The Bomber Mafia: A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War(9)

Kohn continued: “They were a rebellious bunch. They engaged in public relations campaigns. Some of them wrote under pseudonyms to promote airpower.”

I didn’t really grasp the audacity of the Bomber Mafia’s vision until I went to Maxwell. It’s now Maxwell Air Force Base, not Maxwell Field. It’s home to Air University, the successor to the Air Corps Tactical School. People come from around the world to study there. The faculty includes many of the country’s leading military historians, tacticians, and strategists. And I sat one afternoon with a group of Maxwell faculty in a conference room just a stone’s throw from the place where the Bomber Mafia held forth almost a century ago. All the records from the original Tactical School are in the Maxwell archives, and the historians I spoke to had been through the Bomber Mafia’s old field notes and lectures. They spoke of Donald Wilson and Harold George as if they were contemporaries. They knew them. I was struck, though, by one difference. A number of the historians I met with were themselves former Air Force pilots. They’d flown advanced fighter jets and stealth bombers and multimillion-dollar transport planes, so when they talked about airpower, they were talking about something tangible, something they had personal experience with.

But back in the 1930s, the Bomber Mafia was talking about something theoretical, something they hoped would exist.

It was a dream.

Richard Muller, professor of airpower history at Air University, put it like this:

There’s nothing on the ramp that can match what they’re thinking. They’re on crack cocaine. You can kind of ask yourself if you go to a museum, an aviation museum—go down to Pensacola or go to the [National] Air and Space Museum or Wright-Patt[erson Air Force Base] and look at the planes that are on the field in the early thirties, when this idea first comes, and you go, What the hell? How much cocaine are those guys snorting?



One of the unexpected pleasures of talking to military historians is their irreverence toward their own institutions. Muller continued:

There was just this faith that they’ll get there. They don’t quite know how. They don’t quite know where, but they’ll get there, and it’s not particularly unreasonable in their own time and place. It’s not unreasonable for them to have this kind of faith. But really one of the central things that happens inside of this group is a belief in technological progress and material development, and that they can get the right plane. They go from the B-9 to the B-10 to the B-12 to the B-15 prototype to the B-17 to the B-29 in about ten years, which is extraordinary when you think about it.





3.


I worry that I haven’t fully explained just how radical—how revolutionary—the Bomber Mafia thinking was. So allow me a digression. It’s from a book I’ve always loved called The Masks of War, by a political scientist named Carl Builder. Builder worked for the RAND Corporation, the Santa Monica–based think tank set up after the Second World War to serve as the Pentagon’s external research arm.

Builder argued that you cannot understand how the three main branches of the American military behave and make decisions unless you understand how different their cultures are. And to prove this point, Builder said, just look at the chapels on each of the service academy campuses.

The chapel at West Point military academy, the historic training ground for the officers of the US Army, stands on a bluff high above the Hudson River, dominating the skyline of the campus. The chapel was completed in 1910, in the grand Gothic revival style. It is built entirely out of somber gray granite, with tall, narrow windows. It has the brooding power of a medieval fortress—solid, plain, unmovable. Builder writes, “This is a quiet place for simple ceremonies with people who are close to each other and to the land that has brought them up.”

That’s the Army: deeply patriotic, rooted in service to country.

Then there’s the chapel at the Naval Academy, in Annapolis. It was built almost at the same time as its West Point counterpart, but it’s much bigger. Grander. It’s in the style of American Beaux-Arts, with a massive dome based on the design of the military chapel at Les Invalides, in Paris. The stained-glass windows are enormous, letting the light shine into the ornate, detailed interior. That’s very Navy: arrogant, independent, secure in the global scale of its ambitions.

Compare those two to the cadet chapel at the Air Force Academy, in Colorado Springs. This is a chapel from another universe. It was finished in 1962, but if I told you that it was finished last month, you would say, “Wow, that’s a futuristic building.” The Air Force chapel looks like someone lined up a squadron of fighter jets like dominoes with their noses pointed toward the heavens. It looks ready to take flight with a magnificent, deafening whoosh. Inside the cathedral, there are more than twenty-four thousand pieces of stained glass, in twenty-four different colors, and at the front, a cross forty-six feet tall and twelve feet wide, with crossbeams that look like propellers. Outside, four fighter jets are jauntily parked, as if some pilots, on a whim, had dropped by for Sunday morning communion.

The chapel’s architect was a brilliant modernist out of Chicago named Walter Netsch. He was given the same creative freedom and limitless budget that the Air Force usually gives to the people who come up with stealth fighters.

In a 1995 interview, Netsch recalled the commission:

I came home with this tremendous feeling of: How can I in this modern age of technology create something good to be as inspiring and aspiring as Chartres…? In the meantime, I had gotten this idea here in Chicago, working with my engineer, of the tetrahedrons and compiling the tetrahedrons together.