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Take your business further at T-Mobile.com slash now. Pushkin. Hello, hello, patient listeners. Malcolm Gladwell here. Today is a very big day for me. It is the launch of my newest book, The Bomber Mafia, a dream, a temptation, and the longest night of the Second World War.
You can buy The Bomber Mafia from Audible or Apple Books or any place you usually get books. And it's available in print and e-book and audio book. But I urge you.
to buy the audio directly from BomberMafia.com. When you do, you'll be able to listen in whatever podcast app you're using now, and you'll receive an exclusive listener's guide that includes photos and behind-the-scenes commentary from my crack production team.
Those of you who are devoted revisionist history listeners will remember that last season I did four episodes on the firebombing of Tokyo at the end of the Second World War. Curtis LeMay, the birth of napalm, the war over the skies of Tokyo in the spring of 1945. It was all prompted by a trip I took to Japan and a visit to a tiny museum on a side street in Tokyo that left me devastated.
After the season was over, I couldn't get that story out of my mind. And I couldn't shake the idea that there was much more to the story. And there was. I've taken that little kernel from last season and built an entirely new audiobook around it. You'll hear a little bit of material that previously appeared in my podcast, Revisionist History. But in those instances, the material's been expanded with more archival footage, new writing, enhanced scoring, and a whole new context.
If you've heard the episodes of Revisionist History, it will feel like when you've read a book excerpt in The New Yorker of Andy Fair and then gone on to read the whole thing. The story starts back in the 1930s with an obsessive band of pilots in central Alabama who called themselves the Bomber Mafia, who thought they could reinvent war
They had a leader, a man named Haywood Hansel, a southerner and a romantic, a man who would sing Broadway tunes to his fellow airmen as he piloted his warplane home from bomber missions over Europe. Hansel and his fellow dreamers in Alabama woke up one day and realized that they had been given an actual war in which to test their theories. What happened when they put those theories to the test is the story of my new book, The Bomber Mafia.
So what I want to do today is to play you a little teaser. It's from one of the early chapters of the book about a reclusive genius named Carl Norton, who strangely, to this day, seems to have been largely forgotten by history. Norton ran a research program during the years of the Second World War shrouded in as much secrecy as the Manhattan Project taking place in the same period in the New Mexico desert. Norton invented something called the Norton Bombsite.
which was the device at the center of the bomber mafia's obsession. I'm going to play you a little bit of this chapter on Norden, where I track down the one historian who's really paid attention to him. His name is Stephen McFarland. And here we are in Nerd Heaven. Let's start with, for a layperson, describe why the task of
dropping a bomb from an airplane is difficult? I mean, the dumbest possible question. Let's start with that one. Okay. I don't consider it dumb at all. It's amazing to me. I mean, I just assumed, you know, that you watch the videos and the movies and they say, just put the crosshairs on the target and the bomb site will do the rest.
But there's an amazing number of elements that come into dropping a bomb accurately on a target. I think if you think about your own car, you know, driving down the highway at 60, 70 miles an hour, you can imagine throwing out something out the window and trying to hit something, you know, even if it's stationary, like a sign or a tree or anything on the side of the road, you get an idea of just how hard that is.
If you're trying to throw a bottle into a garbage can from a car going 50 miles per hour, you have to perform a bit of amateur physics. The garbage can is stationary, but you and the car are moving quickly, so you have to release the bottle well before you reach the can, right? But if you're in an airplane at 20,000 feet, the problem is infinitely more complicated. Aircraft were flying at 200, 300 miles an hour, sometimes as fast as 500 miles an hour.
They were dropping bombs from up to 30,000 feet that would take between 20 and 30, 35 seconds to hit the ground. And during that whole time, you're being shot at. You're having to look through clouds or not be able to look through clouds. Anti-aircraft artillery. You're having to deal with factory decoys, smoke screens. There's the smoke from other bombs, people screaming in your ear, the excitement that
that all these strange things that happen once war begins, and you get some idea of just how difficult it is. The wind could be blowing at 100 miles per hour. You have to factor that in. If it's cold, the air is denser, and the bomb will fall more slowly. If it's warm, the air is thinner, and the bomb will fall faster.
Then you also have to consider, is the plane level? Is it moving side to side or up and down? A tiny degree of error at the release point can translate to a big error on the ground. And from 20,000 feet, can you even see the target? A factory might be big and obvious up close, but from that far up, it looks like a postage stamp. Bombers in the early days of aviation couldn't hit anything, not even close.
The bombardiers might as well have been throwing darts at a dartboard with their eyes closed. The dream that the airplane could revolutionize warfare was based on a massive, untested, unproven assumption that somehow, someone at some point would figure out how to aim a bomb from high in the sky with something close to accuracy. It was a question on the era's technological wish list until Carl Norton.
He had no help. He did it all by himself. It was all in his mind. He didn't carry notes. He didn't have a notepad. You can't, you know, go to his archive. There is no such thing. It was all kept in his head. And for a man to keep that kind of complexity in his head, I was just amazed that it could be done that way.
But engineers refer to something called the mind's eye, that they see things in their mind, not with their eyes, but with their mind's eye. And that was truly Carl Norton. I always dislike using the word genius because I feel like it's thrown around. And I always prefer to kind of put an adjective in front of the word genius. What's his adjective? He would tell you that only God invents, humans discover, right?
So for him, it was not genius. He would have refused to accept that term. He would not appreciate, would not accept anyone calling him a genius.
He would say he's just one who discovers the greatness of God, is what he would tell you. That God reveals truths through people who are willing to work hard and to use their minds to discover God's truths. Norton began working on the bombsite problem in the 1920s. He got a Navy contract, although he would later work for the Army's Air Corps, which is what the U.S. Air Force was called in those days.
He set up shop on Lafayette Street in the part of Manhattan now called Soho, and there he began work on his masterpiece. These gentlemen are aerial photographs of enemy-held objectives. They are our targets for tomorrow and the next day and the next. One of them may be your target. You're listening to an internal military training film from the Second World War, instructing bombardiers in how to use Carl Norton's creation, the Norton bombsight. They are the reason for your being here.
The reason for all the vast equipment assembled in this and other bombardier schools. For the instructors here to train you. For the pilots here to fly you on your missions. The bombers that flew in the Second World War, in most cases, had a crew of ten men: pilot, co-pilot, navigator, gunners. And most crucially, bombardiers. The people who aimed and dropped the bombs. If the bombardier did not do his job, then the efforts of all nine of his crewmen were wasted.
Its official name was the Mark 15. The airmen who used it called it the "football."
It weighed 55 pounds. It sat on a kind of platform, a packing box stabilized by a gyroscope that kept it level at all times, even as the plane was bouncing around. The bombsight was essentially an analog computer, a compact, finely machined contraption composed of mirrors, a telescope, ball bearings, levels, and dials.
The bombardier peered through the telescope at the target from a moving plane and made a fantastically complicated series of adjustments. Norton created 64 algorithms that he believed represented every dimension of the bombing problem. Like, for example, how much does the speed and direction of the wind affect the trajectory of a bomb? Or the temperature? Or the speed of the aircraft? Now look at the line in the flooring.
That was your sighting line when you started. Remember how the sight's made in two parts? Underneath, there's the stabilizer. And in that, there's another gyro, only it has a horizontal axis. To be properly trained on the Norden took six months. Above that is your sight. The stabilizer is fixed in the longitudinal axis of the airplane. But you can keep turning the sight so that it's always pointing at the target.
All this so the bombardier could know exactly when to shout "bombs away!"
In addition, Norton even created one of his 64 algorithms, was an algorithm that compensated for the fact that when you drop a bomb and it takes 30 seconds to hit the target, during those 30 seconds, the Earth actually moves. It spins on its axis. So he actually created a formula
that if it was going to take 20 seconds for the bomb to hit the target, then the Earth would move, I'm going to make up a number, 12 feet. You therefore had to adjust the computer to say, well, the target's now moved 12 feet. If you're at 20,000 feet, it might move 25 feet. And all of these then had to be put into this computer.
Eventually, almost every bomber that flew missions for the United States over Europe and Japan during the Second World War had a Norden bombsight on board.
The army bought thousands of them. Before every mission, the bombardier would retrieve his device from a vault with an armed escort, carry it out to the plane in a metal box. In the event of a crash landing, the bombardier was instructed to destroy the bombsite immediately, lest it fall into enemy hands. Legend has it that bombardiers were even given an 18-inch long explosive device to do the trick, and as a final precaution.
the bombardier had to take a special oath. I solemnly swear that I will keep inviolate the secrecy of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and in full knowledge that I am a guardian of one of my country's most priceless assets, do further swear to protect the secrecy of the American bombsight, if need be, with my life itself.
In the midst of all this drama and secrecy was Carl Norton, maddening, eccentric Norton. While he was still perfecting his invention, he would sometimes leave Manhattan and return to his mother's house in Zurich. It would drive the military crazy.
The army was just up in arms. The FBI sent agents with him to try to protect him. There was a great fear that the British supposedly thought that he was working for the Germans as a spy, and they were afraid the British would try to capture him. But he absolutely insisted. He said, I'm going to Switzerland. There's nothing you can do to stop me. And of course, the laws of wartime were not yet in effect because the United States wasn't in the war, so legally there was no way they could stop him. So why did the military put up with him?
Because the Norton bombsight was the Holy Grail. Norton had a business partner named Ted Barth. He was the salesman, the public face, and he claimed the year before the U.S. joined the war that, "...we do not regard a 15-foot square as being a very difficult target to hit from an altitude of 30,000 feet."
The shorthand version of that, which would serve as the foundation of the Norden legend, was that the bomb site could drop a bomb into a pickle barrel from six miles up. To the first generation of military pilots, that claim was intoxicating. The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 bomber, the Superfortress.
The second most expensive was the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world's first atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. No, the Norden bombsight, the 55-pound analog computer conceived inside the exacting imagination of Carl L. Norden.
And why spend so much on a bombsite? Because the Norden represented a dream. One of the most powerful dreams in the history of warfare. That if we could drop bombs inside pickle barrels from 30,000 feet, we wouldn't need armies anymore. We wouldn't need to leave young men dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We could reinvent war. Make it precise and quick and almost bloodless. Almost. Pretty good, huh?
In fact, terrific. Thanks for listening to that excerpt of my new audiobook, The Bomber Mafia. All of it lovingly machine-tooled here in the audio factories of Pushkin Industries. If you want to hear more, and you should, you can get it at BomberMafia.com. After your purchase, you can download it and listen to it in your favorite podcast app.
And yes, season six of Revisionist History is in the works. It's so good. It launches in June. Until then, thank you for being such great listeners. I really mean it when I say that this show, and by extension, this new audiobook, would not exist without all of your encouragement over the years. See you soon.
I'm Malcolm Gladwell, and I'd like to take a moment to talk about an amazing new podcast I'm hosting called Medal of Honor. It's a moving podcast series celebrating the untold stories of those who protect our country. And it's brought to you by LifeLock, the leader in identity theft protection. Your personal info is in a lot of places that can accidentally expose you to identity theft.
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On August 29th, Sauron has returned. Prime Video invites you to return to Middle-earth for the epic new season. Sauron will fall. You can't kill me. War is coming to Middle-earth.
I will not stop until he is destroyed. Every soul is in peril. Shall we begin? The Lord of the Rings. The Rings of Power. New season, August 29th. Only on Prime Video.