Reflecting on the Great War and the Birth of Airpower

 

First World War Air Action As Popularly Remembered

By Tammi Davis Biddle, U.S. Army War College

For centuries before the Wright brothers’ first flight in 1903, humans had tried to imagine all of the future roles that airplanes might play—as both military and non-military instruments. During World War I, aircraft underwent revolutionary, telescoped changes driven by the intensely competitive demands of the war. In 1914, warplanes were primitive machines held together by wire and twine; by 1918, large, sophisticated four-engine bombers had been developed and used. These new instruments had major institutional and organizational ramifications for all modern military services—and the institutional transformation this entailed was far from painless.

Prewar expectations tended to influence the interpretation of wartime experience. Since the interpretation of data and evidence is heavily conditioned by what people expect to see, observations are colored by social, cultural, and political influences. Prior to the outbreak of World War I, civilian writers typically held higher expectations for air warfare than military planners did. The latter were generally conservative, expecting an airplane’s main or sole contribution to be reconnaissance. However, a minority—officers who came to hold formative roles in the development of air power and thus came to hold an institutional stake in the future of air warfare—emerged from the war with strong convictions and bold claims about the revolutionary impact of the airplane in war.

[After the Great War], those making bold claims for airpower, [especially Italy's Giulio Douhet, America's Billy Mitchell, and Great Britain's Hugh Trenchard] gained degrees of legitimacy for a variety of reasons. The war had indicated that technological advancement could take place in a highly telescoped way. Many observers thus concluded that the technological development of air power would be fast and relentless—and offensive capabilities would outstrip defensive ones. Moreover, many assumed that some of the most daunting weapons of the war, including chemicals and gas, would be teamed with airpower.

Air advocates argued that all modern states would have to embrace airplanes as essential tools of war and deterrence, insisting that those who failed to do so would put themselves at an enormous disadvantage in the ongoing competition among nations. Air power—long-range bombing especially—would restore offensive operations to the battlefield, and would offer the prospect of directly undermining the enemy’s all-important “will to fight” by strikes on his homeland. One would be able to leap over the army and navy and go right to both resources and popular will. It is interesting to note here that offensive operations had not in fact disappeared from the battlefield. By 1917, armies had begun to work out the basics of modern combined arms, restoring the offensive on land. This was manifest in the German offensive of March 1918, and in the subsequent ground offensives led by the Americans in 1918. However, many writers, traumatized by the trench stalemate of 1914–1917, assumed that the offensive on land was largely dead. Another common misapprehension of interwar theorists was that the German Army and Navy had not been defeated; instead, its population had lost the war due to war-weariness and defeatism.

Source: Airpower and Warfare: A Century of Theory and History, Tami Davis Biddle, U.S. Army War College Press