Author: Malcolm Gladwell
- Fiction
- Taurus
- ISBN: 9788430624591
- Release Date: 06-02-2022
Synopsis
Durante los años previos a la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en una base aérea de Alabama, un grupo de pilotos renegados forjó una idea radical. ¿Qué pasaría si los bombardeos fueran tan precisos como para que las guerras pudieran librarse solamente desde el aire? ¿Podrían los brutales enfrentamientos entre ejércitos de tierra convertirse en cosa del pasado? Este libro cuenta lo que ocurrió cuando intentó llevarse a la práctica ese sueño.
Malcolm Gladwell sigue los pasos de un genio holandés y su ordenador analógico casero, del grupo de científicos pirómanos de Harvard que inventaron el napalm, de un brillante piloto que cantaba tonadas a su equipo y del comandante LeMay, quien ordenaría uno de los ataques más sangrientos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. A su más puro estilo, Gladwell les saca jugo a todos estos personajes fascinantes y nos lleva ágilmente a través de una serie de dilemas que cambiaron el rumbo de la historia para para preguntarnos cuál puede llegar a ser, a menudo, el precio del progreso.
In The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War, Malcolm Gladwell, author of New York Times best sellers including Talking to Strangers and host of the podcast Revisionist History, uses original interviews, archival footage, and his trademark insight to weave together the stories of a Dutch genius and his homemade computer, a band of brothers in Central Alabama, a British psychopath, and pyromaniacal chemists at Harvard. As listeners hear these stories unfurl, Gladwell examines one of the greatest moral challenges in modern American history.
Most military thinkers in the years leading up to World War II saw the airplane as an afterthought. But a small band of idealistic strategists had a different view. This “Bomber Mafia” asked: What if precision bombing could, just by taking out critical choke points - industrial or transportation hubs - cripple the enemy and make war far less lethal?
In Revisionist History, Gladwell reexamines moments from the past and asks whether we got it right the first time. In The Bomber Mafia, he employs all the production techniques that make Revisionist History so engaging, stepping back from the bombing of Tokyo, the deadliest night of the war, and asking, “Was it worth it?” The attack was the brainchild of General Curtis LeMay, whose brutal pragmatism and scorched-earth tactics in Japan cost thousands of civilian lives but may have spared more by averting a planned US invasion.
Things might have gone differently had LeMay’s predecessor, General Haywood Hansell, remained in charge. As a key member of the Bomber Mafia, Hansell’s theories of precision bombing had been foiled by bad weather and human error. When he and Curtis LeMay squared off for a leadership handover in the jungles of Guam, LeMay emerged victorious, leading to the darkest night of World War II.
