The Bomber Mafia | METROMEDIA

In The Bomber Mafia, Malcolm Gladwell combines the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a group of brothers in central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniac Harvard chemists to explore 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 a sideshow. But a small group of idealistic strategists, the “Bomber Mafia,” wondered: What if precision bombing could cripple the enemy and make war far less deadly?

By 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 cost Japan thousands of civilian lives but may have saved even more by averting a planned American invasion. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell asks, “Was it worth it?”