Document created: 31 December 03
Air University Review, January-February
1972
Colonel Albert P.
Sights, Jr., USAF (Ret)
A World War I aviator is flying over No Man’s Land. From his altitude of 10,000 feet, the great battlefield is reduced to the scale of a sandtable exercise. Just ahead, appearing as a delicate tracery, is the impenetrable maze of enemy trenches and barbed wire that his countrymen have assaulted in vain. It passes smoothly beneath his lower wing and recedes quickly into the distance behind him.
Detached from earth, in company with clouds, he moves freely through the boundless ocean of air. His nimble, responsive machine is as new and marvelous to him as today’s spacecraft is to us. He has a feeling of omnipotence.
Spread before him like a giant relief map is the enemy nation itself. Somewhere out there lies Berlin, the symbol and focus of national power, along with the dozens of other cities and towns that sustain the opposing military machine. Without their industries that machine would falter and fail, the road to victory would be opened, and thousands, possibly millions, of lives would be saved. Given suitable airplanes, could not he and his fellow airmen destroy arsenals, oil refineries, marshaling yards—anything vital to the enemy war effort—even in the farthest corner of this vast unfriendly land? His reverie is broken by the sight of hostile planes rising to attack, a grim reminder that nothing comes easily in war, since every new weapon quickly spawns its own counter-weapon.
Aviators were not the first ones to entertain such thoughts. In 1842, the
poet Tennyson foresaw the falling of “a ghastly dew” from the clash of “airy
navies.”1 In 1908, H. G. Wells envisioned war involving great fleets
of airships: “Upon anything below,” he wrote, “they could rain explosives in
the most deadly fashion, forts and ships and cities lay at their mercy. . . .”2
In 1914, F. W. Lanchester, builder of Britain’s first gasoline motor car,
analyzed the tactical problem of bombing a large city: “The critical point to
be aimed at is that at which the fire-extinguishing appliances of the community
are beaten or overcome. Up to this point the damage may be taken as roughly
proportional to the means and cost of its accomplishment; beyond that point the
damage is disproportionately great: the city may be destroyed in toto.”3
Indeed it was mainly writers and politicians who first professed to see important strategic implications in aerial bombardment. Professional military men, aside from the few young aviators among them, rarely engaged in such flights of fancy. The object of war was to defeat the opposing army. Generals found greater relevance in what they might see from horseback on a hill overlooking the battlefield than from the breezy open cockpit of an airplane cruising far behind enemy lines. The hardships and hazards of flying were such that it was left almost entirely to the more durable and expendable junior officers, who had little voice or influence in the higher councils of war.
Still the idea took hold that far beyond the front lines there were legitimate and profitable targets for attack. The growing capability of the airplane to make such attacks possible introduced a wholly new and different factor in warfare. Historically, wars had started on frontiers or at sea or on foreign soil. Ordinary citizens were usually secure in the interior of their country. They lived in a sanctuary, sometimes precarious and temporary but nonetheless an initial place of refuge. Now the airplane promised to eliminate that sanctuary. The entire homeland of a nation would be exposed to direct observation and attack. All citizens—men, women, and children—would find themselves, in a sense, at the front. Though most would be in quiet sectors, none could ever feel entirely safe.
It was inevitable that nations deadlocked in trench warfare should experiment with this new method of attack. The Germans were the first to try it. From late 1914 until the summer of 1918 they conducted a small-scale but sustained strategic air offensive against England. For bombers they used Zeppelins initially and later large, multiengine Gotha and Giant airplanes. Altogether about 250 tons of bombs were dropped, of which more than half fell on the city of London. The bombing produced 4830 casualties, destroyed or damaged much property, and forced Britain into a sizable diversion of war resources to strengthen her homeland air defenses.4 Considering the primitive state of military aviation, these results were impressive. However, they had no measurable effect on the course or outcome of the war, and Germany evidently concluded afterward that they had not been worth the effort.
Britain, on the receiving end of the bombing, took quite a different view.
Her preoccupation with homeland air defense and growing desire to strike back
at German cities, neither of which had much to do with land or naval
operations, led her in the closing months of the war to establish the Royal Air
Force as a separate and coequal military service and to build a strategic
bomber force of her own. Beginning operations in June 1918, this force dropped
on Germany in a five-month period more than twice the weight of bombs that fell
on England during the entire war. On 11 November, the day of the Armistice,
three four-engine Handley Page bombers were fueled and armed for the first air
raid on Berlin—an event deferred for another quarter century.5
In the postwar period, air power theorists, of whom Douhet was the best known and probably the most influential, argued that strong air forces could quickly undermine the enemy’s will and capacity to fight by striking directly at his “vital centers.” Granted, armies and navies were still necessary. However, the air power theorists downgraded their importance by suggesting that they should remain on the defensive while air forces, operating independently, shuttled back and forth over their heads delivering the decisive thrust.
Senior army and navy officers found such a theory of war most uncongenial and resisted it strongly. They outranked and outnumbered the airmen and presumably were more influential in the councils of government. How did it happen, then, that the United States and Great Britain undertook such massive bombing campaigns in World War II? Or, to turn the question around, if the American and British airmen had such a good case, why did no other countries—Japan, Russia, France, Germany, nor even Douhet’s own Italy—try to capitalize on strategic bombing? The fact is that not one country, the United States and Britain included, was willing to gamble on this controversial, untested theory.
Nations on the European continent gave first importance to matching or surpassing the hostile armies arrayed against them just across their borders. Although Japan had no vulnerable land frontiers, she maintained a large army and navy to defend her far-flung oceanic empire. This absorbed most of her resources. In any case, she had little incentive to build strategic bombers, since her principal enemy, the United States, was too large and too far away to be attacked decisively by air.
Britain, whose enemy was closer at hand, did build a large fleet of bombers. Although the effort was costly, it involved little risk and offered the possibility, at least, of a handsome payoff. Her homeland was protected by the Channel, and her sea lines of communication were guarded by a strong navy. She wanted, above all, to avoid a repetition of the disastrous land campaigns of the First World War. There was always the chance that her bombers might fatally weaken the enemy. Failing that, they would at least keep pressure on him while she sought other ways to bring about his defeat.
The United States entered the war with no army or air force of any
consequence and a navy badly crippled by the Pearl Harbor attack. However, her
enemies were far away, and her sea lines of communication were fairly secure.
Whether to emphasize land, sea, or air forces required no agonizing choice. She
could, and did, emphasize all three, putting enormous resources into each. If
airmen thought they could win the war with a strategic air offensive, by all
means let them try. President Roosevelt, who in 1939 had urged Hitler to avoid
bombing cities, now called on American factories to turn out 100,000 warplanes
a year and soon gave his approval to a bombing campaign aimed at “the
progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and
economic system. . . .”6
Although strategic bombing was ultimately used with devastating effect, it became apparent early in the war that the theorists had made some major miscalculations. They had overestimated the destructive effect of aerial bombs and underestimated the technical difficulties of delivering them accurately on target. Also they had underestimated the ability of the civilian population to withstand aerial bombardment. The theorists erred, one supposes, because of the meager and misleading data available from the previous war, in which fewer than a thousand tons of bombs had been dropped by both sides.
If the data from the First World War were skimpy, those from the Second were exhaustive. The Anglo-American air forces dropped 2.7 million tons in Europe alone. Another 700,000 tons fell on Japan. Moreover, the effects produced by all these bombs were examined by the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, whose teams of experts made on-the-spot surveys soon after hostilities ended. Their reports and supporting data, amounting to hundreds of volumes, have been valuable to civilian historians; also to military public information officers, who still cull them for quotes in the continuing dispute over which service really won the war. Apparently, however, this vast store of material has never been seriously studied by the war colleges or military planning staffs. The atomic bomb seemed to make it all irrelevant. As a result, the 1945 generation of air warfare theorists found themselves with even less usable data than their 1918 counterparts—not that they were the least bit dismayed. With a royal flush to lay down on every call, who cared whether two pair beat three of a kind?
It was soon a familiar cliché that a few planes armed with atomic weapons
could deliver, in a single sortie, more explosive power than had been dropped
by all the thousands of bombers in World War II. As Europe faced the threat of
renewed war, atomic air power became the first line of defense of the Western
Allies. “For good or ill, air mastery,” said former First Sea Lord Winston
Churchill in 1949, “is today the supreme expression of military power, and
fleets and armies, however necessary and important, must accept subordinate
rank.”7
Not all Americans agreed with this judgment. It was the year of the so-called “Admirals’ revolt,” in which U.S. naval officers argued, rightly in some ways though often for the wrong reasons, that atomic air power had been overrated. Commander Eugene Tatom, an ordnance expert who should have known better, weakened the Navy’s case by belittling the bomb itself. “You could stand in the open,” he told members of a congressional committee, “at one end of [a 7000-foot airport runway] and have an atom bomb explode at the other end of the runway without serious injury to you.”8 Luckily no one put this claim to a test, and three years later at Eniwetok any lingering doubts about the power of the atom were swept away by the first monstrous explosion of a thermonuclear device.
Meanwhile Air Force officials pondered the implications of nuclear weapons, which were still, in the early 1950s, almost exclusively in the hands of the United States. Amid the frustrations of the Korean conflict, some airmen dreamed of using them to enforce a kind of Pax Americana in a world still afflicted with recurrent wars. Such was the idea, and the ideal, behind Air University’s Project Control. In this elaborate study effort a task force of military officers, assisted by prominent civilians mainly from the academic community, sought to delineate how a world of law and order could be achieved by inducing any would-be violators to abide by established rules under pain of forcible control by air forces and other means invested with proper authority. Project Control took as a point of departure an earlier British experience.
During the 1920s and 1930s the Royal Air Force had successfully used aerial bombardment, or the threat of it, to prevent tribal conflicts in underdeveloped areas of the Middle East. “We imposed a sort of inverted blockade,” said Air Marshal Sir John Slessor in describing the air control system, “making it impossible for the offending tribe to live in its villages, tend its crops, use the normal grazing areas or water points for its cattle or camels—and so on.”9 Tribes were warned well in advance of the specific village or other clearly defined area within which activity of any kind would be liable to attack. Usually the warning alone was enough to bring the tribesmen to terms. If it did not, the RAF fliers would begin to apply pressure by bombing.
Could not atomic air power be used in some such manner to prevent or stop conflicts among modern industrial nations? Today the idea seems naïve, but circumstances and attitudes have changed a great deal in the last 15 years. In the context of its times, Project Control won a respectful hearing and may well have influenced national policy. The “New Look” of the incoming Eisenhower administration did indeed emphasize strategic nuclear air forces. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that the United States would thereafter put primary reliance on its massive retaliatory power. And in the early days of the administration there was even guarded talk of shifting from passive “containment” of Communism to active “rollback.”
For air control to work, the threat to use nuclear weapons had to appear credible, and Air Force officials strove to make it so. Bombers were designed primarily for nuclear weapon delivery, and their pilots were given little or no training in the use of conventional bombs. Donald A. Quarles, Secretary of the Air Force from 1955 to 1957, argued in public speeches that nuclear weapons should be regarded simply as “modern weapons” replacing the outmoded conventional ones in the nation’s arsenal. In 1956 a faculty member from a USAF senior school went so far as to suggest that the United States demonstrate its willingness to use nuclear weapons by actually dropping one on some small, lightly populated place that threatened to disrupt the peace.
Militarily, these efforts of the mid-fifties to conventionalize nuclear weapons had a certain logic. But politically, they were passé. Air control might have belonged to the old era ending, but not to the new era beginning. Its underlying assumptions were rooted in the past—in America’s disappearing atomic monopoly, in Major General Orvil Anderson’s rationale for preventive war, even in Admiral Mahan’s turn-of-the-century call for imperialistic expansion. When the United States made no move to free Hungary from Communist domination during the 1956 uprising, the notion of air control was clearly defunct.
If air power could not control the policies of hostile nations, it could—and did throughout the 1950s—provide a reassuring bulwark against major aggression. Few people doubted that under extreme provocation, such as a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, the 1500-odd bombers of the Strategic Air Command could and would carry out the classic mission of strategic bombing—“to destroy the war-making potential of the enemy nation.”
The decade of the 1960s ushered in a new weapon—the intercontinental ballistic missile—and a new military situation. As increasing numbers of these missiles were deployed on both sides, the era of U.S. nuclear superiority, which had lasted since World War II, came to an end. It was not that the U.S.S.R. had necessarily “caught up” either in number or quality of weapons. Rather, the peculiarities of missile forces were such that nuclear superiority lost much of its former utility.
As long as a strategic nuclear war was to be fought with airplanes alone, a nation might assume that, with superior air forces, most of its own bombers would get through whereas most of the enemy’s would not. In other words, a quick victory was conceivable at a bearable cost. The greater the superiority, the quicker the victory and the lower the cost.
On the other hand, the chances of stopping a missile attack were far more problematic. Once both sides acquired these weapons, people began to doubt that any margin of superiority, however great, would give reasonable protection against a disastrous attack. Thus nuclear forces lost political leverage because of increasing doubts that they would actually be used. What the nuclear-tipped missile did, oddly enough, was to restore—to a degree—the sanctuary status of the homeland that the airplane had stripped away half a century earlier. This is reflected in changing public attitudes.
In the early 1960s, when the Soviet threat was comparatively small, the American people were obviously worried over the possibility of a nuclear attack. Few scoffed at President Kennedy when he said at a 1961 news conference that “we happen to live in the most dangerous time in the history of the human race.”10 Many responded to his appeal for citizens to construct and equip fallout shelters in their own homes. Today, attitudes are altogether different. The average man in the street knows there are many more missiles pointed in his direction. Immeasurable catastrophe could descend on him at any hour of the day or night with little or no notice. Yet he is relatively unconcerned. The fortunes of a small and distant guerrilla war occupy him much more than the possibility of Armageddon at home.
Mr. Average Man may be right in assuming our cities will not be obliterated. Missiles have made nuclear wars unprofitable for the strong nations as well as the weaker ones. But in making such wars less likely, have they made others more so? It could be argued that those who feared a nuclear retaliation were less inclined toward military adventures than those—today’s leaders in Hanoi perhaps—who are persuaded that nuclear weapons will never be used against them.
If another great war does come, what will it be like? On the basis of what has happened in Korea and Vietnam and elsewhere in the first quarter-century of the nuclear age, one would have to conclude that it will be fought with conventional weapons. If so, paradoxically, those much-maligned generals who spend their time studying the weapons and tactics of the last war will be the winners of the next one. And the airmen most in demand will be those schooled in the uses of outmoded iron bombs. This possibility brings us full circle.
Without the euphoric assumption that nuclear weapons will be used “if required,” we are confronted by an old, tough question: What can strategic bombing destroy that is worth the possible loss of the bombers and their crews? It is time to start looking for some new answers.
Arlington, Virginia
Notes
1. In his poem “Locksley Hall,” Tennyson anticipated a world still some three quarters of a century away:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.
Lines 119-24
2. H. G. Wells, War in the Air (New York: Macmillan, 1908), p. 158.
3. F. W. Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare (London: Constable and Co., 1916), p. 191.
4. Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), p. 231.
5. Ibid., p. 226.
6. Combined Chiefs of Staff directive of 14 May 1943 for Operation Pointblank, reprinted in Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1961), IV, 273.
7. Winston S. Churchill in an address, “The Advent of Air Power,” delivered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, March 31, 1949, as quoted by Eugene M. Emme, ed., The Impact of Air Power (Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc., 1959), p. 87.
8. New York Times, October 11, 1949, p. 28.
9. Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor, The Great Deterrent (New York: Praeger, 1957), p. 58.
10. New York Times, October 12, 1961.
Colonel Albert P. Sights, Jr., USAF (Ret), (USMA), was a member of the Concepts Division, Air University, when he retired in 1965. During World War II he served in flying and gunnery training and as Inspector General, 79th Bombardment Wing, Saipan. Other assignments were as Inspector General in Guam and Morocco and as International Politico-Military Affairs Officer, Directorate of Plans, Hq USAF. He graduated from Armed Forces Staff College and Air War College. His articles have appeared in professional journals.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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