The Dream of Civilized Warfare: World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination (review)

Robertson, professor and director of the Media and Society program at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, traces the development of the metaphor of the flying ace of World War I and its effects on American war culture to the present day.

Robertson argues that air power was oversold to the public when America entered the war in 1917. The goal of manufacturing combat aircraft was impossible, given that the U.S. did not have the means to produce them in great numbers. Compounding the problem were lack of clarity about how to use the new weapon, abuses and scandal that resulted from the failure to execute the ambitious production plan, and reliance on propaganda rather than cold fact regarding unrealistic goals. Given the brutal nature of the ground war, it was not surprising that the chivalrous figure of the ace emerged as a tool to promote the war. The image surrounding the combat pilot in turn depended on the heroic conception of civilization versus barbarism and the romance of death. In conclusion, Robertson argues that the terrible war of attrition in World War I has caused current-day theorizers to focus on carrying the war to civilians, thus sparing the troops on the ground.

None of these themes is especially original. What is new and somewhat problematic is Robertson's assertion that the metaphor of the First World War ace and the type of warfare he represented were responsible for turning attention away from the battlefield to civilians. While during the interwar years some military air power theorists may have believed in strategic bombardment as a way of destroying civilian morale, the more prevalent attitude favored pinpoint bombing aimed at the enemy's means of war production. It was not until that method became difficult technologically that the U.S. and Great Britain turned to so-called "area bombing" in World War II and the deliberate targeting of civilians.

Robertson's point about the numbers of civilian casualties in recent air campaigns—the Gulf War, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq—is well taken. Regardless, unlike their predecessors, contemporary air power strategists have generally steered clear of civilian targets, preferring to employ a so-called "effects-based doctrine"—the use of intelligence, targeting, and precision guided munitions to strike at the enemy's infrastructure—electrical power, air defense command and control, etc.

Robertson's assertion that in more recent times the media-created image of the fighter pilot was used to sell air power to a reluctant public—"the airplanes looked like combat fighters, and the individual who emerged from the cockpit was a handsome, clean-cut young man wearing an outfit that bespoke his virility and competence operating a highly technical machine" (p. 416)—may well be true. But today it is just as likely that a woman will be emerging from the cockpit. Whether male or female, contemporary combat pilots, unlike the lone wolf fighter pilots of World War I, represent a corporate attitude.

In the final analysis, Robertson makes a valiant if not always successful attempt to reduce a complicated subject to a single trope of the fighter pilot. Yes, American war planners have dreamed of conducting "civilized warfare" through air power, but the reasons for doing so are multifaceted, extremely complex, and historiographically contentious. Despite its shortcomings, The Dream of Civilized Warfare fills a crying need for an approach to the history of military aviation that acknowledges the forces of social and cultural history.