Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, there are Pushkin listeners. This is Malcolm Gladwell.
Speaker 1: I'm the president of Pushkin Industries and host of Revisionist History.
Speaker 1: But I'm here today as an author. I've written half
Speaker 1: a dozen books, such as Outliers and Blink, but my
Speaker 1: new book, The Bomber Mafia is something different. First, it's
Speaker 1: a work of history, telling the story of how a
Speaker 1: new technology, air power upended the nature of modern warfare
Speaker 1: during the Second World War. It's also the first book
Speaker 1: I wrote to be heard rather than read. You can
Speaker 1: get the print version of The Bomber Mafia wherever you
Speaker 1: usually get your books. And I love my readers, but
Speaker 1: I urge you to listen. The Bomber Mafia is not
Speaker 1: your typical audio book. I didn't record it in a booth,
Speaker 1: solitary and bedantic. I worked with a whole team of
Speaker 1: sound engineers, researchers, editors, musicians, wizards of every kind. They
Speaker 1: were building the mightiest aircraft in history. I mean, would
Speaker 1: you rather I just read some torpid, ruddily nonsense like
Speaker 1: the B twenty nine bomber droned on through the night sky,
Speaker 1: or would you rather hear it for yourself? And the
Speaker 1: assembled airmen will listen to words that a few years
Speaker 1: ago would have been fantastic, but today rolle casually off
Speaker 1: a briefing officer's lips. The Taga gentleman is Japan. When
Speaker 1: I was researching, I went to Maxwell Air Force Base
Speaker 1: to dig through a mountain of tapes interviews with some
Speaker 1: of the most important military figures of the Second World War.
Speaker 1: These were the voices of people I'd only ever read
Speaker 1: about in history books. Suddenly they all came alive inside
Speaker 1: my head. It was magical, and it reminded me why
Speaker 1: I do what I do. We've devised an easy way
Speaker 1: for you to listen to the Bomber Mafia in the
Speaker 1: same player you're using to hear this podcast. Go to
Speaker 1: Bomber Mafia dot com and enter your email and payment method.
Speaker 1: You'll receive an email shortly after payment. Open it and
Speaker 1: follow the easy instructions to add the Bomber Mafia to
Speaker 1: your podcast app. I'm about to play you a piece
Speaker 1: of the Bomber Mafia audiobo Queer. I think it'll explain
Speaker 1: why I wrote it, and I hope you'll hear the magic.
Speaker 1: As a little boy lying in his bed, my father
Speaker 1: would hear the plains overhead on their way in then
Speaker 1: in the small hours of the morning, heading back to Germany.
Speaker 1: This was in England, in Kent, a few miles south
Speaker 1: and east of London. My father was born in nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four, which meant he was five when the Second
Speaker 1: World War broke out. Kent was called bomb Alley by
Speaker 1: the British because it was the English county that German
Speaker 1: warplanes would fly over on their way to London. It
Speaker 1: was not uncommon in those years that if a bomber
Speaker 1: missed its target or had bombs left over, it would
Speaker 1: simply drop them anywhere on the return trip. One day,
Speaker 1: a stray bomb landed in my grandparents back garden. It
Speaker 1: didn't explode, It just sat there, half buried in the ground.
Speaker 1: And I think it's fair to say that if you
Speaker 1: were a five year old boy with an interest in
Speaker 1: things mechanical, a German bomb sitting unexploded in your backyard
Speaker 1: would have been just about the most extraordinary experience imaginable,
Speaker 1: Not that my father described it that way. My dad
Speaker 1: was a mathematician and an Englishman, which is to say
Speaker 1: that the language of emotion was not his first language. Rather,
Speaker 1: it was like Latin or French, something which one could
Speaker 1: study and understand but never fully master. Now that an
Speaker 1: unexploded German bomb in your backyard would be the most
Speaker 1: extraordinary experience imaginable for a five year old was my
Speaker 1: interpretation when my father told me that story of the
Speaker 1: bomb when I was five years old. That was in
Speaker 1: the late nineteen sixties. We were living in England then
Speaker 1: in Southampton. Reminders of what the country had gone through
Speaker 1: were still everywhere. If you went to London you could
Speaker 1: still tell where the bombs had landed, wherever a hideous
Speaker 1: brutalius building had sprouted up on some sentries old block.
Speaker 1: Here they come, they come an absolute steep dive and
Speaker 1: you can see that bombs actually leave the machine and
Speaker 1: coming to Walter. You can hear our own guns going
Speaker 1: like anything now. BBC Radio was always on in our house,
Speaker 1: and in those days it seemed like every second interview
Speaker 1: was with an old general or power trooper, a prisoner
Speaker 1: of war. We shall prove out he once like any
Speaker 1: and our island home ride out on the war. The
Speaker 1: first short story I wrote as a kid was about
Speaker 1: how Hitler was actually still alive and coming for England again.
Speaker 1: I sent it to my grandmother, the one in Kent
Speaker 1: who'd had the unexploded bomb in the back garden. When
Speaker 1: my mother heard about my story, she admonished me someone
Speaker 1: who lived through the war might not enjoy a plot
Speaker 1: line about Hitler's return. She reminded me. My father once
Speaker 1: took me and my brothers to a beach overlooking the
Speaker 1: English Channel. We crawled together through the remnants of an
Speaker 1: old world word too fortification. I still remember the thrill
Speaker 1: of wondering if we would come across some old bullets,
Speaker 1: or a shell casing, or even the skeleton of some
Speaker 1: long lost German spy who'd washed up on shore. I
Speaker 1: don't think we lose our childhood fascinations. I know I didn't.
Speaker 1: One day a few years back, I was looking at
Speaker 1: my book shelves and realized, to my surprise, just how
Speaker 1: many non fiction books about war I had accumulated. The
Speaker 1: big history bestsellers, but also the specialty histories, out of print, memoirs,
Speaker 1: academic texts, and what part of the war were most
Speaker 1: of these books about bombing air Power by Stephen Boudiansky,
Speaker 1: Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare by Tammy Biddell, Decision
Speaker 1: over Schweinfurt by Thomas Coffee whole shelves of these histories.
Speaker 1: Usually when I start accumulating books like that, it's because
Speaker 1: I want to write something about the subject. I have
Speaker 1: shelves of books on social psychology because I've made my
Speaker 1: living writing about social psychology. But I never really wrote
Speaker 1: much about war, especially not the Second Wold War, or
Speaker 1: more specifically air power. Just bits and pieces here and there. Why.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I imagine that a Freudian would have
Speaker 1: fun with that question. But maybe the simpler answer is
Speaker 1: that the more a subject matters to you, the harder
Speaker 1: it is to find a story you want to tell
Speaker 1: about it. The bar is higher, which brings us to
Speaker 1: The Bomber Mafia, the audio book you are listening to now.
Speaker 1: I'm happy to say that with The Bomber Mafia, I've
Speaker 1: found a story worthy of my obsession. One last thing
Speaker 1: about the use of that last word, obsession. This book
Speaker 1: is a service to my obsessions, but it's also a
Speaker 1: story about other people's obsessions, about one of the grandest
Speaker 1: obsessions of the twentieth century. I realize when I look
Speaker 1: at the things I've written about or explored over the
Speaker 1: years that I'm drawn again and again to obsessives. I
Speaker 1: like them. I liked the idea that someone could push
Speaker 1: away all the concerns and details that make up everyday
Speaker 1: life and just zero in on one thing, the thing
Speaker 1: that fits the contours of their imagination. Obsessives lead us astray,
Speaker 1: sometimes lack the bigger picture, serve not just the worlds
Speaker 1: but their own narrow interests. But I also don't think
Speaker 1: we get progress, or innovation, or joy or beauty without obsessives.
Speaker 1: When I was reporting this book, I had dinner with
Speaker 1: the then Chief of Staff of the US Air Force,
Speaker 1: David Goldfein. It was at the air House on the
Speaker 1: grounds of Fort Myer in northern Virginia, just across the
Speaker 1: Potomac River from Washington, d C. A Grand Victorian on
Speaker 1: a street of Grand Victorians where many of the country's
Speaker 1: top military brass all live. After dinner, General Golfing invited
Speaker 1: over a group of his friends and colleagues, other senior
Speaker 1: Air Force officials. We sat in the general's back yard,
Speaker 1: five of us in total. They were almost all former
Speaker 1: military pilots. Many of their fathers had been military pilots.
Speaker 1: They were the modern day equivalents of the people you're
Speaker 1: going to hear about in this book. And as the
Speaker 1: evening wore on, I began to notice something. Air House
Speaker 1: is just down the road from Reagan National Airport, and
Speaker 1: every ten minutes or so, a plane would take off
Speaker 1: just over our heads. Nothing fancy, just standard commercial passenger
Speaker 1: planes flying to Chicago or Tampa or Charlotte. And every
Speaker 1: time one of those planes flew overhead, the General and
Speaker 1: his comrades would all glance upwards just to take a look.
Speaker 1: They couldn't help themselves. Obsessives, my kind of people. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening to that. Excerpt from my new book, Discover
Speaker 1: the Rest of the Story of the Bomber Mafia, available
Speaker 1: at Bomber Mafia dot com.