Anglo-American tactical air operations in World War II

Air & Space Power Journal, Winter, 2004 by Thomas Alexander Hughes

Editorial Abstract: A look at tactical air operations in World War II illuminates important aspects of coalition warfare and the command and control of airpower. Dr. Hughes suggests how lessons learned in the past might help today's joint war fighters use airpower as a combat arm with distinct capabilities and perspectives.

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IN THE ANGLO-AMERICAN tradition, aviation enthusiasts have championed airpower's inherent "flexibility and versatility" as one important advantage Airmen enjoy over their brethren on the ground and at sea. (1) Soldiers and sailors, the thinking goes, must face war's challenges bound by two-dimensional geometry and the slow algebra of surface movement. For them, demarcations like army-unit boundaries and naval vanguards not only rationalize the battlespace but also limit the elasticity of military options. To draw loosely from the great theorist Henri Jomini, to the man with a bayonet or the skipper on the foredeck, strategy is on a map. But flyers fight wars free of such earthly limits. Liberated from the tyranny of terrain and unfettered by maritime matters, pilots retain a capacity to move quickly and freely, complicating the enemy's action and defeating his strategy.

Or so the thinking goes. Undoubtedly more flexible and probably more versatile than other combat arms, airpower is both informed and constrained by the same map that influences ground and sea operations--partly because air forces are often used in joint and combined contexts. Furthermore, Airmen themselves have been unwilling to free operations from the boundaries of battle that emerge from ground or sea perspectives. Airpower's flexibility and versatility depend to some extent on a seamless battlespace, yet air leaders have often demonstrated an inclination to draw lines in the sky to codify the airspace, coordinate actions of different units, and manage coalition air operations. In other words, instead of implementing true integration that capitalizes on the wide-open sky, Airmen have often opted merely to deconflict one air operation from another--and in the process have fragmented their battlespace like their comrades in armies and navies have done.

Anglo-American tactical aviation in World War II serves as a case study in the tantalizing promise of integration and the eventual triumph of deconfliction to orchestrate airpower among services and between nations. Great Britain and the United States began their Allied effort in World War II with a strong common purpose and sufficiently similar views of aviation. In the laboratory of North Africa and Sicily, air leaders moved to amalgamate different air forces and to demark the sky along functional--not geographic or national--lines. Human, strategic, and political matters, however, made this objective too difficult. By the time of the invasion of Normandy, the Anglo-Americans had settled on strict air boundaries marked not only by national identity but also by army, corps, and division demarcations. This inclination to draw lines in the sky carried forward through the Cold War and beyond, suggesting that despite the rhetoric of airpower's flexibility and versatility, Airmen themselves sometimes adopt operational concepts that hinder the elasticity of military aviation. (2)

Tactical Aviation before World War II

The United States and Great Britain came to World War II with comparable if not uniform ideas about the proper development and application of airpower. Their respective aerial traditions from the Great War were operationally analogous, even if the British had more experience. In the war's last year, aviators from both countries participated in embryonic bombardment missions that fired the imaginations of airpower enthusiasts and fueled debate about its future on both sides of the Atlantic. In broad terms, flyers advocated inventive, independent bombing missions for aviation while more conservative adherents in ground and sea uniforms envisioned a role for aviation in support of traditional forces. In the interwar period, these points of view became associated with strategic or tactical airpower, respectively. In Great Britain and the United States, notions of strategic aviation grabbed Airmen, despite differences in national circumstance and the organizational status of their respective air arms. Over time, airpower thought in England and America charted similar courses as pilots championed strategic aviation and situated tactical airpower in an important, though clearly subordinate, role.

A disposition toward strategic aviation led Airmen in both nations to similar assessments of military operations elsewhere. Royal Air Force (RAF) officers denounced the tactical character of air operations during the Spanish Civil War as "a prostitution of the Air Force" and warned that the conflict did not fit expected conventions of general European warfare. (3) In America, Brig Gen Henry Arnold added that the fight had seen airpower used "promiscuously and indiscriminately to supplement artillery actions" instead of employing it behind enemy lines, "where it can exert power beyond the influence of your other arms, to influence the general action rather than the specific battle." (4) Pilots in America and Britain held steadfast to these beliefs, even after German blitzkrieg operations in Poland revealed tactical aviation's potential prowess. Air Marshal Arthur Coningham, the great British practitioner of tactical operations, recalled how the RAF refused to imitate the Luftwaffe's use of the Stuka, despite its status as "the pin up weapon of modern warfare .... Our Air Marshals were criticized at times but they knew the Stuka was a most inefficient aircraft of value only as a specialized weapon under selected conditions." (5)