In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 The Military and the Airplane For many years, military aviation in the First World War has been regarded as a mere sideshow to the war on land and at sea. This attitude has generated a belief that the roles and missions of modern military airpower grew out of the experiences in the Second World War, and over time has resulted in a more generalized feeling that any military airpower experience prior to 1939-45 has little to offer the student of present-day military affairs. In. point of fact, of course, the roles and missions of modern military airpower were first promulgated, explored, verified, and undertaken during the First World War. This is particularly true of the missions of air superiority, interdiction, and close air support. The air leaders of the Second World War were, by and large, conditioned by their experiences in the First WorldWarj they elaborated upon trends and doctrines first undertaken in that earlier conflict, and what differences existed between the nature of military airpower in 1914-18 (particularly during the last two years of that conflictl and 1939-45 were more in the nature of technological change than in the nature of doctrine and strategy. The Birth of Military Aviation, 1903-1914 The advent of the man-carrying powered airplane did not immediately revolutionize military affairs. Rather, for five years after the Wrights' success at Kitty Hawk, the secretive tendencies of the brothers, coupled with popular skepticism and bureaucratic inertia, tended to repress any effort to apply the new technology to the military. (In. the United States, this may have stemmed in part from the embarrassment the Federal 9 10 STRIKE FROM THE SKY government suffered by the well-publicized failure of Smithsonian Institution Secretary Samuel Langley's man-carrying "Aerodrome" in two unsuccessful flight attempts in October and December 1903; the Aerodrome had been built with a $50,000 grant from the War Department , the first governmentally financed heavier-than-air flying machine in the world.) This situation, incidentally, was not unique to the United States; following Santos-Dumont's hop off the ground in France in 1906-

Share