Lessons from the first century of air warfare

Contemporary Review, Dec, 2003 by A.D. Harvey

DURING the hundred years that have elapsed since Orville Wright's first forty-yard flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, air power has been a dominant factor in warfare. And though for most of the last half-century it has been the long-range rocket (first employed in September 1944) which has preoccupied the fearful imaginings of the majority of the world's population, much of the actual experience of air warfare since 1945 has been along lines thoroughly explored during aviation's first four decades. Even today the B-52 heavy bomber, an essential element in the USAF's arsenal, dates back to the early 1950s, having first flown on 15 April 1952; the RAF's Nimrod electronic warfare aircraft have airframes based on the De Havilland Comet which first flew on 27 July 1949; nine national airforces around the world still employ the Douglas DC-3, which first flew on 17 December 1935. Despite evident continuities however, our understanding of the history of air warfare has suffered from the emphasis given to strategic bombing in the historiographical tradition favoured by the RAF and USAF, and by the way the lessons of warfare in the jet age, though incorporated into current operational doctrine, have been incompletely matched up with the lessons to be drawn from the history of air warfare in the piston-engined era.

The key aspects of air warfare may be considered under seven heads:

1. Air Superiority

A few triumphantly successful air superiority campaigns--by the British in Syria, the Germans in Russia, the Japanese in Malaya and the Philippines in 1941; by the Israelis in the Middle East in 1967--were icing on the gingerbread of campaigns actually won by ground forces. In Malaya and the Philippines, the Japanese made virtually no use of their air superiority, once it was achieved, to influence the ground fighting; in Sinai in 1967 Israeli aircraft made significant attacks on Egyptian army formations on only two days, and pilots complained of the lack of information they received from their army colleagues as a factor in limiting the effect of these attacks. Other air superiority campaigns were substantive failures--in September 1939, for example the Luftwaffe, despite its overwhelming numerical and technical preponderance, failed to prevent a single one of the fifty or so Polish Air Force attacks on German ground units. Similarly, the British Harrier jump jets dominated the skies over the Falklands, but were unable to stop the Argentinians from sinking two Royal Navy destroyers and two frigates. 'Big Week' in February 1944 demonstrated that the USAAF had established a numerical and qualitative advantage over the Luftwaffe, but even till the very end of the war the USAAF could not guarantee the safety of its heavy bombers from Luftwaffe fighter attacks, let alone protect them from flak.

2. Ground Support

During the 1939-45 war ground attack was always much less accurate than artillery. The huge losses said to have been inflicted on German armour by rocket-firing Hawker Typhoons at Mortain in August 1944 have now been shown to have been the result of wildly optimistic reporting. A case can also be made for supposing that the vast numbers of Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft employed by the VVS on the Eastern Front 1942-45 had more to do with their impact on frontline troops' morale than with any practical effect on the Wehrmacht's hardware. Advances in technology since 1945 may have transformed the equation between investment and result but data from Kosovo suggest that air attacks on enemy ranks still usually miss. Against lightly armed troops, as in Vietnam, the apparent success of fighter-bomber strikes and covering fire from helicopter gunships is largely predicated on the enemy's lack of suitable weaponry with which to defend itself against air attack. In Vietnam the USAF and the US Army's own helicopter gunships were able to make over-kill-level interventions again and again in the ground fighting, with minimal losses; but victory is more than a matter of spectacular newsreel: the US still lost that war.

There can be no doubt that the US and its allies won the First Gulf War in 1991, though there is still some questions whether the Iraqi Army can be regarded as having made any sort of determined resistance: a Russian general, Anatoliy Malyukov commented, 'this was the first time we saw a war like this, in which aviation practically bore by itself all fundamental missions'; but both photographs and eye-witness reports indicate that much of the bombed-out traffic left by the Iraqi Army on the Kuwait City-Basra road consisted not of military vehicles but looted civilian material, 'school buses, station wagons, tank trucks, luxury sedans, fire engines ...'. The US cannot always count on having such opponents.

3. Strategic Bombing

Strategic bombing programmes had a significant weakening effect on Germany, North Korea and North Vietnam but were clearly not decisive: North Vietnam, which in relative terms may have suffered most from this form of attack, actually came out victorious. In the case of Italy, Japan, and, probably, Afghanistan, bombing seems to have been a decisive factor, but its success was predicated in the inferiority (or non-existence) of air-defence and civil defence provision. In the case of Japan also, the bombing of cities may have been a less effective use of the B-29 bomber than its employment in mine-laying to strengthen the sea blockade of the Home Islands.