Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Bomber Mafia talks of several problems from the Second World War that I had never thought about. They do seem obvious once you hear of it…   With bomber planes flying at high speeds at high altitudes (to avoid being hit by anti-aircraft fire), the odds of any bomb landing where one wanted it to was remote. What was the windspeed? The speed of the aircraft? Was the plane level when you dropped the bomb or moving up/down? Or side to side? And you couldn’t even see the tiny target so far below clearly anyway.   Even though some devices (they were practically analog computers!) were built to try and solve this problem, they never worked out. Because in practice, the person operating it had to set the dials while under enemy fire, in a shaking plane, and sometimes with clouds hiding the target altogether.   This could explain why both the Allies and the Axis powers practiced indiscriminate bombing during the war. If you can’t aim precisely, ...

In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. In response, the League of Nations (equivalent to the UN) imposed sanctions on Italy. Germany and Japan watched this closely: If sanctions were imposed on them, how would they fare? That is the theme of an interview with the author and European historian, Nick Mulder.   Let’s start with Germany. As they started to increasingly focus on militarization and industrialization in the 1930’s, they needed energy. Coal and oil. This need for coal was the reason they invaded the Ruhr eventually (apart from the point that it was theirs to begin with and wrongly taken by France after World War I). On oil, they got lucky with the timing. Thanks to the Great Depression, trade and thus prices fell, making it cheaper for Germany to import oil. The Germans realized that sanctions were unlikely to be imposed on them at a time of global depression – Germany not being allowed to buy oil would mean some exporter like the US would also suffer!   But i...