“I can see it falling through the sky for a couple of seconds and then it disappears,” a thirty-year-old Italian pilot named Giulio Gavotti recalled breathlessly of his first bomb run over a target in Libya. “After a little while, I can see a small dark cloud in the middle of the encampment. I have hit the target!”
In 2011, the world watched as NATO airpower provided the critical edge in the defeat of Muammar Gaddafi’s forty-two-year rule in Libya. In the history of airpower, compared to the great battles of World War II, the Libyan campaign of 2011 was a footnote.
In the history of airpower, 2011 was neither a turning point nor a tipping point. It was the centennial.
Exactly one hundred years earlier, in 1911, in the skies over exactly the same place, Lieutenant Gavotti’s first bomb run had been the first bomb run in the history of aerial warfare.
With the advent of heavier-than-air flight early in the twentieth century, the armies of the world had been buying airplanes, but as with the balloons used by the armies of the nineteenth century, they were only intended as passive observation platforms.
Among the wars being fought by European countries in the early twentieth century was a land grab by Italy that involved the seizure of Ottoman Turkish colonial possessions in North Africa, specifically in the area that later became Libya. November found a squadron of Italian aircraft involved. One of the pilots was Giulio Gavotti.
“Today two boxes full of bombs arrived,” Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father in Naples. “We are expected to throw them from our planes. It is very strange that none of us have been told about this, and that we haven’t received any instruction from our superiors. So we are taking the bombs on board with the greatest precaution. It will be very interesting to try them on the Turks.”
The rest is history.
Three years later, the armies of Europe’s great powers, each of them now equipped with small aviation sections, were in the opening throes of World War I.
Meanwhile, the mainstream technical establishment had been slow to grasp the tactical importance of such operations. In October 1910, Scientific American dismissed the idea of airplanes as war machines, noting that “outside of scouting duties, we are inclined to think that the field of usefulness of the aeroplane will be rather limited. Because of its small carrying capacity, and the necessity for its operating at great altitude, if it is to escape hostile fire, the amount of damage it will do by dropping explosives upon cities, forts, hostile camps, or bodies of troops in the field to say nothing of battleships at sea, will be so limited as to have no material effects on the issues of a campaign.”
Between 1914 and 1918 in the skies over World War I battlefields, the young men of Gavotti’s generation would prove the fallacy of the venerable journal’s assumptions.
In that conflict, aircraft were, indeed, first used as observation platforms, but air-to-air combat was a natural step in the evolution of aerial warfare. Both sides had airplanes and aviators, and soon they encountered one another over the trenches. The first confrontations were gentlemanly, indeed, probably chivalrous, for the knights of the air had something in common with other airmen that their respective countrymen on the ground could only dream of.
It didn’t take long, however, for the realization to sink in that the enemy in the trenches, with his Mauser trained on your skull, saluted the same flag as the silk-scarved enemy gliding by in his lacquered Albatros. Somebody took his sidearm aloft, the first airplane went down, and air combat was born.
Soon, like Gavotti, aerial observers flying over the enemy’s lines realized that they could as easily drop something that exploded. Tactical bombing, as a doctrine, was born. To use Scientific American’s phrasing, aerial bombing had actually started to have “material effects on the issues of a campaign.”
Meanwhile, there were some farsighted airpower theorists who began imagining that aviation might potentially be deployed in such a way as to have “material effects” beyond the battlefield, thereby shaping the course and outcome of the war itself. This is what came to be known as strategic airpower.
Tactical bombing, simply stated, is aerial bombardment of enemy targets, such as troop concentrations, airfields, entrenchments, and the like, as part of an integrated air-land battlefield action at or near the front. Tactical airpower generally is used toward the same goals as, and in direct support of, naval forces or ground troops in the field.
Strategic airpower, by contrast, seeks targets without a specific connection with what is happening at the front. Strategic airpower is used to strike far behind the lines, at the enemy’s means of waging war—such as factories, power plants, cities—and ultimately, the enemy’s very will to wage war.
Strategic aircraft naturally differ from tactical aircraft in that they have a much longer range and payload capacity—certainly more than the average 1914 airplane.
It was not until around the time of World War I that aviation technology had developed to the point where such large aircraft were practical. One of the original pioneers of strategic airpower was a Russian engineer and aviation enthusiast. The year was 1913, and the man was Igor Sikorsky, the same man who would amaze the world thirty years later with the first practical helicopters. The airplane was named the Ilya Mourometz (or Muromets) after the tenth-century Russian hero, and it was the world’s first strategic bomber. The big plane was designed as an airliner but was adapted as a bomber when the war began. It was powered by four engines, as no other plane before it had been, with the single exception of its own prototype, the unarmed Russky Vityaz (Russian Knight).
By the winter of 1914–1915, a sizable number of these big bombers were in action against German targets. The bomb load of each plane exceeded half a ton, and with a range of nearly four hundred miles, they were able to hit targets well behind German lines. The Russians conducted more than four hundred raids without the Germans mounting a similar campaign in retaliation, but in the end, other factors intervened. After initial victories, the Russian Army was defeated on the ground by 1917, the tsar had abdicated, and the events leading to the Russian Revolution were rapidly under way. The Ilya Mourometz had been successful in what it did, but it played only a minor part in one of mankind’s biggest dramas. Igor Sikorsky emigrated from Russia to the United States, and the theory of strategic airpower would remain largely dormant in Russia until after the next world war.
Strategic air operations on the western front were soon to follow those in the east, with British aircraft launching strikes against German positions in occupied Belgian coastal cities in February 1915. The Germans countered with zeppelin attacks on Paris and on British cities as far north as Newcastle. On the night of May 31, after ten months of war, London looked upon its own dead for the first time. About a week later, Austrian aviators launched the first long-range strategic mission on the southern front, causing several fires in and around the Piazza San Marco in Venice. By 1917, the Germans were using long-range, fixed-wing Gotha bombers against London.
In April 1918, shortly after being established as an independent service, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) conducted a series of raids on German cities in the Ruhr and even ranged as far south as Frankfurt, though the raids were more a strategic bombing experiment than a strategic bombing offensive. A full-scale strategic air offensive against Germany was scheduled for the spring of 1919, with Berlin on the target list, but the war ended in November 1918 with the plan untried.
Though the intervention of United States manpower in World War I may have been of pivotal importance to the Allies, the involvement of American airpower was not extensive and consisted almost entirely of tactical operations. Nevertheless, the idea of strategic airpower made a great impression on the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) air units in the war, Colonel Billy Mitchell.
Mitchell’s boss, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, the overall commander of the AEF, saw airpower strictly as tactical ground support, the conventional view of the time. Mitchell, however, saw the potential for a broader application. He wanted to see the AEF airmen striking the enemy at his source of supply, rather than being simply another weapon for ground commanders to use as they would use artillery.
Mitchell became the first major American exponent of strategic airpower, but his ideas were never implemented during the war. Part of the reason was that strategic bombing, though experimental in British and French doctrine, was not yet accepted by the American military establishment at all.
“Aircraft move hundreds of miles in an incredibly short space of time, so that even if they are reported as coming into a country, across its frontiers, there is no telling where they are going to go to strike,” the prescient Mitchell wrote, describing a method of warfare that was still many years in the future. “Wherever an object can be seen from the air, aircraft are able to hit it with their guns, bombs, and other weapons. Cities and towns, railway lines and canals cannot be hidden. Not only is this the case on land, it is even more the case on the water, because on the water no object can be concealed unless it dives beneath the surface.”
After the war, Mitchell, now a brigadier general, became the central figure in the crusade for strategic airpower. Mitchell argued that strategic bombers were cheaper to build and operate than battleships, and they could be used faster and more easily to project American power wherever it might be needed around the world.
“Neither armies nor navies can exist unless the air is controlled over them,” Mitchell wrote in 1925. “Air forces, on the other hand, are the only independent fighting units of the day, because neither armies nor navies can ascend and fight twenty thousand feet above the earth’s surface.”
He raised hackles in 1921 when he told Congress that his bombers could sink any ship afloat. To prove him wrong, the US Navy agreed to let him try out his theories on some captured German warships they had inherited at the end of the war and that needed to be disposed of.
The rules of engagement were written by the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet commander. The Navy would regulate the weight of the bombs and the number of planes, and reserved the right to call off the engagement at any time. In a series of demonstrations held in July 1921, Mitchell and the Army Air Service attacked the German ships anchored in Chesapeake Bay. A destroyer went down, followed by the light cruiser Frankfurt, and ultimately the heavily armored battleship Ostfriesland. Mitchell had dramatically proven his point, but both the US Army and the US Navy remained officially unconvinced.
“Aircraft possess the most powerful weapons ever devised by man,” Mitchell cautioned. “They carry not only guns and cannon but heavy missiles that utilize the force of gravity for their propulsion and which can cause more destruction than any other weapon. One of these great bombs hitting a battleship will completely destroy it. Consider what this means to the future systems of national defense. As battleships are relatively difficult to destroy, imagine how much easier it is to sink all other vessels and merchant craft.”
As Mitchell became more and more outspoken, the US Army transferred him from Langley Field in Virginia (too close to Washington for their comfort) to Kelly Field near San Antonio, Texas. In 1925, after the loss of life from the crash of the Navy dirigible Shenandoah, Mitchell called the management of national defense by the War and Navy Departments “incompetent” and “treasonable.” The army had had enough. Mitchell was court-martialed, convicted, reduced to colonel, and drummed out of the service on half pension. He died in 1936, just a few years short of seeing strategic airpower play a key role in the Allied victory in World War II.
Nevertheless, even before the death of Billy Mitchell, the proponents of the still-unproven concept of strategic airpower had risen to places of influence within the major air forces of the world. In both Britain and the United States, large, four-engine heavy bombers were in development, while in Germany, airpower in general would become fully integrated into battlefield doctrine.