Prior to the outbreak of the Second World War there were many who predicted that air power would play a decisive part in the next general European war. To what extent did the performance of Allied air forces in the European Theater of Operations from 1943 to 1945 confirm these predictions?
The Second World War was the first to be fought employing air power as an integral component of strategy. By mid-1940, the European Continent was under nearly complete control of Axis forces. As such, air power was seen as the only option for breaking the stranglehold.
The Allies’ projections for the European Theater of Operations can largely be summed up in two words: Strategic Bombing. Air power was used for other missions, notably insertions and reconnaissance, but the bombing mission was envisioned as the primary mission of aviation in the European Theater. This was based on technical developments that convinced military and political leaders of the bombers’ invincibility. The Allies planned to leverage this strength to strategically bomb both military and civilian targets. While the strategy was ultimately a success in contributing to defeating the Germans, unforeseen difficulties would mitigate much of the expected impact.
One major factor of the strategic bombing campaign was the understood need to include civilian targets. This reflected the new face of warfare borne out of the new possibilities for the use of air power, and advances in strategic thinking during the previous two decades.
Introduction
The Great war was the first widespread usage of technology on the battlefield, and much of the next decade was spent on developing improvements. Machine guns, tanks, electronic communications, and aircraft made their debuts. Aircraft were not typically integrated into strategic planning during the war, and air interdiction was a major lesson learned as aviation would be used to isolate the battlefield, such as attacking communication lines and close air support (CAS) to support ground troops. By the end of the conflict in 1918, aircraft had been widely employed by the major participants in bombing, reconnaissance, and communications missions. The following two decades were a time of great innovation in air power, such as enclosed cockpits, single wing designs, more powerful engines, and longer ranges.
There were three main factors driving the development of land-based air power. First, all parties wanted to avoid the carnage of the Great War, and aviation was seen as the quickest way to end the conflict based on the use of new technology. By organizing properly as an autonomous branch of the military, air forces could fully realize the new potential. The British were the first of the Allies to act, creating the Royal Air Force (RAF) at the end of the Great War, while the Americans continued to operate as a branch of the Army called the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF). They would use the conflict as an opportunity to build a case for separating the Air Forces from the U.S. Army.
Strategic Thinking on Military Aviation
Several figures were important during this period to developing aviation strategy. In 1927, Giulio Douhet, an Italian army general, wrote “The Command of the Air”, a treatise on the use of air power. He pointed out that during the Great War, the militaries employed the “illogical concept of utilizing the new aerial weapon solely as an auxiliary to the army and navy”, but that towards the end of the war the thinking changed towards using them for offensive missions. He was adamant that air forces should operate independently.
Douhet pointed out the value of being able to go “far beyond fortified lines” without requiring a ground attack to break through defenses, which would inform the thinking on how to avoid excess casualties. His most prescient writing though centered on the now gray line between military and civilian targets. He pointed out that the battlefield was no longer limited by artillery range. The battlefield could no longer be limited to actual combatants. Finally, “There will be no distinction any longer between soldiers and civilians.” It was an uncomfortable truth that had to be acknowledged: attacks on an enemy’s population centers would become the most effective use of air power, that would bring victory “cheaply and easily”.
Other advocates made similar arguments. General Billy Mitchell, a battlefield commander of air forces in the Great War, had been proclaiming the need for an independent air force since the early 1920’s. He believed that the enemy’s air force should be the first target of the air campaign. The U.S Army Air Corps Tactical School argued that “large formations of heavily armed bombers could fight their way through the enemy’s airspace without suffering unacceptable losses. General Jimmy Doolittle commanded heavy bombers in the Mediterranean, and warned his superiors that “that they had better develop long-range escort fighters or the strategic bombing effort was going to run into serious difficulties”. This directly contradicted the RAF belief that escorts were both unnecessary and unfeasible; and the American belief that they were simply not needed.
Strategic Plans
Two of the most important lessons learned from the Great war were air superiority and accurate targeting were paramount to successful air operations.” The philosophical advances in thinking on the use of military aviation resulted in a plan to rely on strategic bombing as the primary use of air power, though the two Allied powers did not agree on how to accomplish the two principal effects. First, there was resistance in both the RAF and USAAF to the idea of using escort fighters to secure the air space. There were also major differences in targeting between the two nations. This lied in the ideas of area bombing vs. selected targeting.
Both nations agreed that there was virtually no benefit to investing in escort fighters to protect bombers. The RAF during the 1920’s made a single-minded commitment to strategic bombing, and the American school of thought was that formations may suffer defeat, but these would be the exception rather than the rule. Thus, there was no need for long-range fighters. This idea would be disproven almost as soon as strategic bombing missions began.
The British believed in area bombing, a strategy informed by Douhet, who theorized that attacks on the enemy’s population centers would shorten conflicts and bring quick victory. Sir Arthur Harris was a proponent of this strategy. The Americans, however, would not plan to directly target civilians. Instead of indiscriminate attacks against civilian targets, select tactical targets such as oil, electricity, transportation, ball bearings, etc. To be sure, this was largely semantics as most of these facilities were operated by civilian populations. But an overt plan to bomb population centers or other civilian populations not directly involved in the war effort would likely not have been approved by the American Congress nor the public.
Another prescient development was the British air defense system. The RAF had the most advanced air defense system in the world. Air Marshal Hugh Dowding spearheaded research and development in radar, which informed further developments in the Hurricane and Spitfire aircraft. By 1939 the country had an air defense system that “integrated aircraft, radar, and communications into a coherent whole”. Were it not for this development, the Blitz and the Battle of Britain surely would have had a more devastating effect on the civilian population of London and other areas of Southeast England.
Execution
The problems with the strategic bombing plans were exposed from the start. Navigation, which directly affected targeting, was a major problem, with one report asserting that British bombers were “doing more damage to cows and trees than to Germany’s cities or industries”. This realization that they were not hitting much of anything finally forced Bomber Command to research technology to support efforts. The British were defeated in the Battle of Berlin in 1943- 1944 and did not resume bombing raids until later in 1944 after France was liberated. Sir Arthur Harris returned to bombing German cities and resuming the “area bombing” plan that he had championed early on.
Americans entered the conflict with a heavy focus on formation, mathematics, and calculations that placed precision worked out beforehand over actual combat experience. This led to a thinking that it was “perfectly feasible” for bombers to operate risk free at altitudes greater than 20,000 feet. This misplaced confidence in bomber fleets being able to identify and attack with precision vital targets without escort fighters, at a frequency and intensity to impact the German war production almost proved catastrophic. It was not until the bomber forces were built up to sufficient strengths that they were able to conduct raids into central Germany with success.
Americans would thus adopt a more Clausewitzian approach of remaining on the offensive, at least from the perspective of bombing missions, while employing the Sun Tzu concept of not excessively and indiscriminately destroying enemy targets.
Conclusion
“Success” is be a relative term. To describe success as the realization of the predictions of air power usage made prior to the war must factor in two main points: the British stuck to an area bombing plan largely to prove pre-war doctrine correct. And the Americans simply relied on the incredible output of heavy industry to overcome the misguided approach of the invincibility of bomber squadrons. In this respect, the predictions of air power in the European Theater would prove correct. Both Clausewitz and Sun Tzu believed in conducting honest net assessments both at the outset of war, and continuous re-evaluations. This was a massive failure of Allied strategy, as it was clear early on that both major Allied powers were blindly sticking to doctrines that had major flaws. There was ample evidence from reconnaissance missions and observations made on the ground, so it cannot be asserted that there was not the intelligence to adapt to the reality on the battlefield, one of Sun Tzu’s most important principles. We see that the Allied air doctrines were nearly impervious to empirical evidence and combat experiences.
In the theoretical and academic concepts of success developed in the interwar period, it could not be said that the air campaigns were a success. Douhet, the most important figure to this day in air doctrine believed that air power could mean a quick and cheap end to any conflict. This obviously was not the reality that was borne out.
There was a serious moral issue to address. The uncomfortable fact of the strategic bombing strategy, and the war in general, was the unavoidable fact that civilians would be killed. In a perversion of sorts of the pre-war precept of avoiding the carnage of trench warfare, much of the killing was transferred to civilian populations killed in British area bombing campaigns and American targeting of German industrial centers. Douhet called this a “brutal but inescapable conclusion”, but that the strongest army and navy would “prove no effective defense against determined efforts of the enemy to bomb our cities.” Thus, the only way to victory was to turn this strategy against the enemy and avoid a protracted war.
Sun Tzu stated that the most important fundamental factor in warfare is to assess the moral factors. Not morality in the traditional sense but ensuring that the people are in “harmony” with their leaders. Militaries, at least in liberal democratic societies, have a duty first to respond to the demands of civilian leaders and populations at home. If strategic bombing that inflicted civilian casualties was what it would take to win the war, then this would have to become the adopted approach. This is a classic application of Clausewitz’ maxim of using the both the maximum use of force and maximum exertion of strength. War is an irrational act. If it was truly believed that targets containing civilian populations would lead to an Allied win, it had to be included as part of the strategy.
Finally, Clausewitz’ “Paradoxical Trinity” is one of the foundational concepts used in strategic analysis. He described it as a balance between the people, military, and government; all parties having different passions pulling them in different directions. For a strategy to succeed, it must consider all three corners of this triangle and live somewhere in the middle, careful not to drift too far in favor of one party at the cost of the others. If we gauge success on this concept, the Combined Bomber Offensive was a success. The air forces proposed their respective strategies and largely stuck to them, despite the tactical problems; civilian leaders backed the plans and funded additional research and new programs despite it turning into a war of attrition; and the people continued to support the effort as the basis of enormous production totals despite the loss of lives.
We see then that the paradoxical triangle was indeed balanced, and the strategy was a success. Other uses of aviation, such as reconnaissance and insertions, also proved crucial to the allied strategy despite not being a major part of the strategy at the onset. But it is a sad truth that while these innovations did help, allied victory came at an appalling cost to civilian lives.
Works Cited
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