The Influence of Airpower upon History: Statesmanship, Diplomacy, and Foreign Policy since 1903

9. A Century of Airpower

273 9 A Century of Airpower Mark Parillo It was only a century ago that airpower became a factor of any consequence in warfare and, by extension, to statesmen. Its arrival, and its rapid rise to military utility in World War I, spawned both theories and controversy about its ultimate value. The debates have continued to the present day; they show no sign of abating. Diplomatic and military practitioners, on the other hand, have had to go beyond theory to create the strategies and policies by which peace is kept or war is waged. As our contributors have outlined, the results have been a mixed bag. Many of the earliest thinkers attempted to understand airpower as something akin to sea power. After all, both involve forces deployed in a medium—the oceans or the atmosphere—that cannot be “occupied” by man-made vessels or other military forces and which therefore are susceptible to only very limited claims of sovereignty. Yes, nations do recognize limited sovereignty on the sea in the form of territorial waters and in the skies as national airspace. Yet the seas and the air remain largely open highways, albeit governed by accepted rules of the road, at least in peacetime. In wartime they are major thoroughfares to be severed through blockade or to be employed for delivering military blows to the enemy. In the great conflicts between nation-states, airpower has been, at least since World War II, the final arbiter of military campaigns, including , we might add, campaigns fought largely at sea. In sum, airpower has succeeded sea power as the ideal instrument for a nation’s projection of 274 Mark Parillo power, that is, its voice in the international dialogue of power politics, in peace as well as in war. Like sea power, airpower is militarily valuable because of its tremendous flexibility. Interwar theorists such as Giulio Douhet often clashed over the definition of airpower: tactical support device, as exemplified by the Luftwaffe, or strategic arbiter of war, as the strategic bombing advocates in Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States proclaimed . In the world’s navies a parallel controversy raged: Were aircraft valuable appendages for the great surface battle fleets, or were they sea warfare’s new dreadnoughts? The latter controversy was resolved in the Pacific theater during World War II, but the former persists to the present day. What World War II unquestionably demonstrated, however, was that the whole debate over airpower as tactical or strategic was itself misplaced, for airpower’s true strength lies in its marvelous versatility. No national air arm showed this more convincingly in World War II than that of the United States. The U.S. Army Air Corps spent the interwar years preparing to conduct independent bombing campaigns to reduce future adversaries to economic and psychological ruin. That meant developing the B-17 and the vaunted Norden bombsight. It meant emphasis in training on formation flying and bombing accuracy. It also entailed undertaking extensive economic studies of potential enemies to determine the quickest way to wreak havoc on the enemy military machine ’s supporting web of industry and so force surrender from the skies. Though the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II visited terrible physical damage and human suffering on the foes’ populations, they did not obviate the need for the destruction of military forces in the field. Extensive naval and ground campaigns had to be waged over the years, and all of them relied on airpower in one form or another. Probably none was more impressive than the Allies’ tactical air forces over the final eighteen months of the war. Soviet Il-2 Sturmoviks, British Typhoons, and American P-47s seemed ubiquitous to the weary Wehrmacht ground forces, so much so that Germany’s desperate 1944 gamble in the Ardennes had to be undertaken in the winter months, since by then only foul weather could keep Allied aircraft from chewing up the attacking panzer columns. A Century of Airpower 275 Add to this the highly valuable air superiority mission. Control of the skies means preserving the air for one’s own purposes while also denying it to the enemy. It was control of the air that enabled operations such as the 1944 Normandy assault (and perhaps even more so the Normandy buildup phase) to occur at all. Allied aerial tactical support would of course have been far less effective and dependable without...