Douhet, Mitchell, and Trenchard Oh My!
Following the First World War, a trio of airpower theorists asserted the primacy of airpower and its ability to win wars outright. These theories emerged from inconclusive battlefield results that played an important yet not decisive impact in the war. They were also influenced by sea power theorists like Alfred Thayer Mahan and Julian Corbett.
Airpower theorists based their ideas on wildly optimistic assumptions questionable evidence about the effect of airpower in World War I. The primary airpower theory held that enemy industry and population’s strategic bombardment would eventually force that enemy to capitulate and sue for peace in an effort to avoid the terrible war of attrition that occurred during World War I.
Italian Giulio Douhet argued that modern civilian cities were vulnerable to aerial attack, that their industrial centers could be obliterated with ease with large bomber fleets, and that pre-emptive attacks to achieve air superiority by destroying the enemy’s air force on the ground was preferable. American Billy Mitchell likewise believed in airpower to avoid the attrition battles on land and sea found during the First World War.
He viewed a direct strategic attack on the enemy would lead to a quick, decisive victory by striking enemy industrial centers and championed the establishment of an independent air arm. Douhet and Mitchell believed that air power alone was key to military success. The British likewise found airpower advocates in their midst. Hugh Trenchard — commander of British air forces in France during the war and Chief of the Air Staff from 1919–29 advocated a policy of offensive airpower via strategic bombing of ‘vital centres’ to win the war, breaking the enemy’s will. Renowned British land-war theorists JFC Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart also made aerial bombing of cities critical in their writings.
Historian Richard Overy calls airpower “the greatest single advantage enjoyed by the Allies,” and sees the air campaign as one of the decisive elements in Allied victory but did not win the war alone as early theorists proclaimed it would. Strategic bombing, according to Allen Millett and Williamson Murray, represented the only means by which Britain could strike Nazi Germany in the opening years of the war. They also argue that the Combined Bomber Offensive contributed to victory because it nested into the Allies overall strategic plans.
Tami Davis Biddle argues that airpower’s reality did not always meet the rhetoric espoused by pre-war strategists. American and British airpower theorists overestimated bombers’ ability to reach targets through robust enemy air defenses without long-range escorts. What began as a hopeful idea to end the war quickly became yet another war of attrition and not decisive in its own right. Michael Sherry finds that American planners overestimated the ability of airpower to defeat the enemy. Allied air power only reached maximum effectiveness after the successful marriage of drop fuel tanks and a British engine in the American P-51 Mustang allowed bombers to enjoy fighter coverage well into mainland Europe.
Perhaps the only example of Douhet’s theory of airpower coming to fruition was the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in that the destruction was so incredible, the Japanese surrendered shortly after that. Nevertheless, the perception of the atomic bomb as the perfect manifestation of airpower theory fueled Cold War strategies of atomic war and deterrence. With airpower, neither Allied nor Axis efforts managed to defeat the “will of the people” though this factor was never seriously entertained by British or American leaders. According to historian Conrad Crane, this is partly due to pragmatic reasons, such as the American Army Air Forces pursuing military and industrial targets as opposed to terror bombing.
The battle over the skies of Europe looked nothing like prewar ideals espoused by the theorists and advocates, but remained critical in diverting resources and hampering Axis industrial output thus creating the conditions for the Allies to defeat Germany in 1944 and 1945. Regardless, none of the air or sea theorists described were irrelevant, just not entirely accurate. Commanders continued to seek the sort of decisive results from a massive naval battle or strategic bombardment that Mahan, Corbett, Douhet, and the rest promised.
