War in the Air: Visions of a Weapon Foretold, by Gregory Alegi “

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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

Vivid 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.

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“Come finì la grande guerra”. Written in May 1918 but published after the Armistice, this novelette introduced the public at large the themes later developed for military professionals in the Command of the air.

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Similarly, the Independent Air Force created by Britain to strike deep within German territory was largely ineffective, in part because aircraft development and production times proved longer than German resistance.3

Despite this, victory through airpower – or, more accurately, the role of air forces in the military establishment - became a central theme in the interwar debates about national defense. Would new technologies restore mobility, avert strategic paralysis and shorten war? Would aviation assist traditional services or replace them? Would it be an evolutionary or revolutionary change – in other words, would the future be merely something yet to come or would it change war itself?

Flight and Future Warfare

In his 1908 novel the War in the air, the English writer H.G. Wells described a future conflict in which secretly-developed aerial fleets project war on a global scale, obliterate the latest dreadnoughts and rain death on cities.4 Much as seventy years later General Hackett would frame the third World War,5 Wells styled the novel as future history and predicted that the war would destroy civilization itself. Passages such as « No place is safe – no place is at peace. [...] the war comes through the air, bombs drop in the night. Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead – dripping death – dripping death» shaped popular perceptions of air war long before a single bomb was dropped. To some extent Wells, who in 1895 had been skeptical of aeronautical development and optimistic about its use, was writing within the genre established a few years earlier by Erskine Childers, which fed in part on public fear of growing German military might,6 but the direct influence of contemporary Zeppelin development should not be underestimated. Although considered a minor work by its author, the War in the air was discussed by the Committee on Imperial Defence and earned Wells a place as an early air-

3 Cfr. Neville Jones, the origins of Strategic Bombing. London, William Kinder, 1973. 4 H.G. Wells, the War in the air, London, Bell, 1908. To contextualize Wells, cfr. Robert Wohl, a Passion for Wings. aviation and the Western imagination, 1908-1914.

New Haven, Yale UP, 1994. 5 John Hackett, the third World War, London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1982. 6 Erskine Childers, the riddle of the Sands, London, Smith, Elder & co., 1903.

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power visionary.7

In fact, the link between flying and warfare had been described and foreseen by writers, scientists and others long before the invention of practical flying machines. To quote but a few, after the first flight of an unmanned hot air balloon, in 1783 the abbot Leonardo Ximenes estimated that the invention would greatly help «Navigation, military Architecture, Physics and Commerce» but «More than anything else would a flying globe be advantageous in Armies that travel upon the land, whether to find the Foe, or to escape it [...] There would be no besieged Fortress, where with the new Machine the General’s communications could not arrive, or to the contrary from whence dispatches could not be made to the Army.»8 In the 1835 poem locksley Hall, Tennyson explicitly linked the future with aerial warfare

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be; Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight dropping down with costly bales; Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain’d a ghastly dew From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue; Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunder-storm; Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.9

In the 1879 novel Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul,

7 See, among other sources, Alfred Gollin, No longer an island: Britain and the Wright

Brothers, 1902-1909, Stanford, Stanford UP, 1984; Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: the literature and theory of aerial Warfare in Britain, 1959-1917, Manchester, Manchester UP, 1996; Richard Davis, “Fear and Terror in the Formulation and Conduct of

British Foreign Policy in the Interwar Years”, in Wojciech Kalaga (ed.), Civilisation and Fear: Society and the Writing of the Subject, Newcastle upon Tyne, Cambridge

Scholars Publishing, 2012, p. 24. 8 Leonardo Ximenes, lettera al Sig. Senatore Marchese lorenzo Ginori intorno alla sperienza del globo volante, Firenze, Allegrini, 1783, quoted in Giorgio Baroni (ed.),

Scrittori al volo. l’aviazione nella letteratura. Roma, Alenia Aeronautica, 2006, pp. 45-46. 9 Alfred Tennyson, locksley Hall (1835), now in tennyson’s poetry, (Robert W. Hill jr., ed.), New York, Norton, 1971; also available at poetryfoundation.org poem 174629.

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Albert Robida described among other things the evacuation of besieged cities by fleets of balloons and air combat between armored balloons firing chloroform gas bombs that made soldiers incapable of defending their cities.10 In the climax of his 1886 novel robur-le-Conquérant Jules Verne predicted that heavier-than-air aircraft would literally destroy lighter-thanair vehicles.11 The book acknowledged the importance of science, but by the time of its 1904 sequel Maître du monde Verne had come to fear it, albeit in terms of the danger of totalitarianism rather than of warfare. By then images of armed flying machines, aerial armadas and air-based strategies for world domination could be found in the work of authors as different as the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti («Here: mine is a multicellular biplane with steering tail: 100HP, 8 cylinders, 80 kilograms [...] I have between my feet a tiny machinegun, which I can unleash pressing a silver button»), the German nationalist Rudolf Martin and the French adventure writer Emile Driant.12

Whatever their literary value, such writings (and the illustrations which accompanied them, as was the fashion of the era) are indicative of widespread concern about the future of war in the aerial age. This dovetailed with the promotion of military applications by inventors, all too aware that War and Navy ministries represented the only substantial foreseeable market.13 Even though heavier-than-air machines cost less than airships, their limited performance restricted not only their short-term commercial interest but also the possibility of attracting research and development funding. As a result, while flying is traditionally portrayed in terms of freedom, technical development came almost immediately under the cloak of secrecy. This explains why some view the development of aviation through an unconventional reading of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus, which foregrounds the relationship between the engineer Daedalus and king Minos,

10 Albert Robida, Voyages très extraordinaires de Saturnin Farandoul, Paris, Librairie

Illustrée, 1879. 11 Jules Verne, robur-le-Conquérant, Paris, Hetzel, 1886; id., Maître du monde, Paris,

Hetzel, 1904. 12 For these and other examples see G. Baroni, op. cit., and R. Wohl, op. cit (particularly ch. 3). 13 I am generalizing from Emmanuel Chadeau l’industrie aéronautique en France 1900-1950, Fayard, Paris, 1990.

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which is to say between technology and the State.14 It also explains why in the postwar decades the aircraft industry was referred to as «Congress’ business».15

The substantial failure of his Avion I, II and III family of aircraft (189097), generously funded by the French Army, did not prevent the French inventor Clément Ader from writing aviation militaire, a treatise more comprehensive than realistic.16 Ader envisaged three main types of aircraft (éclaireurs, or scouts; torpilleurs, or bombers, also capable of anti-shipping operations; and avions de ligne, aircraft of the line), suggested aviation strategies for European powers, provided a table of organization for the armée aviatrice (aerial army) and drew up a training plan and maneuvers (patterned very much upon those of infantry). In the tradition of general staff courses, a substantial part of the book developed tactical themes, including one in which three countries resorted to aerial warfare to sort out their differences. The final section advocated making France strong in the air and denounced its present weakness.

Although not inclined to theorize, the Wright brothers also identified the US and British armies as potential customers for their Flyer, which within two years of the Kitty Hawk flights – as celebrated as they were brief - had developed into a viable aircraft fully capable of controlled and sustained flight.17 Similarly, the German airship pioneer Ferdinand von Zeppelin

14 Peter Fritzsche, a Nation of Flyers. German aviation and the Popular imagination,

Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1992, p. 2. 15 Jakob Vander Meulen, the Politics of aircraft. Building an american Military industry, Lawrence (KS), Kansas UP, 1991, pp. 41 ff. 16 Clément Ader, aviation Militaire, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1911 (3rd printing; or. ed., 1908). 17 The Wright bibliography is very large. In addition to Marvin W. McFarland (ed.), the

Papers of Wilbur and orville Wright, New York, McGraw-Hill, 2001 (or. ed., 1953) and the classic Fred G. Kelly, the Wright Brothers, Mineola, Dover Books, 1989 (or. ed., 1943), recent sources include Richard Hallion (ed.), the Wright Brothers. Heirs of Prometheus, Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1978; Tom D. Crouch, the

Bishop’s boys. a life of Wilbur and orville Wright, New York, Norton, 1989; Thomas

C. Parramore, First to Fly. North Carolina and the Beginnings of aviation, Chapel

Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2002. On the European side see Charles H.

Gibbs-Smith, the rebirth of european aviation, London, HMSO, 1974 and, with some caution, «Les Fréres Wright», icare, n° 147 (1994).

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turned to the military for funding, creating an immediate close connection between airship and State, and thus with its policies and goals.

In short, by the early 20th century there was no doubt that future wars would also be fought in the air. What remained to be seen was how.

Future Present

In 1910 an Italian artillery major summed up the situation with honesty and clairvoyance, writing «Fighting in the air is inevitable and its inevitability arose in the precise moment in which man learned to stay aloft. How it will occur in detail I do not know, nor can it be foreseen, but it is certain that our mind must get accustomed, from now, to the idea of such aerial fighting, so that equipment may adapt to fighting it in the best possible conditions.»18 Within a few years Giulio Douhet – for that was his name – would team with the designer Gianni Caproni to develop the world’s first aircraft designed to a specific concept of operations. 19 On 21 April 1913, during the military aircraft competition held in Turin by the Battaglione aviatori (Aviators’ Battalion, the heavier-than-air component of the Italian Army’s fledgling flying organization), Caproni noted in his diary that Douhet had requested «new extra powerful aircraft to fight airships».20 What Douhet, at the time Acting Commanding Officer of the Battalion, envisaged was not a fighter, but rather an aeroplane with range, payload and reliability that would allow it to carry out duties then reserved for airships.

18 Giulio Douhet, «I problemi dell’aeronavigazione. La potenza aerea», la preparazione, 10-11 June 1911, p. 1. 19 For the creation of the bomber see Gregory Alegi, Caproni Ca.3 at War, Berkhamsted,

Albatros Publications, 2010-11, 2 vols. 20 Quoted in A. Pelliccia, Nessuno è profeta in Patria, Roma, Stato Maggiore Aeronautica/Ufficio Storico, 1981, p. 35. While the four-engine Sikorsky Grand was reported in the Western press widely, albeit superficially (as indicated by the news items in the 21 June, 5 July, 9 and 30 August and 8 November 1913 issues of Flight), it should be noted that the conversation took place several weeks before its maiden flight. This points to an independent line of development. Cfr. Mikhail Maslov, russian aeroplanes 1914-1918. Old Saybrook, Icarus Aviation Publications, 2002; Harry Woodman,

«The Big Ilya», in Paul S. Leaman (ed.), 25th anniversary Seminar Papers, London,

Cross & Cockade, 1996; D. Cochrane, V. Hardesty and R. Lee, the aviation Careers of igor Sikorsky, Seattle, University of Washington Press, 1989.

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Invasion England, 1908-style. A fleet of Wright Model B biplanes, each carrying a single soldier in addition to its pilot, gathers on an airfield. The illustration was prepared to illustrate ideas put forward by Rudolf Martin, then president of the German Air Fleet League.

The prototype flew in November 1914 and the earliest production aircraft were delivered shortly after Italy entered the war on the Allied side in late May 1915. Although Douhet was forced to leave the Battalion to atone for various diplomatic and administrative blunders, he monitored events and dreamed about returning to the Battalion to use the Capronis properly – for instance, to strike the imperial palace in Vienna.21 He first mentioned the idea in July 1915 and stuck to it for over a year, eventually upgrading to the more powerful (but unwieldy) Caproni triplane.22 By 1917 there had emerged two different views of the role of bomber aircraft. The poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who also cultivated the dream of flying over Vienna (and would eventually succeed on 9 August 1918), drew on his experience as observer in a Caproni squadron to suggest an interdiction campaign in which aircraft would «participate in wearing down the

21 Gregory Alegi, «Oltre Vienna. Gabriele D’Annunzio tra letteratura e potere aereo», in

Romain H. Rainero e Stefano B. Galli (eds.), l’italia e la «grande vigilia». Gabriele

D’annunzio nella politica italiana, Milano, Franco Angeli, 2006, pp. 236. The paper also discusses D’Annunzio’s position. 22 Gregory Alegi, Caproni Ca.4. Berkhamsted, Albatros, 2005.

War in the air: Visions of a Weapon foretold 355

opponent, following by lengthy night and day fire, in order to weaken its resistance, also operating on vital centres, on gathering points, on visible routes along which there flow food and supplies». Graphic descriptions helped visualize the actions «against obstacles reinforced over time, against troops mostly hiding in caves, under fire of veritable thundering bedlams [...] interlinked in a half circle with its concavity open westward.» D’Annunzio concluded soberly: «Now, it is manifest how effective our bomber squadrons could be, in determining the results of the action, if sent one after the other over the enemy fire centres indicated by HQ’s.»

Douhet, whose outspoken views about the conduct of the war had landed him in a military jail, had reached different conclusions.23 Writing in prison, Douhet put forward the idea of «aerial warfare as a means unto itself, unique and capable of obtaining grandiose specific results coordinated with, but not subordinated to, actions that can be carried out by the Army and Navy», supporting the conviction that it could «bring the war to a swift and complete solution with minimal expense.» The paper, titled la grande offensiva aerea [the Great aerial offensive], anticipated the celebrated Dominio dell’aria [Command of the air] in calling for a fleet of 20,000 «powerful aircraft», built largely by the United States and including adequate reserves, with which to «achieve absolute command of the air through the systematic destruction of airfields, [and] enemy air material production and supply centres». This would be followed by the «systematic destruction of the enemy’s vital centres in order to deny, or at least reduce, its armies and forces the means of supply and life and to rapidly lower the moral strength of enemy nations.» Morale was a recurring theme (for «breaking the moral strength of enemy nations, a moral strength which is now painfully strained, represents the decisive victory»), as were equating workers with the soldiers whom they supplied with weapons and comparing civilian and frontline losses. «The destruction of the Krupp works and the making its workforce unable to work would certainly be a much greater victory than what can be achieved with a so-called shove and would cost much less.»

23 A complete discussion in G. Alegi «Il mutilato morale: Giulio Douhet a Fenestrelle»,

Quaderni della rivista aeronautica [Qra], vol. 5, n. 6 (2010), pp. 96-114.

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Douhet’s vision, which might be called the ultimate indirect approach, was popularised by the journalist Nino Salvaneschi in Uccidiamo la guerra [let Us Kill the War], a pamphlet whose self-explanatory cover featured a Caproni triplane destroying an industrial centre. Its main limitations were the underestimation of the challenge and cost of producing the required number of aircraft, making them operational (and keeping them so) and the largely unfounded assumption of weak civilian morale.24 Variously rendered in different «countries, stra-

Uccidiamo la guerra»: A graphic description of the strategy envisaged to break the WW1 strategic stalemate: tegic and operational visions destroy the Krupp steel works by air. For good measure, of airpower would feature the English translation added the subtitle «Let Us Aim at prominently in the postwar the Heart of the Enemy». discourse about future war and how to best prepare for it. Despite being largely confined to self-publishing or smaller imprints, Douhet’s thinking had widespread influence and reached the United States (via “Billy” Mitchell, whom he met in 1922, but also through unofficial translations of his famous 1921 book, il dominio dell’aria [Command of the air]), France (through the magazine les ailes), Argentina (1930), Germany (1935) and even the Soviet Union

24 Thomas Hippler, «Democracy and War in the Strategic Thought of Giulio Douhet», in

Hew Strachan and Sibylle Scheipers (eds.), the Changing Character of War, Oxford,

OUP, 2011.

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(1936).25 Indeed, Britain was the only major power in which his ideas did not resonate, possibly because Hugh Trenchard was advocating similar concepts.26

It should also be noted that the radical visions of aerial warfare and its role in national defense were not based on purely military considerations. In fact, they also aimed at supporting claims for an appropriate share of the meager postwar budgets and, ultimately, air force independence - mostly from armies, with the significant exception of the United States, whose insular continental nature made long-range coastal defense the subject of strong clash with the battleship-dominated Navy.27

Over the years airpower would be increasingly presented as the ultimate alternative to the strategic stagnation that had dominated the Great War and was widely expected to prevail in the next conflict, doubly so as France built the fearful Maginot line. Even those theorists who refused strategic bombing, like Amedeo Mecozzi, believed that only air could «dynamize the operations of our surface forces», preventing them from becoming static through the «balance of offensive and defensive possibilities» or naval blockade.28 The implication, which the Blitzkrieg would prove wrong, was that change would apply only to air warfare.

Asked to produce a final summation of his theories for the rivista aeronautica, Douhet wrote la guerra del 19... [the War of 19...], presented as an official history of a post-1932 Franco-German war fought mainly

25 Giulio Douhet, il dominio dell’aria, Roma, Stab. Poligrafico per l’Amm. della Guerra, 1921 (the 1942 Dino Ferrari translation, hereafter cited as Douhet/Ferrari, is now online at airforcemag,com, el dominio del aire (Buenos Aires, Biblioteca del Oficial de Marina, 1930, tr. Raul Mason Lugones e Exquiel T. del Riviero), La Guerre de l’air (Paris, Les Ailes, 1932, tr. Jean Romeyer), luftherrschaft (Berlin, Drei Masken, 1935), Gospodstvo v Vozduhe. Sbornik Trudov po Voprosam Vosdüsnoj Vojni (Moscow, Military Journal Editions, 1936, tr. V. Vinograd); P. Vauthier, la doctrine de guerre du général Douhet, Paris, Berger-Levrault, 1935. 26 Phillip S. Meilinger, «Trenchard and ‘Morale Bombing’: The Evolution of Royal Air

Force Doctrine before World War II», in airwar. theory and Practice, London, Cass, 2003. 27 Thomas Wildenberg, Billy Mitchell’s War with the Navy, Annapolis, Naval Institute

Press, 2013. 28 Amedeo Mecozzi, «Direttiva per l’Aeronautica Militare», Comment 2, para 14, letter d, in Qra, vol. 1, no. 1 (2006).

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in the air.29 The narrative replaced the individual characters who had carried the story in How the Great War ended with instructions about flying formations and detailed statistics about bomber and fighter losses. The shift to an objective, detached style did nothing to change the overall picture imagined by Douhet.

«evidently the enemy intended to act against the mobilization and deployment of the allied armies. there were numerous interruptions, with severe effects in some points, particularly where they interfered and stopped heavy railroad traffic. anxious requests for means of aerial defense came from all quarters, including both military and civilian authorities. over one hundred important towns served by important railroads or main roads were on fire and encased by poisonous clouds which, carried by the wind, some times brought trails of death and terror. impotent to advance and come to the rescue of the battered towns, military units forced to halt at the interruptions were awe-struck by the terrible effect of aerial attacks and by the masses of enemy aircraft flying freely across the sky; while they cursed the barbaric enemy, they also began to complain against their own air leadership for doing nothing.»30

Although Germany lost the undefended cities of Cologne, Koblenz, Mainz and Frankfurt to enemy night bombers using explosive, incendiary and gas bombs, the evacuation of Namur, Soissons, Châlons and Troyes to spare their people from retaliatory attacks brought about the collapse of French morale and effectively ended the war in under 72 hours.

Not everyone shared this terrifying picture of future war. In Italy, the staunchly anti-douhetian Mecozzi advocated the tactical use of aircraft operating in neither an independent nor a subordinate fashion, which he labeled “concomitant”.31 While his theories lacked in thoroughness, they compensated for in clarity: air forces should seek to extract maximum effect from minimum damage and never wage war against the powerless. Although very interested in Douhet’s strategic writings, the Luftwaffe opted for an operational approach, initially effective but which eventually

29 Giulio Douhet, «La guerra del 19...», rivista aeronautica, March 1930. An English translation is included in Douhet/Ferrari. 30 G. Douhet, ibid. 31 On Mecozzi see Qra, vol. 1, no. 1; and in English, Rodolfo Sganga, Paulo G. Tripodi and Wray R. Johnson, «Amedeo Mecozzi’s Alternative Vision of Airpower», in airpower History, summer 2011.

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turned into what has been described as a “strategy for defeat”.32 The US Air Corps Tactical School embraced the concept of strategic bombing but rejected the indiscriminate approach in favor of selective targeting “bottlenecks” or “choke points” in the economy.33 This led the USAAC and its successors to pursue precision, through both advanced aiming technology and daylight operations.34 (Incidentally, it would be wrong to believe that Douhet claimed to speak universal truths. Contrary to commonly held belief, he went as far as to declare that «perhaps, if Italy were as rich as the US, I might not even have conceived my theories».35 Even the warring countries in his final work must be read in purely metaphorical terms, with lazily traditionalist France mirroring actual Italian policy and the radically innovative Germany embodying what Douhet advocated for Italy.)

Shifting from theory to reality, however, shows that independent air forces and army air services were equally confined pragmatic colonial policing or conquest operations, both out of necessity and to make the existing services appreciate the potential value of aviation to surface operations. The heated debates in military journals did little to change this reality. For all of his alleged revolutionary boasting, even Mussolini shrank from confronting the Army-dominated defense establishment, allotting the newly-created regia aeronautica about 15% of the overall defense budget and excluding by law from the Stato Maggiore Generale introduced in 1925.36

32 Williamson Murray, Strategy for defeat. the luftwaffe, 1933-1945, Maxwell AFB,

Air UP, 1983; James S. Corum, the luftwaffe. Creating the operational air war, 1918-1940, Lawrence, Kansas UP, 1997. 33 Haywood S. Hansell, the air Plan that Defeated Hitler, Atlanta, Higgins-McArthur/

Longino & Porter, 1972. 34 Stephen L. McFarland, america’s Pursuit of Precision Bombing, 1910-1945, Washington, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. 35 Giulio Douhet, «Ricapitolando», rivista aeronautica, November 1929; now in il Dominio dell’aria e altri scritti, Roma, Ufficio Storico dell’Aeronautica Militare, 2002 (hereafter in DdA 2002, p. 229) and translated in Douhet/Ferrari, cit. 36 Gregory Alegi, la Storia dell’aeronautica Militare: la nascita. Roma, Aviator, 2015, pp. 99-183.

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Deterrence: the true role of airpower?

It could be argued, and perhaps it should, that the visions of Armageddon found in classical airpower theorists were not intended as blueprints for action (or even for planning) but to educate public opinion about the huge risks a new war would involve for nations still reeling from the human and financial cost of the Great War. In this sense, in his 1928 essay Douhet made two different claims Probabili aspetti della guerra futura [the Probable aspects of the War of the Future]. 37 First, he took to its extreme consequences the concept that wars are won by «attacking directly enemy resistance where it is at its weakest»; next, he extrapolated that «The more weapons will be able to severely harm citizens in general and touch their interests directly, the rarer wars will become, because nobody will be able to say “we arm, you leave for war”.» 38 Analogous concepts can be found in the writings of Hugh Trenchard, who proposed that in the new RAF, which he led continuously until 1930, there should be two bombers to every fighter.39 When read in conjunction with Stanley Baldwin’s famous «The bomber will always get through» statement, widely held to indicate that nations had become vulnerable in their entirety, airpower theory came to resemble a sort of ‘pacifism in arms’ or ‘crypto-pacifism’.40 Underpinning this apparently paradoxical position was the assumption that while the sole possessor of a bomber force equipped with chemical and incendiary bombs would have a large advantage over potential enemies, it would disappear as soon as other countries built up their own air arms. This would result in everyone having the same ability to inflict severe damage on the enemy, erasing the traditional asymmetrical damage distribution between attacker and defender.

Be that as it may, within a decade of the first articulation of the “command of the air” concept, many military planners had come to view future war as synonymous with “total” (i.e., unrestricted) warfare. Helped by

37 G. Douhet, Probabili aspetti della guerra futura. Palermo, Sandron, 1928; now in Dominio dell’aria (DdA 2002) and Douhet/Ferrari. 38 G. Douhet, Probabili aspetti, cit., p. 221. 39 P. Meilinger, op. cit. 40 Michael Howard, War in european History, Oxford, OUP, 1992, p. 129, quoted by

Luciano Bozzo in his introduction to DdA 2002, p. lxiii.

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large official programs to build shelters and distribute gas masks to the population, the vision of anti-city airpower resonated with the general public. Starting with the destruction of Guernica in 1937, the indirect approach advocated by classical airpower theorists was applied widely, albeit minus the deliberate use of chemical weapons. The results were mixed. Although the warring powers built three times as many aircraft as they had during the Great War (600,000 against 195,000), the Second World War lasted much longer (72 months – or 68 when counting Europe alone - against 51). Among the heavily bombed countries, morale held in Britain and Germany and collapsed in Italy and Japan (where the atomic bombing might be said to equate the aero-chemical attacks envisaged by Douhet). The mid-1944 shift towards attacks on the German transportation system – in modern parlance, interdiction rather than strategic bombing– captures the mixed success of the strategic bombing campaigns, whose lack of immediate results raised troubling ethical questions.41 Trying to assess their contribution to the war, the UK and US invested much effort in wide-ranging but largely inconclusive surveys about the recently concluded air war.

Simultaneously, the development of atomic weapons, with their capability to instantly destroy large population centers, reopened the debate about future war and again promised rapid victory and the opportunity to shrink conventional forces. This led to renewed interest in classic airpower theory, particularly in the United States. In order to understand how it had developed, the newly-independent USAF sought access to the Caproni papers and Bernard Brodie concluded that «Douhet’s thoughts are actually more valid today than they were in his lifetime».42 This was because nuclear weapons had suddenly made attainable the picture of obliteration painted in the previous era. As Albert Einstein once said, «I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.» Brodie took the prediction to its logical

41 Stephen A. Garrett, ethics and air Power in World War ii. the British Bombing of

German Cities, New York, St. Martin’s, 1993; A.C. Grayling, among the Dead Cities,

London, Bloomsbury, 2006. 42 Bernard Brodie, «The Heritage of Douhet», RAND Research Memorandum RM1013, 31 December 1952 (online rand.org, RM1013).

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conclusion in his famous 1946 dictum that «the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose.»43 From this basic premise, repeated at regular intervals in the following decades, Brodie constructed a comprehensive theory of deterrence strictly entwined with the ability to deliver the new absolute weapon.44

Once again, airpower’s unique capability to deliver unstoppable destruction deep within enemy territory promised to maintain peace at a fraction of the cost of large standing armies and with far shorter reaction time, particularly when IRBM and ICBMs replaced aircraft at short readiness. Until the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis brought to light the frightful difficulty of managing the rigid, binary alternative, deterrence returned air warfare to the center of the national defense debate and recycled much of the terrifying imagery of total destruction. The 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty went one step further, securing deterrence for the restricted group of countries already possessing nuclear weapons. The 1991 collapse of the USSR all but eliminated the risk of symmetrical nuclear warfare and the ensuing wars saw the use of aircraft shift from airpower to large scale tactical applications, largely foregoing the ambition to shape conflicts.

A curious quick reference dial purporting to offer instructions to survive nuclear attacks.

43 Bernard Brodie (ed.), the absolute Weapon, N. Y., Harcourt Brace, 1946, p. 76. 44 See for instance Strategy in the Missile age (Princeton UP, 1959) and the Future of

Deterrence in U.S. Strategy (Security Studies Project, University of California, 1968).

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Almost two and a half centuries of artificial flight have neither muted the debate nor answered the questions about the form war will take in the future. Recent discussions about the so-called “Revolution in Military Affairs”, asymmetric conflicts, drones, cyber war and lawfare have in turn stolen the limelight from airpower. Just as the promise of winning wars from the air had secured independence from traditional services, the inability to single-handedly win the latest wars is leading some to advocate the abolition of the USAF, the most airpower-oriented of all air forces.45 At the same time, and in quite the opposite direction, the Command of the air continues to attract considerable attention – possibly more than ever before, with a spate of recent translations in countries including Brazil, Spain, France and even China.46 The future, it would seem, remains difficult to interpret and discern – or at least to agree upon.

To the 21st century military historian, the classical reading of the role of airpower in war appears both operationally conventional and strategically innovative, both tied to the past and firmly set in the future. Like many other images Douhet conjured so easily to convey his message, the massive fleets of expensive aerial cruisers seem outdated and naive, incapable of using national resources efficiently to shorten war.47 The meticulous calculation of the number of aircraft and their bomb load has been discounted as “frictionless”, because it does not consider factors such as accidents, navigation errors or malfunctions.48 Experience has shown the assumed weakness of civilian morale to be largely unfounded, just as a number of campaigns have proven the possibility of air defense. Finally,

45 Robert M. Farley, Grounded: the Case for abolishing the United States air Force.

Lexington, University of Kentucky Press, 2014. 46 空权论 (Petroleum Industry Press, Beijing, 2014, tr. Wang Guoliang?), el Dominio del aire (Madrid, Ministerio de Defensa, 2007, tr. Joaquín Sánchez Díaz), La maîtrise de l’air (Paris, Economica, 2007, tr. Benoît Smith), o dominío do ar (Rio de Janeiro,

Instituto Histórico da Aeronáutica, 1988). 47 For a summary of the often fierce discussions in WW2 Britain regarding the allocation of long-range aircraft to strategic bombing or antisubmarine warfare see John Ellis,

Brute Force. allied Strategy and tactics in the Second World War, New York, Viking, 1990, ch. 3 and 4. 48 L. Bozzo, cit., pp. xl e xli.

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the historical record does not support airpower as panacea.

As reasonable as these and other objections are in terms of historical events, they revolve around transitory technical issues rather than core predictions. Precision has redefined the meaning of mass and made instantaneous destruction achievable.49 Douhet’s War of 19... already accounted for attrition to enemy action and today “friction” has been reduced by several orders of magnitude through advances in navigation, reliability, sensors and air-to-air weapons. The continuous Western air operations of the past quarter-century have suffered negligible air combat losses. Civilian and military morale has frequently collapsed even under conventional air attack.50

The quid pro quo comparisons of predictions and outcomes and fact-stretching could go on forever, without universal answers. A more practical approach is to concentrate on the early airpower principles that appear set to continue to play key roles in future wars and operations, regardless of technological issues.

The starting point remains the freedom of movement and access possessed uniquely by air, at both the tactical and strategic level. From this air derives its role as the ultimate enabler for both conventional and unconventional surface operations, including indirect approaches targeting critical infrastructures ranging from HQ’s to communications and energy production and distribution networks. In many ways, the air units in today’s armies and navies confirm the general acceptance of the basic douhetian tenet of the need to control the air in order to operate freely on the surface. In fact, such is their pervasiveness that it might be argued that surface forces are now predicated on air assets of whatever type and purpose. As a corollary, the use of air assets incapable of operating in even moderate-threat environments (such as unmanned air systems or communications blimps) postulates the existence (or achievement/imposition) of «command of the air». The second key precept is the concentration of air

49 Phillip S. Meilinger, 10 Propositions regarding air Power, Washington, US Air Force History and Museums Program, 1995, Proposition 7. Also available at airpower.airforce.gov.au. 50 The most famous instance was perhaps the surrender of tired Iraqi to US reporters during the first Gulf War. Cfr. Baltimore Sun 1991 02 27 online.

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assets under airmen. Traditionally presented as justification for independent air forces, it is now applied through the «Air Components» which in joint and/or multinational operations bring together air assets regardless of their ‘color’ or ‘branding’.

At the same time, the messy aftermath of the 2011 Libyan campaign stands out as a reminder that unsatisfactory outcomes depend on the overall approach rather than the tools chosen to implement it.51 Targets are not policy objectives, nor can air compensate for misjudged or non-identified end-states.

51 Cfr. Gregory Alegi, «The Italian Experience: Pivotal and Underestimated», in Karl

Muller (ed.), Precision and Purpose: airpower in the libyan Civil War, RAND, Washington D.C., 2015.

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“Aeque timebitur”. As proclaimed in the caption, in future wars the aircraft and death “will be feared equally”. Douhet and Trenchard believed this would make war less likely, a concept taken up again during the Cold War