Bomber Mafia Quotes

All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.

The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.

Illegitimi non carborundum. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.

I'm drawn again and again to obsessives. I like them. I like the idea that someone could push away all the concerns and details that make up everyday life and just zero in on one thing - the thing that fits the contours of his or her imagination. Obsessives lead us astray sometimes. Can't see the bigger picture. Serve not just the world's but also their own narrow interests. But I don't think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.

Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.

I define a moral action as one that brings advantage to my friends.

We can admire Curtis LeMay, respect him, and try to understand his choices. But Hansell is the one we give our hearts to. Why? Because I think he provides us with a model of what it means to be moral in our modern world. We live in an era when new tools and technologies and innovations emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose.

The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don’t just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love. You don’t need to remember your child’s emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don’t have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people’s minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies—that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person’s brain is gone.

LeMay always said that the atomic bombs were superfluous. The real work had already been done.

What happens to true believers when their convictions are confronted by reality?

Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.

the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.

Somewhere in retirement, Haywood Hansell saw that announcement in the newspaper, and I’m sure he wondered why he didn’t get an award as well for the effort he put toward fighting a war with as few civilian casualties as possible. But we don’t give prizes to people who fail at their given tasks, no matter how noble their intentions, do we? To the victor go the spoils.

The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound

We would all be sitting in our deck chairs in the backyard, and we would look up, and all of a sudden, the Air House—or maybe even some specific part of the Air House—would be gone. Poof. High-altitude precision bombing. Curtis LeMay won the battle. Haywood Hansell won the war.

To the extent that the war planners back in Washington conceived of a firebombing campaign, they thought of hitting six Japanese cities, not sixty-seven. By July, LeMay was bombing minor Japanese cities that had no strategically important industry at all—just people, living in tinderboxes.

The more you invest in a set of beliefs - the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction - the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don't give up. You double down. As Festinger recalled in an oral history, "One of the things we expected would happen would be that, after the disconfirmation of this prediction...they would...have to discard their belief, but to the extent that they were committed to it, this would be difficult to do.

What did Festinger make of all this? The more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.

For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.

If you want an effective incendiary, something that is sticky is much more effective than something that is not sticky, because it actually adheres to whatever it is transferring its radiation energy into. And that’s why napalm is so effective. If the jelled material is too soft or too weak, then it won’t actually deliver a very large amount of radiation to whatever it’s sticking to. You can think of a Molotov cocktail that’s filled up with gasoline, exploding and delivering gasoline. It can burn somebody or something quite terribly, but the fire will go out relatively quickly. Whereas by contrast, if napalm is thrown on something, it will stick to it.

more you invest in a set of beliefs—the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction—the more resistant you will be to evidence that suggests that you are mistaken. You don’t give up. You double down.

Proficimus more irretenti:

We live in an era when new tools and technologies emerge every day. But the only way those new technologies serve some higher purpose is if a dedicated band of believers insists that they be used to that purpose. That's what the Bomber Mafia tried to do even if their careful plans were lost in the clouds over Eurpoe and blown sidways of the skies of Japan. They persisted, even in the face of technology’s inevitable misdirection, even when abandoning their dream offered a quicker path to victory, even when Satan offered them all the world if only they would renounce their faith. Without persistence, principles are meaningless. Because one day your dream may come true. And if you cannot keep that dream alive in the interim, then who are you?

Mission with LeMay,

The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight.

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision,

That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself. Donald

The plan was okay—basically okay—but here we are trying to find something to win the war the easy way, and there ain’t no such animal.

Yet he had to see, with his own eyes, what airpower did to Yokohama to understand LeMay, because what LeMay had been talking about in their conversation in China was outside the old general’s imagination. He had been taught back at West Point that soldiers fought soldiers and armies fought armies. A warrior of Stilwell’s generation was slow to understand that you could do this, as an American Army officer, if you wanted: you could take out entire cities. And then more. One after another.

I’d rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something—even if it’s wrong he did something—than have somebody who’d vacillate and do nothing.

The area-bombing advocates had this cleverly deceptive word they used to describe the effect of their bombing: dehousing. As if you could destroy a house without disturbing its occupants. But if my house is gone, doesn’t that make me more dependent on my government, not more inclined to turn on my government?

[Haywood Hansell, a légierő tábornoka] Életében első helyen a repülés, másodikon a lovaspóló állt, és messze mögöttük harmadikként a család. Azt beszélik, egyszer a házassága elején gyereksírást hallott, és megkérdezte a feleségét: - Ez meg mi a fene? - A fiad - felelte az asszony.

There’s an expectation that because of this new invention, things will get better, more efficient, safer, richer, faster. Which they do, in some respects. But then things also, invariably, go sideways. At one moment, social media is being hailed as something that will allow ordinary citizens to upend tyranny. And then in the next moment, social media is feared as the platform that will allow citizens to tyrannize one another. The automobile was supposed to bring freedom and mobility, which it did for a while. But then millions of people found themselves living miles from their workplaces, trapped in endless traffic jams on epic commutes. How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?

The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters.

The pilots had encountered what would come to be known as the jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air that circles the globe in the upper atmosphere, starting at around twenty thousand feet. A Japanese scientist named Wasaburo Ooishi had actually discovered the jet stream in the 1920s in a series of groundbreaking experiments.

This is how LeMay described flying the Hump. And LeMay never complained about anything. It was a grueling hell…The mountains were a veritable smorgasbord of meteorological treachery—violent downdrafts, high winds and sudden snowstorms—all served up in temperatures 20 degrees below zero. As if they needed any reminding, the crews could frequently glimpse the 29,028-foot peak of Mount Everest thrusting up through the clouds just 150 miles from their flight path.

He was indeed lacking in the bond of human sympathy for every chance person who was not brought into a personal relationship

There is a set of moral problems that can be resolved only with the application of conscience and will. Those are the hardest kinds of problems. But there are other problems that can be resolved with the application of human ingenuity. The genius of the Bomber Mafia was to understand that distinction—and to say, We don’t have to slaughter the innocent, burn them beyond recognition, in pursuit of our military goals. We can do better. And they were right.ii

On January 21, 2009, the day after his inauguration, President Obama signed a United Nations protocol banning the use of incendiary weapons. As of this writing, 115 nations have signed the disarmament treaty, first introduced in 1981.

Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.

US airmen of the Eighth Air Force were required to fly twenty-five missions to complete their tours of service. And if you were part of that second Schweinfurt mission, in which a quarter of the crews didn’t come back—well, you do the math. Fly twenty-five missions like that, and what are your odds of making it through the war alive?

where winning cost us so much morally?

I’d rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something—even if it’s wrong he did something—than have somebody who’d vacillate and do nothing.” That’s what LeMay values.

This book was written in service to my obsessions. But it is also a story about other people’s obsessions,

Rarely does someone start a revolution alone, at his mother’s kitchen table.

Air Power, by Stephen Budiansky. Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, by Tami Davis Biddle. Decision over Schweinfurt, by Thomas M. Coffey. Whole shelves of these histories.i

Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision, then you’re missing a real treat. ii Airpower has been something I’ve explored in a number of episodes of my podcast, Revisionist History, including “Saigon 1965,” “The Prime Minister and the Prof,” and the eponymous series starting with “The Bomber Mafia” in season 5.