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When the first fledgling air machines took to the sky at the
beginning of this century, very few persons envisioned the wide-ranging ramifications of
this undertaking, particularly in the military realm of endeavor. In slightly more than a
decade and a half, the British had established an entirely new branch of their armed
forces, one devoted entirely to combat in the air. Within the relatively short span of
thirty years thereafter, air power had become a pivotal factor in the Second World War and
a deterrent enforcing the relative (nuclear) peace.
The Wright brothers, who made the world's first powered flight in history, were citizens
of the United States but their fellow countrymen were quite remiss in taking cognizance of
the significance of their achievement. During the First World War it was the European
powers Britain, France and Germany who led the way in developing the airplane as a
significant instrumentality of warfare. When U.S. Army pilots arrived at the Western front
in large numbers in 1918 they flew combat aircraft manufactured in Britain and France.
The airplane began its military career as a means of observation of the enemy army's
activities and movements. But in the Great War the airplane's activities swiftly expanded.
Bombs were dropped on one another's side as an aerial extension of the field artillery.
Airplanes also served as a means of directing the fire of the traditional land artillery
from the air. These initial fragile contraptions eventually took to shooting at each other
with the purpose of knocking down the opponent's aircraft.
The airplane's contribution to the outcome of the war wastefully modest but for the first
time in history it had established itself as a weapon in its own right with very great
potential for the future. It was this potential that convinced the American flying units
to seek their independence from the other sections of the U.S. Army. A precedent had
already been set in Great Britain; in 1918 the Royal Flying Corps had become the Royal Air
Force. But this triumph was not duplicated in the United States because the U.S. Army's
General Staff could see little substantive role for airplanes other than for support of
ground forces.
The political climate of the times was hardly conducive to major strides in military
aviation. The disillusionment of many persons with the peace settlement following World
War I led to a general malaise that produced a return to isolationism for the United
States. A war outside the North American continent affecting the vital interests of the
United States was not foreseen. Even if one or more of the major powers in the Eastern
Hemisphere threatened America, proponents of air power conceded that they did not foresee
intercontinental strikes on the United States from afar in the near future. In any event
the very modest military appropriations for the air arms of the U.S. armed forces did not
allow room for the vast and expansive schemes advocated by the proponents of air power in
the U.S. Diminished in potency to just over a handful of squadrons the Air Service lived
out a diminished and circumscribed existence in the twenties and early thirties.
But voices from within the Army Air Service continued to expound their elaborate notions
of an independent air force decisively affecting the outcome of the next major war. One
particularly strident voice was that of General Billy Mitchell who was particularly
enthused with the wartime possibilities of the bombing airplane. Like other air power
visionaries, Mitchell foresaw waves of bomber airplanes hitting deep behind the battle
lines of a conflict to strike at the heart of an enemy nation's power, its modern
industry. To demonstrate the potential potency of aircraft, Mitchell showed (with old
disused naval vessels in the early '20s) how "unsinkable" battleships could be
rapidly sent to the bottom. Mitchell so antagonized the power elite of the traditional
armed forces, that circumstances eventually led to his court-martial and conviction.
However, Mitchell's crusade for air power was carried on by other voices, occasionally
with successful outcomes. For example, in 1926 the Army Air Service was upgraded
bureaucratically, becoming the Army Air Corps. This transformation led to the Air Corps'
obtaining representation on the General Staff. A modest (but still significant) program of
expansion of the Air Corps was authorized in the early 1930's
As much as these developments made things look somewhat brighter for the advocates of
airpower, it is easy to overlook the generally hostile climate in which these activists
operated. Scenarios for a successful bomber offensive by a large modern air force simply
could not successfully exist in a depression-filled environment in which the dynamic
elements of the modern economy were in the deepest of doldrums and their survival and
revitalization in doubt. Because of these severe economic constraints, little realistic
encouragement was forthcoming as the United States, as mentioned, was committed to an
isolationist posture and only clearly defensive weapons could qualify for only a portion
of the limited military appropriations at the time. However, in spite of determined
opposition, an amazing thing occurred; not only did a meaningfully clear-cut method for
such bombardment metamorphose, but by underhanded means much of the hardware to give it
credibility came into the hands of the U.S. Army Air Corps long before their doctrine came
to be accepted by the higher echelons of the political and military hierarchy.
By the year 1931 some understanding had been reached between the Air Corps and the Navy on
matters pertaining to coastal defense and the prerogative of the Air Corps to engage in
certain specified reconnaissance and bombardment activities in the maritime realm. This
opened the way for the acquisition of a long-range maritime patrol aircraft that could
fulfill this defensive undertaking. Such a plane (it was decided) had to have a range of
5000 miles, a bomb load of at least 2000 pounds and a top speed of at least 200 miles per
hour. But simultaneous to this, air power proponents would have an ideal platform to
further their beliefs in offensive air power as well. Boeing, Douglas, and Martin put
forth designs to meet this proposed undertaking. After haggling between the manufacturers
and the Air Corp, plus a fatal accident, Boeing's proposal was selected and ordered.
The Boeing prototype was the first all metal four-engine monoplane specifically designed
as a (defensive) bomber. Its very prominent gun emplacements led to its being given the
name "flying fortress." The Air Corps wanted 65 such aircraft; the War
Department permitted an order for 13 planes. With the debut of these bombers, the Air
Corps recipients felt assured that they now had a plane with which they could vindicate
their theories.
In the early 'thirties the performance of Army Air Corps bomber aircraft had rivaled that
of their fighters. Thus was conceived in the minds of air power visionaries the notion of
a bomber of sufficient speed and armament to be able to defend itself alone and get their
payloads to target. Along with this was born the companion notion of operations at such a
high altitude that flak and enemy fighters could not easily get at them. A whole new set
of improvements would have to be grafted onto the Boeing design in which crews would be
adequately furnished with oxygen at those great altitudes and have a bombsight from which
they could accurately deliver their payloads to target. Both of these necessities could be
provided for as early as 1928 a new liquid oxygen system for crews at high altitudes had
been successfully tested. Also, a precision bomb- sight had been successfully under
development since 1932. This instrument had been designed by one C.L. Norden initially for
the Navy. It was later adopted by the Air Corps and specifically installed on the new B-17
bomber, as it was by then called. The Norden bombsight became one of the most highly
prized secrets for its precision was of such a magnitude that Fortress bombardiers could
over and over again drop bombs within 50 feet of a practice target at a height of over
four miles up over the dry lake at Muroc, California. Prevailing visibility was ideal and
the hundred foot aiming circle at the dry lake range was easily distinguishable. That such
conditions might not prevail under wartime circumstances (Europe) was casually overlooked
at the time by misguided enthusiasts of air power. Accordingly, a popular legend was born:
that American Army aviators could drop a bomb into a pickle-barrel from four or more miles
above the earth.
Two other items of equipment would soon be commonplace on the U.S. high altitude precision
bomber. One was engine superchargers. Compressed air was forced into the carburetors of
aircraft engines giving them sea level performance at very high altitudes. Superchargers
fitted to an experimental B-17 gave it a top speed of over 300 miles per hour at cruising
altitude. And if American aircraft had deficiencies in defensive armament it was in
quantity rather than quality. Air arms of other nations had at this time standardized on
the .303 rifle caliber machine gun. But the United States Army had decided to select the
.50 inch caliber machine gun as its standard airborne weapon. The so-called "Point
Fifty" was able to fire "half inch diameter" projectiles with greater range
and higher velocity owing to the higher charge.
In 1935, the year in which the B-17 first took to the air, the Air Corps had attained a
somewhat greater degree of autonomy from the Army hierarchy. They had established a
special headquarters to concentrate bomber and fighter activity under a single head, in
place of being under the sovereignty of a traditional U.S. Army structure. But, as before
at certain junctures, the amount of power and independence possessed by the Air Corps
ebbed and flowed irregularly. In 1938, restrictions were placed on the permitted ranges of
B-17s and any newly acquired aircraft bearing the designation "heavy bombers."
The unending attempts of air leaders to depict the Air Corps as an offensive unit with
some degree of independence still went very much against the grain: Official policy
dictated that the role of the Air Corps was Army support in national defense. At the same
time, ominous signs emanating from Europe were starting to show what air power both alone
and in conjunction with ground forces might achieve. The combined air-ground coordination
of the Nazi thrust into Poland in September 1939 forever discredited the reigning
bureaucratic notion of traditionalists in the Department of War that air power is a
circumscribed quiescent appendage of an insular U.S. Army.
Perhaps Providentially, the winds of change in the U.S. government came from the very top.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt's worldview was totally the opposite of the reactionaries
at the War Department and those of their ilk elsewhere in the Federal Government. The
President foresaw that the United States, apart from its stated policy of extra-
hemispheric non-intervention, might eventually be sucked into a war that seemed, in 1939,
imminently likely to overwhelm Europe.
FDR was also of the persuasion that military aviation would play a very substantial role
in attaining victory in such a conflagration. And so it was that those who played such a
prominent role in putting the Air Corps in its supposed traditional place were now
confronted by the need for a reappraisal inspired by none other than the President of the
United States. Plans for a vast American rearmament went forward and a major part of this
was a major expansion of both Army and Naval Aviation. It would be simplistic to suggest
that the doctrine of offensive bombardment was accepted with great dispatch. However, it
soon became the pre-eminent part of American air planning.
It has been argued that a means of measuring the expansion of the Air Corps was to be
found by the number of Groups that made up its totality. A Group was basically composed of
three or four squadrons--the basic and long-accepted flying units. There were 14 such
groups in December 1938 and 67 by the time of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941. At the
same time the number of men and women in the Air Corps rose from a pre-war 21,000 to a
wartime 354,000. To keep pace with this growth, the American aircraft industry had gone
through the ceiling in the composition of its productive facilities. It should be noted
that at the same time, the so-called "arsenal of democracy" was also building
planes for Britain, France, China, and the Soviet Union, among others. This overall growth
in demand from domestic and foreign sources so strained the aircraft industry that
shortages would plague American military air units well into the war.
When Hitler threw his legions into Poland, Britain and France were obliged by previous
agreement to declare war on Germany. At about this time, the U.S. Army Air Corps had but
239B-17s in its air armada. Fortunately for the country these pilots would not be
compelled to go into battle until over two years had passed. Time was permitted so that
these persons plus their air force could methodically prepare to make war on the Axis
powers.
On June 20, 1941, the formal Army Air Force came into being which oversaw the activities
of all U.S. Army air elements, and stood out as another hard-won concession on the pathway
to autonomy. Major General H."Hap" Arnold, previously head of the Air Corps,
stayed on as Chief. He and his leading colleagues had watched the unfolding of the war in
Europe with intense fascination. Both the British and the Germans had come to grief with
their attempts to carry out strategic bombing in daylight; heavy losses had forced them to
operate under the cover of darkness. The kind of bombardment advocated and developed by
the Air Corps was fundamentally a daylight variety yet there was little active
discouragement at this point in the war. The Americans smugly insisted that American
doctrine in this area was predicated on technical achievements and a manner of attack
vastly different from that as practiced by the bombers of the RAF and the Luftwaffe. Few
in the Air Corps would concede that any type of daylight attack involved heavy losses no
matter who carried out the raids. American B-17s and other bomber aircraft would be
ruthlessly ground up by German flak and fighters and almost forced from the skies by the
Nazi defenders of their airspace. But that was some time in the future. For now they had
time to be immature about the matter.10It is a testament to their naivete that American
strategic thinkers felt that they had nothing to learn from the travails of their aerial
counterparts in Britain and Germany. American doctrine was destined to metamorphose
through catastrophe in 1943 into an eventually workable method of air combat but be first
brought to grief by the same travails that nearly paralyzed its European counterparts:
enemy flak and fighters.
The tendencies were evident as far back as 1941 when the British acquired a number of
B-17s for early attack on Fortress Europe. The British experience with the B-17s was
discouraging for little if any effective damage was inflicted on the enemy and eight
Flying Fortresses were written off as operational losses and two actually went down over
enemy air space. The British regarded the Flying Fort as well put together and good to fly
but at that their admiration abruptly ceased. They compared their already operational
Halifax, Sterling, and soon to be on-line Lancaster bomb payloads of up to 12,000 pounds
where the B-17s operational limit was only 4000 pounds of bombs. Also the Fortress lacked
adequate armor protection for its crew members and contained no self-sealing fuel tanks.
Despite its formidable name as a "Flying Fortress," its defensive armament was
entirely inadequate. As far as the RAF was concerned, American ideas of daylight bombing
showed no more signs of success than their own. The Americans, for their part, pointed to
what they saw as many weaknesses in the RAF's employment of the Fortress, in addition to
the already acknowledged technical failings of the airplane.
The B-17 was undergoing radical redesign at Boeing partly because of what was learned from
the British experience and the many improvements brought about were embodied in a radical
new model of the aircraft, the B-17E. The Americans failed to see what was clearly evident
to any honest observer: Luftwaffe, RAF, and American-provided planes were all very
vulnerable to interception by flak and opposing fighters. Unless something could be done
about interception (reliable fighter escorts) any side dispatching bombers in broad
daylight was going to suffer very heavy losses. The many thousands of Americans lost in
the skies over Europe after Pearl Harbor were grimly illustrative of this tendency.
American leaders had to counter that we were seriously involving ourselves for the first
time and what with British and Russian losses at the time, there was no realistic basis
for the Americans to wait with strategic bombing until after reliable fighter escorts were
available (February 1944). There was a huge war of attrition going on all fronts of the
European theater. To do our share we had to expend the crews that we did in 1942 and 1943.
But before this commenced, our side should have clearly seen that we on our side did not
possess the altitude capability to escape German flak and fighters with our improved
Flying Fortresses. There is little excuse to avoid this realization particularly when
nighttime RAF raids were costing the British dearly in losses due to flak and fighters
despite the cover of darkness. Also, in our own case, tight B-17 formations with massed
defensive firepower did not prevent very heavy losses early in the war of our bomber craft
and their crews.
A new United States four-engine bomber of similar size, weight, and performance to the
B-17 was also under development at this time (1941). This was the Consolidated B-24
Liberator. Surpassing the B-17 in bomb payload and range, it showed promise to the RAF who
received some of the early production models. These early models were not used for bombing
German European targets, for their flight endurance made them ideal for anti- submarine
warfare, to oppose the mortal threat posed by the Nazi U-boat campaign to British shipping
in the North Atlantic in 1941.
Long before the Axis powers went to war with the United States, the Roosevelt
Administration had planned for their country's eventual involvement in the European war,
with England as their principal ally. The likelihood of war at the same time with Japan
was acknowledged but Germany, the principal Axis power, would have to be dealt with first.
Hitler's armies had overrun much of continental Europe and they would have to be brought
to battle against the United States eventually. It would take a very long time to assemble
an Anglo-American invasion force to breach the citadels of Fortress Europe. During the
sustained time-frame in which such an invasion force was being assembled, the U.S. would
join its gallant Britanic ally in "softening up" the Nazi enemy's military power
for eventual invasion.
For the air leaders of the U.S. who had struggled so long and valiantly for recognition,
the rapidly approaching war with Germany was their titanic opportunity. With the besieged
island of Great Britain as their principal base, the way was clear for a sustained
campaign of aerial bombardment which would cause a severe disruption of Hitler's war
effort. And if such targets could be successfully destroyed to bring about a severe
weakening of the Nazi war machine's ability to successfully wage war, there was a distant
chance that the task of the invading army would be no more than an occupation. This,
briefly stated, was the concept of strategic bombing. If air power alone succeeded, then
air power would become the dominant military force.
As we have seen from the actual outcome of the war in Europe, air power by itself did not
suffice to bring Germany to her knees. Very ferocious and very intense land campaigns had
to be waged by the Red Army in the East (where most of the fighting and dying of World War
II took place) and the Anglo-American armies in the West to bring down the Nazi War
machine. However, when looked upon from a perspective of combined arms, Anglo-American air
power was a decisive success. As the Normandy beachhead widened, the tactical units of the
RAF and USAAF continued their ongoing task of making life unbearable for the Wermacht and
the Luftwaffe by systematically starving them of their abilities to fuel their vehicles
and aircraft. Thus, the success of their AIR-LAND campaign resembled the success of the
Nazi "blitzkrieg" campaigns in Europe in 1939-41. But in a strategic sense,
also, Allied air power was a success. As we have seen elsewhere, a staggering amount of
men and materiel were diverted from the all-important Nazi Russian front to repair the
vast damage inflicted on Germany's industrial base by Allied strategic bombers. True, the
morale of the German people did not crack under Allied pressure but the dislocations
inflicted upon the armed forces and industrial legions of Nazi Germany made its eventual
defeat inevitable. To that extent the early proponents of American air power featured
earlier in this essay were historically vindicated. Opinion remains sharply divided on
this subject to this day but the Herculean endeavors of America's Air Marshals have earned
them a notable place of honor and significance in the history of the 20th Century, despite
the ongoing controversy.
SOURCES
•Craven, W.F.; and Cate, J.L. The Army Air Forces in World War II. Volume I, Plans
and Early Operations; Men and Planes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948.
•Davis, Burke. The Billy Mitchell Affair. New York: Random House, 1967.
•Deighton, Len. Fighter, The True Story of the Battle of Britain. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1978. •Goldberg, Alfred. A History of the United States Air Force,
1903-1967. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1967. •Hansell, Haywood S., Jr. The
Air Plan That Defeated Hitler. Higgins-MacArthur/Longino & Porter, 1972. •Huie,
W. Bradford. The Fight for Air Power. New York: L.B. Fischer Co., 1942. •Mansfield,
Harold. Vision. New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Inc., 1956. •Rickenbacker,
Edward V. Rickenbacker, An Autobiography. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967.
•Schlesinger, Arthur S., Jr. The Age of Roosevelt: The Coming of the New Deal. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1959. •Sherwood, Robert E. Roosevelt and Hopkins. New
York: Harper & Brothers, 1948. •Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich. New York:
Macmillan, Inc., 1969. •Toland, John. Adolph Hitler. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday
& Co., Inc., 1976. •Whiteley, John F. Early Army Aviation; The Emerging Air
Force. Manhattan, Kan.: Dept. of History, Kansas State University, 1975.
Dedicated to the Memory of Walter G. Stoneman