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Comment by greedo | Hacker News Reader

It's not that Gladwell just place loose with his facts, conveniently leaving out things that contradict his central thesis. It's that he's often just flat out wrong. So wrong that he doesn't even realize how he blows up his own credibility:

"The sole thing the Marianas had going for them was that they were within range of Japan. But even that was an exaggeration. The truth is that they were within range only under perfect conditions. To reach Japan, a B-29 first needed to be loaded up with twenty thousand pounds of extra fuel. And because that made the plane dangerously overweight, each B-29 also needed a ferocious tailwind to lift it off the runway. This was as crazy a situation as anyone faced throughout the whole war."

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IS the horribly wrong thing that an overweight plane would want a headwind to takeoff, or something else?

Yes. It demonstrates his complete lack of understanding how flight works. Lift is generated by air moving from the front of a plane's wing towards the rear. Having a tailwind reduces the amount of air traveling in this direction, reducing lift.

Generally, planes prefer to land and take off into the wind. Tailwinds are nice once you're already in flight, since they give you free speed.

I think this is a bad reason to worry.

Knowing how 'lift' works is basically irrelevant to anything in the rest of the story.

Over 500 pages, you're going to get things wrong.

The important facts of that para related to the strategic importance of the Island. The minute details of 'why lift works' are not really relevant.

What's relevant is that "The islands importance is as an airstrip/base and even then it's barely 'in range'".

It isn't irrelevant in the context; by saying that they are only in range under 'perfect conditions' he makes it sound like the operation was barely doable.

This is misleading. Air operations in WWII where continuously dependent on weather conditions and the wind conditions make a large difference to the payload a piston powered aircraft of that era can carry. The B-29 was specifically designed to accomplish the strategic bombing mission in a pacific war; it would not have been accepted into production if it could not reach Japan from the Marianas Islands. In fact, it could comfortably reach the vast majority of Japan and its industrial centers, only the north of japan was outside of its normal range.

The removal of most self-defense weaponry (except the tail cannon) made the entirety of Japan reachable; they simply weren't needed for night operations and Japan's fighter force was negligible by the end of the war. In fact, future b-29's were built with only a tail cannon in the first place.

Plus the B-29 was previously bombing Japan from China, which was farther than the Marianas, right?

Japan is a very long island chain; parts of it are quite close to China but Tokyo not so much.

I couldn't find a complete list of places the B-29 launched from, but Chengdu was mentioned in the Wikipedia article, and that's pretty far inland.

The entire book is written like that. It should be pretty clear by even his tone that he just speculating and creating his own opinions to form a story. On top of that it is casually written like a series of blog posts; I found it incredibly hard to take seriously.

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