Based on the few books of his I’d heard of, I wouldn’t have expected Malcolm Gladwell to dip into military history … and from what Secretary of Defense Rock says, it might have been better if Gladwell had steered clear of this particular topic anyway:

I recently received The Bomber Mafia as a gift for my birthday, and it was bad, so bad that I felt compelled to write this review. In so many ways, the book is everything that is wrong with the “pop history” genre: a bestselling author with a massive built-in audience, with a hit podcast to cross-promote the material, and a framing promise to reveal a supposedly “great untold story” about the strategic and moral struggles of American airmen in World War II. The problem in this case is that Gladwell’s narrative about Curtis LeMay, Haywood Hansell, and the evolution of strategic bombing repeatedly collides with the existing scholarship and often ignores it altogether. From his treatment of the raids of Münster and Schweinfurt–Regensburg to his use of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey and his confident claims about what compelled Japan to surrender, The Bomber Mafia exemplifies the worst tendencies of popular history: sweeping pronouncements built on selective reading, caricatured context, and a startling indifference to both primary sources and a vast secondary literature.¹

I was only vaguely familiar with Malcolm Gladwell and his work, but for those who don’t know (like me until recently), he has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996, has written a bunch of New York Times bestselling books on sociology, psychology, and economics, and also hosts a very popular podcast called Revisionist History.² This is all to say he is widely known and already has a big audience that is generally receptive to his projects. The book was originally based on four episodes he did on this topic in July 2020, and then turned into print, so it isn’t so much an actual book as it is a printed podcast.³

Unsurprisingly, both the audiobook and print editions were widely acclaimed upon release. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Yale professor Paul Kennedy praised the book as “a wonderful book”.⁴ The journalist Michael Lewis described it as “a riveting tale”, while the bestselling biographer Walter Isaacson called it “a wonderful narrative”.⁵ The book was named a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and selected as an Editors’ Choice by The New York Times Book Review. It also enjoyed significant commercial success, reaching number two on The New York Times Best Sellers list.⁶ To promote the book, Gladwell made appearances on Jimmy Kimmel, MSNBC, and CBS’s Sunday Morning show. MSNBC even stated in the segment title that this is “A great untold story”, which is hilarious, given that I don’t know how much ink has been spilled on the strategic bombing campaigns.⁷

But it should be noted that the book has been criticized by virtually anyone who has seriously studied this topic. Much of the criticism of the book has come from the fact that it hardly focuses on the Japanese and German perspectives, misinterprets why members of the air tactical school focused on precision bombing, and the actual role strategic bombing played in the surrender of Japan.⁸ All of that is valid, but what was initially more startling to me was how little use was made of primary or secondary sources. So many important works are left out makes me wonder how much research Gladwell even put in.⁹ To write about strategic bombing in World War II and not include Michael Sherry’s The Rise of American Air Power, Richard Overy’s The Bombing War, Donald Miller’s Masters of the Air, Ken Werrell’s Blankets of Fire or Death From the Heavens, Geoffrey Perrett’s Winged Victory, and barely using any of the official histories is borderline negligence.¹⁰ Anyone doing research on strategic bombing and Air Power in World War II almost certainly would have come across these.

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1. Popular history is a form of historical writing aimed at broad audiences that usually prioritizes storytelling over real scholarship. See Gerald Strauss, “The Dilemma of Popular History,” Past & Present, no. 132 (1991): 130–49, and more recently, Ben Alpers, “The Promise and Perils of Popular History,” Society for U.S. Intellectual History, August 17, 2021.
2. The show itself isn’t really a conversation with experts and historians (though they do appear) so much as storytelling.
3. I would also preface that I generally don’t have a problem with this premise. There is definitely a segment of the historical profession that dislikes pop history for reasons tied as much to credentials as to content. Much “popular history” is produced by journalists, independent writers, or commentators rather than credentialed academic historians, and that fact alone generates suspicion. In some cases, this skepticism is warranted: weak sourcing, thin engagement with the scholarship, and overconfident claims do real damage. But the problem is not who writes history so much as how it is written. Plenty of non-historians have produced outstanding historical works by taking the craft seriously — immersing themselves in primary sources, engaging honestly with existing scholarship, and resisting the temptation to oversimplify for the sake of narrative punch. Conversely, academic credentials have never been a guarantee for insight or even accuracy. If a writer does the work, respects the evidence, and treats complexity as something to be explained rather than avoided, there is no real reason to dismiss the result simply because of the writer’s background.
4. Paul Kennedy, “The Bomber Mafia’ Review: Architects of a Firestorm”, The Wall Street Journal, April 30, 2021.
5. Summary of reviews in paperback.
6. “Hardcover Nonfiction – May 16, 2021”. The New York Times.
7. Malcolm Gladwell: ‘Bomber Mafia’ Looks At A Great Untold Story From WWII.
8. Some critical reviews include David Fedman and Cary Karacas, “When Pop History Bombs: A Response to Malcolm Gladwell’s Love Letter to American Air Power”, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 12, 2021; Saul David, “Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia is misleading history-lite”, The Daily Telegraph, April 25, 2021, and Steve Agoratus, Air & Space Power History 68, no. 4 (2021): 52–53.
9. This is also coming from a guy who famously wrote that achieving world-class expertise in any field is, to a large extent, a function of accumulating roughly 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, as described in his book Outliers: The Story of Success.
10. Gladwell doesn’t really deal with British strategic bombing; there’s just a brief chapter on Arthur Harris. If interested, see Noble Frankland, Bomber Offensive, the Devastation of Europe (New York: Ballantine Books, 1971) Max Hastings, Bomber Command: The Myths and Reality of the Strategic Bombing Offensive, 1939-45 (New York: Dial Press/James Wade, 1979), and Norman Longmate, The Bombers: The RAF Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-1945 (London: Hutchinson, 1983).