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AIRPOWER:
THEORY AND PRACTICE
AIRPOWER
Theory and Practice
Edited by
JOHN GOOCH
FRANK CASS • LONDON
First published in 1995 in Great Britain by
FRANK CASS PUBLISHERS
Crown House, 47 Chase Side
Southgate, London N14 5BP
and in the United States of America by
FRANKCASS
c/o International Specialized Book Services, Inc.
5824 N.E. Hassalo Street
Portland, Oregon 97213-3644
Copyright © 1995 Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Airpower: Theory and Practice. -
(Strategic Studies, ISSN 0140-2390)
I. Gooch, John II. Series
258.4
ISBN 0-7146-4657-1 (cloth)
ISBN 0-7146-4186-3 (paper)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Airpower: theory and practice I edited by John Gooch.
p. em.
"This group of studies first appeared in a special issue on 'Air
theory and practice' of the Journal of strategic studies, vol. 18,
no. 1"-T.p. verso.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7146-4657-1 (cloth.-ISBN 0-7146-4186-3 (paper)
I. Air power. 2. Air warfare-History. I. Gooch, John.
II. Journal of strategic studies. Vol. 18, no. I (Supplement)
UG630.A3826 1995
358.4-dc20 95-14978
CIP
This group of studies first appeared in a Special Issue on 'Airpower:
Theory and Practice' of The Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 18, No. I
(March 1995) published by Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, phocopying, recording or
otherwise, without the prior permission of Frank Cass and Company
Limited
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham & Eastboume
Contents
Special Issue on
AIRPOWER: Theory and Practice
Introduction John Gooch
Proselytiser and Prophet: Alexander P. de Seversky
and American Airpower Phillip S. Meilinger 7
Institution and Airpower: The Making of the
French Air Force Pascal Vennesson 36
The Luftwaffe and the Coalition Air War
in Spain, 1936-1939 James S. Corum 68
British and American Approaches to Strategic
Bombing: Their Origins and Implementation
in the World War II Combined Bomber
Offensive Tami Davis Biddle 91
'Precision' and 'Area' Bombing:
Who Did Which, and When? W. Hays Parks 145
Atlantic Airpower Co-operation, 1941-1945 John Buckley 175
Strategic Bombers over the Missile Horizon,
1957-1963 Peter J. Roman 198
Airpower vs. Electricity: Electric Power as
a Target for Strategic Air Operations Daniel T. Kuehl. 237
Notes on Contributors 267
Index 269
Introduction
JOHN GOOCH
With the advent of the aeroplane, twentieth century warfare moved into a
third dimension. First used in action by Italy during the Libyan War of
1911-12, aeroplanes played an important part in the First World War and a
major-and still controversial-role in the Second World War. The manned
bomber, central to all theories of strategic air power, remained unchallenged
as the most powerful means of delivering ordnance from the air until the
advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile in 1957. Thereafter airpower
has had strenuously to justify its place as a co-equal in the defence triad both
in budgetary and in operational terms. To do this, airmen have deployed
history to justify their claims to parity with -or even pre-eminence over-the
other services. They have also sought to demonstrate that late twentieth
century wars have been won by strategic air power - or could have been so
won had the air ann been properly and freely used. The eight essays collected
together here range widely among these themes, casting fresh light on some
of the continuing controversies and offering insights into new areas of air
power history.
The aeroplane was still a fledgling when General Giulio Doubet (1869-
1930) began to theorise about its properties and potential. After the First
World War, the task of explaining and extolling airpower was largely under
taken not by Douhetian theorists but by proselytisers and propagandists,
among whose number stands the hitherto neglected figure of Alexander de
Seversky (1894-1974). Philip S. Meilinger's study of Seversky, a Russian
World War I fighter ace who settled America in 1918, accords him the crucial
role of bridging the gap between Doubet and Brigadier General William
('Billy') Mitchell (1879-1936) on the one hand and the early nuclear
theorists on the other. Never an original thinker, Seversky's status and impor
tance derived from his considerable technological expertise and his extra
ordinary polemical vigour. His aim was nothing less than to topple Mahanian
navalism from its dominant position in US security policy and to set airpower
in its place. Although not primarily a theorist, Seversky was able to extend
and refine some parts of the canon of Douhetian thought. The phenomenal
popularity of his book Victory Through Air Power, published in 1942 and
read by perhaps five million Americans, makes him one of the most impor-
2 AIRPOWER: THEORY AND PRACTICE
tant of those crying their wares in the early twentieth century market for
strategic ideas.
Airpower began its military life as a branch of the Army, and the attempts
made by airmen of different nationalities to break free of that subordination
have been a marked feature of its development in the first half of the
twentieth century. Pascal Venesson's case study of the French Air Force
explores the early history of an arm which, although nominally independent
from 1934, remained in thrall to the military until France collapsed in 1940.
Its missions - observation and reconnaissance, especially for the artillery -
subordinated it to the war on the ground, and its aeroplanes - most notably
the hybrid BCR multi-role plane -reflected its confused sense of purpose. In
the circumstances it is perhaps scarcely surprising that its doctrine remained
cloudy.
Technological developments alone fail to account for the particular path
taken by the French Air Force. Nor does the international situation faced by
France of itself provide a satisfactory explanation, since she might justifiably
have responded to the German and Italian threats by developing a Douhetian
bomber doctrine. In fact, Doubet and Douhetism never took root in France,
though French soldiers and sailors had certainly read its institutional meaning
aright in fearing that an independent air arm wedded to the primacy of
strategic bombing might seek to force them into subordination. As
M. Vennesson demonstrates in a contribution in which there is much of
methodological importance for airpower historians of other countries, the
source of the unhappy and ultimately fatal posture assumed by the interwar
French Air Force is to be found in the institutional matrix of defence policy
making during the last two decades of the Third Republic.
Between the wars, airpower was most used as a cheap and effective addi
tive in small wars and colonial policing; although it played an important role
in the Sino-Japanese War from 1931, only the few specialist observers gave
it very much more than a cursory glance there. In the West, strategic airpower
showed something of its potential only once, during the Spanish Civil War
(1936--39). The German air campaign in Spain has hitherto been regarded
either as an overture to World War II or, less commonly, as a postscript to
World War I. In his provocative study, James S. Corum departs from both
traditions to present the Luftwaffe's actions in Spain from a third perspective
- that of the first modem limited war.
In the war against the Republic, airpower was of central importance.
Professor Corum demonstrates that the success of every major defensive or
offensive operation depended on both the possession and the effective use of
air superiority. That superiority did not initially spring from numerical pre
ponderance: in the absence of any qualitative or quantitative advantage to
either side, Nationalist Spain gained air superiority in spring 1937 chiefly
INTRODUCTION 3
thanks to superior German war doctrine. Nor were the Germans merely
masterly in the air: the Luftwaffe's commanders were no less skilful in
managing their collaboration with Franco. Latterly several authors have
allowed the German armed forces great operational virtuosity but have
charged them as seriously deficient in the realms of strategy. The Spanish
episode analysed here now provides some reason to reconsider those charges.
Strategic airpower came of age between 1940 and 1945 as Allied bombers
took to the air in ever greater numbers in the bombing campaign against
Germany. In much the same way as Allied strategy in the First World War
was for a long time presented as a struggle between 'Easterners' and
'Westerners', so the combined bomber offensive has commonly been
portrayed as sharply diverging in both preference and practice between
British 'area bombing' and American 'precision bombing'. Tami Davis
Biddle's innovative study in comparative airpower history takes the origins
of these strategies back to the formative experience of 1914-18 and to the
quite different interpretations subsequently given to a very limited body of
experience by the two air forces. The role of Marshal of the Royal Air Force
Lord Trenchard (1873-1956) in giving pride of place to the moral effect of
bombing as essence of British interwar air doctrine is well known. What is
very much less well known is how much the American preference for the
systematic bombing of industrial targets goes back to a design - the Gorrell
plan of 1917 - which borrowed heavily from a model first devised by the
British but then discarded by them in favour of the Trenchardian dogma. This
strategy was reinforced by the American bombing survey of World War I,
which found that bombing had had no decisive effects on German morale.
The potential to mislead as heuristic concepts which the terms 'area bomb
ing' and 'precision bombing' possess becomes very clear as Dr Biddle traces
the twists and turns of British and American airpower doctrine before and
during World War II. During the 1920s- thanks partly to the proselytising
influence of Billy Mitchell as a publicist for Douhetian ideas - American
thinking on airpower began to converge with that in Britain before reverting
in the 1930s to a strategy of obliteration based on calculation. In Britain, the
Air Staff swung in 1940 to favour inflicting material destruction as well as
seeking to lower enemy morale before reverting to Trenchardism in 1941
when the Butt report demonstrated the apparent inaccuracy of Bomber
Command and its inability to hit precise targets even when it could find them.
As Tami Biddle perceptively notes, although Trenchard presided at the birth
and guided the formative early years of Britain's most technological arm, he
differed sharply from his American opposite numbers in rooting his strategic
assumptions in the nineteenth century world of Clausewitz and Napoleon.
The relationship between theory and action which is one of the themes of
this collection is also taken up by W. Hays Parks in another comparative
