The Influence of Air Power Upon History

Walter J. Boyne

• Publisher: Pen & Sword Aviation
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781783409563
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

The Influence of Air Power upon History makes a startlingly new analysis of the far-reaching implications flight has had on warfare, politics, diplomacy, technology and mass culture. Author Walter Boyne examines the application of air power from the very earliest days of the balloon down to the current era of space warfare and postulates some new and controversial theories that are certain to arouse comment. The author unerringly depicts the contributions made by the people and planes of each era, some of them famous, some virtually unknown, but all vitally important. He highlights the critical competence of individuals at every step of the way, comparing the works of Guilio Douhet, William Mitchell, John Warden, and others philosophically, even as he compares the combat capabilities of leaders such as Hugh Trenchard, Bomber Harris, Herman Goering, Curtis LeMay, and Henry "Hap" Arnold. Aircraft, their weapons, and their employment are given equal treatment. Boyne's views on World War II bombings and air power in the Vietnam War will please many readers--and perhaps shock many others.

Chapter One

Fledgling Wings

The world which rocked with excitement at the invention of the balloon in 1783 would find the nineteenth and twentieth centuries filled with far more sophisticated lighter-than-air (LTA) and heavier-than-air (HTA) craft vehicles, each one successively more capable.

The latter would soon prove to have far more military potential than balloons (of which a concise history can be found in the appendix) or airships, but would face similar problems in development and in gaining acceptance by military leaders. Progress in aeroplanes, as they were known in the early days of heavier-than-air flight, was far more rapid than that of LTA types, thanks to their inherent greater utility. Aircraft, as they became known, revolutionized warfare, although the fact was not fully accepted at first. The first instances in which air power had influence on history were direct and decisive military intervention on the battlefield. The second, less obvious effect was that aviation revolutionized industry with its demand for precision production and with the continual introduction of new and complex systems to make aircraft more effective. This industrial revolution would have profound effects upon the world’s economy by increasing productivity even as it increased quality of manufacture.

The aircraft revolution from the beginning carried the seed of a problem that was not recognized for decades, and that was the heavy support the employment of aircraft required, both in the military and in industry. No previous weapon, not even the dreadnoughts that precipitated the naval shipbuilding race before World War I, had required such a large ratio of support to combatant personnel, nor such a huge industry to support it.

Continued Lighter-Than-Air Progress

While the basic systems of the hydrogen balloon had been provided in the very earliest days of ballooning by Professor Jacques Alexandre César Charles, the necessary components to create a balloon that could be flown under power against the wind and steered in a desired course came much later, as did the term to describe such a conveyance, “dirigible.” Dirigibles were subject to continuous improvement, a process that goes on to this day.

The first practical airship was conceived of in 1785 by General Jean-Baptiste Marie Meusnier, but was not built because there was no adequate power plant. Several people pursued the basic Meusnier idea, but Henri Giffard was the most successful, flying his airship from the Paris Hippodrome on September 24, 1852. Essentially a 144-foot-long, football-shaped envelope filled with hydrogen, Giffard’s dirigible was powered by a three-horsepower steam engine that enabled it to achieve a speed of six miles per hour. Giffard, who at the age of twenty-four had invented the injector used in all steam engines of the time, piloted his craft from a small open basket suspended beneath the envelope. After a second dirigible of his design crashed, he turned to ballooning again, creating an 883,000-cubic-foot monster that was the largest hydrogen balloon ever built and a great success at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair.¹

The dangerous combination of a coal-burning steam engine and a hydrogen-filled envelope was evident to all, and alternatives were sought. Things were somewhat simplified when coal gas for inflating the envelope became more generally available, and later, when the internal combustion engine came into general use.

These two innovations were first exploited by Paul Haenlein. In 1872, Haenlein’s large 1872 airship cleverly ran an early internal combustion engine on gas from the envelope rather than carrying a separate fuel supply. The 164-foot-long envelope held 85,000 cubic feet of coal gas, which had only about one-half the lifting power of hydrogen. Haenlein’s dirigible was not completely successful, but it pointed the way to the future.

The next notable attempt was made by a veteran of balloon flights during the siege of Paris, Gaston Tissandier, and his brother, Albert. Their airship was only ninety-two feet long, but was filled with hydrogen, giving it ample lift. Their choice of electric power was a mistake, however, for the Siemens electric motor they selected had only one-and-one-half horsepower, and could drive the dirigible at only three miles per hour.

It was fitting that the first successful dirigible would come from the old Aérostier’s headquarters at Châlais-Meudon near Paris, where, in 1877, the Central Military Installation for Ballooning had been created, the first of the great government-sponsored aeronautical laboratories, like those at Farnborough in England and McCook Field in the United States. Created by the portly Lieutenant Colonel Charles Renard and Captain Arthur Krebs, the dirigible La France lifted off from Châlais-Meudon on August 9, 1884. It flew for twenty-three minutes in a great circle, averaging about fourteen miles per hour. It was the first time that an airship had been able to make a controlled flight with a return to its starting point. The 165-foot-long La France was inflated with 66,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, and was powered by an eight-horsepower electric motor weighing 220 pounds. These were energized by a special installation of 1,500 pounds of chlorochromic batteries designed by Renard. Krebs had designed the motor, which delivered one horsepower for each 215 pounds of power plant.

The great breakthrough for airships came with the introduction of Gottlieb Daimler’s internal combustion engine, which had a much better power-to-weight ratio, producing one horsepower for each eighty-eight pounds of power plant. Unfortunately, imprudent engineering started German airship development off with the same sort of bang with which it ended when the Hindenburg exploded in 1937.

No less a personage than Kaiser Wilhelm had taken an interest in the development of airships, and he ordered the Royal Prussian Aerial Navigation Department to assist Dr. Karl Woelfert in testing his Daimler-powered dirigible, the Deutschland. Unfortunately, Woelfert had installed the engine too close to the envelope. He and his mechanic, Robert Knabe, had made three flights before taking off from Tempelhof Field in Berlin on June 14, 1897. As the dirigible reached about 2,500 feet, vented hydrogen was ignited by the engine’s open-flame ignition system. The Deutschland blew up, killing both crew members. This tragedy—and many subsequent ones—did not diminish German interest in the airship, however.

Airships: Popular and Professional

Two aristocrats now emerged upon the scene. One, Alberto Santos-Dumont, was to popularize dirigible flight in a series of personal vehicles. The other, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, was to create gigantic airships which would win the heart of his people, establish the first commercial air service in the world, and create a fleet of combat-capable Zeppelins which would conduct the world’s first strategic bombing campaign.

Santos-Dumont was a wealthy Brazilian whose indulgent father sent him at the age of eighteen to Paris to be educated, providing $500,000 to ensure that it was a liberal education. Although small in stature and somewhat reserved in personality, Santos-Dumont became a popular figure in French society. He had a serious side, however, and was dedicated to the idea of flight. No dilettante, he learned the lighter-than-air business in more than a hundred balloon flights.

The young Brazilian designed and had built a series of airships tailored to his size and taste. His first was eighty-two and one-half feet long, and was capable of lifting only 450 pounds with its 6,345 cubic feet of hydrogen. But that was enough to get the 110-pound Santos-Dumont and his two-cylinder De Dion three-and-one-half-horsepower internal combustion engine airborne, albeit briefly.

Santos-Dumont went on to construct nine more dirigibles, and flew them himself, above, and on one occasion, into, the rooftops of Paris. The crash took place with his No. 5, and left the gallant Santos-Dumont to be rescued from a lightwell of the Trocadero Hotel, to the joy of his adoring Parisian audience. It was his No. 9 that gained him the most fame, however, for it was a personal runabout that he used to cruise the boulevards, dropping in on his favorite spots for a drink or dinner and parking his airship on the sidewalks as casually as modern Parisians do their Citroëns.

Increasingly fascinated with heavier-than-air flight, however, Santos-Dumont would soon lead Europe in that field as well.

There were others who advanced the idea of the dirigible, including: Paul and Pierre Lebaudy, who created the first semi-rigid aircraft; Thomas Baldwin, who followed Santos-Dumont’s design lead; and Walter Wellman, whose adventures in the large dirigible America were thrilling but never quite successful.

In marked contrast, Count von Zeppelin never contemplated using his dirigibles as a personal vehicle or for adventurous stunts. He intended them from the start to be used commercially for profit and militarily as a weapon.

The first Zeppelin was far grander than any previous dirigible, for it was 416 feet long and carried 399,000 cubic feet of hydrogen. The hydrogen did not fill the envelope of the Luftschiff Zeppelin (Airship Zeppelin) LZ-1, as he called it, but instead was retained in seventeen gas bags within the aluminum, fabric-covered framework. Two sixteen-horsepower Daimler internal combustion engines drove four propellers. Horizontal control was provided by rudders, while vertical control was provided by a sliding weight.

First flown on July 2, 1900, the LZ-1 had a top speed of about seventeen miles per hour. Unfortunately, the LZ-1 encountered difficulties on all of its three flights, and no one offered to purchase it. The Zeppelin firm was out of funds, and the LZ-1 was broken up and sold for scrap.

Zeppelin persevered, and by 1905, a second aircraft, the LZ-2, was ready, only to be damaged when it was launched. Repaired, it flew again on January 17, 1906, crashing in a violent storm. With government backing, Zeppelin created the LZ-3, which met with some initial success, and attracted widespread popular backing.

The Count and his company were learning with each new Zeppelin, and by LZ-4 they had created a 446-foot-long airship with 530,000 cubic feet of gas, and capable of lifting more than 10,000 pounds of crew, passengers, fuel, and cargo. This was, at last, a practical airship, and Germany began to become very partial to Zeppelins, so much so that when a storm wrecked LZ-4, there was a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and six million marks in contributions. More important, the German Army agreed to acquire two airships, for an additional 2.5 million marks. This began a long and ill-fated relationship between the German military and the Zeppelin, one which sustained the Zeppelin factory, but which cost Germany a great deal of resources that it could ill afford.

The Zeppelin firm was well and truly launched, and despite a continuing series of crashes, in the coming years it would operate a highly successful passenger airship line, Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-Aktien-Gesellschaft (German Airship Transport Company). Usually called Delag for short, the company began operations on November 16, 1909, only to encounter difficulty with three more crashes. It was sustained by German Army financing, in return for which the company trained military airship crews. This military/industrial support enabled Zeppelin to persevere. He retained the admiration and affection of the German public so that by 1911 he could put LZ-10 in service as the Schwaben. The following year, three more Zeppelins joined the Delag fleet, including the Viktoria Luise, Hansa, and Sachsen. The airline flew more than 100,000 miles, carrying 37,500 passengers, and despite several crashes, had no fatalities.

In the meantime, both the Imperial German Army and Navy were acquiring Zeppelins that were presumed to have a formidable military air-power capability, and these would have a definite influence on history.

The Heavier-Than-Air Flying Machine

The internal combustion engine also paved the way for the first flying machine. Unlike the dirigible, the heavier-than-air flying machine proved to be an insoluble problem to everyone but the inimitable Wright brothers of Dayton, Ohio. Orville and Wilbur Wright were self-taught engineers who did not approach flying as scientists seeking basic principles, but as practical men intent on solving the problems of flight. The two men, acting almost as if their personalities were fused, systematically went from an interest in the possibility of flight in 1899 to the successful first flight on December 17, 1903. At that moment in time, they were at least ten years ahead of all possible competitors in the world, including some who had been working on the problem for decades.

There were people who would hotly dispute this fact in 1903, and some people today would still dispute the claim. There are societies that in all honest belief carry the banner for many of these individuals, claiming that this one or that one flew before the Wright brothers did. As a result, the following straightforward paragraphs will perhaps offend those who wish to believe that others had achieved powered, man-carrying flight, or were very close to doing so, prior to the Wrights’ success on December 17, 1903.

The hard facts are, however, that no one, not Clement Ader, Alexander Graham Bell, Octave Chanute, Captain Ferdinand Ferber, Lawrence Hargrave, Augustus Herring, Samuel Pierpont Langley, Otto Lilienthal, Hiram Maxim, John Montgomery, Gustave Whitehead, or anyone else had a development line going which approached that of the Wrights, or which could have led in a reasonable time to a controllable, man-carrying aircraft.

This statement seems harsh, but detailed examination of each of these would-be first-flighters reveals just how deficient their approach and their apparatus were. Ader’s machines, which had received more than 500,000 francs ($100,000) in government financing, were immensely complicated and uncontrollable, and worse, shrouded in fraudulent claims that were later exposed. Bell believed that a flying machine should have the inherent stability to be found in kites, and specialized in intricate tetrahedral multi-cell kites that flew well on a cable, but led nowhere. Chanute acted as information central, gathering information from all over the world, and trying different ideas as they came to him on an almost random basis. He did well in recording and disseminating the actions of others, and created a successful biplane glider. However, he failed to develop a systematic program of his own. Perhaps his greatest failure was his inability to understand what the Wrights were doing, even though he visited them often and observed their activities. Chanute, for all his engineering background and immense knowledge of the aeronautical scene, never grasped that the Wrights had seen and solved the problem of flight in three dimensions. The French enthusiast Ferber was at best an inept copycat, also unable to see the heart of the Wright idea even after studying it, and strangely and sadly incapable of quality craftsmanship. His finished machines looked like a schoolboy’s drawing of the Wright glider. The Australian Hargrave might have been the best of the lot, but he was a kite-flyer, tied to antiquated ideas. Herring was bright and ambitious, perhaps the most able of all except for Lilienthal and the Wrights. Unfortunately he was a schemer, claiming ideas that were not his own, more prone to borrow ideas than to create them, and given to achieving his business goals by fraudulent claims to patents he did not own. Langley was the most culpable of all, a man of science who systematically ignored the scientific approach, and was content to scale up what was essentially a model airplane into a design that had no provision for control, was not stressed for either its catapult launch or flight, had a bizarre launch mechanism, and made no provision for landing. Langley topped himself by entrusting this impossible concatenation of anomalies to a Charles Manly who had created a brilliant engine for him. The problem was that Manly had never flown before, not even a single gliding flight. Manly had no means of controlling the Aerodrome, as Langley called it, and because there was no provision for alighting, was condemned to be submerged immediately upon landing. Fortunately, two crashes yielded no manslaughter charges.

Lilienthal was the most important of this group, and did contribute the concept of a hang glider, controllable by shifting the weight of the pilot. Yet this method placed an inherent limitation on the size and weight of his craft, and ultimately resulted in the crash that killed him. Lilienthal also contributed a great deal of data, not all of it accurate, but a starting point.

It does not get any better. Hiram Maxim, father of the famous machine gun that bore his name and an immensely wealthy industrialist, built a huge machine with a powerful engine and absolutely no means of controlling it if it happened to get airborne. San Jose’s favorite son, John Montgomery, made very dubious and unsubstantiated claims about gliding flight, then sent another man and himself to their deaths in gliders that were demonstrably not airworthy. Gustave Whitehead made fanciful claims that could never be corroborated about an aircraft of dubious strength and lift that had one mysterious engine for ground run, and another mysterious engine for flight.

Other than Lilienthal’s efforts, with their useful, if flawed data tables, only one lasting contribution to aviation was made by all of these experimenters, the two-surface (biplane) glider of Chanute. Nothing useful to aviation was ever developed from any of the other efforts of these experimenters who, despite all claims, were never in anyway meaningful competitors to the Wright brothers. And it must be remembered that these were the most...

Table of contents

• Also by Walter J. Boyne
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One - Fledgling Wings
• Chapter Two - Air Power in World War I
• Chapter Three - Fighters and Bombers
• Chapter Four - Growth of Air-Power Theory
• Chapter Five - Air Power and Its Influence Between the Wars
• Chapter Six - The Search for Air Power, World War II, 1939-41
• Chapter Seven - The Growth of Air Power, 1941-43
• Chapter Eight - True Air Superiority, Then Absolute Air Supremacy, 1944-45
• Chapter Nine - The Cold War, 1945-62
• Chapter Ten - The Cold War, 1963-73
• Chapter Eleven - Post World War II Middle-East Conflicts, Terror, and the Modern Air War
• Chapter 12 - Iraq: Air and Space Power
• Conclusion
• Appendix - The Earliest Expressions of Air Power
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index