The Command of the Air

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The Command of The Air 125 But are such complements adapted to such services? Most certainly they are. First of all we must note that when an independent Air Forc~ confronts an enemy made incapable of flying, any aerial action, auxiliary or not, undertaken against him is accomplished with great ease and important results because the enemy is powerless to retaliate. Once it has conquered the command of the air, an Independent Air Force may lend the army and navy, for auxiliary service, battle units (or units of combat and units of bombardment) and also observation units. These units can carry out with great facility, because in complete safety, all the auxiliary tasks of exploration , reconnaissance, and observation which the army and navy may require of them. The combat units, powerfully armed and capable of maximum intensity of fire in all directions. can serve best to attack marching troops. supply trains, rail movements , and so forth; while the bombing units can serve to destroy objectives bearing directly on surface operations. Therefore, there will be no need of pursuit planes once the command of the air has been conquered. And therefore the constitution of an Independent Air Force according to my ideas will make it able to render all imaginable auxiliary aerial services after it has conquered the command of the air. 8 In all the foregoing my purpose has been to demonstrate that an Independent Air Force, once it has conquered the command of the air, can also meet the needs of all auxiliary services required by the exigencies of war. I have made my demonstrations in abundance because I am convinced that, even after conquering the command of the air, an Independent Air Force should operate independently and not waste its time and disperse its means in actions of secondary importance. Once the command of the air is conquered, the Air Force should attempt to carry out offensives of such magnitude as to crush the material and moral resistance of the enemy. Even if this aim cannot be achieved in entirety, it is still necessary to weaken the enemy's resistance as much as The Command of The Air possible, because that, better than any other means, facilitates the operations of the army and navy. But to achieve such an end, we must avoid dispersing our means and make the most possible use of them. The maximum returns from aerial offensives must be sought beyond the field of battle. They must be sought in places where effective counteraction is negligible and where the most vital and vulnerable targets are to be found-targets which are, even though indirectly, much more relevant to the action and outcome on the field of battle. In terms of military results, it is much more important to destroy a railroad station, a bakery, a war plant, or to machine-gun a supply column, moving trains, or any other behindthe -lines objective, than to strafe or bomb a trench. The results are immeasurably greater in breaking morale, in disorganizing badly disciplined organizations, in spreading terror and panic, than in dashing against more solid resistance. There is no end to what a powerful Independent Air Force in command of the air could do to the enemy! It seems paradoxical to some people that the final decision in future wars may be brought about by blows to the morale of the civilian population. But that is what the last war proved, and it will be verified in future wars with even more evidence. The outcome of the last war was only apparently brought about by military operations. In actual fact, it was decided by the breakdown of morale among the defeated peoples-a moral collapse caused by the long attrition of the people involved in the struggle. The air arm makes it possible to reach the civilian population behind the line of battle, and thus to attack their moral resistance directly. And there is nothing to prevent our thinking that some day this direct action may be on a scale to break the moral resistance of the people even while leaving intact their respective armies and navies. Was not the German Army still able to go on fighting at the time when it laid down its arms? Was not the German fleet turned over intact to the enemy when the German people felt their power of resistance weakening? We must keep in mind, not what aviation is today, but what it could be today. Certain1y if we...