Airpower In Ww2

“The bomber will always get through.” With these words, the Viscount Hugh Trenchard summed up the thinking of the United Kingdom’s Royal Air Force (RAF) and United States Army Air Forces (AAF) about airpower that was prevalent in the interwar years. With the benefit of hindsight, modern military thinkers are able to see clearly why this concept should not have been the sole focus of interwar military thinking about the use of airpower. At the beginning of World War II (WWII), there were competing agendas within the RAF and AAF, forcing these two organizations to focus solely on strategic bombing, albeit in very different ways. In order to fully understand how the unique approaches of the RAF and AAF resulted in a lack of performance and high …show more content…
From these perspectives, the lessons learned in WWII can be synthesized into thoughts of what today’s airpower leaders can learn from them. Thinking on airpower during the interwar years in the UK were dominated by the thoughts of Lord Tiverton, the Viscount Hugh Trenchard, and John Slessor, while RAF execution of the air war during WWII added another important UK military theorist, Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris. In his 1921 book, Command of the Air, Italian General and military theorist Giulio Douhet argued that air forces should be the primary means of conducting war and that wars could be decided quickly through the implementation of a strategic bombing campaign against the enemy’s homeland. He believed that in warfare, the enemy’s civilian population was the most important strategic target of all and that a successful aerial bombardment would demoralize enemy civilians to the point of rising up and forcing their government to capitulate. By this methodology, Douhet believed that a short and relatively concise war could be delivered while avoiding the attritional battles …show more content…
This policy, while not directive in nature and open to interpretation as the allies saw fit, allowed the RAF to conduct their operations against Germany under the cover of darkness and to use their preferred tactic of area bombing. However, at the conclusion of WWII, the RAF conducted the British Bombing Survey Unit report, which found that the British offensive against German towns failed to break the moral of the German civilian population and had little effect on war production. In the interwar years, the RAF made decisions about how to employ their aircraft while the AAF was making similar decisions. The thinking on airpower during the interwar years in the US involved several key theorists, such as Colonel Edgar Gorrell, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, and William “Billy” Mitchell while wartime execution added such US military theorists as General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, General Curtis LeMay, General Pete Quesada, and General George Kenney. Mitchell and Arnold believed that by using the ability to effectively bypass the enemy’s fielded forces, it would allow the attacking force to wage war directly against the enemy centers of gravity (COGs). These attacks would be so decisive that the length

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Airpower In Ww2

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