The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

This chapter is about the development of napalm in the labs of Harvard University. A group of scientists and industrial leaders were tasked by the National Defense Research Committee, which advised the government on creating new weapons, to investigate “better ways to burn things down” (147). The scientists were chemistry professors, and at Harvard, Louis Fieser and E. B. Hershberg worked on incendiary devices. They learned that the DuPont Company was having trouble with an additive used in their paint, called divinylacetylene, which kept catching fire. From experiments with that, the two professors discovered that a sticky gel was the best kind of substance for sustained burning, as it clung to surfaces and maintained its consistency. They tested various gelled substances and eventually found that a mixture of aluminum naphthenate and aluminum palmitate worked best. This was napalm: naphthenate plus palmitate.

Next, they had to convince the military leaders that napalm was viable to use in bombs. In the summer of 1943, they built meticulous models of both Japanese- and German-style neighborhoods, using the appropriate materials for each, in order to closely approximate real-world conditions. Then they had the military bomb the neighborhoods in a Utah desert, using different substances. Each time, they evaluated and scored the damage, rebuilt the models, and bombed them again. The clear winner in terms of destruction was the bomb with napalm.

Gladwell imagines how the members of the Bomber Mafia reacted to the napalm demonstration. It was the exact opposite of everything they stood for. Their government was developing an incendiary that would make bombing more devastating and kill untold numbers of civilians rather than focusing on perfecting the ways to destroy only military targets. On the other hand, their method, precision bombing, was failing. Later, in the fall of 1944, when Hansell’s bombing runs on Japan return one after the other with scant results, Gladwell surmises that Hansell had to be at least a little tempted to use napalm and area bombing. However, he kept the faith. Even when given a direct order by top brass to use napalm on the city of Nagoya, he could only bring himself to stage a trial run and do minimal damage. Next thing he knew, his commanding officer had come to relieve him of his command and turn it over to Curtis LeMay.

LeMay initially took the same approach that Hansell did, trying to take out individual targets in Japan. Maybe it was just Hansell who couldn’t do it. LeMay, however, got the same paltry results and had to think of something else. Facing the same impediments as Hansell, he found workarounds one by one. The jet stream was too strong, so he decided to go in low, underneath it, contrary to Bomber Mafia doctrine. The clouds were still a problem, so he chose to fly even lower—between 5,000 and 9,000 feet. This would make the bombers vulnerable to attack both from the ground and from fighter planes, so he changed the time of attack from day to night. That, however, rendered the bombsights useless, so he chose to use incendiaries: napalm. In fact, in order to carry as much napalm as possible, he had all the defensive guns removed from the bombers, except the one in the tail, to free up weight for the extra napalm. With this new approach, his crew thought they were being sent on a suicide mission.

LeMay’s reputation is that of being cold-blooded and ruthless, always with a calm demeanor. However, Gladwell discusses his other side, of which there were glimpses now and again. LeMay admits to moments of “uneasiness” when he first led his crew in Germany straight-on toward their targets, trying to improve accuracy, rather than evading enemy fire. Gladwell argues that this could have meant LeMay was terrified, but he knew better than to show that in front of his crew. He also rode them hard to prepare them well, more so than other commanders. This could be seen as caring a great deal for them, though. Gladwell quotes a subordinate of LeMay’s who wrote that the general had “a heart that revolted at the idea of what lack of discipline and training would mean to his young crews” (176). As for his approach to warfare, LeMay’s reasoning was that the ends justified the means. If he had to use destructive, violent weapons that killed civilians, it would mean a quicker end to the war, which ultimately is the best outcome and saves lives.

On March 9, 1945, LeMay’s first wholesale attack on Tokyo began using his new methods. It was called Operation Meetinghouse and comprised 300 bombers in total. The first bombers arrived in Tokyo at midnight, and for the next three hours, the planes dropped 1,665 tons of napalm on the city. The result was devastating. Just as military planners had predicted, the napalm and gasoline bombs created “a conflagration of such intensity that it would create and sustain its own wind system” (184). For 16 square miles, everything burned to the ground. There was nowhere for residents to run to escape the fires, and on that one night up to 100,000 people died. 

The toll of LeMay’s bombing campaigns on Japan was devastating, incinerating the better part of many cities—and the people in them. He kept up his firebombing even after the two atomic bomb attacks, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, until the very day of Japan’s surrender. Gladwell writes, “LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done” (188).

Once, in China, LeMay had met with a general a generation older than he who had served in Asia for decades. Joseph Stilwell was lean and rugged and brooked no nonsense; his nickname was “Vinegar Joe.” LeMay tried to explain to Stilwell what the B-29 bombers meant in terms of the nature of warfare, but as an old Army man, Stilwell had trouble imagining that a plane could have such influence. It wasn’t until he visited Yokohama after Japan had surrendered that he fully understood what LeMay had told him. LeMay had hit Yokohama with 2,570 tons of napalm a few months earlier, leaving his usual trail of destruction and death.

Even Secretary of War Henry Stimson, leading the war effort in Washington, seemed a bit oblivious to LeMay’s tactics and deeds. When LeMay firebombed Tokyo a second time, Stimson appeared shocked at the results—even though he was fully aware of what had happened the first time. Gladwell writes that it’s possible he was just like Stilwell in that “[w]hat LeMay was doing that summer was simply outside his imagination” (193). What’s most striking is that there was no debate about the ethics of waging such bombing campaigns. LeMay seems to have improvised it on his own, with little input from higher up. This contrasts sharply with the decision to use the atomic bomb, the ethics of which was debated at the highest level of government.

In the end, judging LeMay for his methods is complicated. A long-standing argument has been that his brutal approach actually saved lives. Together with the atomic bomb attacks, the firebombing campaign hastened the end of the war and avoided the planned amphibious landing and ground war on the Japanese islands. Most estimates show that such an invasion would have led to hundreds of thousands of deaths on both sides. What’s more, a naval blockade of Japan by the US Navy would likely have resulted in widespread food shortages and starvation in the winter of 1946. Gladwell quotes a historian who writes that the August surrender allowed General Douglas MacArthur, Allied commander in the Pacific and overseer of the occupation of Japan, to bring in plenty of food that fall to feed the Japanese that winter.

In the brief Conclusion, Gladwell discusses an evening he spent with several Air Force generals while writing this book. They explained how precise bombing has become over the past several decades, to the point that today a bomb can accurately take out one small part of a single house. The modern equivalent of the B-29 bomber, the B-2 “stealth” bomber, can even evade all detection, coming in unannounced at a high altitude and taking out a small target with precision. There’s no longer any need to use LeMay’s blunt approach to ensure the target is hit. That means, Gladwell writes, “Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war” (206).