Lessons from the first century of air warfare

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

5. Long Range Attack

Since Bleriot's flight across the English Channel in 1909 the aeroplane has always offered the promise of eliminating the constraints of geography. During the Second World War, up to and including the early daylight raids by B-29s on Japan, ultra-long range missions generally achieved poor results in no way commensurate with the investment of effort. The longest non-stop bombing mission of the war, the twenty-four-hour, 3700-mile flight completed by a single Savoia Marchetti SM 75 GA from Gandurra on the island of Rhodes to Gura in Eritrea and back, on 23-24 May 1943, failed even to find its target: the US 83rd Air Depot Group, which then occupied the former Italian airbase at Gura, has no record of ever having been bombed. Later the B-29 fire raids on Japan's cities had a significant impact on Japan's war-making capacity: but they depended on a vast effort by the US Army and Navy to secure bases close enough to fly from. It was the B-52 which fulfilled the World War II dream of a truly intercontinental bomber: but again ultra-long range missions are very much a rich boy's toy. The sixteen-hour 7772-mile mission by a Royal Air Force Vulcan to bomb the runway at Port Stanley on 30 April-1 May 1982 required the support of eleven Victor air-refuelling tankers. Only two of the twenty-one 1000 lb bombs carried hit the runway. For most purposes aircraft carriers are a more practical means of bringing one's air power close to the theatre of operations: but then, if the aircraft carrier is close enough to attack from, it is close enough to attack.

6. Air Supply

The Berlin airlift of June 1948-May 1949 showed what is possible--providing the other side does not interfere. The Luftwaffe's attempts to supply the Sechste Armee at Stalingrad failed, and British air supply of Slim's beleaguered 14th Army at Imphal, April-June 1944, depended on overwhelming Allied air superiority.

7. Airborne Assault

The World War II technology of glider-borne troops and artillery and mass parachute drops has of course been superseded by the employment of helicopters but the basic lessons of Holland 1940, Crete 1941, North Burma, March 1944, and Arnhem, September 1944, remain valid: however useful airborne assaults may be behind or on the fringes of a main battle front, against enemy ground forces organized and in strength airborne forces are likely to suffer disproportionate losses during the flying-in phase and, unless they succeed in defeating the enemy's principal formations before they have regrouped, will be at a serious disadvantage with regard to heavy artillery, armour and (where relevant) ground transportation.

Precisely because air warfare is such an expensive way of making war, it is the sphere where the richer side can most effectively assert its advantage over the poorer side. Vietnam showed that even an enormous advantage in economic and technological resources may not necessarily be decisive: in the overall picture of a war other factors may predominate. But even Vietnam, and earlier Korea, fit into a pattern already detectable in the very first employment of aircraft in warfare, during Italy's invasion of Libya in 1911-12, clearly evident since the final phases of World War II, and ever more inescapable since 1990: the current practice of air warfare consists of richer and more technologically advanced societies imposing their will on weaker and less adequately mobilized antagonists. We should be wary of supposing that the lessons to be learnt from this will stand us in good stead when, later in this century or in the next, we move back into a world order characterized by the confrontation of continent-dominating super-powers or economic power blocs.