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Reflecting on the Air Experience
By Tammi Biddle

First World War Air Action As Popularly Remembered

For centuries before the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, humans had tried to imagine all of the future roles that airplanes might play—as both military and non-military instruments. During World War I, aircraft underwent revolutionary, telescoped changes driven by the intensely competitive demands of the war. In 1914, warplanes were primitive machines held together by wire and twine; by 1918, large, sophisticated four-engine bombers had been developed and used. These new instruments had major institutional and organizational ramifications for all modern military services—and the institutional transformation this entailed was far from painless.

Prewar expectations tended to influence the interpretation of wartime experience. Since the interpretation of data and evidence is heavily conditioned by what people expect to see, observations are colored by social, cultural, and political influences. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, civilian writers typically held higher expectations for air warfare than military planners did. The latter were generally conservative, expecting an airplane’s main or sole contribution to be reconnaissance. However, a minority—officers who came to hold formative roles in the development of air power and thus came to hold an institutional stake in the future of air warfare—emerged from the war with strong convictions and bold claims about the revolutionary impact of the airplane in war.

[After the Great War], those making bold claims for airpower, [especially Italy's Giulio Douhet, America's Billy Mitchell, and Great Britain's Hugh Trenchard] gained degrees of legitimacy for a variety of reasons. The war had indicated that technological advancement could take place in a highly telescoped way. Many observers thus concluded that the technological development of air power would be fast and relentless—and offensive capabilities would outstrip defensive ones. Moreover, many assumed that some of the most daunting weapons of the war, including chemicals and gas, would be teamed with airpower.

Air advocates argued that all modern states would have to embrace airplanes as essential tools of war and deterrence, insisting that those who failed to do so would put themselves at an enormous disadvantage in the ongoing competition among nations. Air power—long-range bombing especially—would restore offensive operations to the battlefield, and would offer the prospect of directly undermining the enemy’s all-important “will to fight” by strikes on his homeland. One would be able to leap over the army and navy and go right to both resources and popular will. It is interesting to note here that offensive operations had not in fact disappeared from the battlefield. By 1917, armies had begun to work out the basics of modern combined arms, restoring the offensive on land. This was manifest in the German offensive of March 1918, and in the subsequent ground offensives led by the Americans in 1918. However, many writers, traumatized by the trench stalemate of 1914- 1917, assumed that the offensive on land was largely dead. Another common misapprehension of interwar theorists was that the German Army and Navy had not been defeated; instead, its population had lost the war due to war-weariness and defeatism.

Sources: Airpower and Warfare: A Century of Theory and History, Tami Davis Biddle, U.S. Army War College Press

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Douhet
By Robert S. Dudney

Giulio Douhet (1869-1930)

In 1911, Italy went to war with the fading Ottoman Empire. Rome’s target was Libya, a Turkish province. It was a forgettable war but for this fact: the Italian Army brought its fledgling force of nine aircraft, which flew history’s first reconnaissance and bombing missions. For military airpower, it was the Genesis 1:1 moment. This long-ago war also had a historic indirect effect: it helped to launch a new career for an obscure Italian officer, Maj. Giulio Douhet. In a 1910 essay, he had predicted, “The skies are about to become a battlefield as important as the land or the sea. ... Only by gaining the command of the air shall we be able to derive the fullest benefit” of combat in this realm. Douhet, long an artilleryman, had just gone on aviation duty. The Libyan war convinced the Army to form a true aviation unit, and Douhet got the command.

Army officers were irritated by his untraditional ideas. They were outraged when, in early 1914, he dispensed with budgeting formalities and ordered a three-engine bomber from his friend and fellow airpower enthusiast, industrialist Giovanni “Gianni” Caproni. For that, the Army exiled Douhet to an infantry division at Edolo, near the Austrian border. He was there in July 1914, serving as division chief of staff and pondering airpower, when the Great War erupted in Europe. Now a colonel, Douhet badgered the Army with ideas about national preparedness. Italy should build an air force potent enough “to gain command of the air,” he declared in a December 1914 essay, so as to render the enemy “harmless.” He advocated production of 500 bombers capable of dropping 125 tons of ordnance per day on “the most vital, most vulnerable, and least protected points” of Austrian or German soil. In 1915, Italy finally entered the war. Douhet was shocked by the Army’s poor condition and leadership. He wrote scathing letters, advocating the use of airpower. He was arrested in September 1916 and court-martialed for spreading false news and agitation. Military judges sentenced him to a year in prison.

Then, in October 1917, came Italy’s disastrous battle at Caporetto, with some 300,000 casualties. It more than vindicated Douhet’s acid remarks about the Army. As a result, he was released from jail and returned to duty as director of aviation at the General Air Commissariat. Things did not go well, and in June 1918 he left military service. The Army overturned Douhet’s conviction and promoted him to brigadier, yet he declined to return and focused on his writing about airpower. It is clear Douhet was profoundly affected by the carnage of World War I, appalled at the murderous result of years of stagnant trench warfare. More deeply, he saw what happened when a force using outdated tactics and illogical plans went up against modern weapons. In 1921, Douhet completed The Command of the Air, his principal treatise on the concept of strategic airpower. While in time it would become hugely influential, initial response was muted. Things were different in 1926 when he published a revised and more strident version. The book drew harsh attacks, especially from army and navy partisans. Small wonder, as it openly claimed their forces to be obsolete. Douhet devoted his final four years to intellectual combat with such foes. In this, as one historian put it, he proved to be “tireless, blunt, impatient, and very self-confident.” [But] what, exactly, did Douhet preach?

Wars are no longer fought between armies, but between whole peoples, he believed, and future wars would be total and unrestrained, with civilians as legitimate targets.

Wars are won by destroying “the enemy’s will to resist”—and only this produces “decisive victory.” Defeat of enemy forces is a poor indirect route. It is far better to strike directly at “vital centers” of power inside an enemy nation.

World War I was a turning point, showing armies and navies can no longer end wars; the power of the defense—poison gas, machine guns—makes offensive action futile

The airplane, though, is revolutionary, “the offensive weapon par excellence,” able to bypass surface defenses and carry out massive attacks on cities, destroying the enemy’s will to resist.

For national defense, command of the air is necessary and sufficient. The army’s job is to mop up after air attacks. The navy is of even less use.

The centerpiece of Douhet’s theory was what he saw as the airplane’s potential to devastate an enemy’s industrial heartland in relatively short order. However, he believed that an air force’s first task was to achieve command of the air, similar to today’s concept of air supremacy.

1918 Artist's Concept of Mass Air Assault

It was a truly apocalyptic vision. Squeamish politicians and civilians were invited by Douhet to “avert their eyes.” He saw little use for “auxiliary aviation” (that is, fighters). In later years, he even maintained these forms of aviation were “worthless, superfluous, harmful,” as they were defensive. “Viewed in its true light, aerial warfare admits of no defense, only offense,” he said. The 1920s and 1930s were years of relative peace, so Douhet’s theories did not face the test of war for two decades. The true extent of his influence on actual military doctrine remains a subject of controversy. . . It appears, in the United States, Douhet’s work served to reinforce the views of Air Corps officers who had already come to the same conclusions by other routes. Douhet’s convictions, as Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold reported in his book, Global Mission, provided ideological ballast to U.S. Army Air Forces doctrine. “As regards strategic bombardment, the doctrines were still Douhet’s ideas modified by our own thinking in regard to pure defense,” said Arnold.

Source: Air Force Magazine, April 2011

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He was neither seen nor heard as he fell, his body and his machine were never found. Where has he gone? By what wings did he manage to glide into immortality? Nobody knows; nothing is known. He ascended and never came back, that is all. Perhaps our descendants will say: "He flew so high that he could not come down again.

L'Illustration, 6 October 1917

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By 1932: A Growing
Fear for the Future

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin

One of the most important consciousness-raising attempts by politicians about the terrible realities of air warfare came in the speech by the Conservative leader Sir Stanley Baldwin to the House of Commons in 1932. Baldwin pointed out that no town was safe: "The question is: whose morale will be shattered quickest by that preliminary bombing?" Baldwin was content to ram home his point that rapidly evolving aircraft technology was a threat in and of itself: "I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through."

Source: The Blitz Companion

Early Fear of Aerial Bombardment

The Threat of Airpower Imagined

Strategic bombing of cities and civilians by aerial means was not a new concept in 1914. Beginning with the Montgolfièr experiments with manned flight in 1783, the possibility of using balloons and eventually heavier-than-air machines for military use was envisioned. Initially used as observation posts and artillery spotters, the idea of using airships and aircraft offensively soon found enthusiasts. It was not until the advent of the internal combustion engine, however, that the potential of aerial bombardment from a controlled platform became realistic. In an 1893 letter to the chief of staff of the German Army, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, developer of the rigid airship that would bear his name and theorist on strategic bombing, wrote that his machine could perform not only observation and transport roles, but also “bombard enemy fortifications and troop formations with projectiles.”

In popular literature and science fiction, the inevitability of airships cruising over cities and dominating future warfare was a popular topic by the late nineteenth century. Jules Verne, no stranger to prescient fiction, wrote in his 1887 story "Clipper in the Clouds" about an aerial battle between two airships loosely resembling the German dirigibles of the First World War. However, it was H.G. Wells who envisioned the strategic bombing of population centers in the future. In his 1908 novel The War in the Air, Wells described a scene in which a fleet of German airships bombed New York City, eerily predicting the fear and terror felt by the public in London and Paris during the Great War. As the historian Lee Kennett argued, so profound and persuasive at capturing public attention was this type of futuristic literature around the turn of the century, that by the time reliable airships and aircraft finally appeared en mass, “extravagant and impossible things would sometimes be expected of them.” During the war, dirigibles and aircraft were seen as an extension of scientific advancement akin to other innovations such as submarines, machine guns, tanks, and poison gas.

So profound were the concerns over the possibility of airborne bombardment, even before the technology to accomplish such a task was near ready, politicians throughout Europe and the United States attempted to regulate aerial warfare. The 1899 Hague Convention, proposed by Russian Tsar Nicholas II in an attempt to regulate armaments and warfare, passed a resolution “agree[ing] to prohibit, for a term of five years, the launching of projectiles and explosives from balloons, or by other new methods of similar nature.”

Although tactical aerial bombing in support of combat operations was employed as far back as 1911 when Italian airplanes dropped the first bombs in combat on Turkish forces in Libya, 1914 saw the first strategic use of bomber aircraft to “strike at the very foundation of the enemy’s war effort-the production of war material, the economy as a whole, [and] the morale of a civilian population.” A few days after the beginning of the First World War, German pilots dropped a few small bombs on Paris in August 1914. In October of that year, the British achieved the first substantial strategic success when one airplane destroyed a zeppelin airship in its shed at Dusseldorf, Germany. By December 1914 the Germans were dropping bombs directly on England.

Christopher Warren
Air & Space Power,
Issue #3, 2018

Born in France in 1879, the son of a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Bill Mitchell's grandfather, Alexander, was one of the richest men in the state. He grew up in Milwaukee and began college in Washington, DC. Upon the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, he left school at age 18 to enlist in the U.S. Army as a private. He quickly rose through the ranks of the Signal Corps, serving in the Philippines, Cuba, and Alaska. As a communication specialist he served with the military relief mission for the San Francisco earthquake and fire and, most notably, he directed the linking of Alaska to the mainland United States via telegraph. Mitchell became the youngest captain in the Army, and was appointed to the General Staff in 1912. On the verge of World War I, he recognized the importance of aviation. In 1916, he learned to fly at his own expense. In Europe, Mitchell was promoted to colonel and, later, brigadier general. During America's St. Mihiel offensive he commanded more than 1,500 British, French, and American aircraft in the war—the largest "air force" yet assembled. After the war, he was appointed deputy director of the Air Service and began advocating increased investment in air power, believing that this would prove vital in future wars.

He returned home after the war to become assistant chief of the Air Service, first for Gen Charles Menoher and later for Gen Mason Patrick. He led an Air Service provisional brigade in the bombing tests against various naval vessels and sank an ex-German battleship with a 2000-pound bomb—at anchor, close to shore, and unprotected with antiaircraft artillery. The isolationist mood of the 1920s made it impolitic to suggest that the United States would ever again be involved in overseas wars. A seaborne attack against the continental United States was not much of a possibility then, but that was the only threat that could be publicly addressed by either the Air Service or the Navy. Thus, Mitchell’s strategic bombing ideas were discussed much less openly, and the utility of airpower in coastal defense became the major issue.

Mitchell was a showboater, one who was not at all averse to going outside channels. He used public relations extensively to try to advance his cause and published frequently in national media while on active duty. Mitchell wrote several books, some of which were published before he resigned. He used a sensationalist approach, which the Navy and soldiers oftentimes considered as firing from the hip. He frequently used immoderate language and seldom paused to qualify it. He was a social lion and behaved rather like a feudal baron as he traveled about his Air Service domains. Here are some of the main points he focused on in his various writings and pronouncements.

Aviation is revolutionary and airpower is inherently offensive; the bomber will always get through.

Air superiority is a prerequisite for other military operations. Enemy armies and navies are not ultimate objectives; the final goal always is to change the will of the enemy, and through airpower, this finally could be done without defeating his surface forces.

Airmen are a special and elite breed of people, and they alone can understand the proper employment of airpower.

Airpower, organized into a separate, equal (to Army and Navy), and autonomous air force under a unified department of defense, could serve as the most effective and economical means of defending the continental United States.

If the matter ever came to fighting an overseas enemy, airpower could decisively attack the enemy’s vital centers without first defeating his armies and navies. Attacks on such vital targets would render war so decisive and quick that the total suffering would be less than otherwise. . . therefore, such [strategic] bombing would be more humane than conventional trench warfare.

Future wars will be total; the ascendancy of the ground defensive will persist; everybody is a combatant and civilian morale is fragile.

Mitchell, however, almost always stood squarely opposed to targeting civilians directly and generally advocated breaking their morale through the destruction of other vital centers like industry, infrastructure, or even agriculture.

Court Martial

He deliberately provoked a court martial in 1925 with his controversial remarks to the press on 5 September, blasting two recent military disasters: a bungled flight during which three Navy seaplanes failed to make it from the West Coast to Hawaii, and the crash of the Navy airship USS Shenandoah while flying over the Midwest on an ill-advised public relations tour. "These incidents are the direct result of the incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the Navy and War Departments," Mitchell stated. “The bodies of my former companions in the air molder under the soil in America, and Asia, Europe and Africa, many, yes a great many, sent there directly by official stupidity." He was convicted of insubordination, and left the Army early in 1926. He lived on his farm in Virginia for the rest of his life, became involved in the presidential campaign of 1932, and was disappointed that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not choose him as assistant secretary of war for air. Mitchell died in February 1936.

Source: The Air Campaign: John Warden and the Classical Airpower Theorists, Air University Press, 1999; Roads to the Great War, 29 July 2016

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Trenchard
By David R. Mets

Hugh Trenchard (1873-1956)

Hugh Trenchard, 1^st Viscount Trenchard G.C.B., O.M., G.C.V.O., D.S.O., was born on 3 February 1873 in Taunton, Somerset, a son of Henry and his wife Georgina (Skene). He joined the army and was wounded in the South African War. In 1912 he learned to fly and at the outbreak of war in 1914 he was placed at the head of the emergent Royal Flying Corps, at that time just a branch of the army. He was appointed in 1918 Chief of the Air Staff of the newly formed Royal Air Force and was knighted in that year. In 1919 he was promoted to the newly created rank of Air Marshal.

At first, he opposed the creation of an independent air force and the idea of strategic bombing. He was stout in his commitment to the preferability of offensive operations for air forces—and suffered substantial losses because of it. Trenchard nonetheless wound up in command of the Independent Air Force (IAF) in France in 1918. It was created in reaction to the German bombing of London and was charged to undertake retaliatory bombing of targets in Germany. The war ended before Trenchard’s force could conduct much strategic bombing; therefore, most of its effort was in support of the armies. When Trenchard returned to the United Kingdom, he was appointed chief of the air staff of the Royal Air Force (RAF). He soon became an advocate of strategic bombing and of colonial control through the use of airpower instead of ground power.

For him, air superiority was a prerequisite for all other operations. Having been disappointed with airfield attack in World War I, Trenchard believed that at least part of the struggle would take place with an air battle. He asserted most strongly throughout his career that engagements over land or sea would commence with a clash of air forces for control of the air. Also, these forces would strongly tend to be determinants of the final outcome because the future course of events depended heavily on the outcome of the first collision. Both Trenchard and Douhet aimed at the collapse of civilian morale, but Trenchard wanted to achieve it indirectly through destruction of infrastructure targets and the like, while Douhet wanted to attack the people directly. Trenchard no doubt favored independent operations but made a greater allowance than Douhet did for cooperation with other services in operations against the enemy’s fielded forces.

On the surface Trenchard’s assumptions seem to have much in common with the following assertions of Douhet [and Mitchell]:

Air superiority is a prerequisite for all other military operations.

The offensive is the stronger form of air war.

Civilian morale is fragile, but the British [morale] is tougher than the German, and the moral effect of bombing is much more devastating than the physical effect.

The bomber will always get through; it does not need escort.

Night navigation, target acquisition, and bombing accuracy are manageable problems.

Victory could be achieved by bombing enemy vital centers and thus breaking his will.

Trenchard on an Inspection Tour with Queen Mary

While World War I was still being fought, he was firm in his commitment to ground support and allowed only that “excess” aircraft could be dedicated to independent operations. After the war, though, Trenchard increasingly argued that the role of the British army and navy was secondary and the role of the RAF and strategic attack was primary. First, by 1921 he was asserting that the RAF should be seen now as the primary instrument of defense for the British Isles and declaring that such a role would best be accomplished through an air offensive. Second, he wanted to reduce the functions of the two older services in such matters as colonial control (as noted), and coastal defense of the home islands. Third, he sought to reduce the many overseas bases and to turn their functions increasingly over to the RAF. The air arm, Trenchard insisted, could accomplish these functions more economically and effectively than the army and navy. In Trenchard’s day, the defense of the British bastion at Singapore was a central part of the debate. After World War I, Trenchard gave a very high priority to bomber units, and he found only a modicum of opposition to his ideas from either inside the RAF or outside. However, he always saw a role for fighters. Early in his tenure, plans were made for a substantial metropolitan air force known as the Air Defence of Great Britain. However, the threat seemed to diminish in the mid-1920s.

Trenchard’s influence on the country’s military service was enormous. He laid down the RAF's initial institutions and doctrine. His ten-year tenure came during a period of theoretical flux and was said to have had an enormous impact on most of his officers.

Source: The Air Campaign: John Warden and the Classical Airpower Theorists, Air University Press, 1999; Roads to the Great War, 29 July 2016

Released in 1943, Walt Disney's imaginative presentation of the airpower theories of Russian émigré Alexander de Seversky (not to be confused with Igor Sikorsky) and their roots in the Great War is arguably one of the most influential films ever produced. Both Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill noted that it influenced their thinking about strategic bombing during the Second World War. Further, the Russian World War I ace's work ultimately provided the rationale for the creation of America's Strategic Air Command in the early days of the Cold War.

Seversky's Victory Through Air Power, and Disney's award-winning documentary with the same title, however, were far from universally popular. Seversky extended Billy Mitchell's vision of airpower to argue that even if bombing could not achieve a quick victory, it could obtain total victory through unconditional surrender. He also openly criticized military leaders for slowing development of very-long-range bomber aircraft in order to promote more conventional weapons such as aircraft carriers and fighter airplanes. Army Air Force and Navy leaders and public relations officers campaigned to discredit de Seversky, his book, and the film. They were largely unsuccessful. By war's end, de Seversky had stimulated popular awareness and driven the national debate on strategic airpower further than any previous writer.

Sources: IMDB; Encyclopedia.com

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