Nor does Gladwell show a grasp of the most recent scholarship on the air war. Army Air Force, not in the RAF not in the Royal Canadian Airforce, not in the Soviet Air Force and not in either GermanyвЂ™s nor JapanвЂ™s air forces did such terrible odds or worse break the will of the airmen and women, who, assuredly, could do the math. The town was home to GermanyвЂ™s main ball bearing factory - destroying it would have, literally, caused the German war machine to seize up.В The raid was only slightly more successful than the first one in 1942 and demonstrated, as Gladwell notes correctly, that even at 30,000 feet planes could be shot down.Д«ut then, he writes, вЂњif you were part of that second Schweinfurt mission, in which a quarter of the crews didnвЂ™t come back - well, you do the math.вЂќ But the fact of the matter is that not in the U.S. A quarter of the air crews that took part in the second raid on Schweinfurt in 1943 were killed or captured. Airmen had to fly 25 missions to complete their tours of service. In the middle of the book, GladwellвЂ™s tone is equally jarring and dismissive when he writes of the odds of a U.S. But, what, exactly, is gained by reading that вЂњwithin a month of becoming prime minister, he was broke?вЂќ Does Gladwell think Churchill should have taken time out from dealing with Nazi Blitzkrieg smashing its way through Europe to balance his check book? ItвЂ™s true that Winston Churchill wasnвЂ™t much of a numbers guy, though, Gladwell might have noted, he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, essentially BritainвЂ™s Treasury Secretary, from 1924 to 1929, a time when though depressed, the British economy did better than the American. In a military history, however, it wears thin pretty quickly. No doubt GladwellвЂ™s hipster tone plays well on his Revisionist History podcasts. His explanation of how napalm was invented and tested (near the tennis courts behind the Harvard Business School in 1942, on, appropriately, July 4) is clear and concise. If it takes a bomb 20 seconds to fall to earth, the target has moved 25 feet. IвЂ™ve written two books that deal with air warfare in the Second World War, and this was the first time IвЂ™d read that bombardiers had to take into account the rotation of the earth. He shows how in addition to the obvious problem of bombing a small point from a plane that is moving hundreds of miles an hour twenty or thirty thousand feet in the sky, both air temperature and humidity are important factors: in cold, dry air bombs fall faster. He makes clear how it was, essentially, an analog computer in which gyroscope, gears and ball bearings did the work done today by a microprocessor. The popular authorвЂ™s discussion of the Norden bombsight is the best IвЂ™ve ever read.

Norden bomb sites