Winged Victory: The Airplane

^{National Archives from Navy.}

^{Navy Sky Raiders from the U.S.S. Valley Forge fire 5‑inch rockets at Noth Koreans in 1950.}

In August, 1914, the First German Army of General Alexander von Kluck had turned south, trying to envelop the British and French armies facing the rest of the German forces. The move exposed von Kluck’s right flank to attack by the substantial garrison of Paris. A British reconnaissance pilot, chugging over the front in flimsy wood‑and‑canvas aircraft, noticed the change of front and notified his superiors.

The French attacked the German right flank. Lord Kitchener, the British commander‑in chief, ordered Sir John French, the British field commander, to attack, too, but Sir John moved as if he were wearing lead shoes. Kluck’s troops, facing the French flank attack, became separated from the other German armies.

John French was finally induced to move, and the British marched for the gap in the German lines. A German reconnaissance pilot, flying in another glorified box kite, noticed the enemy columns heading for the gap. He notified his superiors. The German Great General Staff ordered all field armies to withdraw to a defensible position.

The Battle of the Marne, almost a non‑battle, but one of the decisive battles of the world, was over. The key people were a couple of airmen in machines that few sane people today would consider getting into.

Only 11 years before this, Orville Wright made the world’s first manned, controlled flight. It lasted just 12 seconds. Ninety years later, airplanes had established themselves as the most important of all military weapons. They had replaced the battleship’s guns as the main weapon of naval warfare. They took over much of the role of artillery in World War II, making possible the Blitzkrieg. They flattened cities. From Orville Wright’s altitude of a few feet and speed of about 7 miles per hour, improvements in planes over the years let the U.S. Air Force’s SR‑71 “Blackbird” travel 2,189 miles per hour at an altitude of 86,000 feet – more than 16 miles above the earth’s surface, high enough to qualify its pilot for an astronaut badge.

Progress after the Wright flight was rapid. The idea of flying was unbear‑ably exciting to adventurous spirits. The range, speed, ceiling, and solidity of airplanes grew like Jack’s beanstalk. When the war broke out, pilots no longer had to lie on the wing, like Orville Wright, nor sit out in front of the wing on a totally exposed seat like the 1912 soldiers who made the first trial of a machine gun in an airplane. In 1914, aviators sat in cockpits.

In the first days of the war, all belligerents ordered their pilots not to engage in air‑to‑air combat. Planes were for observation only. Some pilots and observers took to the air with pistols, however. (There wasn’t room in most cockpits for bigger weapons.) Some even used bricks on the end of wires to snag enemy observers’ propellers. The authorities gradually relented. They began issuing pistols with oversized magazines and wire cages to catch the ejected cartridge cases so they wouldn’t strike the pilot or a sensitive part of the plane.

Cockpits got big enough to let observers carry rifles and shotguns. At least one plane was reported to have been downed by a shotgun. German observers took the Mexican‑invented Mondragon semiautomatic rifle up, making it the first semiautomatic rifle to see combat.

Finally, machine guns were allowed, usually manned by the observer in two‑seater planes. Machine guns could fire in any direction except straight ahead for fear of striking the propeller. An interrupter gear that coordinated the gun with the propeller solved that problem. Specialized fighter planes to escort the observation craft were developed. Fighter pilots were glamorized as “knights of the air,” but theirs was a nerve‑wracking and often short life, even for some of the greatest aces. They confirmed an old airman’s axiom: “There are old pilots and there are bold pilots, but there are few old, bold pilots.”

Bombing got off to a slow start in World War I, although Italian planes bombed Turkish forces in Libya during the Italo‑Turkish War of 1911 to 1912. The Italian aviators carried the bombs in their cockpits and dropped them over the side by hand. The Germans used zeppelins, the dirigible airships invented by Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, to bomb Paris and London. Both sides used small bombers, some armored against ground fire, to attack enemy troops, and towards the end of the war, both sides built large bombers to bombard enemy cities.

After the “Great War,” most aeronautical progress was made in the civil sector, spurred by air races and adventurous pilots striving to set records. A new school of military theorists sprang up, however, that greatly influenced strategic thinking about airplanes. Giulio Douhet, an Italian general, was the first of these apostles of air power. In Britain, Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard took up the cause, and in the United States, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell. All held that air forces should be as independent of the other armed services as the navy was of the army. Air forces, they said, were not only the equals of the other services; they were far more essential. By bombing enemy countries, they could destroy their infrastructures, break the will of their people, and leave the armies and navies little to do.

Perhaps strangely, Germany, so ruthless otherwise, never subscribed to this doctrine. Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, was a former fighter pilot, an ace in von Richthofen’s circus. He saw fighter and Stuka pilots as knights, but called bomber pilots mere truck drivers. That’s one reason Germany failed so miserably in the Battle of Britain.

When Germany became bogged down in the Soviet Union, the balance of power in the air shifted to Britain and, a bit later, Britain and the United States.

The British began daylight raids over Germany, but objectives were out of range of their fighters. The horrendous losses they suffered from enemy fighters made them switch to night raids. But flying over a blacked‑out Europe, the flyers frequently missed whole cities. Advanced electronic navigation aids partly rem‑edied that trouble, but precision bombing was impossible at night. The British used “carpet bombing,” simply blanketing an area with bombs. The civilian population became as much a military target as an oil refinery or a factory.

The United States was committed to precision bombing. It had the Norden bomb sight, which reportedly would allow a bombardier to hit a pickle barrel from 10,000 feet. It had the B‑17, the “flying fortress” with the speed of a fighter plane and ten .50 machine guns. It sent its flying fortresses to knock out the Schweinfurt ball bearing works. The raid was a disaster. Fighters had gotten much faster since the B‑17 was adopted, and the 20 mm cannons on the Messerschmitts outranged the .50 machine guns. So did the Germans’ rockets. As for the Norden bombsight, it turned out to be the most overrated military secret since the Montigny Mitrailleuse (a multi‑barrel breech‑loading gun that was France’s secret weapon at the beginning of the Franco‑Prussian War). The U.S. Army Air Forces joined the RAF on night raids and carpet bombing. Long range fighters – the P‑47 and the P‑51 – arrived to drastically cut bomber losses in both day and night raids.

There was no doubt that the bombing plane created almost unprecedented devastation. There had been nothing like it since the armies of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. The air raids on Germany killed 600,000 people and seriously wounded 800,000 more. A single raid on Tokyo and Yokahoma killed 97,000 people, seriously injured 125,000, and burned most of both cities to the ground. Altogether, 668,000 Japanese were killed by American bombers. But in spite of Douhet, Trenchard, Mitchell, and their followers, no civilian populations panicked – not the British in the “Blitz,” not the Germans in the carpet bombing, not the Japanese in the horrendous napalm raids. Two nuclear bombs gave the Japanese Emperor a face‑saving excuse to ask for peace. But that might have happened earlier if the allies had dropped their politically correct but essentially meaningless demand for “unconditional surrender.”

As for effects on the war effort, consider this: In 1942, the British dropped 48,000 tons of bombs on Germany, and the Germans produced 36,804 heavy weapons (tanks, planes, and artillery). In 1943, the British and American dropped 207,600 tons of bombs, and the Germans produced 71,693 heavy weapons. In 1944, the Allies dropped 915,000 tons of bombs and the Germans produced 105,258 weapons.

Although the airplane in World War II proved itself the master weapon in both land and sea fighting, much of the strategic bombing looks like wasted effort.

Technical progress in air forces continued after the war. All combat planes now have jet engines. They drop smart bombs and smart rockets that home in on their targets with uncanny accuracy. It is now possible to avoid the mass slaughter caused by World War II’s carpet bombing. Some planes have no pilots (a cruise missile is a form of jet plane, so is a drone). The space shuttle is both a plane and a rocket. (The Germans had a rocket plane in World War II, the Me 163 Komet. Its range was extremely short, it could not land, and its engine was liable to explode.)

Some have suggested that missiles might replace planes altogether. This is not likely for quite a while. At present, missiles are programmed to fly one route. It is possible to program them to take an alternate route if so signaled.

But a missile cannot sense danger in flight, as a human pilot could, nor can it make a split‑second decision about choosing alternative actions. Airplanes apparently will be the master weapon of warfare for the foreseeable future.