T H E B O M B E R M A FI A

l i ste n er’s g u i de
ma lc o l m g l a d w e l l
Thank you for purchasing Malcolm Gladwell's
The Bomber Mafia.

This exclusive Listener's Guide gives you an

inside look at the production process, archival
imagery and commentary from Malcolm and
the producers and engineers involved with this
extraordinary project.
Note from
the author
Malcolm Gladwell, author and narrator

The Bomber Mafia was

conceived of, from the
beginning, as an audiobook.
We want you to hear the story of Haywood Hansell and
Curtis E. LeMay and the many air battles they fought
over Europe and Japan in the Second World War. But
when you are creating for the ears, you need something
that isn’t necessary if you are only writing a book for the
eyes. You need tape: actual audio of the people you’re
talking about and the events you’re describing. But how
do you do that if every character in your story is dead, and
the events you’re describing are nearly a century old? At
first, I despaired that making an audiobook like this about
the Second World War would be impossible. But then I
discovered that Maxwell Air Force Base, just outside of
Montgomery, Alabama, has a library. And in that library
there is an audio archive. It’s an Air Force archive,
meaning that it’s an archive maintained and curated by
the same people who had a hand in creating the stealth
bomber and guided missiles and all the wizardry and
know-how that goes into modern air wars. I learned
there were recordings of virtually every senior Air
Force officer who mattered in the Second World War,
some inside and outside the original Bomber Mafia,
all painstakingly interviewed over many decades by
trained historians.

So I started my reporting for The Bomber Mafia at

Maxwell. It was August and a classic Alabama summer.
On my first night I went for a run and came back
drowning in sweat. Because it was the middle of the Malcolm and his team preparing the Bomber Mafia script
pandemic, the campus was largely deserted. I met with
some historians, on the faculty of the Air University.
But then, on my second day in Alabama, came the real
prize: access to the archive. I had to go through two
sets of security doors to get in—because, well, this is
the Air Force. There was classified material in there.
 The air conditioning was on full tilt. I was freezing,
shivering. Before I arrived, I had requested a stack of
tapes, the same tapes you will hear over the course of
this book. And they were all there, stacked carefully,
waiting upon my arrival. So I sat in a long, low-
ceilinged room devouring those recordings.
The way an organization maintains
its history tells us something about
the way it conducts its present.
The archive at Maxwell makes you feel reassured about
the modern Air Force. I realized, when I sat down and
started to listen, that—oh yes—I could definitely do an
audiobook about the world of the Bomber Mafia. We
have the tape.
In my family growing up, we loved jigsaw puzzles,
the more complicated the better, and we would do
them all as a family, hunched together around a
table. Each of us would work on a different section,
glancing up at everyone else’s section, every now
and again, to get a sense of where we were. That’s
what working on The Bomber Mafia felt like. I’m now
turning this guide over to the other people at the
table: My editor. My researcher. My producer. My
fact checker. My engineer. My composer. Don’t be
fooled by the name on the front: this book is as much
their creation as mine. Together, we found even more
tape. We uncovered the stories behind it. We set those
stories to music. We spun a huge, strange, sprawling
narrative that you will now have the privilege to hear.
Together we assembled the marvelous puzzle that is
The Bomber Mafia.
At Pushkin, we think this is the way storytelling is
supposed to work.
 One day, I was looking at my bookshelves and realized—to
my surprise—just how many nonfiction books about war I
had accumulated... Whole shelves of these histories. Usually
when I start accumulating books like that, it’s because I want
to write something about the subject. But I never really wrote
much about war—especially not the Second World War. Why?

Maybe the answer is that the more a subject matters to you,

the harder it is to find a story you want to tell about it.

Malcolm’s bookshelf in upstate New York

photographs
and reflections
 Carl L. Norden was a brilliant Dutch
engineer who single-handedly invented
the Norden bombsight used by the
United States in World War II.

Credit: US Navy
The Bomber Mafia: Harold George (left),
Donald Wilson (right), and others were
convinced that precision bombing, aimed at
crucial choke points of the enemy’s supply
chain, could win wars entirely from the air.

Credit: US Air Force Credit: US Army Air Force Official Photograph

Eloise Lynton, producer
Tape research for The Bomber
Mafia began way back in
January of 2020, when
Malcolm was preparing to do
a Revisionist History episode
on the invention of napalm.
As a producer for the podcast, I was tasked with
tracking down any existing archival audio he might be
able to use. That’s when I came across oral histories
with Hoyt Hottel at the Science History Institute. No
one had ever digitized the tape before, and it was an
exciting find. Hottel talked in riveting detail about the
origin of napalm—the race among chemists to build
the “best” incendiary compound. He also described
life-sized models of Japanese houses in the Utah
desert for the military to bomb.
I sent the transcript over to Malcolm in an email: “not
sure if this is of interest... It’s an interview with Hoyt
Hottel who was on the incendiary team during WWII...
there’s stuff about testing on pigs (!?) and about the
Harvard athletic field testing, etc.” A little over an
hour later, Malcolm wrote back: “omg. this interview
is UNREAL.” That was the first of many rabbit holes
I’d go down for what would eventually become The
Bomber Mafia. If you listen to Chapter 7 of the
audiobook, you can hear it for yourself!
 The futuristic thinking of the Bomber Mafia
was typical of what would become the Air Force
Academy, whose modernistic chapel contrasts
radically with the traditional architecture of the
chapels at West Point and Annapolis.

Credit: Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
Julia Barton, editor

As the story editor of the podcast
Revisionist History, I’d edited
stories from Malcolm, all the
way back to the first season,
of this family connection seemed right, so I asked
Malcolm about it. He just looked at me and snapped
his fingers, then said, “The unexploded bomb!” And
that became the author’s note for the book.
Also important, editorially, was the opportunity
to present eyewitness accounts from Japanese

about military doctrine and survivors of the bombing of Tokyo. So much of the
audiobook takes place in the skies, or in the minds of
aerial bombing. military leaders. The sudden descent to the ground-
level experience on the receiving end of all these
machinations is a devastating reality check. I am
especially grateful to the Japanese-speaking voice
The subject had really become a quiet leitmotif of the
actors who were able to bring this material to life in
show by the fifth season, which included a four-part
English, and all the interpreters who worked with us.
series on events of World War II. When Malcolm said
he wanted to expand this material into an audiobook,
I really had to wonder what was driving his fascination.
I wound up Googling the part of England, Kent, where
Malcolm’s dad, Graham Gladwell, grew up. Turns out it
was known as “Bomb Alley.” The timing and geography
A B-29 Superfortress waits to take off from a
runway in the Pacific theater. The B-29 could fly
faster, higher, and farther than any other bomber
in the world and finally put the US Army Air
Forces within striking distance of Japan.

Credit: NARA
 The Army Air Forces’ early facilities on Guam
were primitive: tents and metal Quonset huts.

Credit: NARA
Luis Guerra, composer

Musical ideas for The Bomber

Mafia first developed from the
music I composed for a quartet
of war-related episodes found in
season five of Revisionist History.
For those episodes, I wrote larger ensemble music that
included the marching rhythms of the military drumline,
orchestral winds/brass, and a few textural analog synths.
For the audiobook, the producers and I decided a more
intimate sound would work better. Several key points of this
fascinating story influenced my compositions. The vastness
of the Pacific Ocean, the pursuit to create precision bombing,
and the eccentric characters who chased their dreams all
served as inspiration. I hope that you enjoy listening to the
book as much as I enjoyed creating the music.
 Harvard chemistry professor Louis Fieser and
his associate E. B. Hershberg (not pictured)
conducted experiments with combustible gels
that led to the invention of napalm.

Credit: Hup Fieser, Louis (25). Harvard University Archives

The first napalm bomb test was conducted on
July 4, 1942, behind Harvard Business School
in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Credit: Harvard University Archives/Louis Fieser, The Scientific Method

Amy Gaines, fact checker

As the fact checker on this Schweinfurt: Much of what we know about the damage
done to ball bearing plants during the Schweinfurt
project, I had the pleasure raids comes from the memoirs of Hitler’s Minister
of Armaments and War Production Albert Speer.
of delving into the deep His detailed account highlights what he calls “the
enemy’s error.” Instead of continuing to hit the plants
historical record to sniff out repeatedly, “the attacks on the ball bearing industry

any inaccuracies.
Some of these led to detours that were a bit too much
to wedge into the audio version. But we were able to
offer this material to readers by way of footnotes in the
print version of The Bomber Mafia. Here are some of
our team’s most interesting (and often unintentional)
research finds.
ceased abruptly. Thus, the Allies threw away success
when it was already in their hands. Had they continued
the attacks ... with the same energy, we would quickly
have been at our last gasp.” (Chapter 5)
LeMay’s report to his wife from the Marianas:
Curtis LeMay described the dismal features at his
headquarters in Guam to his wife with almost comical
optimism: “The beach here isn’t too bad. Not much
coral and what there is [is] mostly rotten, so you don’t
get cut up on it. There are quite a few sea slugs around,
but they don’t bother you. This just blew off on the
floor, so you will see some of the same red dirt that we
had in Hawaii.” (Chapter 6)
 The Superfort: The biggest problem with the
earliest versions of the Superfortress was that the
engines easily overheated. If you were a B-29 pilot
in those days, your biggest worry was the enemy
shooting at you. Your second biggest worry was that
your engines would catch on fire. (Chapter 6)

The bombing of Dresden: Kurt Vonnegut’s

Slaughterhouse-Five is framed as science fiction,
but much of the novel is based on Vonnegut’s
experience as an American POW in Dresden during
the RAF bombing campaign. (Chapter 3)

Hansell’s final mission: After being dismissed in

the Marianas, Hansell’s final mission takes place on
January 19. It’s a tremendous success. Sixty-two B-29s
take out the Kawasaki factory. As historian William
Ralph notes: “Every important building in the entire
complex was hit. Production fell by 90%. Not a single
B-29 was lost. Hansell flew back to the United States
the next day.” The irony is unbearable. (Chapter 7)
 To analyze the power of incendiary bombs, a
perfect replica of a Japanese village was built at
the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in 1943.

Credit: japanairraids.org
Jacob Smith, managing producer

Starting with the air raid sirens proper buzzing of a biplane with a rotary engine — and
likewise with the Flying Fortress and Super Fortress
you hear at the opening of the which appear later on.

author’s note, we made every When we take a tour of the military academy chapels
in Chapter 2, the organs and bells match each place he
effort to make sure the sounds mentions. At times, we would reconstruct soundscapes

you hear accompanying the text piece by piece with individual elements, but it was
really exciting to find intact combat recordings. Late
are historically accurate. in production, my co-producer Eloise came across a
harrowing recording from the 1944 battle of Guam,
which we wove into oral history audio of an eyewitness
account of the invasion in Chapter 6.
This meant combing very carefully through the
archival tape to match propellers, engines, bombs
and bombsights. When historical material wasn’t
available, we would try to find modern recordings
of vintage planes. So when Malcolm mentions the
“deadly” Sopwith Camel in Chapter 1, we hear the
 In January of 1945, Major General Curtis E. LeMay
(left) replaced Brigardier General Haywood Hansell, Jr.
(center) as head of the Twenty-First Bomber Command
in the Mariana Islands. At right is Hansell’s chief of staff,
Brigadier General Roger M. Ramey.

Credit: NARA
Aerial view of the Tokyo bombing. On the
night of March 9-10, 1945, one observer
noted that the glow from the fires was
visible 150 miles away.

Credit: NARA
Flawn Williams, engineer

Airplanes are obviously an But there are several spots where the airplanes’ roar
and drone become an element by themselves, an
important part of The Bomber emotional driver of the story, and often are heard
in tandem with Luis Guerra’s evocative musical
Mafia story. scoring. In those moments it felt better to add some
immersive sense of space to the original mono
recordings of the plane engines.

And where possible we used recordings of

A digital stereo reverberation generator, along
the particular models of airplane that were
with a time delay, filled in some sound to the left
appropriate in the story, valuing veracity over mere
and right of the old audio. And I added some tonal
verisimilitude. At various points in the chapters
manipulation of just that delayed reverberation,
of the audiobook, these sounds show up as part
removing the higher harmonics and boosting the
of an old newsreel or film soundtrack. In those
bassy rumble as the echoes blended together with
cases, I mixed them in pretty much intact in their
the original mono sound. I hope that helps you, the
monophonic splendor. At times I just shifted their
listener, feel like you’re hearing the rebound of the
tonal quality to blend in better with the voices
engines’ sound from nearby hills or buildings.
they were accompanying, or used modern software
processing to remove some extraneous background
noise from the old recording.
The Center of the Tokyo Raids and
War Damage is located in an unassuming
building in Tokyo, Japan.

Credit: Nick-D, cc by-sa 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

If you enjoy what you are
about to hear, remember this:
There will be more! The Bomber
Mafia team will ride again!

Malcolm

The Bomber Mafia has roots as episodes of Malcolm’s podcast

Revisionist History. You can listen to the show wherever you get
your podcasts.

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