Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello, Hello patient listeners. Malcolm Glabo here. Today is
Speaker 1: a very big day for me. It is the launch
Speaker 1: of by newest book, The Bomber Mafia, A Dream, a Temptation,
Speaker 1: and the Longest Night of the Second World War. You
Speaker 1: can buy The Bomber Mafia from Audible or Apple Books
Speaker 1: or any place you usually get books, and it's available
Speaker 1: in print and ebook and audiobook, but I urge you
Speaker 1: to buy the audio directly from Bomber Mafia dot com.
Speaker 1: When you do, you'll be able to listen in whatever
Speaker 1: podcast app you're using now, and you'll receive an exclusive
Speaker 1: listeners guide that includes photos and behind the scenes commentary
Speaker 1: from my crack production team. Those of you who are
Speaker 1: devoted revisionist history listeners will remember that last season I
Speaker 1: did four episodes on the fire bombing of Tokyo at
Speaker 1: the end of the Second World War, Curtis LeMay, the
Speaker 1: birth of Napalm, the War over the skies of Tokyo
Speaker 1: in the spring of nineteen forty five. It was all
Speaker 1: prompted by a trip I took to Japan and a
Speaker 1: visit to a tiny museum on a side street in
Speaker 1: Tokyo that left me devastated after the season was over,
Speaker 1: I couldn't get that story out of my mind, and
Speaker 1: I couldn't shake the idea that there was much more
Speaker 1: to the story. And there was. I've taken that little
Speaker 1: Colonel from last season and built an entirely new audiobook
Speaker 1: around it. You'll hear a little bit of material that
Speaker 1: previously appeared in my podcast, Revisionist History, but in those
Speaker 1: instances the material has been expanded with more archival footage,
Speaker 1: new writing in hand scoring, and a whole new context.
Speaker 1: If you've heard the episodes of Revisionist History, it will
Speaker 1: feel like when you've read a book excerpt in the
Speaker 1: New Yorker of Andyfair and then gone on to read
Speaker 1: the whole thing. The story starts back in the nineteen
Speaker 1: thirties with an obsessive band of pilots in Central Alabama
Speaker 1: called themselves the Bomber Mafia, who thought they could reinvent war.
Speaker 1: They had a leader, a man named Heywood Hansel, a
Speaker 1: Southerner and a romantic, a man who would sing Broadway
Speaker 1: tunes to his fellow airmen as he piloted his war
Speaker 1: plane home from bomber missions over Europe. Hansel and his
Speaker 1: fellow dreamers in Alabama woke up one day and realized
Speaker 1: that they had been given an actual war in which
Speaker 1: to test their theories. What happened when they put those
Speaker 1: theories to the test is the story of my new book,
Speaker 1: The Bomber Mafia. So what I want to do today
Speaker 1: is to play you a little teaser. It's from one
Speaker 1: of the early chapters of the book, about a reclusive
Speaker 1: genius named Carl Norden, who, strangely to this day, seems
Speaker 1: to have been largely forgotten by history. Norton ran a
Speaker 1: research program during the years of the Second World War
Speaker 1: shrouded in as much secrecy as the Manhattan Project taking
Speaker 1: place in the same period in the New Mexico Desert.
Speaker 1: Norton invented something called the Norden bomb side, which was
Speaker 1: the device at the center of the Bomber Mafia's obsession.
Speaker 1: I'm going to play you a little bit of this
Speaker 1: chapter on nordon where I tracked down the one historian
Speaker 1: who's really paid attention to him. His name is Stephen McFarland.
Speaker 1: And here we are in nerd Heaven. Let's start with
Speaker 1: for a lay person, describe why the task of dropping
Speaker 1: a bomb from an airplane is difficult. I mean, the
Speaker 1: dumbest possible question. Let's start with that one. Okay, I
Speaker 1: don't consider it dumb at all. It's amazing to me.
Speaker 1: I mean, I just assumed, you know that you watched
Speaker 1: the videos and the movies and they say you just
Speaker 1: put the crosshairs on the target and the bomb side
Speaker 1: will do the rest. But there's an amazing number of
Speaker 1: of elements that come into dropping a bomb accurately on
Speaker 1: a target. I think if you think about your own car,
Speaker 1: you know, driving down the highway at sixty seventy miles
Speaker 1: an hour, you can imagine throwing out something out the
Speaker 1: window and trying to hit something, you know, even if
Speaker 1: it's stationary, like a sign or a tree or anything
Speaker 1: on the side of the road. You get an idea
Speaker 1: of just how hard that is. If you're trying to
Speaker 1: throw a bottle into a garbage can from a car
Speaker 1: going fifty miles per hour, you have to perform a
Speaker 1: bit of amateur physics. The garbage can is stationary, but
Speaker 1: you and the car are moving quickly, so you have
Speaker 1: to release the bottle well before you reach the can, right.
Speaker 1: But if you're in an airplane at twenty thousand feet
Speaker 1: the problem is infinitely more complicated. The aircraft were flying
Speaker 1: at two hundred three hundred miles an hour, sometimes as
Speaker 1: fast as five hundred miles an hour. They were dropping
Speaker 1: bombs from up to thirty thou feet that would take
Speaker 1: between twenty and thirty thirty five seconds to hit the ground.
Speaker 1: And during that whole time you're being shot at, You're
Speaker 1: having to look through clouds or not be able to
Speaker 1: look through clouds, anti aircraft artillery. You're having to deal
Speaker 1: with factory decoys, smoke screens, there's the smoke from other bombs,
Speaker 1: people screaming in your ear, the excitement that all these
Speaker 1: strange things that happened. Once war begins, and get some
Speaker 1: idea of just how difficult it is. The wind could
Speaker 1: be blowing at one hundred miles per hour, you have
Speaker 1: to factor that in. If it's cold, the air is
Speaker 1: denser and the bomb will fall more slowly. If it's warm,
Speaker 1: the air is thinner and the bomb will fall faster.
Speaker 1: Then you also have to consider is the plane level,
Speaker 1: Is it moving side to side or up and down.
Speaker 1: A tiny degree of error at the release point can
Speaker 1: translate to a big error on the ground, and from
Speaker 1: twenty thousand feet can you even see the target? A
Speaker 1: factory might be big and obvious up close, but from
Speaker 1: that far up it looks like a postage stamp. Bombers
Speaker 1: in the early days of aviation couldn't hit anything, not
Speaker 1: even close. The bombardiers might as well have been throwing
Speaker 1: darts at a dartboard with their eyes closed. The dream
Speaker 1: that the airplane could revolutionize warfare was based on a massive, untested,
Speaker 1: unproven assumption that somehow, someone, at some point would figure
Speaker 1: out how to aim a bomb from high in the
Speaker 1: sky with something close to accuracy. He was a question
Speaker 1: on the era's technological wish list until Carl Norton. He
Speaker 1: had no help. He did it all by himself. It
Speaker 1: was all in his mind. He didn't carry notes, he
Speaker 1: didn't have a notepad. You can't go to his archive,
Speaker 1: there is no such thing. It was all kept in
Speaker 1: his head. And for a man to keep that kind
Speaker 1: of complexity in his head, I was just amazed that
Speaker 1: could be done that way. But engineers refer to something
Speaker 1: called the mind's eye, that they see things in their mind,
Speaker 1: not with their eyes, but with their mind's eye. And
Speaker 1: that was truly Carl Norton. I always dislike using the
Speaker 1: word genius because I feel like it's thrown around and
Speaker 1: I always prefer to kind of put an adjective in
Speaker 1: front of the word genius. What's his adjective? He would
Speaker 1: tell you that only God invents humans discover, So for him,
Speaker 1: it was not genius. He would have refused to accept
Speaker 1: that term. He would not appreciate, would not accept anyone
Speaker 1: calling him a genius. He would say, he's just one
Speaker 1: who discovers the greatness of God is what he would
Speaker 1: tell you that God reveals truths through people who are
Speaker 1: willing to work hard and to use their minds to
Speaker 1: discover God's truths. Norton began working on the bomb side
Speaker 1: problem in the nineteen twenties. He got a Navy contract,
Speaker 1: although he would later work for the Army's Air Corps,
Speaker 1: which is what the US Air Force was called in
Speaker 1: those days. He set up shop on Lafayette Street in
Speaker 1: the part of Manhattan now called Soho, and there he
Speaker 1: began work on his masterpiece. These Gentlemen are aerial photographs
Speaker 1: of anime held objectives. They are our targets for tomorrow
Speaker 1: and the next day and the next. One of them
Speaker 1: may be your target you're listening to an internal military
Speaker 1: training film from the Second World War instructing bombardiers in
Speaker 1: how to use Carl Nordon's creation the Norden bomb site.
Speaker 1: They are the reason for your being here, the reason
Speaker 1: for all the vast equipment assembled in this and other
Speaker 1: bombardier schools. While the instructors here to train you wile
Speaker 1: the pilots here to fly you on your missions. The
Speaker 1: bombers that flew in the Second World War, in most
Speaker 1: cases had a crew of ten men pilot, copilot, navigator, gunners,
Speaker 1: and most crucially, bombardiers, the people who aimed and dropped
Speaker 1: the bombs. If the bombardier did not do his job,
Speaker 1: then the efforts of all nine of his crewmen were wasted,
Speaker 1: and all Likelihod, some one of you now sitting in
Speaker 1: this room, we'll see one of these targets, not projected
Speaker 1: on a screen, but moving under the crosshair of your
Speaker 1: bomb side. And where will they fall those bombs of yours?
Speaker 1: That will depend on how well you'll have topped your
Speaker 1: fingers and your eyes to match the precision that has
Speaker 1: been built under a Norden bomb side. Its official name
Speaker 1: was the Mark fifteen. The airman who used It called
Speaker 1: it the football. It weighed fifty five pounds. It sat
Speaker 1: on a kind of platform, a packing box, stabilized by
Speaker 1: a gyroscope that kept it level at all times, even
Speaker 1: as the plane was bouncing around. The bomb side was
Speaker 1: essentially an analog computer, a compact, finely machined contraption composed
Speaker 1: of mirrors, a telescope, ball, bearings, levels, and dials. The
Speaker 1: bombardier peered through the telescope at the target from a
Speaker 1: moving plane and made a fantastically complicated series of adjustments.
Speaker 1: Norton created sixty four algorithms that he believed represented every
Speaker 1: dimension of the bombing problem, like, for example, how much
Speaker 1: does the speed and direction of the wind affect the
Speaker 1: trajectory of a bomb, or the temperature or the speed
Speaker 1: of the aircraft. Now look at the line in the flooring.
Speaker 1: That was your sighting line when you started. Remember how
Speaker 1: the sight's made in two parts. Underneath as the stabilizer,
Speaker 1: and in that there's another gyro Only it has a
Speaker 1: horizontal axis to be properly trained on the Norton took
Speaker 1: six months above that is your sight. The stabilizer is
Speaker 1: fixed in the longitudinal axis of the airplane. But you
Speaker 1: can keep turning the site so that it's always pointing
Speaker 1: at the target. But the sight is also connected to
Speaker 1: the stabilizer by rods voliteer to pilot okay to level sir.
Speaker 1: By these the gyro controls the possession of the sight
Speaker 1: so that no matter how much the airplane yours, the
Speaker 1: sight will always point in the same direction. Level level
Speaker 1: bombed the way. All this so the bombardier could know
Speaker 1: exactly when to shout bombs away. In addition, Nordon even
Speaker 1: created one of the sixty four algorithms was an algorithm
Speaker 1: that compensated for the fact that when you drop a
Speaker 1: bomb and it takes thirty seconds to hit the target.
Speaker 1: During those thirty seconds, the Earth actually moves, it spins
Speaker 1: on its axis. So we actually created a formula that
Speaker 1: it was going to take twenty seconds for the bomb
Speaker 1: to hit the target, then the Earth would move. I'm
Speaker 1: going to make up a number twelve feet. You therefore
Speaker 1: had to adjust the computer to say, well, the targets
Speaker 1: now move twelve feet. If you're at twenty thousand feet,
Speaker 1: it might take it might move twenty five feet. And
Speaker 1: all of these then had to be put into this computer. Eventually,
Speaker 1: almost every bomber that flew missions for the United States
Speaker 1: over Europe and Japan during the Second World War had
Speaker 1: a Norden bomb site on board. The army bought thousands
Speaker 1: of them. Before every mission, the bombardier would retrieve his
Speaker 1: device from a vault with an armed escort carry it
Speaker 1: out to the plane in a metal box. In the
Speaker 1: event of a crash landing, the bombardier was instructed to
Speaker 1: destroy the bomb side immediately lest it fall into enemy hands.
Speaker 1: Legend has it that bombardiers were even given an eighteen
Speaker 1: inch long explosive device to do the trick, and as
Speaker 1: a final precaution, the bombardier had to take a special oath.
Speaker 1: I solemnly swear that I will keep inviolate the secrecy
Speaker 1: of any and all confidential information revealed to me, and
Speaker 1: in full knowledge that I am a guardian of one
Speaker 1: of my country's most priceless assets. Do further swear to
Speaker 1: protect the secrecy of the American bomb side, if need be,
Speaker 1: with my life itself. In the midst of all this
Speaker 1: drama and secrecy was called Nordon. Maddening eccentric Nordon. While
Speaker 1: he was still perfecting his invention, he would sometimes lead
Speaker 1: Manhattan and return to his mother's house in Zurich. He
Speaker 1: would drive the military crazy. The army was just up
Speaker 1: in arms. The FBI sent agents with him to try
Speaker 1: to protect him. There was a great fear that the
Speaker 1: British supposedly thought that he was working for the Germans
Speaker 1: as a spy, and they're afraid the British would try
Speaker 1: to capture him, and so they but he absolutely assisted.
Speaker 1: He said, I'm going to Switzerland. There's nothing you can
Speaker 1: do to stop me. And of course the laws of
Speaker 1: wartime were not yet in effect because the United States
Speaker 1: wasn't in the war, so that legally there was no
Speaker 1: way they could stop him. So why did the military
Speaker 1: put up with him? Because the Norton bomb site was
Speaker 1: the Hole of Grail. Norton had a business partner named
Speaker 1: Ted Barth. He was the salesman, the public face, and
Speaker 1: he claimed the year before the US joined the war
Speaker 1: that we do not regard a fifty foot square as
Speaker 1: being a very difficult target to hit from an altitude
Speaker 1: of thirty thousand feet. The shorthand version of that, which
Speaker 1: would serve as the foundation of the Northern legend, was
Speaker 1: that the bomb site could drop a bomb into a
Speaker 1: pickle barrel from six miles up to the first generation
Speaker 1: of military pilots, that claim was intoxicating. The most expensive
Speaker 1: single undertaking of the Second World War was to B
Speaker 1: twenty nine bomber the super Fortress. The second most expensive
Speaker 1: was the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the
Speaker 1: world's first atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project. But the third
Speaker 1: most expensive project of the war not a bomb, not
Speaker 1: a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. No,
Speaker 1: the Norton bomb site, the fifty five pound analog computer
Speaker 1: conceived inside the exacting imagination of Karl L. Nordon And
Speaker 1: why spend so much on a bomb side because the
Speaker 1: Norden represented a dream, one of the most powerful dreams
Speaker 1: in the history of warfare, that if we could drop
Speaker 1: bombs inside pickle barrels from thirty thousand feet, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: need armies anymore. We wouldn't need to leave young men
Speaker 1: dead on battlefields or lay waste to entire cities. We
Speaker 1: could reinvent war, make it precise and quick and almost bloodless.
Speaker 1: Almost pretty good, terrific. Thanks for listening to that excerpt
Speaker 1: of by new audiobook The Bomber Mafia. All of it
Speaker 1: lovingly machine tooled here in the audio factories of Pushkin Industries.
Speaker 1: If you want to hear more, and you should, you
Speaker 1: can get it at Bombermafia dot com. After your purchase,
Speaker 1: you can download it and listen to it in your
Speaker 1: favorite podcast app. And yes, Season six of Revision's History
Speaker 1: is in the works. It's so good. It launches in
Speaker 1: June and till then. Thank you for being such great listeners.
Speaker 1: I really mean it when I say that this show,
Speaker 1: and by extension, this new audiobook would not exist without
Speaker 1: all of your encouragement over the years. See you soon.