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Air University Review, July-August 1981
a new look at deep interdiction
Lieutenant Colonel James L. True, Jr.
Seen in retrospect, the bombs that tumbled from the bays of the heavy bombers over Ploesti, Romania, during World War II demonstrate well the complexities and interrelationships that spelled strategic Allied failure in the well-publicized, low-level attack of 1943 versus the little understood but decisive success of the bombing efforts of 1944. Modern critics of strategic bombing and deep interdiction would do well to ponder the difference between the air efforts of 1943 and those of 1944 over Ploesti and consider what lessons they may hold for tactical and strategic air forces today.
Conventional wisdom has come to view deep interdiction primarily as behind-the-lines air attacks against enemy transportation systems for the purpose of destroying or delaying "the enemy’s military potential before it can be brought to bear effectively against friendly forces."1 But in my opinion, by describing only a part of a larger process in the air interdiction attacks of World War II, the conventional viewpoint has misdescribed one of the fundamental principles of successful deep air interdiction and strategic air attack.2
In terms of the military objectives, I find much overlap between the presumably tactical mission of interdiction and those of strategic air attack as well as a significant difference. The conceptual and employment similarities and differences between the two mission categories are also examined. Deep air interdiction in this article is the employment of long-range combat aircraft or missiles in offensive air operations against enemy economic and logistic targets, both fixed and mobile, for the purpose of catastrophically weakening enemy resistance.
A new look at successful deep air interdiction in World War II then suggests that:
—successful deep interdiction is produced by closing a cycle of destruction on some important factor or factors of enemy strength;
—this cycle of destruction requires a measure of control over all three elements of enemy war supplies: the sources of war material production, the movement of supplies to the battle area, and increased consumption in combat;3
—successful interdiction is a long, difficult, but effective air strategy; and
—neither the grinding repetitions of interdiction nor a single dramatic strategic attack is likely to win wars alone but only when combined.
Even if not widely appreciated at present, the basic tenets of deep interdiction are simple, and clearly they are not new at all.4 The common objective of all successful interdiction is to so enfeeble enemy resistance that the invading armed forces can effectively achieve whatever constitutes the political goal of the war. Stated that way, it may be easier to understand that the major mechanisms in interdiction are cumulative denial and debilitation rather than an annihilating lightning blow. Contrary to much preuse expectation, interdiction squeezes rather than strangles, hence the first part of our title. Consequently, deep interdiction is a very likely strategy for the nonnuclear or limited wars of the 1980s and ‘90s. I suggest, then, that interdiction can be an extraordinarily effective strategy when used correctly; for, when the tourniquet of deep interdiction is properly applied in coordination with the hammer of a lightning psychological blow, the minds of extremely recalcitrant, determined, and independent leaders are changed and wars are won.
The epic low-level raid against the oil refineries of Ploesti, Romania, in August 1943, and the aerial siege against those same refineries in April through August 1944 provide not only a case study on the growth of air power. They also give an opportunity for examining both successful and unsuccessful deep interdiction efforts under very similar settings. By contrasting the effort of 1943 to those in 1944, we can focus on the key factors of success, something we would not otherwise be able to do for an undertaking that is as enormous, costly, complicated, and human as deep interdiction.5 With a clearer appreciation of the nature, limits, and capabilities of deep air interdiction, we can better evaluate the importance of the Allied air forces antioil campaign in World War II and its critical contribution to the destruction of the Luftwaffe. Readers can then better judge for themselves the utility of deep air interdiction as a part of military strategy for winning the potential national conflicts of the present.
Considering the state of the bomber’s art and the fortunes of the Allies in 1943, the dramatic August raid was well planned, prepared, and launched. Ninth Air Force planners grouped the boilerhouses, cracking plants, and distilling units of the nine major oil refineries in Ploesti and nearby Campina into seven target sets. A fairly large strike force of 177 B-24s was assigned to the targets. Air power leaders decided that low-level attack was the most likely method for destroying the targets or for producing severe and lasting damage. Training the crews in low-level combat flying and target acquisition required substantial time and effort. When the training and preparations were complete, the mission was launched from Allied bases in North Africa across the Mediterranean to Romania.6
The raid was launched 1 August 1943. Through a complex series of events en route, Colonel Keith Compton, who commanded the lead group, made a serious navigation error when nearing Ploesti. That error and a radioed release to targets of opportunity by Brigadier General Uzal Ent, the force commander, caused significant confusion over the target. The B-24 Liberators of the 376th Bombardment Group and those of the 93rd Bombardment Group skimmed over or near Ploesti or Campina from the east and south, respectively, while the other groups came roaring in also at low level from the north and west as originally planned. The results on the target were spectacular but somewhat disappointing, and the results on the attackers were heavy and decisive.
Conceived as a one-time, low-level knockout punch, the August 1943 raid temporarily knocked out 40 percent of the throughput capacity of the oil refineries and 42 percent of their cracking capacity. The attackers lost 53 of the 177 participating American aircraft, 55 more were damaged, 440 men killed or missing, and 79 men interned.7 Ploesti recovered in a few weeks.8 The Allied costs in men, time, and materiel in training for the mission and the permanent loss of many of the attacking bombers and crews virtually precluded additional follow-on strikes.
At the time of the raid, Ploesti was processing all of the crude oil that could be piped in by using only 60 percent of total refining capacity. Rapid repairs and rerouting to undamaged and previously idle facilities enabled the Ploesti refineries quickly to produce at greater rates than before the raid.
When planning the details of the 1943 raid, air power leaders did not raise their planning horizons beyond the theater level (that really came later with the formation of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in January 1944); nor had they adequately dealt with all the elements of the interdiction equation. They sought to destroy major producer of enemy war materiel without considering the necessity for attacking the movement of that materiel to the battle area nor its enforced consumption in combat. There was little or no early appreciation of the relationship of interdiction elements with each other and their applicability to strategic bombing.
Full of the heady concepts of strategic bombardment so courageously espoused by Brigadier General Billy Mitchell and Giulio Douhet and possessed of the first large and reasonably accurate heavy bomber force in history,* many World War II era air planners and directors believed that one or a few raids would constitute such a smashing hammer blow to the exposed and inflammable refineries that they would be removed from the war.9 Recovery from such a blow, if it were possible at all, would surely take so long as to yield many opportunities for finishing the job with a return raid. In the light of such reasoning, the daring low-level strike could be seen as decisive in itself. But, as illustrated here, the pattern of success in aerial bombardment includes both the hammer and the type of interdictive preparations symbolized by the tourniquet.
*Some devotees of the Royal Air Force or the Luftwaffe would no doubt contest this statement, but consider the evidence. Both of them came to favor area bombing; Air Chief Marshal "Bomber" Harris expressed doubts about the accuracy limits of his command or any other; and the Luftwaffe failed to mass produce a four-engine heavy bomber. One is left with the belief that the United States had produced the first large reasonably accurate heavy bomber force in history. In the crews, aircraft, and supporting elements of the U.S. Army Air Corps, the air bombardment force only dreamed of earlier was created and employed in battle.
Deep interdiction took on a new scale and comprehensiveness in the antioil campaign of 1944. By the end of that year, the Allied oil interdiction campaign had attacked both natural and synthetic oil facilities in Germany, Austria, and Romania. The aviation and motor gasoline of the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht provided a common type of target for both the Eighth Air Force in England and the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. The importance of aerial fighter escort was well recognized.
In contrast to the Ploesti raid of 1943, the bombers in 1944 did not neglect the second element of air interdiction: attacking the movement of supplies to the battle area. The Royal Air Force (RAF) dropped thousands of magnetic mines into the Danube River. There the mines destroyed some petroleum products coming up river by barge, and they held up other shipments of oil while the Axis conducted minesweeping operations. Such a holdup tends to congregate, compress, and make more visible the traffic upstream of the bottleneck. In Romania, the Combined Bomber Offensive attacked pertinent rail marshaling yards while the U.S. attacks on the Ploesti refineries assumed the character of a siege.
This aerial siege of the oil refineries began on 5 April 1944 with a high-level daylight strike of more than 200 B-17 and B-24 aircraft accompanied by P-38 and P-47 fighters. Despite partly overcast weather, the bombers visually aimed and dropped 587 tons of bombs onto the target area. On 15 April 1944, 137 bombers followed up the first strike with another. Damage was considerable from both raids. More attacks followed on 24 April and on 5 May.10
Through a combination of warning systems, antiraid procedures, and dogged rebuilding, Ploesti remained surprisingly resilient in the face of repeated aerial bombardment. One of the more effective procedures was to increase the use of smoke pots to obscure the target area. Large raids of 761 and 377 bombers took place on 23 and 24 June, respectively, but smoke screens at Ploesti forced both groups to resort to blind bombing into smoke. Later it was learned that only one refinery had been hit by the large raids. In July, the H2X radar method was used to bomb through the smoke screen with mixed results. Later assessments showed the hits from the raids to have been largely haphazard. A few raids produced better results. Nonetheless, the quality and the quantity of German opposition indicated that the defenders still considered Ploesti to be worthy of protection.11
The aerial siege continued with little letup until Ploesti fell. On 10, 17, and 18 August 1944—1039 Liberators and Flying Fortresses dropped 2200 tons of bombs on the active refineries in little over a week. The once aggressive German fighter defense had suddenly deteriorated; the bombers were able to attack in such a long stream that the smoke screen thinned considerably before the attacks were over. Sixty-five bombers followed up on 19 August, the third consecutive day of air strikes, to keep the fires burning. The RAF attacked at night. Oil production at Ploesti dropped to about 10 percent of original capacity.
At the end of August 1944, the Red Army arrived and took possession,12 but for the real success of the Ploesti attacks we have to take another look at the skies over Germany and German—occupied Europe.
In the antioil campaign, the Allied air forces used all three elements of successful air interdiction to create a cycle of destruction in which the strength of the Luftwaffe was catastrophically weakened. The bombers sought to destroy the sources of supply (the first element); they disrupted its movement to battle by bombing or mining the transportation systems (the second element); and when Allied fighter escorts joined with the bombers, the combination forced the consumption of enemy aviation gasoline, pilots, and planes in combat (the third element). Thus, the antioil campaign provides us with a model of a successful air interdiction campaign, and remarkably enough it contained all three elements within itself without a major reference to ground action.13
With aviation gasoline in short supply and with the sources of production under threat, the Germans in 1943 and 1944 had faced a relentlessly narrow set of choices: curtail air training to favor operations: curtail current air operations in favor of continuing a high level of training; or curtail both somewhat in an effort to share the shortage. Heavy Allied bomber attacks on significant political, economic, and logistic targets made the German choice an excruciatingly difficult one. The Luftwaffe decided to curtail pilot training flying with the result that pilots were sent into combat with less and less flying experience. It was this lack of well-trained pilots that proved to be the source of the Luftwaffe defeat in 1944.14
Offensive Allied bombers were an irresistible target for the Germans, and Allied lighter escorts attrited them in combat. Like a drowning man struggling for air, the Luftwaffe needed ever more aviation gasoline as less and less could be found.
So long as the Allied bombers were attacking vital targets deep within Germany, the German fighters had little choice but to oppose them. In the battles of skill and attrition that ensued, the lesser-trained pilots of the Luftwaffe suffered higher losses than the accompanying P-51 and P-47 escorts, and ever greener groups of German pilots were hastened forward to replace the losses. In the end the oil shortage required that even operational flying be sharply curtailed because of the increasingly successful antioil campaign. The cycle of destruction was complete. By the summer of 1944, the offensive and defensive strength of the Luftwaffe had been significantly debilitated, and the constant pressures of the air campaigns and the increasing waves of Allied ground attacks acted together to keep the Luftwaffe from ever recovering.15
One does not need an extraordinary imagination to conceive of an entirely different outcome for the war in Europe. He need only juxtapose the burgeoning German production of jet fighters (which used a fuel not in so short supply as aviation gasoline) with an opportunity for the Luftwaffe to stand down to accumulate sufficient stores to make its transition to jets complete. With sufficient jet fighters for defense and V-weapons for offense, Germany might have fashioned a very different war in 1944-45. None of the elements of air interdiction should be overlooked, nor were they in the antioil campaign of the Allies in 1944.
What lessons in tactics and doctrine should one draw from the interdiction of oil, the Ploesti raids, the seesaw battle between destruction and recovery, and the aerial exhaustion of the Luftwaffe? It is always dangerous to assume that the lessons of the past apply to the present. Nevertheless, four tactical lessons still seem to be pertinent. They are presented in the form of an analogy.
If one thinks of deep interdiction as an effort to amputate a man’s leg by means of a tourniquet, then four tactical lessons from Ploesti can be stated as follows: apply the tourniquet to the right place, get the tourniquet all the way around the limb, expect the job to be tough and long, and never loosen the tourniquet.
Correct assessment of the enemy’s vulnerability is critical to success in deep air interdiction. The converse of Sun Tzu’s adage might have been demonstrated at Ploesti: "If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."17 Oil production recovered surprisingly fast, partially because unexpected idle capacity could easily be brought on line to replace losses.
One could restate the third tactical lesson as follows: despite expectations, one or a few air strikes were not going to knock out anything of value to the Germans. But did not this precept also apply to our interdiction experiences in Korea and Vietnam?
If a task is foreseen to be difficult, it does not necessarily follow that it should not be undertaken. A realistic assessment of interdiction benefits and costs may well mean that it is not lightly undertaken to accomplish inappropriate objectives. Just as realistically, however, deep air interdiction may be selected as a useful and effective strategy for accomplishing appropriate goals.
Interdiction is a contest between the attackers’ ability to implement destruction and disruption over time versus the defenders’ abilities to prevent damage and recover constructively. Thus, interdiction is a race between cumulative debilitation and increasingly effective or ineffective recovery. Considering just the first element of interdiction (attacking or controlling the sources of production), we find that even an inadvertent relaxation of the tourniquet allowed recovery to begin from the antioil campaign. In his memoirs, Former Reichsminister Albert Speer described the results of a de facto relaxation due to antiraid procedures and the degraded bombing accuracies during the bad winter weather of 1944:
By now [July-August 1944] we considered it a triumph to reach at least a tenth of our former production. The many attacks had taken such a toll of the piping systems in the chemical [synfuel] plants that direct hits were no longer required to do extensive damage. Merely the shock of bombs exploding in the vicinity caused leaks everywhere. Repairs were almost impossible. [Nonetheless, repairs were made and made surprisingly well.] In August, we reached ten percent, in September five and a half percent, in October ten again—of our former capacity. In November 1944 we ourselves were surprised when we reached twenty-eight percent (one thousand six hundred and thirty-three metric tons daily).19
The last tactical lesson of deep air interdiction bears repeating: Never loosen the tourniquet.
At least four important strategic hypotheses about deep interdiction can be formulated from the foregoing examination of the Allied oil interdiction campaign of World War II: The interdictor must use, control, or influence all three elements of interdiction together to close the cycle of destruction upon his enemy; interdiction is neither complete nor permanent; interdiction does not win wars by itself; and interdiction is a war-winning strategy when it is combined with any one of several sorts of dramatic, psychological hammer blows. At Ploesti, the hammer was occupation by the Red Army. In Italy, neither the tourniquet of the Strangle air interdiction campaign nor the hammer of the Diadem ground offensive would have accomplished their goals without the other. Together, the Strangle-Diadem combination broke through the stalemated Gustav Line and marched the Germans out of Rome.20
The criticalness of dealing with all three elements of interdiction is implicit in recognizing that interdiction is a strategy of cumulative debilitation that is made significant through combat engagement of the enemy. A weakened but unengaged opponent recovers, and he recovers wiser, more resourceful, and usually more intent on seeking revenge. But a weakened and engaged opponent is like the drowning man that the Allied oil interdiction campaign made of the Luftwaffe in 1944.
Those who, in their enthusiasm, still believe that deep interdiction can win wars alone should carefully consider a case that was parallel to that of Ploesti involving a synthetic fuel facility that was not so quickly occupied by the Red Army.
At Ploesti the Red Army arrived before any significant rebuilding had been accomplished, but there can be little doubt that if they had not arrived Ploesti would have staggered up from the ashes once again to furnish fuel to the Axis as soon as cessation of the bombing allowed such an undertaking. In a similar case, the large synthetic fuel plant at Merseberg-Leuna, Germany, received Allied attentions like those showered upon Ploesti, yet the Leuna plant somehow again and again resumed production until the end of the war.
According to the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Leuna was attacked 20 times by the Eighth Air Force and twice by the RAF in the last half of 1944. A total of 6552 bomber sorties were flown against the plant, and 18,328 tons of bombs were dropped. At first, in the days following a bomb raid, Leuna would resume partial production, and then greater and greater portions of the original capability would be restored until the next raid struck. The data on Leuna seem to point initially toward a learning curve in restoring production (decreasing intervals between bombing and the restoration of partial production), but that was apparently overtaken by a greater cumulative effect of destruction. Like a fighter punishing a cut over his opponent’s eye, the Eighth Air Force persisted in bombing Leuna until it was no longer able to recover even partial production from 28 July to 14 October 1914. Bad weather degraded the accuracy of the six heavy Allied attacks in November, allowing Germany enough of a respite to restore Leuna to 15 percent of its capacity by January 1945. The plant continued at that rate until virtually the end of the war.21 Unless an opponent is hammered after he has been weakened, by miracle or superhuman effort, he will restore for himself those capacities that he holds to be important.
For those who remain skeptical of the effectiveness of deep interdiction, the fall of Japan provides further food for thought. Despite widespread expectations during World War II that Japan would never capitulate without the cataclysmic agony of an Allied invasion, she did, and she did so after a military sequence of the tourniquet and the hammer. The B-29s fire-bombed the dispersed factories of Japanese production (the first element of successful deep interdiction); U.S. submarines doggedly assaulted her maritime lines of communication (the second element); and the U.S. advances in the central and southwest Pacific enforced Japanese consumption of war materiel (the third element). With all three elements of interdiction engaged, Japan’s army and navy suffered the same cycle of destruction discussed in connection with the Luftwaffe and the antioil campaign. The tourniquets were applied to the right places, all the way around the life lines and sinews of the foe; and, though the job was long and tough, they never let up. The tourniquets were not loosened, and Japan was thus prepared for the hammer.
The atomic hammering of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was devastating enough to create its own strategy and literature,22 but its success as a psychological hammer on the minds of the military leaders of Japan seems less well appreciated. Does anyone now doubt that in 1945 Japan was a thoroughly mobilized nation-in-arms prepared to contest in blood and destruction the invasion of any square mile of its homeland?23 Yet its obdurate leaders either changed their minds or were replaced after both the cumulative weakening of national power from the U.S. bomber and submarine tourniquets and the psychological hammering of the atomic bomb. Nonetheless, this important and perhaps critcal lesson does not appear in our operational doctrine today.
Those who codified USAF doctrine after World War II and Korea appear to have conceived of offensive air attacks as two separate roads. The strategic road led directly to the heart of the enemy’s economy and government; strategic air attack could be decisive in and of itself; and its employment was dependent on a separate Air Force with its own doctrine, strategies, force structure, and constituencies. The tactical road led back to the battlefield; tactical air attack supported and made possible successful ground battle decisions; and its employment also depended on centralized control but perhaps with less rationale for an Air Force service separated from the Army.24
Strategic air attack rationalized and supported the nuclear superiority of the United States and our national strategy of massive retaliation. In turn, nuclear dominance and massive retaliation held out hope for a "clean" military instrument of power which could threaten compelling destruction upon those who would oppose us without the mire, blood, anguish, and national casualties of previous wars. Tactical air attack was categorized into air superiority, interdiction, and close air support missions all of which were dependent almost exclusively on conventional munitions. As a consequence, surely its missions, forces, and operational doctrine should take second place to the strategic ones on which national survival more depended. But after two limited wars and several conventional power projections, is it now time for another change in perspective? The accompanying schematics suggest that it is.
By casting the immediate military objectives of bombardment into target categories, we can compare and contrast the current battlefield air interdiction (BAI) and interdiction attacks with strategic attack. In this schematic the major differences are in the delivery vehicle (TAC-provided or SAC-provided) and the range of targetry to be attacked. The two types of missions share many of the same types of targets and for many of the same purposes.
One could divide air power into tactical and strategic compartments merely as a realistic recognition of their essential differences in objectives: tactical air power directly relates to the land battle whereas strategic air power seeks out the economy and government of an enemy. But our ability apply the lessons learned from one war to the next would be improved by recasting our mission categories. More specifically, the two-roads approach of tactical versus strategic has outlived its usefulness in the area of operational doctrine. Therefore, as alternative operational doctrine, I propose new categories of deep interdiction and strategic attack.
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Deep interdiction would be defined as aerial bombardment by long-range combat aircraft or missiles in offensive air operations against those factors of military, logistical, economic, and technical targets whose destruction or disruption will catastrophically weaken the national military power of an enemy—i.e., the tourniquet. Of course, the second category of strategic attack would be defined as aerial bombardment by long-range aircraft or missiles in offensive air operations against those factors of logistical, economic, technical, political, and social targets whose destruction or disruption will shatter the mind-set of those enemy leaders who can accede to the desired political goals of the war—i.e., the hammer.25
In this perspective, the 1943 Ploesti raid failed because it could not be repeated and because it was isolated from the other necessary parts of a successful interdiction campaign. The 1944 siege succeeded because it dealt repeatedly with all three elements of interdiction and was part of a theater-wide oil interdiction campaign. The success of a campaign may be measured by how well it accomplished its primary goal, which was the fatal weakening of the Luftwaffe. Thus, the objective of both the oil and aircraft industry attacks was to disrupt and destroy the central process by which the Luftwaffe joined aircraft, pilots, and consumables into weapon systems; in short, to disarm the enemy. Because the enemy’s weapon-system process stretched across technical, economic, and logistical targets, Allied efforts against that process are best understood as deep interdiction.
My goal here has been to focus attention on deep interdiction and strategic attack and the relationship between them. Understanding this relationship and the relationships of these missions to the other land and air battles of the theater appears to have been the key to successful air power employment in World War II. As for the present, whenever criticisms deep interdiction or conventional strategic bombing arise or whenever some overly optimistic planner starts talking about strangling the opposition, consider the tourniquet and hammer. You may be surprised to see how well they apply.
Air War College
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Notes
1. AFM 2-1, Tactical Air Operations——Counter Air, Close Air Support, and Air Interdiction, 2 May 1969, p. 7-1. In AFM 1-1, Functions and Basic Doctrine of the United States Air Force,14 February 1979, pp. 2-13, one finds a broader description of the function of air interdiction: to "restrict the combat capability of the enemy by delaying, disrupting, or destroying their lines of communications, their forces, and their resources." The part of the described interdiction mission category that may have a direct or near-term effect on surface operations is often called battlefield air interdiction (BAI). TACM 2-1, Tactical Air Operations, 15 April 1978, pp. 4-30- 4-36, pictures battlefield interdiction as a doctrinal response to the Soviet propensity for the deep echeloning of armored forces. The thrust of this article is to consider and assess the broader category usually referred to as air interdiction and investigate what principles of air employment appear to be related to its success or failure.
2. To answer why interdiction principles were used fairly successfully in World War II but were largely disappointing in Korea and Vietnam, some air power enthusiasts would point out the large differences between limited wars and general conventional war. For an excellent example, see Colonel Herman L. Glister, "Air Interdiction in Protracted War: An Economic Evaluation," Air University Review, May-June 1977, pp. 2-5, 10-18. Others would ascribe the failures of modern air interdiction to a variety of other causes: (1) our ineptitude in analyzing its real costs and benefits, see Captain Robert O, Heavner, "Interdiction: A Dying Mission?" Air University Review, January-February 1971, pp. 56-59 or perhaps Wing Commander Alan Parkes, RAF, "Air Interdiction in a European Future War—Doctrine or Dodo? Air University Review, September-October 1976, pp. 16-18; (2) to capability limitations, inappropriate restraints, and overly gradual force application, for example, General George J. Eade, "Reflections on Air Power in the Vietnam War," Air University Review, November-December 1973, pp. 2-9; or (3) to some sort of tragic flaw inherent in deep air interdiction today, see Steven L. Canby, "The Interdiction Mission—An Overview," Military Review, July 1979, pp. 22-27; or Charles E. Myers, Jr., "Deep-Strike Interdiction," United States Naval Institute Proceedings, November 1980, pp. 47-52.
The differences between limited and general wars are certainly numerous and important, but I believe another explanation may be that the "real" principles of interdiction were discovered during World War II but were not quickly codified and institutionalized in the postwar Air Force. When that codification was accomplished, many perceptions of those principles had faded and changed. Perhaps it would be fair to say that USAF leaders were preoccupied with solving weightier and more demanding issues such as the role and mission of the newly separated service, the maintenance of some sort of force structure in the frenzy of postwar demobilization, the definition of tactical and strategic aviation and the priority of each, and an interservice decision over the command and control of the theater air forces. For whatever reasons, the principles and doctrine of World War II air interdiction were not uniformly agreed to and codified very quickly. The first major USAF-wide document on doctrine (AFM 1-2, United States Air Force Basic Doctrine) was approved for publication on 1 April 1953. General operational procedures appeared in AFM 1-7, Theater Air Forces in Counterair, Interdiction, and Close Air Support, on 1 March 1954, seven months after the Korean War truce. See AFM 1-1, 14 February 1979 for the evolution of USAF basic doctrine. Additional details maybe found in Frank R. Jenkins, The Development of Interdiction Doctrine and Strategy in the USAF: Post World War II (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air War College Research Report, 1977).
3. Of course, there are those today who believe that interdiction is limited to only the second element, movement to the battlefield. The central thrust of this article is that route denial and battlefield isolation are essentially meaningless military tasks unless related to an overall effort to control production, impede movement, and increase combat consumption. If a measure of control can be brought to all elements, I believe that interdiction can create both a general overall enemy shortage of a specific sort of combat supplies and an acute, specific, and critical shortage of the same supplies in the battle area. And successful interdiction does so at a time when weakened enemy resistance could allow our own armed forces to attain our desired military and political objectives in war. On the other hand, a one-element interdiction campaign may well isolate the battlefield; but, if there is no general shortage, fresh and innovative resupply will quickly follow; and, if there is no increased consumption in combat, the enemy is allowed to save up whatever supplies do arrive until he has accumulated enough for a new offensive of his initiative. The cycle of destruction is not closed until all three elements can be at least partially accounted for. See Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention (New York, 1969/73), pp. 75-76, and General William Momyer, Air Power in Three Wars (Washington, 1978), p. 163.
4. I contend that General Carl Spaatz, Commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces, exercised an appropriately high appreciation of the three elements of interdiction in his plans for destroying the Luftwaffe through both the counterair and counteroil campaigns. See David MacIsaac, Strategic Bombing in World War II (New York, 1976), pp. 17-19, and Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate, editors, The Army Air Forces in World War Two, vol. III (Chicago, 1951), pp. 174-77.
5. It is important for analysis of any air strategy to appreciate the human dimension of all armed conflict. As this article shows, interdiction is a complex contest between national antagonists who, more often than not, are found to be both determined and resourceful. The dynamics between destruction, construction, and battle are clearly more difficult to grasp than any mechanical, mathematical, or fanciful analogues. We are not justified in calling our historical comparisons experiments, but neither are we likely to have any satisfactory replacement for them. Debate and informed dialogue remain our major sources of truth as we try to produce approximate lessons in the use of air power during international conflict.
6. This account of the Ploesti bombardments is largely based on Leon Wolff, Low Level Mission (Garden City, New York, 1957), and James Dugan and Carrol Stewart, Ploesti (New York, 1962). Additional sources, of course, were used throughout and are cited where appropriate.
7. "Brief History of the Ninth Air Force," The 9th Sees France and England (AAF Publication Company, 1947), p. 3.
8. It is difficult to state authoritatively how fast Ploesti recovered from the 1943 attack. The Soviets occupied Romania in August 1944, but the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) never got an opportunity for the sort of thorough and detailed review of enemy records that was possible in most of Germany. The USSBS reported that the 1 August 1943 raid had a "temporary effect" and that deliveries of Romanian oil actually increased from August 1943 through April 1944. USSBS Over-all Report (European War), (Washington, 30 September 1943), p. 41
9. Air War Plans Division (AWPD)-42, the 1942 revision of AWPD-1, did not plan for any repeat attacks on the Romanian oil refineries. See AWPD-42, Appendix G VII and Thomas A. Fabyanic, Strategic Air Attack in the United States Air Force: A Case Study (Manhattan, Kansas: Military Affairs/Aerospace Historian Publishing Series, 1976), p. 59.
10. These April 1944 attacks were actually initially directed as part of the counterrail effort; however, I agree with the 15th Air Force historian, the official Air Force history, and the USSBS that because of the damage inflicted then to the refineries we should count the April raids as the beginning of the offensive against enemy oil. See Fifteenth Air Force History, vol. I, p. 363; USSBS Over-all Report (European War), p. 41; and Craven and Cate, vol. III, p. 174,
11. Craven and Gate, vol. III, pp. 283-91.
12. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (European War), (Mimeographed Report, 30 September l943), p. 12x; and Craven and Cate, III, p. 291.
13. In one sense it is correct to state that the antioil bombing campaign was a complete air interdiction campaign that succeeded without direct requirement for ground action, but a wider perspective would reveal that the ground conquest of Italy was necessary to provide nearby air bases, that the Red Army offensive caused much of the German motor and aviation gasoline consumption, and that the Red Army was the instrument of Ploesti’s demise in World War II. Nonetheless, I believe that having all three interdiction elements employed primarily by air power alone merits attention, especially since their use resulted in the debilitation of the Luftwaffe.
14. USSBS, Over-all Report (European War), p. 22. Of course, a good case can be made that it was the unexpectedly heavy wartime attrition of German pilots that caused the progressive collapse of the pilot training program as its leaders sought to fill the empty planes. On the other hand, why did pilot attrition continue to be unexpectedly heavy? I agree with Craven and Cate that the oil attacks of 1944 made a reality of an allied antioil threat which, in the words of Albert Speer, "had been a nightmare to us for more than two years." See Craven and Cate, vol. III, p. 287. In my view, it seems likely that prioritizing and allocating for an expected shortage of oil played a large rote in the German decisions on wartime pilot training, and clearly the oil attacks played the primary role in initiating combat attrition of the German weapon systems.
15. The USSBS conclusion that the counteroil campaign was the primary source of the Luftwaffe’s defeat through its lack of well-trained pilots is still persuasive today, for we can see more clearly than the Allies could in World War II how wildly improbable it would be to assert that the counterair campaign against the German fighter industry was the cause. During the last half of 1943, Allied Intelligence estimated average monthly single-engine fighter production at 645 whereas the actual German monthly figure was 851. The fighter production facilities were the major target for the counterair bombing offensive, but fighter production increased under attack. After intensified bombing (including the massive efforts of "Big Week" in February 1944), Allied intelligence estimated monthly single-engine fighter production at 655 during the first half of 1944. After the war, the actual monthly production average for that period was found to have been 1581. More fighters were available than there were pilots to man them. See Craven and Cate, vol. III, pp. 45, 174-77.
16. Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Samuel B. Griffith (New York, l963) p. 84.
17. Ibid.
18. Albert Speer goes so far as to say that Craven and Cate missed the decisive point of the Combined Bomber Offensive. He said, ". . . the real importance of the air war consisted in the fact that it opened a second front long before the invasion of Europe. That front was the skies over Germany." Spandau: The Secret Diaries (New York, 1976). The trick to getting the interdictive tourniquet all around the limb is one of scale.
19. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich (New York, 1970), p. 348.
20. F. M. Sallagor, Operation "STRANGLE" (Italy: Spring 1944), R-851-PR (Santa Monica, California, 1972), pp. v-xiv; and Craven and Cate, vol. III, pp. 373-96.
21. USSBS, Summary Report (European War), p. 12.
22. See for example, Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton, New Jersey, 1959); Klaus Knorr, On the Uses of Military Power in the Nuclear Age (Princeton, New Jersey, 1966).
23. The words of the Japanese Archbishop of Tokyo are most explicit about the determination of the people of Japan to resist invasion: "The nation would never give in. To realize that there was no hope of winning the war and the will to surrender were matters of an entirely different kind. The people had made up their minds to offer life and everything for the country." Letter, 9 May 1946, reprinted in U.S. Army Air Forces, Mission Accomplished: Interrogations of Japanese Industrial, Military, and Civil Leaders of World War II (Washington, 1946), p. 97. See also John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire: 1936-1945 (New York, 1970), for a review of the fortunes of the peace and war factions in the Japanese government in 1945.
24. Contrast the tactical AFM 1-7, Theater Air Forces in Counterair, Interdiction, and Close Air Support; AFM 2-1, Tactical Air Operations— Counterair, Close Air Support, and Air Interdiction; and TAC Manual
2-1, Tactical Air Operations, with the nuclear-oriented AFM 2-11, Strategic Aerospace Operations.
25. The tourniquet and the hammer analogies were suggested by the cumulative and sequential strategies of Joseph C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (New Brunswick, New Jersey, 1967), pp. 23-29.
Contributor
Lieutenant Colonel James L. True, Jr.,
(B.A., McMurry College; M.S., Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville) is Chief, National Security Studies, Air War College. His operational assignments were in airlift, air rescue, and weather reconnaissance; support assignments included plans, search and rescue coordination, management analysis, and budgeting. Colonel True is a graduate of Squadron Officer School, Air Command and Staff College, Industrial College of the Armed Forces, and a Distinguished Graduate of Air War College.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.Air & Space Power Home Page | Feedback? Email the Editor
