A couple of years before the United States entered the Second World War, there was a meeting

at Harvard University.

The President of Harvard was there, the President of MIT, a Nobel Prize winner, the President

of the Standard Oil Development Company, and two professors, Louis Thieser from Harvard

and the chair, Hoyt Hottel from MIT.

Come 39, a lot of people thought that the war was something we'd be in sooner or later

and our state of preparedness was poor.

Hottel was slender, high forehead, generous eyebrows, a giant in his field.

He had been tapped by the National Defense Research Committee, the NDRC, the top secret

government group charged with developing new weapons for the American military.

The most famous effort of the NDRC was of course the Manhattan Project, the multi-billion-dollar

operation out of Los Alamos to develop the first atomic bomb.

Hottel's group was a more obscure subcommittee.

They weren't physicists, they were chemists.

Their focus wasn't on finding better ways to blow things up.

It was on finding better ways to burn things down.

My name is Malcolm Gladwell.

You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.

This is part two of a four-part series about Curtis Lamey and the events of March 1945.

Part one which you should listen to first if you have not already was about the rise of

an insurgent group of pilots known as the Bomber Mafia.

They believed that wars could be won entirely from the air, but bombers need bombs.

...