The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell
Author:Malcolm Gladwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2021-04-27T00:00:00+00:00
Chapter Six
âIt would be suicide, boys, suicide.â
1.
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. Itâs all a little strange, if you think about it.
Nonetheless, even within that general category of absurd, there is a continuum. The war that was fought in Europe at least resembled previous wars. It was absurd in a familiar way: neighbor against neighbor. The D-day landing required a short trip across the English Channel. People can swim the English Channel. On the ground, troops marched, holding rifles. They fired big pieces of artillery. Give Napoleon one week of training, and he probably could have managed the Allied push across Europe as well as any general from the twentieth century.
But the Pacific theater? It was on the other end of the war-absurdity continuum.
The United States and Japan probably had less contact with each other and knew less about each other than any two wartime combatants in history. More importantly, they were as far apart geographically as any two combatants in history. The Pacific war was, by definition, a sea warâand, as the conflict grew more intense, an air war. But the sheer scale of the Pacific battleground made it the kind of air war that no one had fought before.
For example, at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the workhorse of the US Army Air Forces was the B-17 bomber, also known as the Flying Fortress. Thatâs what LeMay and Ira Eaker and Hansell were using in Europe. The Flying Fortress had a range of roughly two thousand milesâone thousand miles out and one thousand miles back. In January of 1944, you couldnât find an air base controlled by the Allies within a thousand miles of Tokyo. Australia is more than four thousand miles from Japan. Hawaii is just as far. The Philippines made the most sense on paper, but the Philippines had been captured by the Japanese and werenât fully recaptured until late in 1945. In any case, Manila was still 1,800 miles from Tokyo.
If you were the United States and you wanted to drop bombs on Japan, how would you do it? Solving that problem took the better part of the war. The first step was building the B-29 Superfortress, the greatest bomber ever built, with an effective range of more than three thousand miles.
The next step was capturing a string of three tiny islands in the middle of the western Pacific: Saipan, Tinian, and Guam. They were the Mariana Islands, controlled by the Japanese. The Marianas were 1,500 miles across the water from Tokyoâthe closest possible spot where you could build a runway. If you could put a fleet of B-29s on the Marianas, you could bomb Japan. The Japanese knew that, too, which led to another absurd moment: some
Download
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.
Africa | Americas |
Arctic & Antarctica | Asia |
Australia & Oceania | Europe |
Middle East | Russia |
United States | World |
Ancient Civilizations | Military |
Historical Study & Educational Resources |
The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell(1176)
Submerged Prehistory by Benjamin Jonathan; & Clive Bonsall & Catriona Pickard & Anders Fischer(1161)
Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown(1130)
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber & David Wengrow(1102)
The Way of Fire and Ice: The Living Tradition of Norse Paganism by Ryan Smith(1029)
Wandering in Strange Lands by Morgan Jerkins(1013)
Driving While Brown: Sheriff Joe Arpaio Versus the Latino Resistance by Terry Greene Sterling & Jude Joffe-Block(1000)
Tip Top by Bill James(1000)
Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen(998)
Red Roulette : An Insider's Story of Wealth, Power, Corruption, and Vengeance in Today's China (9781982156176) by Shum Desmond(994)
F*cking History by The Captain(966)
It Was All a Lie by Stuart Stevens;(939)
White House Inc. by Dan Alexander(904)
Evil Geniuses by Kurt Andersen(900)
Treasure Islands: Tax Havens and the Men who Stole the World by Nicholas Shaxson(879)
American Dreams by Unknown(857)
American Kompromat by Craig Unger(847)
The Fifteen Biggest Lies about the Economy: And Everything Else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs, and Corporate America by Joshua Holland(814)
The First Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch(810)