Thread by @Alan_Allport

Well ok then

Ok, straight off, something I’m confused about.

If this quote is accurate, what did Reagan mean by a corvette? Chevy didn’t start making the car until the 1950s. As for the ship ... well, it’s a lot longer than a B-29. Anyone?

🤦‍♂️

I’m just throwing this chunk of red meat out there

Up to page 36 and relentless American exceptionalism of strategic bombing theory continues. Absolutely everything associated with sbt came out of Maxwell Field. Oh, and they came up with ‘the bomber will always get through.’ No, I’m not making that up. Sorry Stanley.

Ok

Trenchard reading this book

Page 51-2. Account of the Air War Plans Division 1 doc in summer 41 implies it was entirely a creation of Maxwell Field theory, ignoring that co-author Hansell (one of the main characters in the book) had just returned from the UK with 500 lbs of documentation about RAF bombing.

Also suggests (because that’s Gladwell’s thesis) that AWPD1 solely focused on precision bombing of industry choke points. In fact, it accepted that bombing of civilian urban areas for morale purposes might be an important secondary target in an extended strategic bombing war.

Oh now he’s just trying to get me angry

Where to even start with this horseshit?

That the RAF had already spent two painful years trying to make precision bombing work? That Chamberlain had personally begged FDR to send the British the Norden Bomb Sight? That Harris (he’s still to come) didn’t actually believe that area bombing could destroy morale?

The Blitz. Even a not-very-bright undergraduate could figure out why this might be problematic evidence.

Here we go

The RAF did area bombing because Frederick Lindemann wanted it to area bomb and he wanted it to because he was a sadist and Arthur Harris carried it out because he was a psychopath. You think I’m exaggerating, I bet. That’s what Gladwell says. That’s the words he uses.

I’m not even a fan of Harris and this book is making me want to flag wave for him.

“Ostensibly”.

Now here is genuinely psychopathic behavior which Gladwell seems to find adorable because, you know, it’s what obsessives like him do

Fellas, stalk that girl so relentlessly that eventually she marries you because she’s run out of other options.

Describes the Regensburg part of the Schweinfurt-Regensburg raid as a mere ‘diversion’ which doesn’t sound right to me although I admit I’m no expert here.

Getting the sense that Gladwell is really, really uninterested in any causal explanation in history that doesn’t boil down to the personality quirks of some weird guy.

Couple of things here. One is that Hansell had been *ordered* to stop flying so many combat missions. The other is that officers of different ranks do different things - it’s not a ‘choice’ based on quirky personality traits.

Now here we go: something genuinely interesting. Not Gladwell, but an excerpt from a Saturday Evening Post account of the 1st Schweinfurt raid. He’s right, it is harrowing, and I’m a little surprised something so graphic would be printed so soon afterwards.

Wait. I thought the British didn’t do precision bombing cos Fred Lindemann was a psycho or something.

We’ve jumped to October 1944, so apparently this history of American strategic bombing in WWII in the ETO is going to not mention the P-51 or counterforce strategy or Big Week or any of that. At all.

Author has totally lost interest in Europe now, so I *think* we’re supposed to understand that the sbc against Germany was a failure because Schweinfurt didn’t go well. Maybe. Honestly I’ve no idea. Anyway, onto the Pacific.

Here you go @NavalAirHistory

Passages such as this take for granted that precision bombing advocacy was underwritten by a deep concern for avoiding civilian casualties - hugely exaggerated as a motive by Gladwell (with little accompanying evidence) imho.

Confident evidence-free assumptions about the motives of the main characters *abound* in this book, far too many to mention. Gladwell just assures us that this must have been why X did Y.

Gladwell literally seems to believe that area bombing involved flying over a city and just randomly dropping your incendiaries, ignoring the fact that (a) this didn’t work and (b) the RAF knew it didn’t work and (c) it went to great lengths to figure out specific target patterns.

Lots of stuff about LeMay being taciturn and stubborn but driven by an deep unspoken concern for the well-being of his airmen, which sounds a lot like ... Arthur Harris, whom we we reassured earlier was a psychopath whose behavior was simply a matter for criminologists.

Gladwell, notes, correctly, that the firestorm raids on Tokyo were carefully planned with much attention paid to the pattern and speed and volume of incendiary delivery, etc. Omitting entirely that this was precisely the same thing going on in the ETO.

Ok, concluding comments:

Gladwell’s Procrustean distortions mean that anyone reading this book would I think emerge less well informed about the strategic bombing campaign in WWII than they were when they began. He ignores the international dimension of bombing theory ...

...entirely, treating the whole thing as an American story. He fundamentally misunderstands the appeal of precision bombing, which was not as his story demands primarily a moral cause but a technocratic one - it was seen as an *efficient* way to defeat the enemy. He takes ...

... for granted that the USAAF’s ‘Bombing Mafia’ deplored the idea of attacks on civilian targets for moral reasons when in fact they had always been open to such bombing as an option. His treatment of the RAF’s bombing war is absurdly oversimplified and his descriptions ...

... of Lindemann and Harris defamatory. One would come away from the book thinking that a clear practical distinction existed between British and US bombing policy in the ETO until war’s end, ignoring the fact that a large % of radar-guided USAAF bombing was indistinguishable ...

... in practice from area bombing. One is led to believe that the sbc in the ETO completely failed without any serious discussion of the dramatic changes of events in 1944 which changed the character of the campaign entirely. His treatment of the sbc in the PTO is *I think* ...

... somewhat better (though that may be because I know less about it) but his description of the role of the campaign in bringing about Japan’s surrender is not a serious one - there is literally no mention e.g. of the submarine campaign against Japanese lines of supply nor ...

... or the key decision by the USSR to DOW on Aug 8 1945. Overall, the book reduces a complex global story spanning decades to a daytime soap-opera psychodrama about two Americans to whom Gladwell feels entitled to attribute endless explanatory motivations based on nothing ...

... other than what is convenient to his trite overarching thesis about obsession or genius or something. And oh yes he doesn’t understand tailwinds. FIN.