Case Studies in Strategic Bombardment

R. Cargill Hall

• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781839746338
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This volume, the third in a series of historical case studies of important air power missions, addresses the most controversial (and arguably most significant) air power mission of all—strategic bombardment. The ability of aircraft and missiles to destroy or disrupt an enemy's war-making potential and to break or weaken his will to resist, independent of the actions of ground and naval forces, has served as the central theme of air power theory and as the rallying point of air advocates, who made it the raison d'être for independent air forces. Written by well-known military historians, each chapter stands alone as a case study of an important stage in strategic air operations; combined, the chapters provide a comprehensive and insightful analysis of the theory and practice of strategic bombardment from its inception in World War I through the Gulf War of 1991.From "Boom" Trenchard and "Billy" Mitchell to John Warden and Charles Horner, the vision of air power prophets and airmen is tested against the reality of bureaucratic inertia, aircraft capability, technological advances, and bombing accuracy. Seldom in the twentieth century has technology fully met the demands of air power theory. Technology, of course, is the prime determinant of doctrine and operations. This exceptional volume surveys the entire history of strategic bombardment and its technology, from the Zeppelin and Gotha of the Great War to the F-117 and the penetrating precision guided bomb of the Gulf War. The reader will find technological advances—such as radar bombing and range-extending air-to-air refueling—that answer one problem only to produce new requirements and expectations that demand more advanced technology. Guided munitions, while offering remarkable precision, have underscored the problems of strategic intelligence collection and dissemination, and of locating and attacking both fixed and mobile targets.

1—Strategic Bombardment before 1939 Doctrine, Planning, and Operations

Richard J. Overy

Strategic bombardment lies at the very center of the history of air power. “The bomb,” according to the Royal Air Force War Manual of 1936, “is the chief weapon of an air force and the principal means by which it may attain its aim in war.”{19} Early views of air power as a form of warfare with distinct objectives and operational features, and independent in a real sense of the other fighting services, were based largely on the argument that bombardment could be an autonomous strategic activity. The strategic use of air power differed from tactical bombardment in two important ways. First, it formed part of the grand strategic aim by directly attacking the enemy’s will to resist, bypassing the surface campaign and independent of its immediate objectives. Second, strategic bombardment focused on complex target systems chosen not because of any direct or necessary relationship with the enemy’s forces in the field, but because their destruction would undermine the enemy nation’s willingness and capability to wage war at all. Tactical bombardment prepared, supported, and expedited ground initiatives, even with long-range attacks, but it did not constitute a separate air strategy.

In the interwar years, the idea of strategic bombardment gained wide currency in military circles and among the public at large. The strategic use of air forces gave the contemporary and widespread concept of total war a direct foundation. It was argued that only strategic bombardment brought war directly to civilian populations, attacking their morale and economic base of their war effort, thus breaking national resistance. When, in 1936, U.S. Army Maj. Harold George lectured on air power to young American airmen at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Maxwell Field, Alabama, he asserted that the very nature of war itself was changing as a result of the bomber and its power to attack not just armed forces, but whole nations as well: “It appears that nations are susceptible to defeat by the interruption of their economic web. It is possible that the moral collapse brought about by the breaking of this closely-knit web will be sufficient, but closely connected therewith is the industrial fabric which is absolutely essential for modern war.”{20} The “national objective” in war, announced a senior RAF officer that same year, is “the demoralization of enemy people.”{21} These views reflected the growing awareness of a fundamental change in the nature of warfare in the early twentieth century, from a war between opposing armies and navies to a war of attrition involving the material resources and morale of whole nations. This change afforded strategic bombardment a special place in the evolution and popular perception of air power.

In practice, strategic bombardment was limited before 1939; it was just one of many roles assigned to national air forces. Resources devoted to strategic bombardment air forces were, in the case of most major powers, negligible. For much of the interwar period, the technology for major strategic air operations was woefully deficient. The acceptance of strategic bombardment doctrine and the size and nature of bomber forces varied widely from country to country, according to circumstance. In Britain and the United States, strategic bombardment aviation was accepted by their air forces as a necessary component of air power, but in the Soviet Union, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan, bombardment, whether long-or short-range, was closely related to the immediate aims and objectives of the other services. Why such a disparity should emerge is one of the central questions addressed here, though it would be wise to recall that no air force was capable of mounting an effective strategic bombing campaign before 1942, including that of the United States and Great Britain. In 1941, Lt.-Gen. Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Corps,{22} rated America’s offensive capability in the air “at zero strength.”{23}

All bombardment operations before the outbreak of war in 1939, even those of World War I, were small in scale and largely tactical in design. Strategic bombardment was an unredeemed promise, “an article of faith.”{24} It had but a limited and relatively ineffective life at the end of the First World War. After 1918, however, general ideas about the strategic use of aircraft developed together with specific bombardment doctrine, and the foundations were laid for organized bombing forces. Major technological advances made possible the evolution and ultimately large-scale production of heavy bombers, and hurried efforts in the late 1930s helped translate this evolution into effective strategic bombardment forces with serious operational potential.

The Genesis of Strategic Bombardment

The powerful and ambitious conviction that a future war might be decided from the air had its roots in the dramatic transformation of aviation in the ten years preceding 1918. When, in November 1918, Germany signed the Armistice ending World War I, British and American forces were preparing a major air offensive against German industry and communications with the use heavy bombers capable of flying 1,300 miles with a maximum bombload of 7,500 pounds.{25} Just ten years earlier, powered flight was in its infancy, “a form of sport which consists in providing a spectacle to draw a crowd,” according to the British Admiralty.{26} Military skepticism about the future of aviation in war was considerable, justifiably based on the unreliability and poor lifting power of early aircraft. Serious military and naval interest in aviation only began in the two years before the outbreak of war, and that interest was divided between airships and airplanes. The main role expected of these aircraft was to gather intelligence, for they promised a more economical and effective way to obtain reconnaissance information over both land and sea.{27} Neither air combat nor aerial bombing was regarded as a significant element of use in aviation. In 1910 the Admiralty held the view that “direct attacks by dropping explosives, though possible, is not likely to have so much effect....”{28}

Nonetheless, the coming of effective powered flight immediately opened the prospect of bombing from the air. In 1910 Glenn Curtiss demonstrated this in America with an attack using simulated bombs on a dummy battleship. A year later the U.S. Army used live bombs in tests in San Francisco. In 1911 Italian aviators dropped small bombs on Turkish forces in the Libyan war. Even the British navy carried out bombing experiments “with some considerable measure of success” before 1914.{29} It was an obvious development, and none of the major powers ignored its potential before 1914. A lively campaign in France to expand French air power in 1912 highlighted not only the ability of aircraft to attack troop formations with bombs, but their ability to attack rear areas, convoys, and even arsenals and munitions stores as well.{30} The German airship was regarded as a major threat to the Western Powers if its aviators ever chose to drop bombs rather than take photographs. The Russian designer Igor Sikorsky produced the first four-engine bomber in 1913, forerunner of a generation of Russian heavy aircraft. Though thirty years would elapse before major air campaigns along these lines could actually be launched, early discussions of bombing operations and their probable effect helped frame the evolution of aerial bombardment. The imaginative and intellectual foundations of strategic bombardment were laid long before such a technique became technically and organizationally feasible on any large scale.{31}

World War I almost immediately ushered in an important period of experimentation with all forms of aerial warfare. This included occasional and sporadic attacks by bomb-dropping aircraft, largely in pursuit of objectives closely connected with the land battle. Such attacks, neither coordinated nor sustained, were carried out by small numbers of aircraft suffering high losses.

The first aerial operations that could be regarded as strategic in any real sense of the term were conducted, not by airplanes, but by Zeppelin airships. At the outbreak of war, the German deputy chief of naval staff, Paul Behncke, argued that airships, each carrying a 2,200 pound bombload over a range of 400 miles, should be used to attack the British mainland. The strategic result he aimed for was not material destruction that, with the force at his disposal, would be slight, but was panic “which may possibly render it doubtful that the war can be continued.”{32} The commander of the German Naval Airship Division, Peter Strasser, was an even greater enthusiast. At the height of the airship campaign in 1916, he urged the naval high command to make available as many airships as possible “in the interest of a prompt and victorious ending of the war.” Through the proper conduct of bombing operations, Britain could “be deprived of the means of existence through increasingly extensive destruction of cities, factory complexes, dockyards, harbor works with war and merchant ships lying therein, railroads, etc.....”{33} Though the German high command approved of the attacks, the number of airships produced could not match Strasser’s strategic conception; airship losses proved unacceptably high, and the amount of damage done (196 tons of bombs, 557 deaths, £1.5 million in material destruction) was of little strategic significance.{34}

The vulnerability of the airship fleet was demonstrated by the immediate and largely successful response of Allied forces to its threat. The only successful independent strategic air operations mounted by the Allies before 1918 were directed at the airship pens and at airship construction and repair facilities. These attacks, undertaken mainly by the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) based in France, anticipated the counterforce strategy of later years. At the time, these air attacks were regarded as an extension of the naval war, designed with the support of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, as a defense against the Zeppelin threat to the British fleet.{35}

Attempts to extend the frontline battle account for the isolated attacks made by the French Army Air Force and the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) on positions in Germany deep behind the German lines, or Italian attacks on the Trieste and Pola naval bases and British attacks on Turkish military targets in the Middle East. The British directive “Bomb Dropping Attacks,” issued February 1915, specifically identified troop concentrations and rail links with the German front as vital targets.{36}

French Army aviators, with extensive public support, planned a more wide-ranging campaign against particular industrial targets within range of French aircraft, including the chemical works at Mannheim, the Krupp works at Essen, the Mauser factory at Oberndorf, and an explosives factory at Rottweil. British bombing campaigns, meanwhile, proved ineffective; the RFC and RNAS lacked adequate aircraft, a satisfactory bombsight, trained bomber personnel, and a core of tactical doctrine. By mid-1915, the British Army concluded that “aerial attack has not proved to be a serious operation of war.”{37} French forces, too, lacked sufficient numbers of aircraft designed for bombing to do mu...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• DEDICATION
• Foreword
• Preface
• Photographs
• Maps
• Charts
• Tables
• Introduction-David MacIsaac
• 1-Strategic Bombardment before 1939 Doctrine, Planning, and Operations
• 2-The British Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany in World War II
• 3-The American Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany in World War II
• 4-Strategic Bombing in the Pacific 1942-1945
• 5-U.S. Strategic Bombardment Doctrine Since 1945
• 6-Strategic Bombardment Constrained: Korea and Vietnam
• 7-Strategic Bombardment in the Gulf War
• Strategic Bombardment: A Retrospective
• Contributors
• NOTES