THE AXIS AND the Allies produced eight hundred thousand military, transport, and trainer planes during World War II—an astonishing development given that air power had only come of age during World War I. Almost three hundred thousand planes were lost to combat or accidents, or were too badly damaged to be salvaged. The Allies built three times as many aircraft as the Axis. In the critical categories of heavy bombers, transports, and fighter-bombers, the aircraft of the Allies very quickly proved as superior in quality as they were greater in quantity, and they gave the victors advantages in mobility, deployment, and offensive reach undreamed of by the Axis.
Recordkeeping was predictably sporadic, especially on the Eastern Front. Many of the documents of the German Luftwaffe, for example, were lost by war’s end, both by intent and in the flotsam and jetsam of the chaos of spring 1945. Nonetheless, a good guess is that about 350,000 pilots and air crewmen on all sides died, although air fatalities in most militaries were lumped in with army losses. Perhaps nearly two million European and Asian civilians perished from strategic bombing raids, at least half of them women and children. World War II began with the bombing of Warsaw and ended with the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the impressive advances in air power, perhaps only 3 percent of military casualties during World War II were related to the use of aircraft. Still, air power proved the greatest single expenditure of all military investments, comprising on average 30 percent of the major belligerents’ outlay and over 40 percent of America’s wartime budget. The costly venture—one especially favored by the democracies as a way of reducing infantry losses—was predicated not on killing lots of the enemy per se, but on destroying its machines and its ability to produce war materiel. Air power required building and maintaining complex machines, airfields, and communications, the unprecedented consumption of expensive aviation fuels, and the costs of aircraft maintenance, as well as an extraordinary outlay in training pilots and crews in a way not true of ground troops.1
The cost effectiveness of air power was always hard to calibrate. By 1941, air forces were so deeply embedded within tactical army and navy operations, logistics, and transportation that it was almost impossible to isolate them as either a separate budgetary cost or a single strategic dividend. There was also the psychological component—how to calibrate the terror instilled by shrieking Stukas in Poland and France, or what the incineration of Tokyo and destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki did to the Japanese commitment never to surrender. It is canonical that air power in and of itself cannot end a war, but the Japanese gave up without being invaded, arguably in large part due to the B-29 fire raids and the dropping of two atomic bombs rather than just the Soviet invasion of Manchuria.2
Armored operations were not critical to the Japanese army. Amphibious assaults were not routine German naval operations. The Soviets did not conduct much strategic bombing. However, every belligerent employed some sort of tactical air force and diverted key resources from both the army and navy to fund it. Likewise, military aircraft spawned ancillary weapons and technologies completely unseen in the past, from huge aircraft carriers and airborne troops to guided missiles, semi-smart rocket bombs, and jet fighters. The two deadliest breakthroughs of the war—napalm and atomic bombs—were weapons of the air. Over Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, and Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, they accounted for the two most lethal days in the history of warfare.
Until the twentieth century, fighters were either soldiers or sailors: the hoplites of Marathon, the sailors on triremes at Salamis, the men both on and beneath the walls of Vienna, the sailors at Lepanto, the cavalry at Waterloo, and those manning ships of the line at Trafalgar. All missiles—arrows, sling balls, javelins, and artillery projectiles—were launched from the ground or ships. During most of the Age of Gunpowder until the late nineteenth century, the attacker was usually within sight of the intended target. In 1939 all that changed forever.3
Of course, fighting in the air was not entirely novel in 1939. A rare use of hot-air balloons in the Napoleonic Wars (1799/1803–1815) and the later famous 1849 Austrian “bombing” of Venice caused consternation but had no effect on the course of those wars. Thousands of biplanes in World War I put combatants above the earth in a way only dreamed about since the myth of Icarus or the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci. Aerial fighting after 1914 escalated rapidly, often involving thousands of planes. Yet, even then, airplanes were still considered unreliable or even dangerous machines and thus had little influence on the strategic pulse of the conflict, despite the production by late 1918 on all sides of an aggregate two hundred thousand war and transport planes. Nonetheless, in World War I the French and British only sporadically bombed Germany. Berlin remained almost completely untouched.4
German zeppelins and bombers inflicted slight damage and loss of life in Britain and France during World War I, far less than a single typical Allied bombing raid twenty-some years later. Air power by 1918 finally had grown to be important tactically over France and Belgium, but had yet to evolve into an effective strategic weapon. But by the outbreak of World War II, just four decades of aviation had already led to monoplanes so powerful and fast that those directing the air war suddenly began making astounding promises of air supremacy over the battlefield. These theories were grounded on a central premise: soldiers would not just transfer their fighting to the skies, but by doing so would reinvent battles below.
AS IS COMMONLY the case during cycles of radical technological breakthroughs, interwar euphoria over air power soon led to fantastic claims that air power would eliminate most fighting on the ground altogether. The prewar Italian air theorist General Giulio Douhet in dramatic fashion warned that
to have command of the air means to be in a position to wield offensive power so great it defies human imagination. It means to be able to cut an enemy’s army and navy off from their bases of operation and nullify their chances of winning the war. It means complete protection of one’s own country, the efficient operation of one’s army and navy, and peace of mind to live and work in safety. In short, it means to be in a position to win. To be defeated in the air, on the other hand, is finally to be defeated and to be at the mercy of the enemy, with no chance at all of defending oneself, compelled to accept whatever terms he sees fit to dictate. (italics in original)
The failed German Blitz over Britain would early on prove Douhet absolutely wrong in almost every claim. The problem with such air and armor prophets was not that they were mistaken per se, but that their exaggerated and melodramatic forecasts made no allowances for the age-old challenge and response cycles: for every “unstoppable” tank or bomber that “always got through,” World War II proved that there would emerge a new counterweapon, such as a cheap, hand-held Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon or high-performance fighter.5
Grandiose theories about omnipotent air power were understandable, given the lingering trauma arising from the Western European trenches and subsequent vows never to fight such a static infantry battle again. The utopian efforts of well-meaning statesmen in the 1920s to outlaw certain planes and bombing strategies conversely also meant exaggerating public fears of air power, while also stoking their own militaries’ desires to possess air forces as lethal as possible. The technological breakthroughs of the interwar period in aviation science—the payload, range, and speed of fighters and bombers tripled between 1935 and 1940 alone—also frightened European publics. The rapid growth of air power in the 1920s and 1930s was analogous to the specter of nuclear weapons in the early Cold War, which was another argument that new weapons had grown so terrible that wars of any sort could never be fought again without the utter destruction of civilizations.6
A new generation of fast and high-flying planes, it was believed, would bypass the battlefield to attack the civilian rear. Warplanes alone would end an enemy’s economic ability to make war, or at least would terrorize a population into calling off its military effort altogether, thereby diminishing the loss of life. In other words, no theorist or politician quite knew what to expect of air power in the next war.
“I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him; the bomber will always get through. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.” So on November 10, 1932, British prime minister Stanley Baldwin infamously offered his pessimistic assessment of air defenses to the British House of Commons. True, Baldwin might have been correct that a majority of bombers on most missions might usually “get through.” But they would do so only at such a high cost, and often with such questionable results, that doubt would arise over the sustainability and efficacy altogether of strategic bombing. Later, Baldwin would accept that fighter and bomber production could provide Britain deterrence against the German threat of invasion, but his successor Neville Chamberlain eventually returned to the earlier view that massive rearmament was wasteful and provocative, even though to his credit he maintained fighter production and encouraged air force development. The problem with Baldwin and Chamberlain was not that they had unilaterally disarmed Britain, but that both did not accelerate and expand British fighter production at a rate that was attainable, given British industrial and technological advancement and what was warranted by the rise of the Third Reich.7
The major prewar prophets of the air—Clément Ader (Military Aviation), Giulio Douhet (Command of the Air), Colonel William “Billy” Mitchell (Winged Defense), Royal Air Force Marshal Hugh Trenchard, and General Walther Wever—had in varying degrees predicted not just that air power would be integral to all land and sea tactical operations of the future, but also that strategic bombing could radically diminish enemy production. Among them, Wever perhaps was the least dogmatic; he tried to ensure a multifaceted tactical and strategic capability for the Luftwaffe rather than having it become an independent branch of the military that possessed the ability to win wars for Germany entirely through air operations against the industrial and population centers of the enemy. Again, some of the air determinists later were to be proven partly right by the cinders of Berlin and Tokyo, and perhaps by the dropping of the atomic bombs, but quite wrong by the horrendous losses of the Luftwaffe, RAF Bomber Command, and the US Army Air Forces, as well as the need of the Allies to invade the homelands of Germany and Italy to end the war. Even after prolonged bombing campaigns, cities and their inhabitants were surprisingly resilient. Planes, it turned out, were like catapults and crossbows: their effectiveness hinged on technological challenge and response, and evolving proper tactics and strategies.8
Soon flak guns, barrage balloons, radar, and fighter aircraft checked the raw offensive power of the bomber—along with nature, in the form of fog, ice, clouds, and high winds that were often the best defenses of Berlin and Tokyo. By late 1940, the prewar dreams of new uncontested weapons of the skies had been brought back to earth. Air power, it turned out, could not level the industries of island fortress Britain any more than nightly appearances of German Heinkel, Dornier, and Junkers bombers could terrorize the London public into giving up. Thousand-plane British area-bombing raids might have engulfed Hamburg in flames but nonetheless did not initially much curb the German production of new Tiger and Panther tanks that would blast apart their Russian counterparts.9
Humans, after all, live not in the air but on the ground, and sometimes underground, during bombing attacks. As deadly as strategic bombing might eventually become in World War II, it might never replace the Neanderthal need to meet the enemy on the ground, destroy his will to resist, defeat him, and occupy his territory. Air power could not see soldiers hiding in reinforced buildings or interrogate prisoners or talk with civilians. Critics of air power argued over whether bombers and fighters were simply assets transferred to another theater of operations—and one less relevant than ground warfare in forcing an enemy to surrender.
Yet, by 1943, once air power was freed from its fantastical prewar promises and with the continual appearance of far better engines, airframes, guidance, and sighting systems, strategic bombing and tactical air support slowly had begun to substantiate some of the wild claims of its prewar messiahs. Improved fighters became instant force multipliers of armor and infantry in a way not seen before 1939. Multitudes of long-range escort fighters, rather than new advanced bomber designs per se, finally empowered the deep penetrations of air squadrons. With air supremacy—destroying the enemy’s air forces to gain a monopoly of the skies and thus to attack with near impunity everything below—anything was possible. Without it, the airplane was simply nullified by another airplane.
As air advocate Alexander P. de Seversky put it, “only air power can defeat air power.… The actual elimination or even stalemating of an attacking air force can be achieved only by a superior air force.” Again, the great controversy of air power in World War II was not that planes created great damage on the ground. (By 1945 many parts of the great industrial and capital cities of the defeated Axis—Berlin, Bremen, Dusseldorf, Hamburg, Kobe, Mainz, Milan, Tokyo, and Yokohama—lay in rubble, and the culprit was most often air power.) Instead, the question hinged on the degree to which warplanes brought enough military dividends to justify their high costs—and if so, exactly how they were to be employed.10
By 1945, the rough consensus was that when air supremacy (effective enemy air opposition no longer exists) or perhaps even superiority (enemy air opposition is consistently defeated) was finally achieved, then a new force might be unleashed in spectacular fashion to destroy armies, navies, industries, and civilian centers in ways otherwise impossible. (It was assumed that naval and ground anti-aircraft systems could not nullify the offensive punch of aircraft.) Yet should belligerents find themselves almost evenly matched, stalemate in the skies became a diversion of resources perhaps otherwise better spent on the ground, especially given that the losses of pilots and crews often exceeded the fatality rates of foot soldiers.
PILOTS WERE AS important as planes, and sometimes good pilots in mediocre planes could match bad pilots in superior aircraft. Airmen were also not just combatants but technicians of sorts, who had to become more attuned to the workings of their machines than those who drove internal combustion engines below. Most important, airmen could target the enemy almost anywhere they pleased. The battle space was now to be gauged in cubic, not square, yards. It seemed as if the practical elements of all the classical military handbooks from Aeneas Tacticus, Vegetius, Sun Tzu, and the Byzantine Emperor Maurice to Generals Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini were suddenly to be rendered irrelevant. Air zealots were convinced that they were creators of an entirely new military science and doctrine.11
Ships before the twentieth century had fought only at sea level. Seasoned Alpine troops who fought in Scandinavia between 1939 and 1940, or Anglo-American and Japanese troops who climbed through the high ground of the China-Burma theater, rarely fought much above ten thousand feet. In contrast, airplanes now battled from near ground level to thirty thousand feet, in a three-dimensional fashion unknown among earth- and sea-bound soldiers and sailors, and in an atmosphere unobstructed by coastlines or mountains. The Allies sought to send out bombing squadrons—especially with the advent of the B-29 Superfortress in late 1944—that flew so high at five-and-a-half miles above the earth that they were almost immune from both artillery fire and most enemy fighters. But that assumption sometimes failed to reckon that the increased power and fuel required to reach such altitudes radically impaired bombing accuracy, payload capacity, speed, and both human and mechanical performance. If air power was freed from the impediments of terrain, it was also far more constrained by a nascent and not altogether understood technology.
When a Tiger tank stalled or a British destroyer lost power, trapped crews still had some recourse to fight on land or the surface of the sea. In the air, the failure of machines sent crews spiraling to earth in parachutes, at best, or free falling to their deaths, at worst. In other words, airplanes, like submarines, were intrinsically more dangerous modes of transport than either surface ships or wheeled vehicles, especially in the terrible weather of the northern latitudes. War at sea was treacherous. But that danger was why most of history’s greatest sea battles—Salamis, Lepanto, and Navarino, for example—took place near land.12
Aeronautics evolved far more rapidly than even the most radical improvements in naval and land warfare. If it had taken three hundred years for clumsy matchlocks and harquebuses to displace crossbows and longbows, in just the twenty years between the world wars, air power was completely reinvented. True, the new American Essex-class aircraft carriers that by early 1944 had ensured naval supremacy over the Japanese were far more sophisticated than the smaller and simpler USS Wasp (CV-7) (1940–1942) or even the huge battle-cruiser converts like the USS Lexington (CV-2) (1927–1942) and USS Saratoga (CV-3) (1925–1946). Tiger tanks were far more powerful (if hardly more reliable) than their tiny and mostly underarmed German Mark I and II predecessors that crushed Poland. All these improvements nonetheless were incremental evolutions rather than pathbreaking innovations. Turrets, tracks, armor, and internal combustion engines marked the parameters of tank technology.13
In contrast, World War II began with plodding biplanes like the British Fairey Swordfish torpedo bomber and ended inconceivably with the deployment of Me 262 German jet fighters and V-2 ballistic missiles. Air power saw the greatest technological breakthroughs of any theater of the war. The allure and potential of such a radically new technology initially seemed to have drawn the top engineering and scientific minds in Europe in a way not true of artillery, tanks, or surface vessels. America’s air lords—Hap Arnold, Jimmy Doolittle, Curtis LeMay, and Carl Spaatz—proved among the most capable generals of any military in the war.14
The experience of air battle was also far more solitary. Even in the largest of planes—the behemoth B-29 that burned down much of the urban core of Imperial Japan, for example—only eleven crewmen fought within a single airframe. That was a far different experience from, say, even that of a small Fletcher-class destroyer, which usually required over three hundred officers and men, or the tank crews that were accompanied by hundreds of infantrymen and grenadiers at their side. The fighter pilot depended on his own machine far more than other warriors below, and usually had far more ability at his own fingertips to kill and destroy than foot soldiers and sailors. And yet the pilot’s own aircraft required a squad of mechanics to fuel, fix, and arm the plane—numbers vastly greater than those to the rear that supplied and equipped a single foot soldier. Esprit de corps was pyramidal, not lateral, as a host of unseen support soldiers was needed to empower a single pilot or bombing crew.15
Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr., sixty-two when the war ended, was on the bridge of his warships during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, and sixty-three-year-old General Gerd von Rundstedt motored about the front during the 1939 invasion of Poland. In contrast, supreme air marshals rarely flew routine fighter missions and only occasionally were observers on bombing missions. No one expected General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, commanding general of the US Army Air Forces, to lead B-17 squadrons over Germany, or General Curtis LeMay, veteran of some of the most dangerous B-17 missions and a few B-29 flights from China, to lead the B-29s on the fire raids—as much as either might have liked to. Air power was different: a middle-aged or old man could lead from the bridge or jeep, but not so easily from behind the controls of a fighter or high-performance bomber. Either the greater odds of death in air combat or the rigors of air pressure and altitude made leading from behind far more common among air marshals. Of course, too, a general in a cockpit was more isolated from his men in other bombers than was an army commander in a jeep on the ground. The old World War I ace, rotund Hermann Goering, like Field Marshal Albert Kesselring staring out from Cap Gris Nez across the Channel, had no firsthand and updated knowledge of British Spitfires or of much else above the ground.16
Remote and distant supreme command—in the manner of Admiral Doenitz’s unfamiliarity with the constantly changing threats facing his U-boats—may explain in part why airplanes (like submarines) for much of the war were often so unwisely deployed. Often air campaigns were waged against the recommendations of pilots themselves, whether in the German decisions to turn back from attacking British airfields in 1940 to the area bombing of cities or in the largely disastrous American daylight precision bombing campaigns of 1942–1943. Over twenty American generals and admirals died due to enemy action during combat operations during World War II; the few Army Air Force generals who perished were lost in crashes (e.g., Lieutenant General Frank Maxwell Andrews, Lieutenant General Millard Fillmore Harmon Jr., and Brigadier General James R. Anderson) rather than shot down leading missions.
By 1945 aircraft carriers, not battleships, were recognized as a navy’s most lethal attack arm. The two largest American offensive operations in the European theater—Normandy and the Arnhem campaign—all saw airborne troops play major, if not always successful, roles. Without British Mosquitoes and Typhoons, and American Thunderbolt fighter-bombers, the Allied ground offensive of July and early August 1944 might well have stalled in Normandy. Between D-Day and the end of the European war on May 8, 1945, American fighters and fighter-bombers flew an incredible 212,731 sorties against German forces, and expended twenty-four million rounds of .50 caliber ammunition at the German army—over seventy thousand rounds every day and about twenty bullets per enemy combat soldier. German Panzers, at any rate, considered it dangerous to be transferred from the Eastern Front to the Western, largely because American and British armor had far more lethal fighter air support than did superb Soviet armor.17
Ships operated amid squalls and storms. Vast amphibious operations like the D-Day invasion of Normandy went ahead in the middle of rough seas. British cruisers, battleships, destroyers, and carriers in May 1941 closed in on the Bismarck despite fog and high seas. Army Group Center continued its desperate march on Moscow even when late autumn temperatures dipped to almost minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
Routine cloud cover and the jet stream, however, doomed the early campaigns of high-altitude, precision bombing by B-29 Superfortresses. Without the confident expectation of serial snowstorms, fog, and overcast skies over Belgium, Hitler would never have ordered his December 16, 1944, “Watch on the Rhine” campaign through the Ardennes that hinged, for a moment successfully, on inclement weather that grounded British and American fighter-bombers. Even with crude radar sets, weather patterns governed the effectiveness of World War II air power in a way not true of either naval or infantry operations. “If weather at the target area was not suitable to bombing,” wrote American Brigadier General Haywood S. Hansell, “then a whole mission had been wasted and perhaps the lives of many crewmen had been lost to no effect.”18
The epic poet Homer’s bowman Paris was deemed less heroic than the spearman Achilles. A medieval knight’s death by a crossbow bolt was somehow felt to be tragic in a way being hacked in face-to-face combat by an aristocrat’s broadsword was not. Transferred to the twentieth century, that same dichotomy played out with a rookie pilot in a strafing Typhoon or Thunderbolt above Normandy easily wiping out a crack German veteran Waffen SS platoon that had survived three years of nightmarish battle on the Eastern Front. The lamentations of German generals over the hordes of fighter-bombers that shredded their Panzers were predicated not just on anger at the Luftwaffe’s comparative impotence but also on the ancestral notion that missile troops—in this case American and British kids in their teens and early twenties piloting Jäger Bombers (“hunter-bombers”)—should not so easily from afar and anonymously kill their supposed veteran infantry betters on the battlefield.19
World War II infantrymen and sailors objected that aircrews’ food, accommodations, and hours were far preferable to the alternatives of the trench and foxhole, or the mess hall and hammock on rolling seas. Most airfields were to the rear of the front lines. Relative calm between missions allowed a break from the stress of combat that sailors on a cruiser never had because they could never be quite sure whether there were enemies below, above, or on the surface. Soldiers complained that they waited weeks for rest and relaxation, but “flyboys” enjoyed both every day. Such perceptions had nothing to do with the reality of death. B-17 crews, for example, suffered higher casualty percentages than did most infantry units or seamen below. By late 1944 and early 1945, the Luftwaffe on average was losing to accidents and enemy action more than 30 percent of its deployable fighter force per month.20
Three to four times as many ground soldiers were wounded as killed. But in the air the ratio was reversed: three times as many were killed as injured—no doubt because of the ubiquity of larger-caliber machine guns, cannon, and flak, the added enemy of the altitude, and the lack of accessible medical attention. Thin skins of a metal plane offered almost no protection for pilots and crews. Hundreds of machine gun and cannon rounds, usually in calibers larger than those of infantry rifles, often left little flesh remaining. Other than occasional armor behind the seat, most planes did not have the horsepower to accommodate reinforcement of their aluminum airframes. Planes were far faster than land vehicles and their crashes therefore far more lethal. Flying in a bomber was the equivalent of manning a tank or ship without armor. Harold Bird-Wilson, air vice marshal and veteran of the Battle of Britain, relates the gruesome story of his squadron commander, who mistakenly attacked a heavy German Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter: “Jerry got the better of him and all we found of him was his shirt.” No poem of World War II has been more haunting than Randall Jarrell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” with its eerie last line, “When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.”21
Successfully bailing out of a B-17 or B-29 was no guarantee of survival. Along with the rigors of capture and detention, there were occasional summary executions by civilians showered daily by incendiaries. My father, a central fire control gunner of more than three dozen B-29 missions, once remarked that he sometimes did not even wear a parachute on a low-level fire raid, given that either the inferno or irate civilians below meant instant death if he ever descended from the plane. Fighter-bombers often unloaded their magazines on civilian trains, ordinary car traffic, and houses and farms—a fact not forgotten by those on the receiving end when pilots bailed out or ditched. Aircrews did not overly worry about the effect of their operations on civilians thousands of feet below. As one B-29 tail gunner remarked years later of the fire raids, “unlike men on the ground, we were far removed from the suffering we caused far below. We engaged in anonymous destruction.” No one lamented, for example, that a British fighter strafed the car of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock—who claimed privately that he had no sympathy for the Nazism that he so eagerly served—killing the general, his wife, and stepdaughter, who were all fleeing the front in the closing days of the war.22
HISTORICALLY, CAVALRY HAD played five chief roles on the Western battlefield. They served as prebattle reconnaissance forces to scout enemy formations. They covered the exposed flanks of vulnerable infantrymen. As heavier mounted lancers, cavalry blasted a hole for infantry to exploit. Horsemen were also used as rapid pursuers against the vulnerable and fleeing defeated. Occasionally en masse they conducted full-scale attacks on enemy infrastructure. The new air cavalry of World War II followed all five of those agendas. During the breakout from Normandy in late July 1944, Allied reconnaissance apprised the American army of the position of dug-in German formations. In “Operation Cobra,” launched seven weeks after the D-Day landings, some three thousand American heavy and fighter-bombers during the last week of July 1944 blasted a hole through German Panzer divisions. That massive aerial assault allowed the US First Army to break out from its stagnation within the hedgerows.
Once the newly formed American Third Army joined the race eastward from Normandy, General George S. Patton relied on the tactical air cavalry of General Elwood “Pete” Quesada’s fighter-bombers to protect the flanks of his fast-moving force from encirclement by superior German Panzers. Operation Barbarossa three years earlier had been predicated on Panzer thrusts that ranged far ahead of infantry, their vulnerable flanks also being protected by the Luftwaffe. Even if American fighter-bombers could not always easily stop Panzers, they systematically destroyed supply trucks, interrupted logistics, terrified armor and artillery crews, and slaughtered infantry. Weeks later at the so-called Falaise Pocket, it was the pursuing air formations, in the manner of Napoleonic chasseurs, that inflicted much of the damage on fleeing remnants of Army Group B that had sought to escape from the closing Allied pincers. By war’s end, packs of fighters were free-ranging over the enemy’s homeland, destroying anything that moved.23
Air power was revolutionary and traditional all at once. It brought cavalry to the heavens as well as the machine gunner and heavy artillery. Speed and distance were redefined by air power. Bombs came from distances undreamed of by artillery, while airborne weapons were fired not by slow-moving vehicles or ships but from platforms that were gone by the time their shells hit their targets.
Common air parity did neither side much good. Occasional air superiority allowed planes to attack those below with mixed results. But rare air supremacy meant air power ruled the seas and the ground. The effect of air power may not have been the only cause of the Axis defeat. But as a general rule, when German and Japanese planes enjoyed supremacy in Western Europe, Russia, and Asia and the Pacific until mid-1942, the Axis were ascendant. When they did not, Axis forces between 1943 and 1945 across the globe quickly went from stalemate to defeat to absolute ruin, as Allied aircraft flew and attacked wherever they wished.