The Bomber Mafia reads like a thriller and argues like a philosophy seminar.
About the author
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of seven New York Times bestsellers, including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers and Talking to Strangers, and the host of the Revisionist History podcast — where this book began.
Perfect for readers of
Sapiens, Dan Wang's Breakneck, military history that argues about ideas — and every Gladwell fan who hasn't met his most cinematic book.
