So it was finally decided that what we should do is develop a big cover of plastic over the glass windows, which eliminated many of the sources of the problem, because each little piece of glass sitting in that window frame, everything begins to—it doesn’t take much for water to come through. And so they went and put in these long panels of plastic, and it’s done a lot to eliminate the major problem.
This is so Air Force. You build a twenty-first-century chapel in the middle of the twentieth century, and it’s so far ahead of its time that you have to do an engineering workaround based on a reanalysis of meteorological patterns. My point is—where did this radical new mind-set come from? It came from the Air Corps Tactical School, in that intellectual flurry between 1931 and 1941. In those seminar rooms and late-night arguments, the culture of the modern Air Force was born. They would take warfare into the air. They would leave every other branch of the service behind. And if you stand in the sanctuary of the Air Force Academy chapel and stare up at the soaring aluminum ribs of the ceiling, you’ll get it.
Meanwhile, what’s happening back at the Naval Academy? They’re burnishing the brass rails in their chapel by hand.
4.
As with all revolutionary groups, the Bomber Mafia has a defining legend, an origin story. And as with all legends, it may not be strictly accurate, but here’s how it goes:
On St. Patrick’s Day in 1936, in Pittsburgh, there was a flood. It was a devastating event. Pittsburgh is unusual in that it sits at the head of a major river, the Ohio, formed by the convergence of two other rivers, the Monongahela and the Allegheny. And that day, the convergence of the rivers swelled in a massive flood.
Airmen do not typically concern themselves with land-based disasters. Hurricanes, maybe. Thunderstorms. A flood is the kind of thing the Army worries about. But there was an odd consequence of the Pittsburgh flood that would end up having a dramatic influence on the revolution brewing down at Maxwell Field. It had to do with the fact that among the hundreds of buildings along the riverbanks destroyed by the rising water was a factory belonging to a firm named Hamilton Standard. Hamilton Standard was the country’s principal manufacturer of a spring used in making variable-pitch propellers, which were basic equipment on most airplanes at the time. But because Hamilton Standard couldn’t make variable-pitch propeller springs, no one could make variable-pitch propellers, and because no one could make variable-pitch propellers, no one could make airplanes. The Pittsburgh flood brought the whole aeronautics industry of 1936 to a halt: for the want of a spring, the airplane business was lost.
Down in Alabama, the Bomber Mafia looked at what happened to Hamilton Standard, and the men’s eyes lit up. The member of the Bomber Mafia who spent the most time thinking about that spring factory was Donald Wilson. And what happened in Pittsburgh made him realize something. War, in its classical definition, is the application of the full weight of military forces against the enemy until the enemy’s political leadership surrenders. But Wilson thought—is that really necessary? If we just take out the propeller-spring factory in Pittsburgh, we cripple their air force. And if we can find another dozen or so crucial targets just like that—“choke points” was the phrase he used—bombing could cripple the whole country. Wilson then devised one of the Bomber Mafia’s most famous thought experiments. And remember, the men could only do thought experiments. They didn’t have any real bombers. Or any real enemy. Or any real resources. They were spitballing.
In the thought experiment, Wilson made the manufacturing hub of the Northeast the target:
Now, when we began theorizing about this thing…we had no air intelligence of any possible enemy. Thereby we had a thing…a unit that possibly could be reached by an enemy. And in order to illustrate this concept, we assume that an enemy would plant himself down in Canada and be within reach of this northeastern industrial area.
So the enemy in this thought experiment is in Canada—let’s say Toronto. Toronto is 340 miles from New York City as the crow flies, easily within the range of the planes the Bomber Mafia was dreaming about. What kind of damage could a fleet of bombers do, coming down from Toronto on a single bombing run?
In a two-day presentation in April of 1939 at the Tactical School, they tried to figure it out.
I spoke about the thought experiment with historian Robert Pape, who wrote a book called Bombing to Win, about the origins of many of the ideas taught at the Air Corps Tactical School. Pape described the presentation:
The bombing that they’re focusing on [is], number one, the bridges. Number two, they have the bombing of the aqueducts. The bombing of the aqueducts is important because what they want to do is cause massive thirst in the New York population. They basically want to create a situation where there’s almost no potable water for the population to drink. And then, number three, they target electric power.