What's on your nightstand

What’s on My Nightstand July 2025

Which book has moved or engaged you? Please share it with other CCW members. We accept all genres. Tell us what the book is about (without giving away any spoilers), your reaction to it and why. Please send book reviews to Barbara.siebeneick@gmail.com. (Please note that all book reviews are the opinion of the writer and not the Central Coast Writers.) This month’s review is from Barbara Siebeneick

The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell 2021, Bay Back Books/Little, Brown and Company, 235pages

This book begins with the dream of Army pilots believing their role in the military should be more than just conveying supplies and troops. They believed that the Air Force should be separate from the Army and could be a vital part of WWII.

At the beginning of the war in Europe, the RAF (Royal Air Force) conducted night raids over enemy territory where they dropped bombs in area bombing, hoping to demoralize the public who would then cause the war to end quicker. The loss of civilian life was considered a part of warfare. Remember, they still had the memory of WWI and the bloody land war that took hundreds of thousands of lives in the trenches.

The Bomber Mafia was a group of a dozen pilots who believed precision bombing would be more effective. If they could take out the plants that made ball bearings, for example, then every machine used in war would break down.

The problem was precision bombing was very difficult. The pilot must find the target, analyze wind, speed, trajectory, etc. and hope they would hit the target. Enter the Norton bombsight. With this instrument, the group believed it could hit with complete accuracy. However, they would then need to fly in daylight, opening the planes to more attacks. They felt that if the US Air Force flew by day (precision) and the Brits (area) at night, the endless bombardments and accurate attacks would end the war sooner. Unfortunately, theory and actuality didn’t sync and they lost hundreds of planes and thousands of pilots while doing relatively little damage to their targets.

Part Two takes place in the war raging in the Pacific. Now the Air Force was located in the Mariana Islands. The flight to Japan was long and they had to detect their target, drop their bombs and return before they ran out of fuel. Added to the distance was the weather. During the time they were on the island, the weather prevented most of their proposed attacks. There were strong storms and heavy fog cover. Chemists had invented Napalm and they were itching to try it on the Japanese. In less than two months they dropped enough Napalm to wipe out 16 square miles of Tokyo and many major and small towns in Japan. It has been said that the use of the incendiary bomb, Napalm, did enough damage that dropping the atomic bombs later did not need to be done.