Strike From the Sky: The History of Battlefield Air Attack, 1910-1945

12. The Genesis of Anglo-American Air Support: The British Experience in the Western Desert

12 The Genesis of Anglo-American Air Support: The British Experience in the Western Desert From Peace to War Despite prewar doctrinal notions, both Great Britain and the United States developed their respective air support systems based on combat experience. Further, the American system, as employed in the Normandy breakout, was a system that owed its origins to British trial and error in the Western Desert. The swift German victory on the European continent stunned military professionals. In Great Britain, it resulted in a pronounced bureaucratic "turf war" between the British Armywhich desired diversion of as many air assets as possible in support of army forces and, ultimately, creation of its own organic ground support air forces-and the Royal Air Force-which remained wedded to the interrelated notions of strategic air warfare involving bombardment of an enemy's homeland and air defense of Great Britain using highperformance interceptor fighters such as the Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire. Across the Atlantic, the American army echoed its British counterpart to a remarkable-and understandable-degree. (There, of course, the Army Air Forces were still a part of the Army per se, though the connection between the air and land forces was growing steadily weaker.) The realities of the European war forced both the RAF and the USAAF to come to grips with the problem of air support of land armies. In 1941, this manifested itself in a series of Army-AAF war 149 150 STRIKE FROM THE SKY games held in the United States, coinciding with actual British combat experience in the Middle East.34 The war games in the United States revealed limitations as well as potentialities of various combat forces. Not surprisingly, cavalry were shown to have little more than ceremonial value in modern war. Air operations during the Carolina and Louisiana games, however, also focused attention-particularly in light of the European experience-{)n future air-ground coordination and air support of the land battle. During the games, fully 60 percent of AAF sorties went toward interdiction missions, 22 percent to strike at armored and mechanized forces in rear areas, and 18 percent for "miscellaneous" missions including direct battlefield support; air units refused to support forces when the concentration of the "enemy" appeared too small to warrant profitable attack, or when the "enemy" was within the range of friendly artillery. Control proved awkward; requests went from field units to division or corps level, were passed to an air liaison officer who approved or disapproved each request, and then passed it to an "air support command" that again reviewed it for approval or disapproval. When flights were en route to targets, the only air-ground communications link was via the air liaison officer at division or corps level; thus the actual front-line forces could not (as in the German system) communicate directly to the strike flight. Despite its deficiencies and a general uneasiness within the Army's ground forces, this system was elevated from operational concept to tactical reality via the issuance of Field Manual 31-35; its key element was the establishment of "air support commands" to work with ground forces. These commands actually had only observation aircraft on strength, and had to rely on the theater air commander to supply combat aircraft when needed; in 1942, fighters, dive bombers, and medium and light bombers were added as "organic" air support command elements. Air and land commanders both were uneasy with the arrangement. Air commanders saw it as drawing off strength that could best be used in the strategic air war against the enemy's heartland and in interdiction missions. Ground commanders saw the air support allotted to them as being too fragmentary, sporadic, and sparse to be much good. These concerns ironically mimicked arguments then raging through the British defense establishment as well, particularly since the American system roughly followed the inspiration of a British RAFArmy system which was, even at that time, undergoing profound revision as a result of lessons learned in France and the Western Desert.3s The Second World War lSI Britain's antipathy for direct involvement of aircraft on the battlefield-aside from its qualified experience and use of aircraft for such purposes in the "air control" operations of the 1920s and 1930swas quickly swept aside by actual events. The perceived lack of effort of the RAF to assist the ground forces in France and in Greece-an unfair, but...