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War in the Air: Visions of a Weapon Foretold by Gregory Alegi1 Winged Victory
«At first they flew at low altitude, heading north, towards Cologne. Immediately their horizon widened to the provinces on the Rhine, with smoke rising here and there to indicate the locations that until two days earlier had been Zülpich, Euskirchen, Düren, Jülich, Bergheim, Kerpen, Brühl and other small towns. They next flew over Cologne and Mülheim which appeared dead cities; as they passed a crowd of people, which looked like an anthill, squatting between Cologne and Siegburg, ran in every direction; they then followed the course of the Rhine, also dead, without a boat, without the smallest steamer; they overflew the still smoldering ruins of Koblenz and Mainz and continued over Mannheim and Karlsruhe. All roads leading to the Rhine were crammed with crowds which as they passed overhead dived into the fields screaming, and the echo of their shouting reached up to them. All the land that gradually appeared under their eyes seemed pockmarked by a quantity of little craters. No railroad movement: long columns of trains parked near what had been stations; no engine blurting its plume of smoke. No westward movement. Everything went east, and even a light breeze pushed the smoke from the fires to the east, from where the great threat to humanity had begun.»2
V
ivid descriptions of the destruction of Germany from the air to pressure Wilhelm II to accept defeat, embrace surrender and rapidly end the Great War featured extensively in Come finì la grande guerra. La vittoria alata [How the Great War Ended. The Winged Victory], the explicitly titled novelette that the Italian military theorist Giulio Douhet wrote in early 1918 to promote his vision of an Allied Air Army operating independently of the land front. Before the story found a publisher, the Central Powers collapsed for a mix of factors including internal revolution and the effects of the naval blockade. 1 LUISS University, Rome / Italian Air Force Academy, Pozzuoli (Naples). This essay is
dedicated to the memory of Baldassare “Uccio” Catalanotto (1929-2015), who disliked airpower theory but taught me much about aviation history and writing. 2 Giulio Douhet, Come finì la grande guerra. La vittoria alata. Roma, L’Eloquenza, 1919, p. 119. Except where indicated, all translations are by the author.
