How Effective is Strategic Bombing?

Lessons Learned From World War II to Kosovo

Gian P. Gentile

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780814732717
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

In the wake of World War II, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson and President Harry S. Truman established the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, to determine exactly how effectively strategic air power had been applied in the European theater and in the Pacific. The final study, consisting of over 330 separate reports and annexes, was staggering in its size and emphatic in its conclusions. As such it has for decades been used as an objective primary source and a guiding text, a veritable Bible for historians of air power.

In this aggressively revisionist volume, Gian Gentile examines afresh this influential document to reveal how it reflected to its very foundation the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing. In the process, he exposes the survey as largely tautological and thereby throwing into question many of the central tenets of American air power philosophy and strategy.

With a detailed chapter on the Gulf War and the resulting Gulf War Air Power Survey, and a concluding chapter on the lessons of the Kosovo air war, How Effective is Strategic Bombing? is the most comprehensive and important book on air power strategy in decades.

CHAPTER 1
THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN CONCEPTUAL APPROACH TO STRATEGIC BOMBING AND THE UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY

All this sounds very simple; but as a matter of fact the selection of objectives, the grouping of zones, and determining the order in which they are to be destroyed is the most difficult and delicate task in aerial warfare, constituting what may be defined as aerial strategy.

GUILIO DOUHET, 1921

There is that whole question of what is morale…. I confess I don’t know what morale is.

CARL BECKER, 1943

In his 1921 book The Command of the Air, Italian air power theorist Guilio Douhet argued that once strategic bombers had achieved command of the air, they could quickly force an enemy into submission by dropping bombs on key targets in its cities.¹ But he only loosely defined those targets, and he never explained how to select them. Indeed, Douhet went on to state that it would be impossible to determine enemy targets in aerial warfare systematically because the choice would “depend on a number of circumstances, material, moral, and psychological, the importance of which, though real, is not easily estimated. It is just here, in grasping these imponderables, in choosing enemy targets, that future commanders of Independent Air Forces will show their ability.”² Considering the overwhelming confidence that Douhet had in the ability of a fleet of bombers to destroy enemy cities and break the will of the civilian population, one would think that target selection would have played a more important role in the Italian’s theory of air warfare.³ Douhet’s reluctance to deal with target choice anticipated the problems that air commanders would have with target selection and evaluation during World War II.

Douhet challenged conventional military thought on warfare in the 1920s by claiming that the nation that owned an air force predominantly of strategic bombers could avoid costly naval and ground engagements by attacking the “vital centers” of enemy cities, thereby creating terror among the civilian population. The result, according to Douhet, would be a quick, decisive victory for the nation equipped with an independent strategic air force. A casual glance at the title of Douhet’s book, The Command of the Air, leads one to think that gaining superiority in the air—the ability to fly at will over enemy territory—was the most important objective. But for the Italian, this was only the first, albeit essential, part of a theory of air warfare that ultimately envisioned using airplanes to bomb enemy cities.⁴ Within those cities, Douhet argued, were primarily two types of objectives to bomb: the morale of the people and their material resistance. Munitions factories, transportation networks, and electric power plants, for example, made up material resistance—what commonly became know as the enemy’s war-making capacity. But Douhet made clear that while it might be important to attack the enemy’s industrial capacity to resist, the enemy’s morale would ultimately have to be attacked. The way to break the morale—the will to resist—of the enemy was to bomb cities, killing large numbers of civilians.⁵

American airmen were aware of Douhet’s theory. As early as 1923 a translation of The Command of the Air was being circulated at the Air Service Headquarters. In 1933 the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Maxwell Field, Alabama, maintained copies of Douhet’s work.⁶ Historians have debated how much direct influence Douhet had on the development of American air power strategy in the 1930s. Some analysts argue that air power proponents like William Mitchell had greater influence on American thinking on strategic bombing than Douhet. Others argue that Douhet’s prolific writings played an important role in shaping American views on air power.⁷ Most scholars, however, would agree that Douhet’s collective works gave a literary comprehensiveness to the ideas that shaped the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing.⁸

By 1939 American airmen had developed a conception of air power that envisioned using strategic bombers to attack the “vital links” of the enemy’s war-making capacity, thereby breaking the enemy’s will to resist.⁹ But what were the “vital links” in the enemy’s industrial structure essential to the capacity to resist? American airmen were soldiers, not experts in industrial economies. They were trained to fly aircraft and to drop bombs on critical targets. However, the targets to attack under the American conception were economic in nature. To assess how the destruction of any given target would affect the overall war capacity of the enemy nation required a level of analysis that airmen, by their training, were unable to provide.

Naval and ground commanders of the same period did not have the same problem. For an army officer commanding an infantry division, for example, the target or objective to attack was generally similar in nature to his own command. It would probably be another infantry division or smaller-sized unit trying to block his advance. To analyze the target and its importance, therefore, was something that the ground officer was trained to do. The ground commander could determine success or failure by the amount of ground gained and the level of destruction of the enemy and his own forces.

For American airmen, target selection and evaluation were a much more complicated and ambiguous task. Unlike the ground officer, airmen were generally not attacking targets similar to their own men and equipment.¹⁰ Hence the uncertainties of target selection and evaluation, which were embedded in the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing, created a need for civilian experts to change “imponderables” to ponderables. Organizations like the Committee of Operations Analysts, the Committee of Historians, and the United States Strategic Bombing Survey were an outgrowth of this need.

I

The biggest problem for American air officers during the years following the end of World War I, however, was not so much target selection (that problem would present itself more fully in the 1930s when they began to develop a strategic bombing concept) as achieving a coequal status with the army and navy. The leading proponent in the 1920s for an independent air arm was Army General William Mitchell.¹¹ Conventional thinking concerning air power during that decade saw it mainly as an adjunct, or supporting arm, of ground and naval operations. Since air power, according to this line of thinking, could not win a war, it did not require independent status. Mitchell, conversely, argued that an independent air force could win by itself. He also posited that the United States should rely on an independent air force, not the navy, for its first line of defense.¹² For publicly criticizing his superiors and their respective services, Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 and convicted of “conduct prejudicial to good order and military discipline.”¹³ After the conviction Mitchell resigned from the service but continued his air power crusade with greater zeal.

Throughout the court-martial ordeal Mitchell had the strong support of his fellow air officers. For example, Lieutenant Orvil Anderson, who later became a major general and served as a director on the Strategic Bombing Survey, testified on behalf of Mitchell’s ideas for an independent air arm. One year prior to Mitchell’s court-martial, the House of Representatives created a committee led by Representative Florian Lampert to determine air power’s role in the national defense. The committee received testimony from many air officers who argued that the air corps should have an independent role in defending the continental United States from naval and air attack. The navy also presented its case to the committee. Lieutenant Ralph A. Ofstie testified that the nation’s defense was in good hands with the navy and therefore an independent air force was not needed.¹⁴ Ofstie, like Orvil Anderson, became a director of the Strategic Bombing Survey at the end of World War II. His testimony in 1924 anticipated the bitter interservice rivalry between himself and Anderson over air power issues in the post–World War II unification debates.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, airmen had to show caution when advocating their conceptual approach to strategic bombing. Mitchell and other American airmen believed that strategic bombers were fundamentally offensive weapons designed to strike quickly, violently, and preferably with surprise at key targets in enemy territory.¹⁵ In the logic of air power theory that Douhet, Mitchell, and other airmen of the time understood, there was a need to strike first at the enemy’s homeland to destroy its aircraft and production facilities before they could be brought to bear against the United States. Defense of the continental United States, however, was the ostensible justification that airmen used when calling for an independent air force. Continental defense fit comfortably with isolationist American attitudes. It would have been unpalatable for air officers to advocate air power in an offensive role after the American experience with German aggression in the Great War and the nominal support for the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1929 that purportedly outlawed war. The Depression years focused American attention on internal domestic problems. Arguing for a fleet of long-range strategic bombers designed to attack the homeland of a foreign nation obviously smacked of direct American military involvement in foreign affairs. Air officers, therefore, had to couch their crusade for an independent air force (an air force that they understood fundamentally as an offensive weapon) in the rhetoric of defensive military policy that coincided with the isolationist temper of the American public.¹⁶

In 1937, Major General Frank M. Andrews, commanding general of the Army Air Forces, supported a congressional bill to make the air arm independent from the army. The general stated in a memorandum to the army adjutant general that the rapid evolution of bombardment aviation in other threatening nations throughout the world had convinced him “that a safer state of national security and peace can be insured more positively and sooner, through the development of air defense and the Air Forces which make possible such defense … on a basis coequal in authority with the Army.” The implication of General Andrews’s statement was that the proposed independent air force would use its airplanes in a defensive role: to engage and destroy enemy aircraft in the air as they attempted to bomb American cities. This was not primarily the way General Andrews and other airmen intended to use an independent air force. The general went on to acknowledge in the same memorandum that the modern bombardment airplane existed to attack the enemy nation’s “vital organs.” To keep a potential enemy from attacking the “vital centers” of the United States, General Andrews argued that

the airplane is an engine of war which has brought into being a new and entirely different mode of warfare—the application of Air Power…. It is another means, operating in another element, for the same basic purpose as ground and sea power, the destruction of the enemy’s will to fight. It is a vital agency, to insure in peace, the continuation of our nation’s policies and existence, or in war, the destruction of the enemy’s will to invade our defensive jurisdiction.¹⁷

According to the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing that by 1937 was reaching maturity at the influential Air Corps Tactical School, the way to break the enemy’s will to resist was first to destroy its war-making capacity by bombing key economic-industrial targets.¹⁸ Once those key targets had been selected and bombed, the will of the enemy would most likely collapse.¹⁹ General Andrews’s rhetorical allusion to the defensive use of airpower nevertheless was grounded in an offensive conception for an independent air force. To destroy the enemy’s “will to invade,” as the general suggested, the United States would have to launch a strategic bombing offensive that would prevent the enemy nation from using its war-making capacity first to attack American soil with strategic bombers.²⁰

The Munich conference of 1938 and Hitler’s subsequent march into Czechoslovakia created a more conducive atmosphere for air officers forthrightly to advocate their conceptual approach to strategic bombing.²¹ Air Corps Tactical School officer Lieutenant Colonel Donald Wilson pointed out to other members of the school that the United States needed to develop a long-range bombardment force that could threaten an enemy nation’s “home territory.” Although he did not explicitly mention Germany as the “home territory” that the United States should be able to threaten, the thrust of his argument made clear that Germany was the nation he had in mind. Wilson asked what would be the result if this “upstart dictator” (presumably Adolph Hitler) could threaten America’s home territory with strategic bombardment. According to Wilson the United States had the greatest “ability to secure, manufacture, and organize the men and materials required for war.” Why then, inquired Wilson, should the United States itself be “vulnerable to such a new theory as air attack?” He answered: “Simply because an industrial nation is composed of interrelated and entirely interdependent elements. The normal every day life of the great mass of the population is basically dependent upon the continuous flow and uninterrupted organization of services, materials, and food.” Wilson then brought out a clear example of why American air officers thought that attacking “vital links” in the enemy’s industrial structure with strategic bombers would destroy their capacity to resist:

The industrial nation has grown and prospered in proportion to the excellence of its industrial system, but, and here is the irony of the situation, the better this industrial organization for peacetime efficiency the more vulnerable it is to wartime collapse caused by the cutting of one or more of its essential arteries. How this is accomplished is the essence of air strategy in modern warfare.²²

Since the individual was so closely linked to the industrialized state, airmen believed that by attacking the key components of that industrial state, the enemy’s will to resist would almost certainly collapse. This became axiomatic among American airmen. But airmen offered only a loose explanation of the link between strategic bombing attacks on industrial capacity and the purported breakdown of the enemy’s will to resist. Instead they focused more clearly on objectives, or targets, that were tangible and easy to quantify: the “vital links” of the enemy’s war-making capacity. Determining these “vital links” became the “essence” of air strategy. Wilson, quoting Douhet, stated: “The art of air strategy consists mainly in choosing the objectives.”²³

ACTS instructor Major Muir Fairchild, who later became the chief of plans for the Army Air Forces (AAF) in World War II, had refined the American conception of air power in classes to officers at the Air Corps Tactical School. In a 1939 lecture to ACTS students titled “National Economic Structure,” Fairchild argued that there were two types of objectives to attack with strategic airpower: the morale of the people and the “national economic structure.” Fairchild acknowledged at the beginni...