They’re not really investigating the psychology of bombing. They’re not investigating the sociology of bombing. They’re not really even investigating the politics of the bombing—that is, the implications the bombing would have for populations, societies, and for governments. What they’re really doing is focusing on the technology of the bombing of the time, what target sets it would allow the bombers to hit.
The presentation was given by a key Bomber Mafia associate, Muir Fairchild. Fairchild argued that the aqueducts are the most obvious targets. The aqueduct system serving New York City is ninety-two miles long. Then there’s the power grid. Fairchild directed his students to a chart: “The Aerial Bomb Versus Traction Electric Power in the New York City Area.”
As Fairchild concluded: “We see then that seventeen bombs, if dropped on the right spots, will not only take out practically all of the electric power of the entire metropolitan area but will prevent the distribution of outside power!”
Seventeen bombs! Conventional wisdom was that you would have to bomb the whole city—reduce it to rubble with wave upon wave of costly and dangerous bombing attacks. Fairchild’s point was, Why would you do that if you could use your intelligence, and the magic of the Norden bombsight, to disable a city with a single strike? As Pape told me:
They’re certainly thinking that the bomber alone or airpower alone is going to win the war. And what they’re thinking is that it’s going to win the war and prevent a mass carnage like what occurred in World War I, where the armies clashed together year after year after year, and millions and millions of people died in the meat grinder of the trenches.
You can see why Donald Wilson, only half jokingly, said that if the Army had known what was going on at Maxwell, they would have put all the members of the Bomber Mafia in jail. Because these men were part of the Army, but they were saying that the rest of the Army was irrelevant and obsolete. You could have hundreds of thousands of troops massed along the Canadian border, complete with artillery and tanks and every other weapon imaginable, but the bombers would just fly right over them, leapfrog all the conventional defenses, and cripple the enemy with a few carefully chosen air strikes hundreds of miles beyond the front lines.
Tami Biddle, a professor of national security at the US Army War College, explains the Bomber Mafia’s psychology this way:
I think there’s a fascination with American technology. I think there’s a strong moral component to all this, a desire to find a way to fight a war that is clean and that is not going to tarnish the American reputation as a moral nation, a nation of ideas and ideology and commitment to individual rights and respect for human beings.
The Bomber Mafia—despite its ominous name—was never very large. It was a dozen men at most, all living—more or less—within walking distance of one another on those quiet, shaded streets at Maxwell Field. Nor was the Tactical School itself some massive facility. It was never West Point, churning out generation after generation of Army officers. During its twenty years of operation, it produced just over a thousand graduates. Had the Second World War never happened, it is entirely possible that the theories and dreams of this little group would have faded into history.
But then Hitler attacked Poland, and Great Britain and France declared war on Germany, and by the summer of 1941 it was obvious to everyone that the United States would soon be at war as well. And if the country was to go to war, it was obvious that it would need a strong air fleet. But what did a strong air fleet mean? How many planes did it need? To answer that question, the Army high command in Washington turned in desperation to the only group of experts who might have an answer: the instructors at the Tactical School, down at Maxwell Field in Alabama.
So the Bomber Mafia went to Washington and produced an astonishing document that would serve as a template for everything the United States did in the air war. The document is titled “Air War Plans Division One” （AWPD-1）。 It lays out, in exacting detail, how many planes the United States would need—fighters, bombers, transport planes. Also how many pilots. How many tons of explosives. And the targets in Germany for all those bombs, chosen according to the choke-point theory: fifty electrical power plants, forty-seven transportation networks, twenty-seven synthetic oil refineries, eighteen aircraft assembly plants, six aluminum plants, and six “sources of magnesium.” And this astonishing set of projections was produced just in nine days, start to finish—the kind of superhuman feat that is only possible if you have spent the previous ten years in the seclusion of central Alabama, waiting for your chance.