Dan Snow's History Hit - Malcolm Gladwell
Episode Date: May 15, 2021Malcolm Gladwell has sold millions of books and more recently become a podcasting titan and he joins Dan to talk about his most recent project The Bomber Mafia. The Bomber Mafia is about a group of mi...litary officers who came up with and transformed the concept of strategic bombing during the Second World War and after. In this episode, Dan and Malcolm talk about one of the leading proponents of airpower General Curtis LeMay who implemented a devastating bombing campaign against Japan during the Second World War. They also discuss what subjects which inspire Malcolm's curiosity and his love of audio storytelling.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, I've got fellow podcaster Malcolm Gladwell on the podcast now.
I mean, I say fellow podcaster, I mean podcasting titan Malcolm Gladwell on the podcast.
He very sensibly chose to be born in Hampshire, where I live in England.
He then equally sensibly chose throughout much of his childhood to live in Ontario,
where my mother is from and where I also spent much of my childhood.
Sadly, that's where the similarities end. He went on to write books that have sold tens of millions of copies and entertained and informed the world with all his wonderful
podcasts. His latest book is about the bomber mafia, the group of men who almost came up with
the idea and then transformed the concept of strategic bombing during the Second World War
and after. It's a hugely interesting book and it's always great to get the take of someone who loves
to crunch the numbers and look into the detail. It's an audio project as well because there are
great interviews with people like the legendary, the terrifying Air Force General Curtis LeMay.
A leading proponent of inflicting gigantic casualties upon the enemy, of Carthaginian pieces, and possibly
a first-strike nuclear war. So it's got it all, folks. It's got it all. It was a great treat to
have Malcolm Gladwell on the podcast. If you wish to listen to other episodes of this podcast
without the ads, if you want to watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries, we've set up our
own history channel, historyhit.tv, a safe space for true history fans. Trending on the channel, we've got the lost Ninth Legion, which
disappeared somewhere into the north of Britain, or did it? We send our fearless historians up into
north of Britain to try and track it down. We've also got Dr. Elna Janneger talking about medieval
lives. And we've got a lot of Second World War content at the moment with great documentaries
coming out of our team in Poland. So please go and check out historyhit.tv. It's like the Netflix for history. It's got podcasts
on there and lots of TV shows as well. You're going to love it. But in the meantime, everyone,
here's the very brilliant Malcolm Gladwell.
Hello, Malcolm. Great to have you on this podcast.
Thank you. I'm delighted to be on your show.
This is the peon of praise to Curtis LeMay that I don't think anyone saw coming.
Well, it is and it isn't. I mean, it's a kind of ambivalent hymn. I do think that what he did
was necessary to end the war in Japan as quickly as possible. But Curtis LeMay would have said, if we asked him
today, why did you burn 66 Japanese cities to the ground in this number of 1945? He would have said,
because if I didn't, many more would have died in a land invasion of Japan. I think that's correct.
At the same time, I reserve the right to be horrified by the man.
Yeah, of course, of course. You're very clear that he's responsible for the death of a vast number of people. But I admit, like you, I've
always found that there is a logic to his belief. I mean, once you're in a war, it does make sense
to end it as soon as possible. Yes, he always believes that. And I think, particularly in the
Pacific theater of the Second World War, you had this problem, which was almost every
scenario you looked at for the capitulation of Japan involved just a staggering loss of life.
Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of Japanese were close to starvation,
dying of starvation in the summer of 45. MacArthur came in and fed the Japanese. Had he not done that, who knows how
many people would have perished? The Soviets were poised to invade Japan. God knows what would have
happened if they had done one of their rampages through Japan. I mean, you could go on and then
a land invasion by American troops in the fall of 45 would have been probably the bloodiest fighting of the war,
right? So it's like there were no good outcomes, I think, in that particular war.
I'm always struck by how commanders are often right at a time and a place, a bit like
artists and rock stars. One album is sublime, the rest suck. And if you look at, I don't know,
someone like Pei Tai, he was the right man for the moment, but the wrong man in the Second World War.
You know, arguably he got the strategy right for the Second World War, but don't know, someone like Pétain, he was the right man for the moment, but the wrong man in the Second World War. Arguably, he got the strategy right for the Second World War. But the Cold War,
that feels different. I mean, I think arguing for a preemptive nuclear strike was insane.
Yes. LeMay is one of the two protagonists of the bottom mafia. And he's fascinating for
the very reason you have described. He is a genius in the context of the Second World War and has a series of ideas.
You know, much of tactical bombing as we used it in the Second World War is developed by LeMay.
He's an extraordinary innovator and he's the great bomber pilot of the Second World War.
There's no question about that.
great bomber pilot of the Second World War. There's no question about that. After the war,
he ascends to first running the Strategic Air Command, and then he's running the Air Force by the 1960s. And his ideas never evolve. And I could have in my book, I've spent a great deal
more time talking about the American bombing campaign in Korea. And what the Americans do
to the North Koreans in that war, war is kind of unspeakable.
He basically takes the same ideas that he developed in the Second World War,
which is let's just napalm everything in sight.
And he applies them to the Korean conflict to no particularly good end.
And what are we left with?
We're left with a North Korean country, which in some ways quite legitimately has a major
bone to pick with the United States ever since, right?
Like at one point in the Korean conflict, the Air Force stops bombing Korean targets
because, quote, they have run out of targets.
There's nothing left.
I don't know whether that's the wisest way to prosecute a war.
Why this subject?
Why have all the wonderful podcasts that you've recorded, Revisionist History,
why is this the one that you wanted to make into a book?
Is it the particular relationship of data, of statistics,
and this grand, tragic historical narrative
that you'll get when you're talking about war on this scale?
Well, you know, it's been with me. My father grew up in Kent, in Bomb Alley, right? The part of Kent
where all of the German planes would fly over on their way to Bomb London during the Blitz. And as
a child, he was instructed to sleep under his bed as some kind of defense against. In fact, a bomb
does drop on my grandparents' house. It drops in the garden and it thankfully doesn't explode.
So it's like I grew up on these stories of this era. My father was born in 1932. Like any member
of that generation, the war had a permanent effect on his imagination, right? And so these are the stories I grew up on.
Some part of me has always wanted to tell a World War II story, and I just have never found the right one.
And then this kind of crazy story about this conflict within the U.S. Air Force between these two characters,
Ewood Heron Tansel and Curtis LeMay. It just
struck me that this is the story I've been waiting my whole life to tell.
So funny. My dad was almost blown up as a kid just down the road from that.
You mentioned these two air power professionals. You say Curtis LeMay,
in a way he won the battle but lost the war. Why do you say that?
Two things. One is that if you had talked to an American airman who served in Europe
or Japan during the Second World War, and you said, who was the greatest military leader you
knew? They would all say Curtis LeMay, without question. It would be like asking an English
person who was the greatest football player of your generation. You know, I don't know what they
would say. George Best. I don't know. I'm just looking that name out.
He's on that kind of level of...
And yet,
history has treated him
very unkindly.
And he didn't end his career
with any...
And secondly,
the ideas that he espoused,
he was the greatest proponent
of this notion of area bombing,
that the best way to win a war
is to burn everything
in enemy territory to the ground.
That idea has not survived, right?
That's not what we do anymore.
In fact, what we do today is what the bomber mafia were dreaming about back in the 1930s,
which is we use technology to allow us to drop bombs with extraordinary precision to
limit the amount of collateral damage and civilian casualties in any
conflict. So the book is, I begin with this group of dreamers who had this idea in the 30s in
Alabama. And it doesn't work in the Second World War, but it does work eventually. They were just
50 years too soon. So, you know, LeMay is sort of on the wrong side of history, even as he plays
an outsized role in the Second World War.
side of history, even as he plays an outsized role in the Second World War.
You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I've got Malcolm Gladwell on. More after this.
Have you heard of the teenage werewolf prosecuted in 1603? Did you know that the 17th century British government relied heavily on female spies? And do you want to know about chin-chucking and thigh sex?
Of course you do. I'm Susanna Lipscomb, and my new podcast, Not Just the Tudors, is a deep dive into
what I like to think of as the long 16th century. We'll be talking about everything from Aztecs to
witches, Velazquez to Shakespeare, Mughal India to the Mayflower. Not, in other words, just the Tudors,
but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, But wars between the great powers
are so different to the kind of messy insurgencies, the regional
conflicts, the so-called stabilization wars that we've endured today and throughout so much of my
life. The fact that hasn't been a great power war, would Curtis LeMay claim that as one of his
successes, his legacy? Yes, he would have. And of course, the ideas, you know, the drones,
the kind of precision warfare as it's practiced in the present day is not practiced between the great powers. It's what the United States does to little bitty powers. Right. I mean, it's an odd thing. It's like no one's ever set out to do a kind of modern superpower conflict using these ideas of precision and high technology we're still
relying on this old paradigm of we'll try and keep the peace by threatening absolute destruction
but when it comes to taking out milosevic or going after taliban leaders or al-qaeda leaders
we're using all the modern technological means we have just to take out individuals. So it's a funny thing. I guess the tactics available to the modern war planner are
just more diverse than they were during the Second World War. What about cyber? Isn't that the
equivalent now, this brand new technology that can reach into the heart of an enemy's country and
force them to make peace, derail the economy, derail their ability
to make war. I mean, you talk about the notional strike on New York City, you take out the aqueducts,
et cetera. Well, dropping bombs on aqueducts is actually pretty inefficient. Shut them down
using the old internet, shut down the power grid via computer, and boom. Weirdly, isn't that the
bomber mafia's dream? Yes. So I think you're absolutely
right. The evolution of precision warfare. So to backtrack, you know, the bomber mafia in the 1930s
are a group of people who think that area bombing is stupid. And what you should really do is just
take out very, very precise targets in enemy territory. They do a famous seminar on how to cripple New York City,
and it's 14 bombs, the aqueducts, the power plants, the bridges, and you're done. No civilian
needs to die. Just by severing the aqueduct, you've rendered New York helpless. There's no
fresh water. And cyber is the kind of modern equivalent of that it's like you could be sitting in front of your computer in
beijing or somewhere in north korea or outside of moscow and if you shut down the power grid
on the east coast of the united states i was listening to some cyber expert recently talking
about crashing the cloud at some point someone's going to hack their way into the cloud.
And if you think about how many business operations Grind will halt under that scenario, I mean,
you know, it's insane. I mean, we couldn't do anything, right? So yes, why would you expend thousands of lives in a ground attack on your enemy when what you really need to do is sit back
and just selectively disable every bit of technology that makes your enemy's economy work even modest cyber hacks have
extraordinary consequences right like the hack on sony a couple years ago resulted in an incredible
blow to the prestige of sony tons of people people lose their lives. Hollywood's in turmoil.
Go on and on and on. And that was just a kind of one single attack on basically the emails of one
selected company in Los Angeles. I mean, it's sort of crazy how powerful those kinds of attacks can
be. I'm really fascinated by how you choose your subjects. I mean, how do you decide what determines
where your gaze falls?
Well, it's changed over the years. Now I'm so interested in audio. So this book,
The Borrowed Mafia, began as an audio book. The audio book is the thing that we poured our hearts
into. And then we took the other book and we made a print version of it, which is also,
I think, compelling, but in a different way. I'm now very interested in storytelling through sound.
I think, compelling, but in a different way.
I'm now very interested in storytelling through sound.
So now I ask myself the question, can I get good audio?
My next book is going to be about the Los Angeles Police Department.
And it's an enormous topic, but the direction I'm taking is being steered by where can I get tape?
So to give you a kind of random example, there's a famous police chief of the LAPD who
was deposed in 1992 after the Rodney King riots. And there's some incredible tape of him being
confronted at some hearing. And I found the tape, right? And so all of a sudden, I was like, oh,
that's a chapter. I'll build a story around this confrontation, which if you listen to it,
it's gripping. I mean, it's kind of history
brought to life. So that's the way I'm thinking now. Similarly, with the bomber mafia, I discovered
this archive at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, where they had sat down for
hours with every leading figure in the US Air Force in the Second World War. It's all there.
I mean, hundreds of hours of tape of these men reliving their
experiences. I mean, it was a goldmine. I couldn't believe it. I was like, this is incredible, right?
I could spend years in this archive. So that's what excites me now.
You know, I just could not agree more. I often think to myself,
actually, we're at the beginning of this revolution. We don't really know its impact.
I mean, you and I are old enough to have met people that fought towards the beginning of us being able to record audio and pictures.
Like, it's not super exciting to us. But for our kids, kids, kids, they will have
battlefield footage. They will have veteran interviews with people that lived 200 years
ago. That's like us having a documentary about George Washington or Napoleon Bonaparte. We still don't understand the gigantic nature
of the change that we've lived through in the last hundred years. Yeah, yeah. And think about
the way we'll tell history in the future. You really will be able to truly relive. You know,
I remember as a child, we had these illustrated English history books,
which I would pour over as a kid, and they would have these full-scale reproductions of paintings
of kind of epic battles over the years. And I was always mesmerized by these paintings. You know,
The Charge of the Light Brigade, that famous painting, that kind of stuff. Well, you know,
my children and their children, they'll have the same
experience, except they'll watch a video of the equivalent of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
It'll be that much more compelling. I want to ask at the end now,
your books are growing out of audio now. You're famous writing these gigantic bestsellers,
but what does it say that now you are putting the audio project first?
The audio allows you to tell a different kind of story.
I have written books in the past that were very analytical.
And when you do an argument with numbers and statistics and things,
print is the best way to go.
You know, as I've grown older,
I'm much more interested in telling stories that are emotional,
that attempt to move people, to touch their hearts or make them cry,
or all those kinds of things. That's the power of audio. You know, my friend Charles always likes to say, we think
with our eyes and we feel with our ears. And I've gone from being an eye person to an ear person,
I think, as I've grown old and sentimental. So the idea that in my 50s, I can reinvent myself
as a storyteller using a different form is just
tremendously exciting. And maybe at the age of 75, I want to do film, who knows. But that idea
that all of a sudden, I'm using different resources and reaching people in different ways,
just, it's like I started over. I'm like a child again. It's fantastic.
Well, same here. It's so exciting. Thank you very much for coming on My Little Old Pod.
The book is called? The Bomber Mafia. Thank you very much for coming on My Little Old Pod. The book is called?
The Bomber Mafia.
Thank you and good luck with it.
I'd really appreciate it. Thank you, Dan.
I feel we have the history on our shoulders.
All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were our government, and finish. I've got just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in
a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here
to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want
to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour
to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating,
if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from
the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to
the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things, and I can spend more of my time getting
pummeled. Thank you.