![]() Another example: Gladwell calls the firebombing of Tokyo on March 9 and 10, 1945, “the longest night of the war.” This unfortunate phrase, this unproven superlative, is repeated in the book’s unwieldy subtitle. Marshall, were just as important, but Gladwell simply tosses out the claim about Stimson and hurries on. Was Henry Stimson, Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of war, truly “responsible, more than anyone, for the extraordinary war machine that the United States built in the early years of the Second World War”? It certainly is arguable that others, like Gen. Those large conclusions seemed unsubstantiated to me. But when Gladwell leaps to provide superlative assessments, or draws broad lessons of history from isolated incidents, he makes me wary. I enjoyed this short book thoroughly, and would have been happy if it had been twice as long. When he is introducing characters and showing them in conflict, “The Bomber Mafia” is gripping. It is indeed a conversational work, almost garrulous at times, as when he reports that one psychologist “has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies - that some part of him or her has died along with the partner.” However, this chatty style also glides over some important historical questions. Randall Jarrell captured LeMay’s blithely brutal approach in two of the most memorable lines of 20th-century American poetry: “ In bombers named for girls, we burned / The cities we had learned about in school.”Ī novelty of this book is that Gladwell says it began as an audiobook and then became a written one, reversing the usual process. To bombing experts, parks are nettlesome “firebreaks” that interfere with a target city’s combustibility. To most people, a city park is a grace note, a green space that makes urban life more livable. One of Gladwell’s skills is enabling us to see the world through the eyes of his subjects. This ferocious approach may have helped end the war, but there is no question that it was horrible. LeMay’s solution was to saturate Tokyo with napalm bombs, killing as many as 100,000 people in about six hours, and then to go on and firebomb dozens of other Japanese cities, killing thousands upon thousands, sometimes when the target cities were of little or no military value. ![]() LeMay was instead, in the words of the military historian Conrad Crane, “the Air Force’s ultimate problem solver.” As Gladwell tells it, the practical problem was how to win the war as quickly as possible. What could be more American than the story of LeMay, a gruff, cigar-chewing Ohioan who made his way through the state university by working night shifts at a foundry? He was hardly a theorist, and especially not someone out to make war more humane.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |