Haywood Hansell, and bring in his nemesis, that rough, cigar-chomping advocate of carpet bombing, Curtis LeMay. Gladwell narrates, to toss out the leading figure of the Maxwell mafia, the high-principled Gen. Air Force leadership decided it was time, as Mr. attempted high-level pinpoint bombing in the Pacific War, with larger B-29s and greater bomb loads, “strategic” bombing didn’t work. Constant layers of gray sky (this was northwest Europe, not Arizona) rendered looking through the Norden bombsight useless, and swift Focke-Wulf fighters clobbered the B-17s 60 went down in one day. That fine vision was brutally destroyed over the skies of Germany in 1943. Malcolm Gladwell on the terrible endgame of a bombing campaign, Joan Didion’s collected accounts of the American scene, Napoleon the art thief, Victorian mediums and more. Soon, they would be flying the powerful B-17 airplanes that could carry tons of bombs high in the sky and right over enemy factories, harbors and cities. Still, as a small bunch of airmen hashed out strategies at their Maxwell headquarters during the 1930s, they had to be careful with the terrifying new weapons of war at their disposal.

The morality of the conduct of air war was on the minds of many intelligent officers in the 1920s, all of whom were convinced that their impressive new machines could render obsolete both land power (sluggish and bloody, as the fighting from 1914 to 1918 had shown) and sea power (slow and ineffectual) by delivering a decisive blow from the air.

Was the conflict a morally just one-a war against evil, a war fought against an attacker? And was the fighting being pursued in a morally proportionate and discriminate way? By the 1930s, the coming of air power-of machines capable of inflicting great damage from a distance upon the enemy nation at home-complicated the matter profoundly. Augustine, 1,500 years before World War II. Gladwell’s audio narration, or the printed book (which is simply the text of his spoken version), it is useful to recall two compelling questions asked about “Just War” by St.

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