The Bomber Mafia

4.5Gladwell is upfront that this isn't like his other books in the subject matter. At the very end he mentions that unlike traditional book this was created as an audiobook first before being published in print. This is a rich audiobook in that it is more than just Gladwell's voice, he uses audio clips of interviews, segments of news reports (pretty cool to hear Ronald Regan voicing some of them), music, and the sound of planes.The first half of the book is more about Britain's engagement with Germany and the latter half is of the US in the Pacific. I really appreciate Gladwell also giving some of Japan's perspective. He visits a Japanese museum, plays an account of a Japanese woman who had survived the fire bombing of her city, and some Japanese war propaganda. Gladwell also goes into the origin of napalm, oof napalm is some horrific stuff.I listened to this as I was also reading [b:Verax: A Graphic History of Electronic Surveillance 33911351 Verax The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance A Graphic Novel Pratap Chatterjee https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1499741786l/33911351.SX50.jpg 54876816] and wonder what he would have thought of drone strikes as I consider them to be the epitome of precision bombing. Near the end Gladwell mentions that ‘it has its own set of drawbacks. If your target is a single man inside a room then you have to have intelligence good enough to tell you that man is the man you want. And when you have a way of hitting that man inside a room then it becomes awfully easy to decide to strike, doesn't it. They all worried about that fact. The cleaner and the more precise a bomber gets the more tempting it is to use that bomber even when you shouldn't.'

Like most of Malcolm Gladwell's books, this one is well thought out and well presented. For me it spreads new light on the motivations behind the “Bomber Mafia”. They were a small coterie of Army Airforce officers who set U.S. strategic bombing doctrine for much of WW2.
Were the Bomber Mafia visionaries trying to avoid unnecessary deaths? Or, were they misguided officers who, unwilling to abandon their dreams and accept that they were wrong, caused the deaths of large numbers of U.S. bomber aircrew? A good case can be made either way.
In parallel, was Curtis LeMay a hard man who made the hard decisions necessary to end the war? Or, was he a mass murderer? I lean toward the former, but again, a case can be made either way.
I recommend the audio version because it includes excerpts from recordings of many people involved. (The interview with a survivor of the fire-bombing of Tokyo is especially heart-rending.)
Makes you think. Solid 4 stars.

I'd give it 3.5 stars. This is a great dad book since it's about WWII and Gladwell has that classic dad book style anyway, but the book doesn't back up Gladwell's thesis. It's full of interesting vignettes and anecdotes that are fascinating to discover, but much of Gladwell's premise that the concept of precision bombing as a way to prevent larger casualties hasn't panned out in reality.

Gladwell essentially argues that carpet bombing may have won WWII, but obviously that was because of the existence of the precision bombs of today. It ends up being a weak thread to connect the strong individual stories within.