I once read a passage by the Royal Air Force general Arthur Harris about what it meant to be an air commander in the Second World War:
I wonder if the frightful mental strain of commanding a large air force in war can ever be realized except by the very few who have experienced it. While a naval commander may at the most be required to conduct a major action once or twice in the whole course of the war, and an army commander is engaged in one battle say once in six months or, in exceptional circumstances, as often as once a month, the commander of a bomber force has to commit the whole of it every twenty-four hours…It is best to leave to the imagination what such a daily strain amounts to when continued over a period of years.
So there were Hansell and Norstad in Guam. Two war-weary airmen, facing what they hoped might be the war’s final chapter. Hansell suggested a quick tour: Stand on the beach. Admire the brand-new runways, cut from the jungle. Chat about tactics, plans. Norstad said no. He had something more personal to discuss. And in a moment that would stay with Haywood Hansell for the rest of his life, Norstad turned to him: This isn’t working. You’re out.
“I thought the earth had fallen in—I was completely crushed.” That’s how, years later, Hansell described his feelings in that moment. Then Norstad delivered the second, deeper blow. He said, I’m replacing you with Curtis LeMay.
General Curtis Emerson LeMay, thirty-eight years of age, hero of the bombing campaigns over Germany. One of the most storied airmen of his generation. Hansell knew him well. They had served together in Europe. And Hansell understood immediately that this was not a standard leadership reshuffle. This was a rebuke, an about-face. An admission by Washington that everything Hansell had been doing was now considered wrong. Because Curtis LeMay was Haywood Hansell’s antithesis.
Norstad offered that Hansell could stay on if he wished, to be LeMay’s deputy, a notion Hansell considered so insulting that he could barely speak. Norstad told him he had ten days to finish up. Hansell walked around in a daze. On his last night in Guam, Hansell had a little more to drink than usual and sang for his men while a young colonel played the guitar: “Old pilots never die, never die, they just fly-y-y away-y-y-y.”
When Curtis LeMay arrived for the changeover, he flew himself to the island in a B-29 bomber. “The Star Spangled Banner” was played. The airmen of the Twenty-First Bomber Command marched by for review. A public relations officer proposed a picture of the two of them to mark the moment. LeMay had a pipe in his mouth—he always had a pipe in his mouth—and didn’t know what to do with it. He kept trying to put it in his pocket. “General,” the aide said, “please let me hold your pipe while the picture is taken.”
LeMay said, in a quiet voice, “Where do you want me to stand?” The cameras clicked and captured Hansell squinting off into the distance, LeMay looking down at the ground. Two men, anxious to be anywhere but in each other’s company. And with that, it was over.
The Bomber Mafia is the story of that moment. What led up to it and what happened next—because that change of command reverberates to this day.
2.
There is something that has always puzzled me about technological revolutions. Some new idea or innovation comes along, and it is obvious to all that it will upend our world. The internet. Social media. In previous generations, it was the telephone and the automobile. There’s an expectation that because of this new invention, things will get better, more efficient, safer, richer, faster. Which they do, in some respects. But then things also, invariably, go sideways. At one moment, social media is being hailed as something that will allow ordinary citizens to upend tyranny. And then in the next moment, social media is feared as the platform that will allow citizens to tyrannize one another. The automobile was supposed to bring freedom and mobility, which it did for a while. But then millions of people found themselves living miles from their workplaces, trapped in endless traffic jams on epic commutes. How is it that, sometimes, for any number of unexpected and random reasons, technology slips away from its intended path?
The Bomber Mafia is a case study in how dreams go awry. And how, when some new, shiny idea drops down from the heavens, it does not land, softly, in our laps. It lands hard, on the ground, and shatters. The story I’m about to tell is not really a war story. Although it mostly takes place in wartime. It is the story of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer. A band of brothers in central Alabama. A British psychopath. Pyromaniacal chemists in a basement labs at Harvard. It’s a story about the messiness of our intentions, because we always forget the mess when we look back.