Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II (4 page)

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
air
power 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.

Even as Billy Mitchell was uncannily predicting the use of airpower in future conflicts, events were in motion on the other side of the Atlantic that would propel the nations of Europe and the world into the Second World War.

In the Treaty of Versailles, which concluded the First World War, the wartime Allies had imposed steep reparations demands and economic restrictions that shoved Germany’s already tottering economy to the brink. In so doing, they were creating the environment which would breed the next great war.

While the rest of the world was enjoying a decade of prosperity in the 1920s, Germany imploded. Having been the industrial powerhouse of continental Europe before the war, that nation collapsed economically because of its defeat and the Versailles restrictions. Unemployment and hyperinflation reached staggering levels that have few, if any, comparisons in the history of modern industrialized nations. Also part of the Versailles restrictions was the policy forbidding Germany to have an air force, or even an aircraft industry.

The treaty handed Germany insult on top of injury, demanding that it accept sole responsibility for the war. While Germany had been the
principal combatant among the Central Powers, there were plenty of nations on both sides who had a share in the blame for the war having started. Because Germany had been so obviously singled out, it provided German extremists of all stripes a gift on which they could agree. The treaty became a lightning rod for the harangues of rabble-rousers from all political persuasions.

Out of the swirling sea of leaderless chaos, there at last emerged a powerful and charismatic leader who promised much and was embraced by masses yearning for prewar glories.

Germany’s downward economic spiral reversed its course when Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists came to power in 1934. When Hitler became
Führer und Reichskanzler
(leader and Reich chancellor), he began rearming Germany in violation of the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. In 1936, his armies occupied the German Rhineland, again in direct violation of the Treaty of Versailles.

Tensions between Germany and its wartime enemies, Britain and France, quickly increased, but neither of them was keen to challenge Hitler and risk another war. Neither did the Soviet Union relish the idea, despite the ferocious ideological divide between the Nazis and the Communists. Hitler had written at length in his 1926 manifesto,
Mein Kampf
(
My Struggle
), about his desire to incorporate large slices of the Soviet Union into his Third Reich, but as with so much about his tome, the world did not take it seriously.

The ticking of the time bomb of World War II began with Hitler’s grab for the territory of Germany’s closest neighbors. In March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria in a move that was called
Anschluss
, or “Connection.” This fulfilled the dreams of Germanic ethnocentrists in both countries who wished to see all German-speaking people united in a single Reich. There were also large numbers of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, and Hitler next demanded that Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland region also be folded into his Third Reich. There were also a large number of Germans in the nominally independent port city of Danzig, which had alternated between Poland and Prussia for centuries before the League of Nations took it away from Germany in 1920, when Poland was reconstituted, and made it a “free city.” Known as Gdansk in
Polish, it was coveted by Poles, whose territory surrounded it, and it was coveted by Germans, who had owned it for more than a century and wanted it back.

In September 1938, at the now infamous summit conference, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and France’s President Édouard Daladier flew to Munich, the mother city of the Nazi Party, to meet with Adolf Hitler. The Führer told these gentlemen that the Sudetenland should properly be part of Germany, and he promised that this was the end of his territorial ambitions. Czechoslovakia naturally complained, but Chamberlain and Daladier ignored the Czechs and acceded to the Führer’s demands. When Chamberlain flew home, he happily announced that he had helped to negotiate “peace for our time.”

In March 1939, Hitler decided that he wanted the rest of Czechoslovakia. The price tag for “peace for our time” had gone up. Chamberlain and Daladier were willing to go to almost any lengths to appease Adolf Hitler and avoid war. Like a terminal patient in his hospital bed, Czechoslovakia had no choice. The poor country was chopped into bits. Slovakia was sliced off as a quasi-autonomous satellite of Germany, while the remainder of Czechoslovakia became the Reich Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.