REVIEW --- Books: Before the Atomic Bomb --- The promise of high-tech precision bombing gave way to more brutal methods as World War II dragged on

"Writing beautiful books on horrifying themes is a rare art, and one which is usually best left for the great novelists. That has not deterred the polymathic Malcolm Gladwell from seeking to make his new work of narrative history -- which was created primarily as an elegantly produced audiobook (Pushkin Industries, 51/4 hours, $17.99) but is also being published as a printed volume -- engage with one of the most upsetting episodes of World War II. Near the end of the conflict, the Allied forces began firebombing the cities of Japan, when the populations of the home islands had no chance of protecting themselves against death from the air. The carpet bombing of cities was a morally repugnant form of warfare, which was to tarnish the reputations of the U.S. Army Air Forces and, in Europe, the RAF Bomber Command. No military leaders had planned on such a strategy before the war, but the choice was forced upon Allied air commanders by the exigencies of conflict, the weather and technical setbacks.

Among those air commanders, none embraced the switch to the daylight hammering of the enemy's cities more willingly and determinedly than the obsessive, pathologically driven Ohioan Curtis LeMay. If Mr. Gladwell's tale is a tragedy, as it surely is, Gen. LeMay is its villain. The author begins with one set of American airmen -- the "Bomber Mafia" of the title, officers of the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field, Ala., who thought that, by use of a super-complicated special bombsight, they could achieve morally appropriate pinpoint attacks on enemy targets. Yet his story is dominated by the figure of LeMay and his harrowing firebombing of Japan's cities.

Before one goes further into Mr. Gladwell's audio narration, or the printed book (which is simply the text of his spoken version), it is useful to recall two compelling questions asked about "just war" by St. Augustine, 1,500 years before World War II. Was the conflict a morally just one -- a war against evil, a war fought against an attacker? And was the fighting being pursued in a morally proportionate and discriminate way? By the 1930s, the coming of air power -- of machines capable of inflicting great damage from a distance upon the enemy nation at home -- complicated the matter profoundly.

The morality of the conduct of air war was on the minds of many intelligent officers in the 1920s, all of whom were convinced that their impressive new machines could render obsolete both land power (sluggish and bloody, as the fighting from 1914 to 1918 had shown) and sea power (slow and ineffectual) by delivering a decisive blow from the air. Still, as a small bunch of airmen hashed out strategies at their Maxwell headquarters during the 1930s, they had to be careful with the terrifying new weapons of war at their disposal. Soon, they would be flying the powerful B-17 airplanes that could carry tons of bombs high in the sky and right over enemy factories, harbors and cities.

So what a great thing it was, this Bomber Mafia felt, that an obsessive, reclusive Dutchman called Carl L. Norden had spent his career perfecting a bombsight that, when properly calibrated, could deliver high-level bombs with pinpoint accuracy. This was, as Mr. Gladwell laconically observes, "intoxicating . . . one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare." It promised that war would be "precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost."

That fine vision was brutally destroyed in the skies over Germany in 1943. Constant layers of gray clouds (this was northwest Europe, not Arizona) rendered looking through the Norden bombsight useless, and swift Focke-Wulf fighters clobbered the B-17s; 60 went down in one day. Even when the U.S. attempted high-level pinpoint bombing in the Pacific War, with larger B-29s and greater bomb loads, "strategic" bombing didn't work. And now it was late 1944. The U.S. Air Force leadership decided it was time, as Mr. Gladwell narrates, to toss out the leading figure of the Maxwell mafia, the high-principled Gen. Haywood Hansell, and bring in his nemesis, that rough, cigar-chomping advocate of carpet bombing, Curtis LeMay. With no Luftwaffe in the way in Europe, and the B-29s' bomb bays filled with a new American invention (napalm bombs), LeMay could send out aerial armadas of low-flying planes to devastate the virtually unprotected Japanese cities. His piece de resistance was the horrendous firestorm attack upon downtown Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945.

"The Bomber Mafia" is a remarkable audiobook, and a work of art. Mr. Gladwell has a mesmerizing voice and has assembled his various materials with rare skill: Technical explanations, introductions of the main characters (including Norden, Hansell and LeMay), quotes from the airmen, and interviews with later historians all flow together naturally.

Reading "The Bomber Mafia" as a plain old history book, it has to be said, takes away a bit of this magic. The professional historian slows down to check Mr. Gladwell's limited notes, and some of the atmosphere of the spoken word is lost. There are also gaps in his account (for instance, the RAF Bomber Command he is so quick to dismiss actually did attempt careful bombing, until clouds and the Luftwaffe forced it also to alter its tactics). Then there is the so, so brief mention of the atomic bomb in this book. Yet its development and use are part of the same story.

The central act of Gen. LeMay's reign of destruction had been the incineration in one night of a thousand city blocks in downtown Tokyo -- creating a glow which, it was said, could be seen 150 miles away. Around 100,000 Japanese perished during the single bloodiest day (actually, six hours) in all of human history. That is more than were killed during either of the two atomic bombings that August. One can spare the reader lots of grisly details about torched bodies, and on the whole Mr. Gladwell does. When he reports that the U.S. airmen came back from the raid "shaken," his audience knows why. By this stage, the listener to this audiobook is probably reaching for a stiff drink.

But there was more. The carnage of the Tokyo fire-raid did not cause LeMay to stop the strategy, and his forces continued to incinerate Japanese cities in the six months that followed. Okayama's buildings were burned down by 69%, Tokushima by 85%, and 67 more cities were incinerated by August, Mr. Gladwell reports. Each week, new targets were searched for until there were hardly any left. This seems reminiscent of the Gestapo's relentless search, near the end of the war, for pockets of European Jews who might have escaped earlier destruction.

Amazingly, LeMay's aerial pounding did not stop even after the two atomic bombs were dropped -- the Manhattan Project had been a separate venture and he apparently did not care much about it. Only after August 14, when news arrived that Japan had asked for peace terms, were the weary aircrews told by their commander that they need bomb no more.

How long would the firebombing of Japanese cities have gone on, had not the total surprise of the atomic bombs, plus the Red Army's attack upon Manchuria, moved the emperor to call for an end to the conflict? We know that, for the fanatical Japanese military leadership, their last hope of salvaging their own honor was in fact to have a large Allied invasion that they could stand up against. What did it matter to them if, meanwhile, LeMay's bombers crushed more cities, forcing the survivors to flee to the forests?

Here Mr. Gladwell misses the chance to stress a further, horribly ironic point: The two atomic bombs, while devastating Hiroshima and Nagasaki, brought the madness of napalm firebombing to a grinding halt. I had never thought of the dropping of the atomic bombs in such a light before. They really did end the war, in the way that neither the grim U.S. submarine blockade nor LeMay's city raids could do.

The ironies in this wonderful book continue to the bitter end. Perhaps the most grotesque came in 1964, when LeMay was given Japan's highest award to a foreigner for helping to rebuild the postwar Japanese Air Force. Yet, Mr. Gladwell observes, Tokyo never gave recognition to that earlier Bomber Mafia, whose belief in pinpoint, discriminate warfare had fallen victim to the vagaries of war.

Gen. Haywood Hansell and his colleagues strove to fight the good fight, in accordance with what just- war tradition would have considered the proper rules. When a sufficient distance followed World War II, the judgment of history became clearer: The Allied nations had indeed fought in a just war, but they had not always acted in accord with Augustine's call for a discriminating and just way of fighting. And of the few examples where Allied actions were plainly wrong, as well as ineffectual militarily, Curtis LeMay's point-blank firebombing of Japan's cities stands out. One puts this book down -- or listens to its ending -- shaking one's head at the folly and human cost of it all.

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Mr. Kennedy, a professor at Yale University and the author of numerous works including "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers," has just completed a study called "Victory at Sea, 1936 to 1946."” [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: Before the Atomic Bomb --- The promise of high-tech precision bombing gave way to more brutal methods as World War II dragged on

Kennedy, Paul. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]01 May 2021: C.7