The Bomber Mafia, page 3
Why did the military put up with him? Because the Norden bombsight was the Holy Grail.
Norden had a business partner named Ted Barth. He was the salesman, the public face. And he claimed, the year before the United States joined the war, that “We do not regard a fifteen-foot square…as being a very difficult target to hit from an altitude of thirty thousand feet.” The shorthand version of that—which would serve as the foundation of the Norden legend—was that the bombsight could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up.
To the first generation of military pilots, that claim was intoxicating. The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world’s first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden. And why spend so much on a bombsight? Because the Norden represented a dream—one of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare: if we could drop bombs into pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn’t need armies anymore. We wouldn’t need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We could reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost.
Footnotes
i In 2011 I gave a TED Talk on Norden and his invention.
Chapter Two
“We make progress unhindered by custom.”
1.
Revolutions are invariably group activities. That’s why Carl Norden was such an anomaly. Rarely does someone start a revolution alone, at his mother’s kitchen table. The impressionist movement didn’t begin because one genius took up painting impressionistically and, like the Pied Piper, attracted a trail of followers. Instead, Pissarro and Degas enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts at the same time; then, Pissarro met Monet and, later, Cézanne at the Académie Suisse; Manet met Degas at the Louvre; Monet befriended Renoir at Charles Gleyre’s studio; and Renoir, in turn, met Pissarro and Cézanne; and soon enough everyone was hanging out at the Café Guerbois, trading ideas and egging each other on, and sharing and competing and dreaming, all together, until something radical and entirely new emerged.
This happens all the time. Gloria Steinem was the most famous face of the feminist movement in the early 1970s. But what was it that led to a doubling of the number of women elected to office in the United States? Gloria Steinem plus Shirley Chisholm, Bella Abzug, and Tanya Melich coming together to create the National Women’s Political Caucus. Revolutions are birthed in conversation, argument, validation, proximity, and the look in your listener’s eye that tells you you’re on to something.
For those caught up in the dream of changing modern warfare, that place where friends spent time with one another and had long arguments into the night and saw that look in their comrades’ eyes was an air base called Maxwell Field. Maxwell Field was—and is—in Montgomery, Alabama. It was an old cotton plantation converted to an airfield by the Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur. In the 1930s it became home to something called the Air Corps Tactical School, the aviation version of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, or the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Much of the base today remains the same as it was when it was built, in the 1930s: everything is in pale yellow concrete or stucco, with red tile roofs. There are hundreds of elegant houses for the officers, built in the French provincial style on quiet curving streets lined with giant ring-cup oak trees. In the summer, the air is thick and wet. This is deep inside Alabama. The grand nineteenth-century buildings that make up the Alabama state legislature are just down the road, a few miles away. It does not feel like the birthplace of a revolution.
But it was.
In those years, the Air Force was not a separate branch of the military. It was a combat division of the Army. It existed to serve the interests of the ground forces. To support, assist, accompany. The legendary Army general John “Black Jack” Pershing, who commanded the American forces in World War I, once wrote of airpower that it “can of its own account neither win a war at the present time nor, so far as we can tell, at any time in the future.”i That’s what the military establishment thought of airplanes. Richard Kohn, chief historian of the US Air Force for a decade, explains that in the early days, people just didn’t understand airpower:
I remember one congressman being quoted as saying, “Why do we have all this controversy over airplanes? Why don’t we just buy one of them and let the services share it?”
The very first site of the Air Corps Tactical School was not in Alabama but in Langley, Virginia. There were stables out by the airplane hangars, and pilots were expected to learn how to ride, as if it were still the nineteenth century. Can you imagine how the Army’s pilots of that era—and there were only a few hundred of them—felt about that? So long as they were part of the Army, they came to believe, they would be under the command of people who couldn’t fly airplanes, didn’t understand airplanes, and wanted them to rub down the horses every morning. The pilots wanted to be independent. And the first step toward independence was to move their training school as far away from the influence of the Army—culturally and physically—as humanly possible. The fact that Maxwell Field was on an old cotton plantation in a sleepy corner of the South was, to use the modern expression, a feature and not a bug.
Because airpower was young, the faculty of the Tactical School was young—in their twenties and thirties, full of the ambition of youth. They got drunk on the weekends, flew warplanes for fun, and raced each other in their cars. Their motto was: Proficimus more irretenti: “We make progress unhindered by custom.” The leaders of the Air Corps Tactical School were labeled “the Bomber Mafia.” It was not intended as a compliment—these were the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano and shoot-outs on the streets. But the Air Corps faculty thought the outcast label quite suited them. And it stuck.
Harold George, one of the spiritual leaders of the Bomber Mafia, put it like this: “We were highly enthusiastic; we were starting on, like, a crusade…knowing that there were a dozen of us and the only opposition we had was ten thousand officers and the rest of the Army, rest of the Navy.”
George was from Boston. He joined the Army during the First World War and became captivated by airplanes. He started teaching at the Tactical School in the early 1930s and rose to the rank of general during the Second World War. After the war, he went to work for Howard Hughes, setting up Hughes’s electronics business. Then George left to help build another electronics firm that became a giant defense contractor. And this is my favorite part: he was twice elected mayor of Beverly Hills.
That’s one man. In one lifetime. But if you had asked Harold George what was the highlight of his career, he probably would have said those heady days in the 1930s, teaching at Maxwell Field.
As he said in an oral history in 1970, “Nobody seemed to understand what we were doing, and therefore we got no directives that we were to stop the kind of instruction that we were giving.”
The Tactical School was a university. An academy. But not many of the faculty had any experience teaching. And the things they were teaching were so new and radical that there weren’t really any textbooks for anyone to study or articles for anyone to read. So they mostly made things up—on the fly, so to speak. Lectures quickly turned into seminars, which turned into open discussions, which spilled out into dinner in the evening. That’s what always happens: Conversation starts to seed a revolution. The group starts to wander off in directions in which no one individual could ever have conceived of going all by himself or herself.
Donald Wilson was another of the Bomber Mafia inner circle. He was the one who later wrote in his memoirs that he had a dream of a different kind of war. As he recalled of those days,
I feel quite certain that if the controlling element of the War Department general staff had known what we were doing at Maxwell Field, we would have all been put in jail. Because it was just so contrary to their established doctrine that I just can’t imagine their knowing and allowing us to do it.
2.
When people thought about military aircraft in the first part of the twentieth century, they thought of fighter planes: small and highly maneuverable airplanes that could engage the enemy in the air. But not the renegades at Maxwell Field. They were obsessed with the technological advances in aviation that happened during the 1930s. Aluminum and steel replaced plywood. Engines got more powerful. Planes got bigger and easier to fly. They had retractable landing gear and pressurized fuselages. And those advances allowed the Bomber Mafia to imagine an entirely new class of airplane—something as large as the commercial airliners that had just started ferrying passengers across the United States. A plane that big and powerful wouldn’t be limited to fighting other planes in the sky. It could carry bombs: heavy, powerful explosives that could do significant damage to the enemy’s positions on the ground.
Now, why would that be so devastating? Because if you put one of these newly powerful engines inside one of these newly massive airplanes, that plane could fly so far and so fast for so long that nothing could stop it. Antiaircraft guns would be like peashooters. Enemy fighters would be like small annoying gnats, buzzing harmlessly. This kind of airplane could have armor plating, guns at the back and front to defend itself. And so we arrive at principle number one of the Bomber Mafia doctrine: The bomber will always get through.
The second tenet: Up until then, it had been assumed that the only way to bomb your enemy was in the safety of darkness. But if the bomber was unstoppable, why would stealth matter? The Bomber Mafia wanted to attack by daylight.
The third tenet: If you could bomb by daylight, then you could see whatever it was you were trying to hit. You weren’t blind anymore. And if you could see, it meant that you could use a bombsight—line up the target, enter the necessary variables, let the device do its work—and boom.
The fourth and final tenet: Conventional wisdom said that when a bomber approached its target, it had to come down as close as it could to the ground in order to aim properly. But if you had the bombsight, you could drop your bomb from way up high—outside the range of antiaircraft guns. We can drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from thirty thousand feet.
High altitude. Daylight. Precision bombing. That was what the Bomber Mafia cooked up in its hideaway in central Alabama.
Historian Richard Kohn described the Bomber Mafia this way:
It was collegial. I would call it almost to the point of “band of brothers.” But if you didn’t buy the doctrine, and some of them didn’t, you could be…not exactly expelled from the brotherhood but suspected and opposed.
There was a pilot on the Tactical School staff named Claire Chennault, who dared to challenge the Bomber Mafia orthodoxy. They ran him out of town.
Kohn continued: “They were a rebellious bunch. They engaged in public relations campaigns. Some of them wrote under pseudonyms to promote airpower.”
I didn’t really grasp the audacity of the Bomber Mafia’s vision until I went to Maxwell. It’s now Maxwell Air Force Base, not Maxwell Field. It’s home to Air University, the successor to the Air Corps Tactical School. People come from around the world to study there. The faculty includes many of the country’s leading military historians, tacticians, and strategists. And I sat one afternoon with a group of Maxwell faculty in a conference room just a stone’s throw from the place where the Bomber Mafia held forth almost a century ago. All the records from the original Tactical School are in the Maxwell archives, and the historians I spoke to had been through the Bomber Mafia’s old field notes and lectures. They spoke of Donald Wilson and Harold George as if they were contemporaries. They knew them. I was struck, though, by one difference. A number of the historians I met with were themselves former Air Force pilots. They’d flown advanced fighter jets and stealth bombers and multimillion-dollar transport planes, so when they talked about airpower, they were talking about something tangible, something they had personal experience with.
But back in the 1930s, the Bomber Mafia was talking about something theoretical, something they hoped would exist.
It was a dream.
Richard Muller, professor of airpower history at Air University, put it like this:
There’s nothing on the ramp that can match what they’re thinking. They’re on crack cocaine. You can kind of ask yourself if you go to a museum, an aviation museum—go down to Pensacola or go to the [National] Air and Space Museum or Wright-Patt[erson Air Force Base] and look at the planes that are on the field in the early thirties, when this idea first comes, and you go, What the hell? How much cocaine are those guys snorting?
One of the unexpected pleasures of talking to military historians is their irreverence toward their own institutions. Muller continued:
There was just this faith that they’ll get there. They don’t quite know how. They don’t quite know where, but they’ll get there, and it’s not particularly unreasonable in their own time and place. It’s not unreasonable for them to have this kind of faith. But really one of the central things that happens inside of this group is a belief in technological progress and material development, and that they can get the right plane. They go from the B-9 to the B-10 to the B-12 to the B-15 prototype to the B-17 to the B-29 in about ten years, which is extraordinary when you think about it.
3.
I worry that I haven’t fully explained just how radical—how revolutionary—the Bomber Mafia thinking was. So allow me a digression. It’s from a book I’ve always loved called The Masks of War, by a political scientist named Carl Builder. Builder worked for the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica–based think tank set up after the Second World War to serve as the Pentagon’s external research arm.
Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are. And to prove this point, Builder said, just look at the chapels on each of the service academy campuses.
The chapel at West Point military academy, the historic training ground for the officers of the US Army, stands on a bluff high above the Hudson River, dominating the skyline of the campus. The chapel was completed in 1910, in the grand Gothic revival style. It is built entirely out of somber gray granite, with tall, narrow windows. It has the brooding power of a medieval fortress—solid, plain, unmovable. Builder writes, “This is a quiet place for simple ceremonies with people who are close to each other and to the land that has brought them up.”
That’s the Army: deeply patriotic, rooted in service to country.
Then there’s the chapel at the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. It was built almost at the same time as its West Point counterpart, but it’s much bigger. Grander. It’s in the style of American Beaux-Arts, with a massive dome based on the design of the military chapel at Les Invalides, in Paris. The stained-glass windows are enormous, letting the light shine into the ornate, detailed interior. That’s very Navy: arrogant, independent, secure in the global scale of its ambitions.
Compare those two to the cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. This is a chapel from another universe. It was finished in 1962, but if I told you that it was finished last month, you would say, “Wow, that’s a futuristic building.” The Air Force chapel looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens. It looks ready to take flight with a magnificent, deafening whoosh. Inside the cathedral, there are more than twenty-four thousand pieces of stained glass, in twenty-four different colors, and at the front, a cross forty-six feet tall and twelve feet wide, with crossbeams that look like propellers. Outside, four fighter jets are jauntily parked, as if some pilots, on a whim, had dropped by for Sunday morning communion.
The chapel’s architect was a brilliant modernist out of Chicago named Walter Netsch. He was given the same creative freedom and limitless budget that the Air Force usually gives to the people who come up with stealth fighters.
In a 1995 interview, Netsch recalled the commission:
I came home with this tremendous feeling of: How can I in this modern age of technology create something good to be as inspiring and aspiring as Chartres…? In the meantime, I had gotten this idea here in Chicago, working with my engineer, of the tetrahedrons and compiling the tetrahedrons together.
What do you think it says about the Air Force that they would construct a cathedral out of aluminum and steel, in the shape of an upright fighter jet, in the middle of the Colorado mesa? That’s what Carl Builder asked in his book. And his conclusion was: this is a group of people who desperately want to differentiate themselves as much as possible from the older branches of military service, the Army and the Navy. And, further, the Air Force is utterly uninterested in heritage and tradition. On the contrary, it wants to be modern.
Netsch designed the entire Air Force Academy chapel around pyramid-shaped seven-foot modules. Tetrahedrons! This is a branch of the service for people who want to start over, to wage war in new ways, to ready themselves for today’s battles. They aren’t spending their time studying the Peloponnesian War or the Battle of Trafalgar. The Air Force is obsessed with tomorrow, and with how technology will prepare it for tomorrow. And what happens with Netsch’s chapel after it’s built? It has all kinds of structural problems. Of course it does! Like some brilliant bit of breakthrough computer code, it had to be debugged.
Netsch explained:
You get into technology, you sometimes get into trouble…What happened is that all of a sudden, these leaks started. And [we] would fly out to Colorado Springs and check in [to] a little cheap motel and wait for the rains. And it would rain, and we would rush up to the chapel—it’s a big building—and try to find out where it was leaking inside…I had to write a report, and I was so hurt about these leaks. I called it “A Report on Water Migration on the Air Force Academy Chapel.” Needless to say, I received humorous digs over my euphemism. But what we found out was that…each of the tetrahedral groups would move in the wind. It’s very windy up there, and the building can receive wind from many planes. And it’s long, so it could be doing one thing at one end and another thing at the other end. These joints where everything is connected is where all the glass goes through.
