The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War

Haywood Hansell came from a long line of distinguished military men, dating back to the American Revolution. He himself had a brilliant mind and “distinguished himself quickly” (79) as an instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School at Maxwell Field. He was a strong advocate of the Bomber Mafia’s doctrine. Still, Gladwell writes, he was a strange fit for the military in some ways. His favorite book was Don Quixote, the story of a man who sticks to an ideal that is never realized, one ultimately based on illusion. His press releases as a general were not full of bluster like most, but rather honest assessments even if they came across as naïve.

Hansell sought a target that was vital enough to halt the German war machine if taken out. The German bombing of a Rolls Royce factory in Coventry, England, made an impression on him. Although the attack didn’t fully succeed, it did destroy the skylights on the roof. When rain followed soon after, water rusted thousands of ball bearings, stopping the production of engines for a time. All machines with rotating parts rely on ball bearings, and Hansell decided that these would be his target. The German town of Schweinfurt was the location of most ball-bearing factories, so he devised a plan to send a diversionary force of B-17s elsewhere, to draw away the German fighter planes, before following up with B-17s headed to Schweinfurt. To lead the former mission, he chose Curtis LeMay.

Gladwell describes LeMay as the opposite of Hansell. He was practical, direct, and all business—no romantic theorizing for him. He rose swiftly through the Army Air Corps, a major general by age 37. Once in England for the war, he made his mark quickly, devising a formation for bombers that protected them well from enemy fighter planes. Soon the whole Eighth Air Force adopted the formation. LeMay also changed the way pilots flew in their bombing runs. To evade enemy attack, pilots were taking evasive moves until straightening out their flight right near the intended target. This made it hard for bombardiers to accurately line up their targets, causing too many bombs to miss their mark. LeMay wanted them to flight directly to their targets. He admitted it would be easier for the enemy to track and shoot them, but he calculated that it would take 377 rounds for an antiaircraft gun to bring down a bomber, a toll that wasn’t likely. He told his group they were all to fly straight in the future and see what happened. Not content to just give orders, he led the way in his own bomber. Not a single plane was lost, and more targets were hit.

LeMay’s role in the mission on Schweinfurt was to lead a first wave of decoy bombers in the direction of Regensburg, where Germany’s Messerschmitt aircraft factories were located. The mission was intended to look like an attack there, which would draw heavy defense from the Nazi fighter planes. Then a second wave of bombers would take off ten minutes later en route to the real destination, the ball-bearing plants in Schweinfurt, with the hope of meeting little resistance. On the day of the attack, in August 1943, England was shrouded in fog. LeMay had planned for this possibility and had made his pilots practice blind takeoffs relying only on their instruments. They had no trouble getting airborne. However, no other commander had done the same with their bomber group, and the Schweinfurt bombers took off hours late after waiting for the skies to clear. This gave the German fighter planes time to regroup and engage the B-17s. Engage they did, as the second group lost 50 or 60 bombers, leading to the death or capture of 552 crew members. What’s more, only 80 bombs out of about 2,000 hit their targets, to which Gladwell asks, “That doesn’t sound like precision bombing, does it?” (101).

The problem at the root of such dismal results was the Norden bombsight, what Gladwell calls the “mechanical cornerstone of the Bomber Mafia ideology” (102). Its effectiveness was theoretically sound, but in the real world any number of factors made its accuracy fall short. As a mechanical device relying on oil to smooth moving parts, friction was one issue. At low temperatures caused by the high altitude at which the bombers flew, the oil would thicken slightly, adding friction that reduced the accuracy of readings. Another problem was simply the fog of war. In the heat of battle, bombardiers attempted precise work in chaotic conditions. One historian explained that they tried so hard to keep the crosshairs of the sight on target that they changed their posture, which changed the angle of vision. Finally, there was weather: the bombsight worked only when the target was clearly in sight. Clouds shut that down instantly.

Nevertheless, the Bomber Mafia stuck to the script and tried again that fall, despite the failure of the first run. Again, the target was Schweinfurt’s ball-bearing factories. The first attack had slowed production temporarily but certainly did not result in the “choke point” hoped for. The second attack did slightly better but again did not halt production. Again, losses were heavy: 60 planes downed, 17 planes damaged beyond repair, and 650 men either captured or killed. Soon afterward, the Eighth Air Force commander Ira Eaker was reassigned out of England. Washington changed tack and adopted British bombing methods. One later attack was on the old German city of Münster, not an industrial center at all. The target was the city’s cathedral on a Sunday at midday, when civilians would be leaving service. As one airman later wrote about the briefing, “General Hansell was aghast” (109).

Gladwell discusses how research has shown that true believers in any idea act in the face of evidence that their beliefs are wrong. Instead of changing course and admitting error, they double down, making excuses or elaborate rationales for continuing to have faith in their original beliefs. Once they’ve invested so much of themselves in it, they almost have no other choice. Thus, it makes sense that Haywood Hansell did not find failure in the Schweinfurt raids, but instead called them justified. LeMay, on the other hand, was never a believer in the Bomber Mafia doctrine; he was much too practical, too focused on results. He hated the fact that he’d lost 240 of his men on that first Schweinfurt mission when he’d led the decoy group to Regensburg. In later years, in his retirement after a storied career, the foyer of his house had two murals, one each of Regensburg and Schweinfurt, as a reminder of the loss men.