To Command the Sky is a scholarly record of the fight for domination of the skies over western Europe during World War II. It also explains the technical details of the tactics used to defeat the Luftwaffe. This book is important for serious students of World War II or military aviation.
To Command the Sky is a scholarly record of the fight for domination of the skies over western Europe during World War II. It also explains the technical details of the tactics used to defeat the Luftwaffe. This book is important for serious students of World War II or military aviation.
To Command the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942-1944
344
To Command the Sky: The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942-1944
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Overview
To Command the Sky is a scholarly record of the fight for domination of the skies over western Europe during World War II. It also explains the technical details of the tactics used to defeat the Luftwaffe. This book is important for serious students of World War II or military aviation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817382902 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 09/15/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 344 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
To Command The Sky
The Battle for Air Superiority Over Germany, 1942â"1944
By Stephen L. McFarland, Wesley Phillips Newton
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1991 Smithsonian InstitutionAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8290-2
CHAPTER 1
THE CHALLENGE
In July 1849 some 200 small, unmanned but armed balloons appeared above Venice. Besieging Austrian troops resorted to this first known episode of aerial bombing in an attempt to crush a Venetian bid for freedom from the Hapsburg monarchy. An Austrian artillery officer, Lt. Franz Uchatius, took advantage of a device developed 67 years earlier to initiate a new era in warfare. A fuse burning in each had been calculated through measurement of air currents and distance to release a pear-shaped iron bomb from each balloon as the flotilla passed over the city. The bombs fell as planned, but apparently did little damage.
Use of the skies for warfare was slow to catch on. Men would not drop aerial bombs again until the early twentieth century, perhaps because of the failure of the experiment over Venice, more probably because balloons were somewhat vulnerable to the influences of wind. Soldiers deployed balloons for observing the battlefield in the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the Boer War, and the Russo-Japanese War, but the resumption of bombing awaited a swifter, more stable carrier.
The extension of war into the skies initiated a struggle to control the skies, both to claim superiority in the airspace over enemy territory and to deny enemies the same advantage. The purpose and objective of early aerial warfare was to drop bombs on or shoot bullets at ground targets and to use the vantage point of altitude to gain information about the course of land battles. Control of the air was a necessary first step to allow or to stop bombing and reconnaissance. Air superiority was a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Though used neither systematically nor to any great effect, military forces experimented with this new weapon of war. In nearly all cases it was used in reconnaissance or bombardment. The airplane began to come into its own during the tumultuous and long-lasting Mexican Revolution that erupted in 1910. Though in microcosm, most of the elements of aerial combat developed during this conflict. In 1913 two mercenaries from the United States flying for different factions, Dean Ivan Lamb and Philip Rader, encountered one another and exchanged pistol shots. They were acquaintances and whether the exchange was hostile or feigned is unclear, but it is the first known episode demonstrating the potential of air-to-air combat and the probability of aerial battles for air superiority.
When World War I broke out, no specially designated aerial units existed to carry out bombardment and threaten enemy skies, but the Germans quickly employed Zeppelins and small "Dove" tractor airplanes to bomb French cities in single-craft attacks. The French formed their first bombing unit in September 1914. The British navy's air arm soon began limited raids against German Zeppelin bases. These efforts demanded air superiority, receiving it only because of the weaknesses of defenses, not due to any actions of the offense. In World War II terms, the damage was slight, but the psychological impact was extensive.
Venice, London, Paris, and Freiburg, among others, experienced the horrors of bombing in World War I, temporarily convincing Europeans of the importance of controlling the air over one's own homeland and, in order to gain victory, over an enemy's homeland. The lesson was not wasted on some American military observers. In these places occurred experiences that would become familiar to urban populations in Spain and China in the decade before World War II and to many others around the world during that conflict. The pattern would be repeated, although becoming more complex because of technological advances: from the observers came the first warning; sirens sounded; if it was night, searchlights played across the sky; bursts from antiaircraft guns blossomed darkly here and there; now and again an airship or plane plunged to earth, trailing flame and burning debris. Night or day, the fear was contagious, the terror consuming—the phenomenon of the most modern cities in the world blacked out, their populations hiding. Horrendous sounds and tart smells filled the air and gripped the emotions.
As a leading historian of strategic bombing has noted: "At war's end, the bomber had emerged in the popular mind—with some justification—as the most dangerous weapon the war had spawned." Bombers had spared American cities, though on one occasion a New York City company tested a siren without notice, igniting somewhat of a panic.
In the Great War the most glamorous flier did not ride in a bomber. He was the fighter pilot. At the outbreak of the war there was no such defined role and no aircraft called "fighter" or any equivalent term. Gradually the specialized role, doctrine, tactics, and technology of the fighter evolved from a hodgepodge of primitive actions and innovative thought. Initially reconnaissance was king, most notably when an Allied pilot spotted disarray in the German maneuvering at the Marne or when spying aircraft played a key part in the Germans' overwhelming victory at Tannenberg. The idea was not long in dawning on commanders that something was needed to counter the spies in the sky; the concept of air superiority and air-to-air combat evolved rapidly. The natural hostility between the pilots of the various belligerents soon led to exchanges of gunfire, à la Lamb and Rader, first with pistols, then rifles and awkwardly positioned machine guns. Ten months into the war came the first significant technological breakthrough, the deflector plate of the Frenchman Roland Garros, followed by the interrupter gear of Anthony Fokker for the German air force, which allowed machine guns to fire directly forward through the propeller without shattering the blades. Now pilots could aim their airplanes, not their guns; airplanes became weapons instead of just carriers of weapons. The fighter plane was born. It was, however, known among the English-speaking air forces as a "pursuit plane," or sometimes simply "pursuit," until the name "fighter plane" or "fighter" was substituted in the late 1930s.
As technology became more sophisticated and battle a more demanding teacher, most of the elements of aerial combat involving fighters in that war and future wars evolved: the eight, wingover, falling leaf, split-S, barrel roll, slow roll, snap roll, the wingman concept, the Lufbery Circle, hiding in clouds, using the sun to blind an enemy, other advantageous positions, deflection shooting, and watchfulness—"better a stiff neck than a broken one."
Reconnaissance and bombing airplanes, although they came to perform distinct roles, were at times dependent on the escort fighter. This relationship began to take shape even while the distinctiveness of each type was emerging early in the war. Roland Garros was escorting another plane on a bombing mission in the spring of 1915 when he was shot down. Because British unarmed reconnaissance planes fell increasingly the victims of Fokker's first true fighter, Hugh Trenchard, commanding the British army's Royal Flying Corps, issued an order early in 1916 that reconnaissance aircraft "must be escorted by at least three other fighting machines [and all] ... must fly in close formation." This was an early case of close escort, a tactic that would prove controversial in World War II.
Because most of the bombers were considerably slower than enemy fighters, they had to have an escort of fighters with speeds able to match that of the interceptors. In 1917 Trenchard mandated that each of his bombers would have two escorting fighters and each reconnaissance plane would have five. In October 1918 formations of eighteen or more DH-9s, a medium bomber, operated in support of British troops breaching German defenses on the Western Front under the escort of at least a third as many speedy SE-5As to take on the still potent threat of the Fokker D.VIIs, perhaps the finest all-around fighter of the war.
During the war the idea of the vital necessity of escort diminished, even for Trenchard. Possibly this was due in part to the short range of fighters that in the main precluded their escorting long-range strategic bombers. When air defenses became effective, the heavy bombers changed from daylight to night operations, again making escort impractical. By necessity, these bombers were self-defending.
To increase the self-defending capabilities of the bombers, commanders usually ordered formation flying. Height was the initial element of self-defense, but interlocking firepower evolved as an equally important tactic. The German Gothas attacking England usually flew in a diamond formation, lumbering along at 75 MPH and an altitude of above 10,000 feet. Altitude and interlocking formation firepower evidently worked, as antiaircraft guns began to cause as much harm to bombers as intercepting fighters, speeding the development of a third tactic to defend the attacking bombers—night bombing.
Besides the implications drawn from strategic bombing in the popular mind and by certain theorists, the most important doctrine to emerge from aerial combat in the Great War was air superiority. From the outset, strategic bombing and air superiority were linked. The first-generation British naval planes that bombed Zeppelin bases in 1914 were attempting to prevent the Germans from winning an early form of air superiority while attempting to exert it themselves. The Zeppelins, Gothas, and R-planes achieved air superiority over England, though admittedly limited in terms of area, duration, and objectives attained. The same was true for the British Independent Force's strategic campaign over Germany in 1918, though it was arguably more rigorously contested by German air defenses.
Air superiority in World War I was connected with the evolution of the fighter plane and its tactics, but the air superiority that the fighter planes strove to win was associated with the ground fronts. Fighters tried to control the air over the battlefields, "a specific operational area," gained through "air fighting." The bombers also played a role in this form of air superiority, bombing rear zones to interdict the battlefields. More rigorous application of bomber efforts by either side against communications and supply might have been decisive.
Fighters in World War I, besides their counterair, escort, air defense, and fighter-bomber functions, took on a strategic role on at least one occasion. The first ship to be refitted with a full carrier deck carried British fighters in 1918 to within range of German Zeppelin sheds; these aircraft inflicted heavy damage. This was a major step in the development of the aircraft carrier, yet it was also the strategic fighter in action, portending future developments in the next world war—using fighters to carry the war to the sources of the enemy's power. How some prophets of air power in the postwar period could downplay the fighter plane remains almost incomprehensible.
Other than American volunteers in the flying services of the Allies and seaplane technology, the United States contributed little to these various developments in aerial warfare until it declared war in 1917. Even then it remained seriously laggard in technology until the end of the war, its Army Air Service using only foreign designs in combat. Because of the time needed to organize and train, most Air Service units did not enter combat under American direction until the summer of 1918. By the Armistice American fliers had participated in most phases of aerial combat, with one notable exception—they received no heavy bombers and so did not experience that precedent for the strategic bombing that a later generation of Army fliers would help to shape and direct in another world war.
In May 1917, shortly after the United States had entered the war, Maj. William Mitchell of the Army's air arm separated the functions of the air forces into a "tactical phase" and a "strategical phase." The tactical phase, he stated, was "basically to insure observation for the fire and control of our own artillery. To accomplish that, airplanes and balloons observe the fire while others fight off hostile aircraft which attempt to stop it." The strategic phase "is being seriously considered by the belligerents ... To be successful, large combatant groups of airplanes must be organized, separate from those directly attached to the Army units." It was with the latter that Mitchell declared "that the United States may aid in the greatest way and which ... if properly applied will have a greater influence on the ultimate decision of the war than any one arm." While the Army Air Service did not produce a "strategical" unit, the Navy's air arm did organize such a force, the Northern Bombing Group. It lacked, however, the equipment to conduct operations.
In Mitchell's recommendations can be seen the seeds of the theory that he would promulgate after the war and for which he became increasingly controversial. Meanwhile he became a foremost practitioner of the "tactical phase," appreciating its contribution to the ground campaigns on the Western Front and broadening his view of its possibilities.
In a semi-official postwar history of the Army Air Service in World War I, the terms air superiority and air supremacy appeared several times. Specifically they referred to British or German air superiority, stressing the former's supremacy for much of 1918, but also noting the U.S. Army Air Service's role in the last campaigns of the Western Front. Mitchell's recommendations and even the statements of nonfliers evidenced this sensitivity to the doctrine of air superiority. On 21 June 1917, Maj. Marlborough Churchill of the U.S. Army field artillery commented, "If the enemy is master of the air, the artillery cannot conquer the ground which the infantry is to occupy." A year later, Mitchell and some of his fliers, with some combat experience under their belts, observed that "ascendancy in the air in any given sector of the front is obtained by the attack, destruction or dispersing of the enemy air elements operating on that sector, and so completely dominating them that they are unable to carry out their missions."
In the two decades after the war, a small group of air power visionaries began the process of turning these practical lessons into doctrine for fighting the next war. They worked in obscurity, with one exception, so that when crews of Boeing B-17s, Consolidated B-24s, Lockheed P-38s, Republic P-47s, and North American P-51s climbed into their aircraft for missions over Hitler's Festung Europa in that next war, they had little if any idea of the theories shaping the strategies that had brought them to that moment. These crews were familiar with their aircrafts' accoutrements, characteristics, and capabilities, but were mainly ignorant of the technological developments that had led to the weapons they were trained to operate. Most important for the air battles to come, they knew practically nothing of the finer points of air superiority as a theory—only the consequences of the failure to possess it.
Such was not entirely the case with a few individuals at the group level and some commanders of units echeloned above that level. Some of these had attended the U.S. Army's school for theory, the Air Corps Tactical School, where the ideas of the three most influential theorists, Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, and Hugh Trenchard, had some impact. The most senior commanders, the "Bomber Barons," of the American strategic effort would later testify to varying degrees of knowledge about these theories.
Giulio Douhet (1869–1930) was an Italian army officer in World War I who had begun to theorize about flight and its future impact upon warfare before that conflict broke out. He became a confidant of the Caproni aircraft manufacturing interests, which produced heavy bombers in World War I and which naturally promoted the merits of strategic bombing. An artillery officer, Douhet had some knowledge of scientific principles, which he would later apply in an attempt to validate his ideas. During the war he was so critical of the Italian failure to devote more resources to air power and his government's otherwise inept conduct of the war that he was court-martialed and spent some time in prison. Released and restored to military service before the war ended, he was formally cleared of wrongdoing in 1920 and became a general in 1921. For a time he was a chief consultant on aviation matters to the Fascist dictatorship, but soon retired to advance his theories through literary means. His core work wasCommand of the Air, first published in 1921, revised and republished in 1927.
Douhet postulated that air power was the wave of the future in warfare; it would relegate sea and land forces to secondary holding roles. A winning air force, which must be independent to do its work, must strike swiftly and aggressively in mass area bombings against enemy centers of population, communications, and industry to destroy civilian morale and impair the ability of the enemy's surface forces to function. To achieve these ends, the winning air force first had to "conquer command of the air." When one side had command of the air, it was "in a position to prevent the enemy from flying while retaining the ability to fly oneself." Key to Douhet's theory was air superiority, total if possible. Discounting the plausibility of any effective air defense, he stated, "We must therefore resign ourselves to the offensives the enemy inflicts upon us, while striving to put all our resources to work to inflict even heavier ones upon him." Douhet felt that the most effective way for one air force to defeat another was to strike its bases and sources of production, although air-to-air combat would likely also take place. The air force that possessed the most resources would eventually gain a war-winning victory. The loser would be "at the mercy" of the victor, "compelled to accept whatever terms" the latter might impose.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from To Command The Sky by Stephen L. McFarland, Wesley Phillips Newton. Copyright © 1991 Smithsonian Institution. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
CONTENTSPreface to the Paperback Edition
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Challenge
2. Training to Destroy
3. Trial and Error—Early Operations
4. To the Brink—The Fall Crisis
5. Transition to Air Superiority—Big Week
6. Berlin, the Strategic Fighter Campaign, and Control of the Air
Epilogue
Appendix
Notes
Bibliographic Essay
Selected Bibliography
Credit Lines
Index
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