On the night of March 9, 1945, more than 300 U.S. Army Air Forces B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from rudimentary airfields in the Mariana Islands in the western Pacific, retaken from the Japanese the previous summer. Their mission was to attack a 12-square-mile sector of central Tokyo containing the highly flammable, densely packed wooden dwellings of thousands of working-class families as well as industrial and commercial buildings. During the three-hour raid their bombs ignited a firestorm that was so intense it killed 100,000 people and sent up a glow that was visible 150 miles away. When the returning B-29s touched down, teams fumigated them to dissipate the smell of burning flesh. In “The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War,” Malcolm Gladwell takes readers on the journey that led to that attack — the “longest night” of the subtitle. Along the way, he signposts both the technological developments enabling the raid and the underlying strategic and moral judgments.
Gladwell, a staff writer at the New Yorker, usually writes on social psychology — previous books include “Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know” and “David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.” His interest in air power began as a child when his English father recounted the roar of Luftwaffe planes overhead during their attacks on London. Gladwell’s particular fascination is with the “Bomber Mafia,” an influential group of officers at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field in Alabama.
