A virtual book launch event
In conversation with Jake Tapper, anchor and chief Washington correspondant for CNN.
A Dutch genius with a homemade computer, a British psychopath, pyromaniacal Harvard chemists, daredevil pilots and a brutally pragmatic general.
Their synergy fostered the deadliest night of World War II - and left us with harrowing moral dilemmas about how technology and best intentions collide in the heat of war.
No one is better poised to unravel that night, the bombing of Tokyo, or its implications, than Malcolm Gladwell, who uses his podcast, Revisionist History, to examine the past and ask whether we got it right. He will join us for the launch of his new book, The Bomber Mafia.
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 had a different view. This “Bomber Mafia” asked: What if precision bombing could, just by taking out critical choke points—industrial or transportation hubs—cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?
In his podcast, Revisionist History, Gladwell reexamines moments from the past and asks whether we got it right the first time. In The Bomber Mafia, he steps back from the bombing of Tokyo on the deadliest night of the war and asks, “Was it worth it?” The attack was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost tens of thousands of civilian lives, but may have spared more by averting a planned US invasion.
Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. As a key member of the Bomber Mafia, Hansell believed in precision bombing, but his theories had been foiled by bad weather, enemy jet fighters, and human error. 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.
The author of five New York Times bestsellers that have sold over 20 million copies worldwide, Gladwell has been selected as one TIME’s 100 Most Influential People and one of Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers.
In conversation with Jake Tapper, anchor and chief Washington correspondant for CNN and author of The Devil May Dance to be published by Little, Brown on May 11, 2021.
Image Credit: Celeste Sloman