Industrial Warfare - Aerial Warfare

Aerial Warfare

The first use of airplanes in war was the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, when the Italians carried out several reconnaissance and bombing missions. During World War I both sides made use of balloons and airplanes for reconnaissance and directing artillery fire. To prevent enemy reconnaissance, some airplane pilots began attacking other airplanes and balloons, first with small arms carried in the cockpit, and later with machine guns mounted on the aircraft. Both sides also made use of aircraft for bombing, strafing and dropping of propaganda leaflets.

The German air force carried out the first terror bombing raids, using Zeppelins to drop bombs on Britain. By the end of the war airplanes had become specialised into bombers, fighters and surveillance aircraft. Most of these airplanes were biplanes with wooden frames, canvas skins, wire rigging and air-cooled engines.

Between 1918 and 1939 aircraft technology developed very rapidly. By 1939 military biplanes were in the process of being replaced with metal framed monoplanes, often with stressed skins and liquid cooled engines. Top speeds had tripled; altitudes doubled (and oxygen masks become commonplace); ranges and payloads of bombers increased enormously.

Some theorists, most famously Hugh Trenchard and Giulio Douhet, believed that aircraft would become the dominant military arm in the future, and argued that future wars would be won entirely by the destruction of the enemy's military and industrial capability from the air. This concept was called strategic bombing. Douhet also argued in The Command of the Air (1921) that future military leaders could avoid falling into bloody World War I-style trench stalemates by using aviation to strike past the enemy's forces directly at their vulnerable civilian population, which Douhet believed would cause these populations to rise up in revolt to stop the bombing.

Others, such as Billy Mitchell, saw the potential of air power to neutralize the striking power of naval surface fleets. Mitchell himself proved the vulnerability of capital ships to aircraft was finally in 1921 when he commanded a squadron of bombers that sank the ex-German battleship SMS Ostfriesland with aerial bombs. (See Industrial warfare#Naval warfare)

During the Second World War, there was a debate between strategic bombing and tactical bombing. Strategic bombing missions focused on targets such as factories, railroads, oil refineries and cities, and required heavy four-engine bombers carrying large payloads flying deep into enemy territory. Tactical bombing focused on troop concentrations, command and control facilities, airfields, and ammunition dumps, and required dive bombers and fighter bombers, small aircraft that could fly low over the battlefield.

In the early years of World War II, the German Luftwaffe focused on tactical bombing, using large numbers of Ju-87 Stukas as "flying artillery" for land offensives. Artillery was slow and required time to set up a firing position, whereas aircraft were better able keep up with the fast advances of the German panzer columns. Close air support greatly assisted in the successes of the German Army in the Battle of France. It was also important in amphibious warfare, where aircraft carriers could provide support for soldiers landing on the beaches.

Strategic bombing, by contrast, was unlike anything the world has seen before or since. In 1940, the Germans attempted to force Britain to surrender through attacks on its airfields and factories, and then on its cities in The Blitz in what became the Battle of Britain, the first major battle whose outcome was determined primarily in the air. The campaigns conducted by the Allies in Europe and the Pacific could involve thousands of aircraft dropping tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions over a single city.

Military aviation in the post-war years was dominated by the needs of the Cold War. The postwar years saw a rapid conversion to jet power, which resulted in enormous increases in speeds and altitudes of aircraft. Until the advent of the intercontinental ballistic missile, major powers relied on high-altitude bombers to deliver their newly-developed nuclear deterrent; each country strove to develop the technology of bombers and the high-altitude fighters that could intercept them. The concept of air superiority began to play a heavy role in aircraft designs for both the United States and the Soviet Union.