This is the part of Malcolm Hard decisions that can’t be explained well by our brains. To bombing experts, parks are nettlesome "firebreaks" that interfere with a target city's combustibility. In the case of Malcolm Hard decisions, it is possible to change our mind on a matter, or we can make it clear to ourselves that we will take that particular action, even if it is counter to what we believe is right. To most people, a city park is a grace note, a green space that makes urban life more livable. One of Gladwell's skills is enabling us to see the world through the eyes of his subjects. During the World War II, the US Air Force had to decide between two horrendous alternatives: Should enemy areas be firebombed, wreaking great destruction but possibly hastening the end of the war, as proposed by Gen. Malcolm Gladwell on the Hard Decisions of War. This ferocious approach may have helped end the war, but there is no question that it was horrible. Conflict: How Soldiers Make Impossible Decisions is about making hard choices-where all outcomes are potentially negative. In three cases, the decisions had to receive some kind of legislative approval. This show comes in two parts, an overview of the Vietnam War era by Dan, followed by a conversation with famed writer, historian and war correspondent Sir Max. precision bombing ideas, Curtis LeMay and the firebombing of Japanese cities. LeMay's solution was to saturate Tokyo with napalm bombs, killing as many as 100,000 people in about six hours, and then to go on and firebomb dozens of other Japanese cities, killing thousands upon thousands, sometimes when the target cities were of little or no military value. In all twelve nations studied, the decisions for war were made by small coteries, most of them having fewer than ten persons. Revisionist History host Malcolm Gladwell joins Dan to discuss the development of U.S. LeMay was instead, in the words of the military historian Conrad Crane, "the Air Force's ultimate problem solver." As Gladwell tells it, the practical problem was how to win the war as quickly as possible. What could be more American than the story of LeMay, a gruff, cigar-chewing Ohioan who made his way through the state university by working night shifts at a foundry? He was hardly a theorist, and especially not someone out to make war more humane. When his troops were taken by surprise at the bloody Battle of Shiloh in April 1862 and floundered for months outside Vicksburg, Mississippi, Grant faced sharp charges of incompetenceand rumors.
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