The Command of the Air

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER IV I COME NOW to the most interesting problem, the problem of the future. This may seem difficult to the reader, but that is appearance rather than reality. We have already well established our starting point-we have seen the events which have been maturing. Now all we have to do is to deduce from them the effects which must follow. Human reasoning has this divining power which brings man closer to God. Using abstract calculus as a basis, Maxwell discovered and defined electromagnetic waves, which we cannot perceive with our senses. On the same basis Hertz built the instrument which revealed them; and Marconi in his turn put them to use and gave them to mankind. In the matter we are examining , we are confronted with facts which our senses can see and perceive, and therefore we should easily be able to define the consequences which must inevitably ensue from them, provided we free our minds from the set traditions of the past. In a book of mine in 1921 I asked the following question: Is it not true that the strongest army deployed on the Alps and the strongest navy sailing our seas, could do nothing practical against an enemy adequately armed in the air who was determined to invade our territory and destroy from the air our communication, production, and industrial centers, and sow death, destruction, and terror in our population centers in order to break our material and moral resistance? The only possible answer then was: "It is true"; today the answer is the same, and tomorrow it must still be the same, unless one denies that airplanes fly and poison gases kill, which would be absurd. As I have said about the last war, the armies then functioned as organs of indirect attrition of 187 188 The Command of The Air national resistance, and the navies as organs to accelerate or retard this attrition. While the armies and navies tend indirectly to break the enemy's resistance, the air arm, having the capacity to act upon the very source of resources, tends to break it directly-namely, with more speed and efficacy. Once one had to be content with destroying a battery with shells; today it is possible to destroy the factory where the guns for the batteries are being built. During the last war tons of explosives and whole mines of iron were fired at regions covered with barbed-wire entanglements in order to destroy them; the air arm can ignore that kind of objective and use its shells, explosives, and poison gases to much better advantage . An army can reach the enemy's capital only after facing the enemy army, defeating it, and pushing it back by a long, painful, onerous series of operations; the air arm instead may try for the destruction of the enemy's capital even before war is declared. There is no comparison between the efficacy of direct and indirect destructive action against the vital resistance of a nation. In the days when a nation could shield itself behind the stout armor of an army and navy, blows from the enemy were barely felt by the nation itself, sometimes not at all. The blows were taken by institutions such as the army and navy, well organized and disciplined , materially and morally able to resist, and able to act and counteract. The air arm, on the contrary, will strike against entities less well-organized and disciplined, less able to resist, and helpless to act or counteract. It is fated, therefore, that the moral and material collapse will come about more quickly and easily. A body of troops will stand fast under intensive bombings, even after losing half or two-thirds of its men; but the workers in shop, factory, or harbor will melt away after the first losses. The direct attack against the moral and material resistance of the enemy will hasten the decision of the conflict, and so will shorten the war. Fokker, the famous airplane builder, who understands the mentalities of all his international clients, said: Do not believe that tomorrow the enemy will make any distinction between military forces and the civilian population. He will use his most powerful and terrifying means, such as poison gas and other Probable Aspects of Future War 189 things, against the civilian population, even though in peacetime he may have professed the best intentions and subscribed to the strictest limitation of them. Squadrons of airplanes will be sent to destroy...