A Dream, a Temptation, and the Longest Night of the Second World War
0316296813
Malcom Gladwell
Notes
I don’t think we get progress or innovation or joy or beauty without obsessives.
The more you invest in a set of beliefs – the greater the sacrifice you make in the service of that conviction – the more resistant you will be to evidence that you are mistaken. You don’t give up; you double down.
Let’s start with LeMay, someone whose entire identity is about problem solving. It’s how he made sense of the world. He’s not a man of great personal charm and charisma. He’s not some towering intellectual. He’s a doer. As he put it much later: “I’d rather have somebody who is real stupid but did something – even if it’s wrong he did something – than have somebody who’d vacillate and do nothing.”…when a problem solver is free to act, he will let nothing stand in his way.
Hansell embarrassed one of his officers in front of everyone, something no commanding officer should ever do, not if he wants to maintain the respect of his men.
“How many time have we just died on the vine, right here on these islands? We assembled the airplanes, assembled the bombs, the gasoline, the supplies, the people. We got the crew set – everything ready, to go out and run the mission. Then what would we do? Sit on our butts and wait for the weather…So what am I trying to do now? Trying to get us to be independent of the weather. And when we get ready, we’ll go.”
LeMay Autobiography
“Ralph, you’re probably going to get killed, so it’s best to accept it. You’ll get along much better.”
LeMay
“War is a mean, nasty business, and you’re going to kill a lot of people. No way of getting around it. I think that any moral commander tries to minimize this to the extent possible, and to me the best way of minimizing it is getting the war over as quick as possible.”
LeMay