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.