Beneficial Bombing: The Progressive Foundations of American Air Power, 1917-1945

7. Progressive Legacies

235 7• Progressive legacies It is a fundamental principle of democracy that personnel casualties are distasteful. we will continue to fight mechanical rather than manpower wars. • gEn. hEnry h. arnoLd, 1944 only air power can frequently circumvent enemy forces and attack strategic centers of gravity directly. other components, on the other hand, need to fight their way in— normally with large casualties. air operations—especially with modern weapons and accuracy as used in the gulf war—are very much likely to result in fewer casualties to either side. air power then becomes quintessentially an american form of war; it uses our advantages of mobility and high technology to overwhelm the enemy without spilling too much blood, especially american blood. • CoL. John a. WardEn iii, 1992 2September1945 Tooey Spaatz stood on the deck of the uss Missouri and watched a seemingly endless stream of b-29s pass low overhead. The spectacle , which also included vast formations of Army Air Forces and Navy fighters, was an awesome display of American air power following the formal Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. Spaatz was the only American representative present at each of the war’s major surrender ceremonies—at Rheims and Berlin in May 1945, as well as at Tokyo—and he could take grim satisfaction in knowing that much of the devastation that he observed in the two enemy capitals resulted from men and aircraft that he had led. As he watched on the Missouri with the other Allied representatives, he was the acknowledged commander of the world’s mightiest aerial strike force. 236 pr o g r e ssi v e l e g ac ie s Postwar Perceptions The American public and its political leaders also acknowledged the Army Air Forces’ contribution to concluding the Pacific War, and they viewed that contribution from a progressive perspective. Yet their definition of “progressive air power”—had they used such a term—would have now mirrored the definition that air commanders would have given it since at least the summer of 1943 in Europe and March 1945 in the Pacific: air power designed to end the war as rapidly as possible with the fewest American lives lost in the process. Most Americans believed that the atomic attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had accomplished exactly that. That conviction—along with the belief that the nation would rely on strategic bombers and atomic bombs to decide a future conflict —enabled airmen to embrace the grail of service autonomy in September 1947. As Billy Mitchell had predicted, the new U.S. Air Force became the nation’s first line of defense, and the key to defending the country now rested on the ability to attack and destroy any potential aggressor with air power. For American airmen, World War II did not perfectly fit the progressive ideals that many of them had held on the eve of the conflict. They had entered the war believing that they possessed the necessary technology and a blueprint for using it that would enable them to wage war in pristine fashion. Relying on high altitude, daylight precision bombing, they would sever the key strands of an enemy’s industrial web, bring its war-making capability to a halt, and compel surrender—while at the same time they would validate the need for a separate air force. The entire process would be quick, inexpensive, and efficient—the precise destruction of a small number of vital targets would risk few airmen and would kill a small number of civilians, thus averting the carnage from a clash of armies like that generated by World War I’s Western Front. 237 pr o gr e ssi v e l e g ac ie s Although the character of World War II matched that envisioned by Mitchell and Air Corps Tactical School instructors—a global struggle against enemies viewed as direct threats to America ’s security—the conflict soon developed its own momentum that proved difficult to restrain. “Unconditional surrender” was an outgrowth of the war’s evolution, and unconditional surrender and rapid victory were not complementary objectives against fanatical foes like Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. The former goal demanded the destruction not only of war-making capability, but also of hostile governments and the way of life that they fostered , and those objectives could not be obtained quickly. In addition , the aim of unconditional surrender may have inadvertently lengthened the war by causing...