AIR POWER On evaluation

Korero (AEWS), Volume 3, Issue 9, 4 June 1945, Page 10

AIR POWER On evaluation

By

in the Fortnightly, March, 1945

Atlhe stock of air power in the market The stock of air power in the market 1 of popular estimation has fallen a little since the heavy fighting began on land. Of that there is no doubt, but to conclude from the fall that, objectively, there has been a “ debunking ” of air power, or that it has been shown to be nothing but a fraud, would be utterly unwarranted. It was, is, and will continue to be a factor of the first importance in the process of the achieving of victory. What has happened is that many people expected it to yield quick results, which, in point of fact, were never possible. The enthusiasts who backed and boosted air power were not always its best friends. A sign of the changed view was to be seen in a recent message from a British newspaper correspondent in New York. “ It is now accepted by all the top Allied leaders,” he stated, “ that the experiment of trying to win this war by bombing can be written down as a failure. Whatever has happened to Major Seversky ? ” No doubt Major Seversky, Mr. W. B. Ziff, and the others who did expect victory to be secured by air action alone would reply that the conditions which they postulated were never in fact fulfilled. They assumed the creation of air forces and the adoption of an air strategy which the Allies were not, it is clear, prepared to create and to adopt. That, too, would be the answer to the critics of the distinguished chief of our own Bomber Command if he were now asked to comment on a statement of his made in the spring of 1942. “If I could send 20,000 bombers to Germany tonight,” he said, “ Germany would not be in the war to-morrow.”

We know that that kind of force, at least, has not been employed ; in fact, it could in no circumstances have been employed. Even Sir Arthur Harris’s other and more moderate programme, of i,ooo-bomber raids regularly maintained, was not and could not be realized. There were always too many conflicting calls on Bomber Command’s resources to allow the assault on the industrial Reich to be maintained on the peak load. Indeed we have Mr. Churchill’s word for it that the idea of knocking Germany or Italy out of the war by bombing alone was not one beyond the bounds of possibility. “ Opinion is divided,” he told the American Congress on May 19, 1942, “ as to whether the use of air power could by itself bring about a collapse in Germany or Italy. Well, there is certainly no harm in trying.” It was evident that he himself doubted whether the experiment would result in a speedy decision, for he went on to explain the purpose of the Anglo-American air offensive as the smashing of Germany’s war industry, the destruction of the centres engaged in it, and the dispersal of the munitions population. That is obviously not a programme which could be completed in a brief time. No Government expected the war to be decided by air action alone. The proof of that fact is that every Government built up a great army as its main force for war. If there had been any real prospect that an air force would have sufficed, such a force would have been given priority in the preparations for war.

It was not given priority. There is no evidence that it was favoured at the expense of the other Services. Our own Government’s attitude to the question was made clear by a Minister, Lord Beaverbrook, when the war had been in progress for over two years. “ Aircraft cannot win the battle alone,” he told the Clydeside shop stewards on November 30, 1941. “ The tank might. The tank and the aircraft together is the form in which we want to fight this battle-front.” Lord Beaverbrook was no disparager of the air arm ; he had been Minister of Aircraft Production ; and his words were therefore the more significant. They might equally have been applied to Germany’s plan for winning the war. Her instrument of victory was armour on the ground plus the Stuka in the air. It is true that Germany had a powerful air force in 1939, but it was the wrong kind of air force for strategic use ; and only by such use of it could it win the war alone. For Germany the air weapon was always mobile artillery—as it is, indeed, for military writers in other countries. Captain Cyril Falls, for instance, in his book “ Ordeal by Battle,” states that “ the offensive role of aircraft consists, as to about 80 per cent., in acting as air-borne artillery,” the other 20 per cent, being observation, &c. The Germans have always dreaded air power—when used against themselves. That was first, why Hitler made such efforts in 1935-36 to have bombing limited by international agreement to the battlezone ; secondly, why the Luftwaffe was unable to damage our war-production when it did turn, rather inexpertly, to long-distance raiding in 1940 ; and, thirdly, why in 1942-43 the German propaganda machine was turned on at full blast to try to persuade us that our longdistance raiding was useless and that we should do better to keep our Air Force for tactical employment. Unfortunately, the Germans found support in a good deal of “ misguided propaganda ” here in Britain ; the description was Mr. Herbert Morrison’s. The well-meaning people who engaged in it were really playing the enemy’s game. There is little doubt now that before 1939 many of us expected far too much

of the new weapon of the air. It was credited with capabilities which it did not really possess. The swift, overwhelming stroke which it was to deliver on the outbreak of war became an obsession and a nightmare. “ The blow of the air is so strong that it is likely to be a knock-out because of its immense destructiveness and its power to land on a vital spot,” wrote Mr. C. R. Attlee in 1934. “ The amount of destruction that can be wrought by a concentrated attack by a considerable air force is so great,” said Lord Cecil in the House of Lords on November 29, 1933, “ that it may well be that one or two such attacks will decide the whole ultimate course of the war.” “ There is no doubt,” he added, “ that a strong attack made on this city (London) and on the other great centres of our life might absolutely cripple us in, I might say, forty-eight hours. That is the actual fact.” Mr. Churchill himself, in a speech in the House of Commons on November 16, 1937, referred to the view that the next war would be decided by air action in nine days ; but it was clear from what he said that he did not share that view himself. The view that the next war would be decided in record time by air action was never held by the Air Staff. A distinguished member of it, now Air Marshall Sir John Slessor, wrote five years before the war began : “ No attitude can be more vain or more irritating in its effect than to claim that the next Great War—and when it comes—will be decided in the air and in the air alone.” (” Air Power and Armies,” 1934, p. JI 4-) War is, in fact, a matter of team work, and an air force is part of the team. It cannot play a lone hand if it is to serve the common cause. It is not playing a lone hand when, sometimes, it seems to be doing so. The strategic air offensive is not a separate war. If before the war popular expectation of what air power could accomplish was unreasonably high, it must be admitted that the misapprehension was increased to some extent by the unguarded and rather overdrawn accounts that were given of the effect of our attacks on German centres in 1940-41. It is evident now that we were not hitting Germany

nearly as hard as we thought we were. We were regaled with lurid descriptions of the damage and devastation which our Wellingtons, Whitleys, and Hampdens were causing. We read of Essen, Dusseldorf, Mannheim, Hanover, and other towns swept by fire, of buildings collapsing under high explosive bombs, of whole areas reduced to rubble, of widespread ruin left in the wake of each attack. The effect of the bombing of the synthetic-oil plants and the refineries was exaggerated in particular. Oil, we were told, was Germany’s heel of Achilles, and that was where we were hitting her. Already, by September 21, 1940, a Minister then informed us, 90 per cent, of her synthetic production and 80 per cent, of her refineries had been “ hammered with devastating effect.” The strange fact was that she still had enough oil to send her armoured columns careering all round Europe. The sober truth is that the bomb-loads which our aircraft carried at that time could not possibly have had the almost apocalyptic effect that was claimed for them. They were puny loads, judged by present standards. How ideas have changed in this respect is shown by the fact that the dropping of fifteen tons in a night was thought worthy of mention in some of the official reports of the autumn of 1940 ; indeed, the fact that three tons had been dropped on Boulogne on August 17, 1940, was also specially recorded. It is not surprising that that kind of air attack accomplished less than had been expected from it. Nevertheless, to conclude that we made a mistake in opening and maintaining the strategic air offensive would be unwarranted. We were right, absolutely right, in what we did. We kept the war alive by it, put heart into the nation here at home, gave our air crews invaluable experience for the great work that was still to come. We were beginning to immobilize a huge army of home defence in the Reich, to divert German man-power from

other essential work to the repair of bombdamage, to teach the Germans that a war is not invariably fought beyond their own frontiers. Those experimental raids of 1940-41 were profitable from many points of view. It was only in 1942-43, however, that air power in the true sense came into action in this war. We had too small an Air Force to batter Germany’s war potential effectively before that time. The “ 1,000-bomber ” raids of 1942 were a portent of the wrath to come to Germany, but it was only in 1943 that our mighty Lancasters and Halifaxes were available in adequate strength to make the air offensive a major operation of war. The Battle of the Ruhr in the spring of 1943, the Battle of Hamburg that was fought in the last week of July, 1943 (when 75 per cent, of the city was devastated), and the Battle of Berlin which followed in November and December were landmarks on the long road to victory. They were as significant as those epochal events at sea, the sinking of the “ Tirpitz ” by the two Lancaster squadrons on November 12, 1944, and the brilliant success of the American carrier-borne aircraft against Japanese warships and convoys in a number of encounters in the Far East. Assuredly the strategic air offensive has always been worthwhile. “ That,” said General Smuts at Nairobi on December 11, 1943, referring to the bombing of Germany, “ is the most important and considerable contribution to victory now being made. I put it second to nothing else.” It was, however, a delayedaction contribution. “ We must not expect too quick results,” Lord Hankey had written in September, 1942. “ Like all methods of attrition, bombing takes time.” “ We should press on with bombing to the utmost,” he added, “ since this is an indispensable preparation for future campaigns, but it would be premature to count on it to bring about an early decision.” A method of attrition is often a disappointing method. It seems at times to be getting one nowhere. It is in the nature of things that a stage should come when a feeling of frustration, impatience, petulance emerges, when people are inclined

to say : “ Oh, this is no good. It’s all hot air. All our bombing has not prevented the Germans from carrying on the war on two long fronts or Runstedt from breaking through in the Ardennes or Doenitz from mounting a new U-boat campaign.” That is the natural reaction to a situation in which a long war seems to drag. But the policy is as sound still as ever it was. The point never was and is not that air action will give quick results or will force a decision by itself. It was always and is that without the air offensive we should probably not beat Germany at all. It is an essential ingredient in the prescription for victory. Without it, for all our dissatisfaction, we should be in a far worse situation. Sea power—a method of attrition, too —and air power are alike in that, like the mills of God, they grind slowly. Sea power strangles ; air power disarms ; land power administers the knock-out blow. No one of these three can be spared. In 1933 the Nazi Party came into power in Germany. In six years of “ guns before butter ” it built up an army, an air force, a submarine fleet, and a war potential surpassing in magnitude the combined armed strength and war potential of all the rest of the world. What has to be done is to reverse that situation and to restore the comparative position of 1933. It has been the task of Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force and of the Bth and 15th United States Army Air Forces to undo the German military reflation of 1933-39. There is no reason to suppose that that can be accomplished in much less than six years also. Not until after the end of the war shall we be able to assess the contribution which air power has made to the success of the allied cause. Not until then, also, shall we know what the war has done to further the interests of civil aviation. It has done much, we can say already. It has made the Atlantic crossing by air a commonplace. That ocean had been flown twenty thousand times by the middle of August, 1944, and the time from shore to shore had been almost halved. It will remain for the air liners of the stratosphere to halve it again. They will probably do so, with a good margin.

What has been happening to the Atlantic has befallen other seas and oceans, too. Distances have been abridged in a way which only the urgency of war-like missions could have made practicable. The whole world has been girdled by air lines. It would not be untrue to say that there has been more “ civil aviation ” since 1939 than there was in all the years that went before. The Royal Air Force Transport Command and the United States Army Air Transport Command have carried between them more passengers and freight than all the civil air lines of the pre-war era carried in comparable periods of time. The great network of airfields, flyingboat bases, and staging-posts which have come into existence for the purposes of the war will remain no doubt, though probably with some shrinkage, to serve the interests of international air transport in peace. The very fact that the military aviation of countries like the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and the United States has worked in close association during these years of conflict should be a good omen for the future. The comradeship of the air will not pass away with the war. How far the technical developments and improvements which the military aircraft has undergone will affect the civil aircraft of to-morrow remains to be seen. The standards of peace will be different from those of war, and the high performance, great speed, and climb manoeuvrability and other characteristics which war demands will not be necessary advantages in peace. There will be an increasing divergence between military and civil types of aircraft. Nevertheless, some of the advances which have marked the period of the war cannot fail to have their effect on the design and construction of the kinds of aircraft which will be wanted when the world settles down again to the ways of peace.