Malcom Gladwell's “THE BOMBER MAFIA"
Book review by Dennis D. McDonald
Things I liked about this hardback book:
It’s small, compact, lightweight, and easy to read.
It has a nice set of black and white photos in the center.
It focuses on one of my favorite topics, aeronautical history.
It provides some useful background information about the Norden bombsight.
It contains a decent index in the back.
It provides a sobering assessment of the value of daylight high altitude “precision bombing” by the US in Europe during WWII.
Things I didn’t like:
It concentrates a bit too much on the overly-simplistic “great man” approach to interpreting history.
It contains some blatantly inaccurate statements that should have been caught by any competent editor (e.g., at one point Gladwell writes that the atomic bombs “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” were both dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima by the Enola Gay (page 121)).
That last item about the Enola Gay really set me off and caused me to mistrust the book as a whole. Granted, I’ve read a lot about the Pacific War and do have a strong interest in the story of how atomic bombs were developed. I was also simultaneously reading Don Farrell’s exemplary Atomic Bomb Island which provides a more detailed — and much better researched — description of how B-29 bombers were employed against Japan during WWII.
That said, would I recommend this book given my mistrust of its factual information?
I believe it does have some value in that it does put the atomic bomb attacks on Japan into the context of the process by which Japan’s cities were being systematically put to the torch by low level incendiary attacks by B-29 bombers. But there are other much better books available that I believe are more factually trustworthy such as Tillman’s Whirlwind.
I would recommend other books instead of The Bomber Mafia regardless of Gladwell’s status as a best-selling author.
Review copyright (c) 2021 by Dennis D. McDonald