The road to firebombing Tokyo was paved with good intentions

In the 1930s, a group of American airmen had a dream. Air power, they believed, would do away with the need for armies and navies. The aeroplanes of the future would be able to drop bombs so accurately that there would be no need to kill soldiers in their millions: a handful of strikes on a few key factories would be enough to cripple an enemy’s economy and force them to sue for peace.

It did not take long for this dream to turn sour. When the second world war broke out, the Americans soon discovered that their precision bombing was not nearly so precise when they were being shot at. When they flew high, clouds often obscured their targets. When they flew low, they were so vulnerable that they had to hide under cover of night — which also meant they could not see their targets. In the end, they stopped aiming at specific factories and began destroying whole cities instead, particularly in Japan. Rather than saving lives, air power had simply made the bloodshed more indiscriminate.

This is the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia, which charts the failure of the American bomber dream during the second world war. It begins with the invention of the Norden bombsight, which was supposed to revolutionise bombing accuracy; it ends with one of the most indiscriminate acts of violence of the 20th century — the fire-bombing of Tokyoin 1945. This is an extremely sensitive subject, and must be treated with great care. Gladwell is to be applauded for insisting that we look at this uncomfortable history a little more honestly; but, unfortunately, the space he allocates to it is probably not enough to give it the nuance it deserves.