Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002)
Airplanes and their potential to swiftly win wars from high above the brutal reality of ground combat have fascinated military thinkers since the invention of the airplane. In Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare, Tami Davis Biddle describes how American and British air power enthusiasts interpreted the promise of long-range bombing as a wartime panacea. Biddle is currently a Professor of History and National Security Strategy at the US Army War College, where her research focuses on warfare in the 20th century and especially the history of air warfare. She has published numerous works on civil-military relations, grand strategy, the law of war, and US national security since World War II. This book was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2002.
Biddle argues that a faulty interpretation of the World War I experience, together with organizational interests, shaped interwar debates about strategic bombing and maintained ideas about its potentially revolutionary character. By the time World War II began, the British and Americans had invested heavily in strategic bombing and saw little choice but to solve the problems in real-time and make long-range bombing as effective as possible. Biddle describes the development of these ideas and how they came to dominate the thinking of airpower enthusiasts in the British and American air forces from World War I through World War II. She argues that strategic bombing was mostly ineffective in World War II through 1943 and that the Combined Bomber Offensive nearly failed thanks to German interceptor aircraft and ground defenses. The Allies made significant changes that preserved the offensive, and by 1944, both numbers and capabilities of Allied bombers – and critically, long-range escort fighters – increased dramatically.
Biddle shows that interwar conceptions concerning the primacy of the long-range bomber stemmed from the push for independence—the Royal Air Force maintaining theirs while Americans were trying to win independence. She sees the appeal of strategic bombing to win wars quickly by destroying civilian morale and thus avoiding the deadly stalemate of the Western Front was appealing for both countries, especially two nations who eschewed large standing armies for technological dominance at sea, and now in the air. However, the rhetoric and assertions about the ability of bombers to hit their targets with any accuracy, their ability to penetrate enemy airspace unmolested, and their ability to destroy such an ambiguous target as enemy willpower were highly unrealistic and failed to materialize during the war. Marrying long-range fighter escorts with drop tanks while putting more bombers in the air than the enemy could destroy proved the critical answer to enemy defenses. Biddle sees the advent of long-range escorts and “Big Week” in February 1944 as critical moments that helped the Allies win the war of attrition fought in the skies over Europe and finally achieve air superiority.
Biddle bases her approach to understanding this disconnect between the rhetoric of strategic airpower and its reality on concepts of institutional dynamics in shaping ideas, using conceptual methods from cognitive psychology on information processing and intellectual development within institutions. Most of her source work comes from doctrinal publications, archival sources, and the documentary milieu any twentieth-century military organization produces. This book contains 85 pages of endnotes, indicating the rigorous research Biddle conducted to create this work. Because she is specifically focusing on the difference between pre-war (and mid-war) claims and what was achieved, she offers no judgment of strategic bombing’s impact on the war, only that the results of the aerial campaign were inconclusive.
In five long yet readable chapters, Biddle highlights bombing in the First World War and how air power affected the result, the British and American interwar institutional fight for relevance and doctrinal development in the interwar period, and the results of the Combined Bomber Offensive and the bombing of Japan in World War II. Rather than provide complete historiography in the introduction, Biddle only engages with historical analyses of the Allied bombing campaign’s effects at the end of the book; ostensibly, this choice was because she is less interested in the overall effect than the gap between what was rhetoric and reality. Regardless, this work is ideal for historians of this era and airpower, practitioners, and any scholar desiring to grasp better how military organizations develop, institutionalize, and adapt operational concepts.