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Technology and Culture 43.3 (2002) 643-644



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Book Review

War Machines:
Transforming Technologies in the U.S. Military, 1920-1940


War Machines: Transforming Technologies in the U.S. Military, 1920-1940. By Timothy Moy. College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+218. $39.95.

In War Machines, Timothy Moy asks whether entire technological systems can bear the imprint of the institutions that created them. He approaches this question by looking at the U.S. Army Air Corps and the U.S. Marine Corps prior to World War II, and his answer is a resounding "yes."

According to Moy, the Air Corps emerged from World War I with the mission of supporting the army in its quest for a decisive land battle. To airmen, this put them in a position of perpetual bureaucratic inferiority within the army. As a result, they concocted a vision of strategic bombing that required new technologies—the heavy bomber and the precision bombsight—to fulfill it. These new technologies would allow them to claim a separate mission and thus justify a separate service. The bureaucratic imperative drove Air Corps doctrine and technology.

The Marine Corps, on the other hand, had no obvious mission in the aftermath of World War I and therefore had to invent one in order to justify its continued existence. The mission it chose, amphibious attack against defended islands, also would require new technologies—simple but rugged landing craft.

Moy plows some old ground with this "ideas and weapons" approach. Regarding the Air Corps, his history contains inaccuracies, while also omitting other pertinent factors. Billy Mitchell did not advocate terror bombing against civilian populations, nor did the Royal Air Force before the war, although such bombing became more prevalent because of the unanticipated strength of enemy air defenses coupled with bombsight and navigation technologies that were not as advanced as had been hoped. In addition, because of his focus on doctrine and bureaucratic factors, Moy does not discuss the impact of either the Great Depression or the role of commercial aviation in determining the force structure of the Air Corps. The depression made airplane and engine manufacturers risk-averse. Rather than develop high-performance airframe and power-plant technologies for advanced fighter planes, they focused on reliability, endurance, and heavy [End Page 643] load-carrying capacity—factors that were essential not only in commercial airliners but also in strategic bombers. In short, Air Corps force structure was molded by factors outside its own institution.

Moreover, even if one focuses on doctrine as the prime determinant of force structure, one could view Moy's conclusions as overly cynical. Many airmen sincerely believed that the airplane offered new ways to fight wars that would involve less death and destruction than traditional surface warfare. Their calls for a strategic bombing doctrine and its attendant technologies were not based on bureaucratic parochialism but on a hardheaded belief that such a doctrine was best for the nation. One may note that those ground officers who opposed this view were equally sincere, and not merely attempting to protect their turf for bureaucratic reasons.

I would add here that Moy's basic premise—that strategic bombing dominated the Air Corps prior to World War II—is open to debate. For example, when war broke out in September 1939, the Air Corps possessed only fifteen strategic bombers. More than twenty thousand new aircraft were built in the next two years, but still less than 2 percent of the Air Corps inventory consisted of heavy bombers. Such statistics hardly reveal a fixation on strategic bombing.

The account of the marines' quest for a mission is more supportable. In the budgetary austerity of the interwar years, the army was fighting for funds and a clear target was the seemingly superfluous Marine Corps. The marines responded to this threat by latching on to a strategy, War Plan Orange, that envisioned a major naval war against Japan. Such a war would require advanced bases, and such bases would be captured by amphibious assault. This specialized mission...

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