Meanwhile, the U.S. Army conducted a long search for a practical doctrine of strategic bombardment. Most of the work was conducted at the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) at Maxwell Field, Alabama. Between the world wars, ACTS was the closest thing to a U.S. air academy. It provided courses in leadership, command, and air doctrine and strategy, though some instructors and students recognized that until proven in combat, theory necessarily remained theoretical.
When the doctrinal search began in 1920, airmen acknowledged that aviation technology would not match airpower theory for many years. In truth, two decades passed before Douhet’s vision of long-range bombers delivering heavy loads became a reality. Consequently, in the first six years of discussion, ACTS’s focus narrowed on the primacy of bombardment over the other aviation branches, notably reconnaissance and observation, ground attack, and fighter. Experience in the Great War had conclusively proven the worth of aircraft in reconnaissance and directing artillery fire, the great killer of the Western Front. Only the Germans deployed dedicated ground attack units, but most combatant air arms used aircraft to support the infantry.
With the primacy of bombardment aviation accepted by 1926, the Maxwell theorists next evolved the concept of the self-defending bomber, which would not require fighter escort. ACTS’s second study period lasted until 1934, the dawning of the B-17 era. Though the early technological deficit was declining as more capable aircraft emerged, some important wrinkles remained to be ironed out. It is remarkable that so many knowledgeable practitioners (nearly all captains and majors) denigrated the fighter. With some exceptions, they convinced themselves that unescorted heavy bombers could not only survive but thrive in a modern air defense network. The school solution held that bombers would operate in an altitude sanctuary, well above the range of heavy flak guns and even beyond the effective ceiling of most interceptor aircraft. Among the few dissenters was a leather-faced Louisiana fighter pilot named Claire Lee Chennault, who in 1937 left the service for his heresy and took himself to China.
In truth, Chennault was not the only practitioner who recognized the importance of pursuit aviation. But as with strategic bombing, technical reality trailed in theory’s slipstream. Other fliers knew that long-range fighters would be necessary to escort heavy bombers, but almost none existed before 1943. However, there was evidence from abroad for those who cared to look. The Sino-Japanese conflict (initiated in 1931; permanent from 1937) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–39) seemed to indicate the need for bomber escorts. But neither war provided many solid case studies of modern, large-scale air operations.
If the limited examples of China and Spain could be ignored, the Battle of Britain should have convinced ACTS that unescorted daylight bombing was a dead end, in both the figurative and Darwinian sense. During the four-month 1940 air campaign, the Luftwaffe lost 1,000 bombers with escort, proving that fighter range as well as performance was crucial to bomber survival. But Hermann Göring’s Messerschmitt 109 fighters were fully extended just to cover his bombers over London from bases in northern France. His longer-ranged twin-engine Me 110 fighters, though fast and well armed, simply could not compete with lighter, more agile single-engine interceptors. Therefore, bomber escort became the question that no one dared speak. Because there were no long-range fighters, policy was tweaked to do without them. In short, the technological tail wagged the doctrinal dog.
Having spent fourteen years producing the philosophy and method of bombardment, from 1935 the next set of ACTS classes got down to bombing business: translating previous work into a viable doctrine. The process lasted until the verge of America’s entry into the Second World War, being completed in 1940. It emphasized the self-defending bomber, operating in daylight (for better navigation and bombing accuracy), and attacking specific target sets: enemy industry, transport, petroleum, and other military-industrial facilities. ACTS shared Trenchard’s conclusion that without specifically targeting enemy civilians, depriving them of power, water, and other services would cripple their morale and, ergo, force the hostile nation into submission. It was also vintage Mitchell, who believed “the very threat of bombing” could expel civilians (i.e., factory workers) from industrial centers. Therefore, presumably direct air attack on enemy cities would result in a shorter war and fewer military casualties.
In twenty years of discussion and study, nearly 1,100 officers graduated from ACTS. Of those, nearly two-thirds attended between 1936 and 1940, and 261 served as generals in World War II. By 1941 the technology was forthcoming, with B-17s and B-24s in the inventory, providing the second generation of American airmen with the means to conduct strategic warfare. How well theory matched reality waited to be seen.
The Nine-Day Miracle
In August 1941 the newly semi-independent Army Air Force worked a miracle, and it took just nine days to do it.
As part of the overall Army plan for U.S. entry into the European War, which had begun in 1939, the service’s aviation branch was allowed to conduct its own planning. That was the good news. The bad news: the document was needed almost immediately to coordinate with British planning. Arnold tossed the hot potato to the Air Corps Tactical School.
Before Pearl Harbor, Arnold’s commission to ACTS was fourfold: determine what was needed to defend the Western Hemisphere; conduct strategic operations against Germany; hold the line in the Pacific; and support an eventual American-Allied return to Occupied Europe. The overall strategy was in keeping with what would become Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s “Germany first” policy, announced in January 1942.
Five exceptional officers were tasked with producing what became Air War Plans Division One, better known as AWPD-1. The team included Colonel Donald Wilson, Lieutenant Colonels Kenneth N. Walker and Harold L. George, and Majors Haywood S. Hansell and Laurence S. Kuter. All would become generals. Eventually Ken Walker and “Possum” Hansell held bomber commands in the Pacific: Walker received a posthumous Medal of Honor for his combat leadership while Hansell would feature prominently in the B-29 campaign against Japan.
The planners received the go signal on the 4th of August; they delivered on the 12th.
AWPD-1 was the starting point in a series of papers describing what was necessary to conduct a strategic bombing campaign against a hostile industrialized nation. The focus was almost wholly upon Germany, as lack of targeting information prevented a similarly detailed plan against Japan. Tokyo would figure in AWPD-42, which was issued the following autumn.
Among AWPD-1’s target sets were electrical power production, transportation hubs and networks, petroleum production, and enemy morale. Germany’s electrical grid was dropped from first to thirteenth place in eventual priority, under the mistaken impression that it was too widespread to be crippled. In wartime, enemy industry and petroleum processing would become the major objectives, with transport and troop formations outranking power generation. However, postwar examination confirmed the planners’ prescience, as the power grid was indeed vulnerable.
AWPD-1 detailed the force structure needed for a global air war: personnel, aircraft, bases, targets, and the operating doctrine to make it all work. The document’s major error was the number of aircraft to be ordered, as not even the airpower acolytes predicted the enormous capability of American industry. The plan’s postulated 239 combat groups (ninety-eight of them flying bombers) proved eerily close to the wartime high of 243 with 80,000 aircraft and 2.4 million men.
Well after the war, Hansell recalled the work of 1941. “In view of the world situation, the Strategic Air Intelligence Section naturally concentrated on the Axis powers. It was slow and tedious work, but ultimately we made a lot of headway with Germany and Italy. Japan, however, was a different story. The Japanese had established and maintained a curtain of secrecy that we found absolutely impenetrable. There were not even any recent maps available.”
At the time, few Americans were concerned with prospects for war with Japan, considered a land of polite, smiling people who b
owed much and viewed the world through Coke-bottle glasses. “Made in Japan” was stamped on cheap, imitative products of little account, and whatever mischief Tokyo conducted in Asia was far removed from the national consciousness. As Hansell wrote, “The American people simply could not believe that Japan would challenge the United States in open warfare.”
Then came the events of December 7, which, as Hansell said, “in one blow destroyed the validity of all the Army and Navy War Plans. Naturally all strategic plans of any importance had embraced a major role for the United States Fleet. Suddenly the surface component of that fleet had lost its backbone. Not only were we suddenly at war but almost all the strategic planning for the conduct of our military operations had been nullified in one stroke.”
Strategic airpower doctrine resembled a three-legged stool. It depended equally upon targeting (material and psychological), bombing accuracy, and the viability of the self-defending bomber. Surprisingly, AWPD-1 touched upon the desirability of long-range escort fighters but AWPD-42 did not.
Airmen such as ACTS’s Kenneth Walker firmly believed in the concept of precision, daylight bombing from high altitude. The advantages were obvious: relative immunity to antiaircraft fire; the presumed difficulty of fighter interception; and better navigation and bombing accuracy than at night. However, by the time AWPD-1 was finished in 1941, the British had abandoned daytime operations over Germany, having learned that unescorted bombers could not survive in daylight. The Luftwaffe’s flak and fighters made nocturnal missions costly enough: throughout the war, about half of Bomber Command personnel were killed or captured, mainly flying at night.
Theory Versus Reality
Two of the most influential figures in American bombardment aviation were immigrants: a Russian flier and a Dutch engineer. Between them, they represented the enduring pattern that strategic bombing theory usually outpaced reality by more than twenty years. They were Alexander Nikolaivich Prokofiev de Seversky and Carl L. Norden.
“Air power is the American weapon,” declared Alexander de Seversky in his classic 1942 treatise, Victory Through Air Power. Seversky was an accomplished airman, having been taught to fly by his father at age fourteen in 1908. During the Great War the youngster joined the czar’s naval air service, losing a leg but returning to duty. Loss of a limb did not prevent him from becoming the nation’s leading naval ace. Appointed to a military mission to America in 1917, his stay overlapped the Bolshevik revolution in his homeland. Happy to spend the rest of his life in the United States, he quickly established relations with the aeronautic elite, including Billy Mitchell.
Seversky bore more credentials than any contemporary: naval officer, airman, fighter ace, engineer, and manufacturer. With that background he wrote widely and well—hundreds of articles appeared under his byline—and he lectured extensively. By one reckoning he addressed 100,000 military officers during his career.
Settling in New York, Seversky founded his own company in 1931 and became a factor in the aviation industry. (The surname represented a PR flack’s dream: “Sever the Sky!”) However, he proved a poor businessman, and in 1939 Seversky was voted out by his board of directors, who reestablished the firm as Republic Aircraft.
Nevertheless, few airmen pushed harder or more eloquently for full development of “the American weapon” than Seversky. Nearly as concerned with aviation’s philosophical aspects as Douhet had been, Seversky published his “Air Power Lessons for America” in 1942. By war’s end they proved about one-third accurate: among other things, he underestimated navies and aircraft carriers while overstating bombing’s effect on morale. However, some of his lessons later gained credence with improved technology.
For all his success as an author and lecturer, no venue matched Seversky’s bravura performance in the 1943 Disney version of Victory Through Air Power. Aside from the cinematic artistry, Seversky’s onscreen performance mesmerized many viewers. Moving about the soundstage, his blue eyes seemingly penetrating the camera, he made an impressive appearance, reinforced by a Count Dracula voice that left audiences spellbound.
Yet for all his background and knowledge, Seversky conjured a peculiar plan. Narrating a polar view of the world, he espoused quashing Japan with long-range bombers from, of all places, the Aleutians. Whether he had ever flown there, he should have realized that the Alaskan weather factory produced arguably the worst flying environment on earth, with base construction and logistics posing enormous problems as well.
However, Seversky waged a single-minded crusade to convert his countrymen to the Mitchell vision of airpower: an all-conquering force that would turn the Army and Navy into supporting arms. Reality forced itself upon such grandiose visions, but it would be difficult to overstate Seversky’s influence with the American reading public.
Meanwhile, airpower’s hands-on practitioners took over from the theorists. In that regard, Seversky handed off to another émigré from even more unlikely origins.
The world’s most famous bombsight was the brainchild of Carl Norden, born of Dutch parents in Java in 1880. After studying engineering in Europe he sought opportunity in America and became an industry consultant before the Great War. Impressed by his work with the Sperry Gyroscope Company, in 1920 the Navy asked Norden to develop a gyro-stabilized bombsight to replace the British and American types then in use.
Two years later Norden’s design was successfully tested, and the Army took note. Despite a long rivalry, the two services had decided to standardize on some items, including a precision bombsight. The first large order (eighty Mark XI sights at $5,000 each) came in 1927, based on tests that demonstrated a mean error of 110 feet from aim point at 6,000 feet altitude.
Peering through his eyepiece, a bombardier set up his Norden for the attack with the aircraft’s automatic pilot slaved to the sight so the bombardier was flying the airplane through his sight. Because accuracy depended on an absolutely level bombing platform, the Norden used two gyroscopes set to maintain wings level and a constant plumb line relative to the ground.
The bombardier had already performed a crucial task, setting values for speed, altitude, temperature, and barometric pressure. Then he consulted a thick book of mathematical tables to synchronize the sight and aircraft speeds.
As the bomber approached the target, the bombardier put his crosshairs on the desired impact point via a movable mirror that measured the changing approach angle. In his eyepiece the target appeared stationary, and the bombardier could make subtle course corrections by turning knobs that controlled the autopilot. That was important because winds aloft adversely affected a bomb’s trajectory, requiring the human operator to “kill his drift” via the sight. Judging the wind was more art than science, especially since winds could be diverse at various altitudes.
Contrary to the movies, the bombardier did not press a button before shouting “Bombs away!” Rather, the exercise in three-dimensional geometry was calculated for the sight to release the bombs at the instant the plane passed through a predetermined point above the earth. Atop the sight were two parallel tracks, each with a moving pointer. One indicated the plane’s progress through space; the other the bombardier’s estimate of the correct release time. If the bombardier had done his job well, when the two pointers met they tripped an electromechanical switch that opened the shackles in the bomb bay, sending the ordnance on its ballistic parabola to the target.
Whatever the sight’s virtues, interwar tests led to unjustified optimism about the accuracy of high-level bombing. Most of the experiments prompting unrealistic expectations had involved optimum scenarios: clear weather, no time pressure (certainly no flak or fighters), and bombers mostly flown at 10,000 feet or less. But flying straight and level at “angels ten” in the face of a well-defended target proved tantamount to suicide.
During the war, U.S. Army commanders would describe their operations as precision attacks, which in a manner of speaking fell within bounds. Flying in daylight, seeking specific aim points, the American metho
d of strategic bombing was demonstrably more accurate than the RAF’s nocturnal area attacks. But in 1942–43 the Americans fared only slightly better. The vaunted “pickle barrel” accuracy of the Norden sight mated to the B-17 and B-24 usually failed to match the brochure under combat conditions.
Nevertheless, no bombers were useful without accurate bombsights, and Norden’s invention filled a void, becoming the world standard in its lethally esoteric trade.
Morality of Bombing
Douhet and many other airpower theorists espoused a seeming contradiction: by ruthlessly bombing civilian production centers a greater good would be realized in shortening a war, reducing the carnage among soldiers. That dichotomy appeared rational in light of the World War I experience, but inevitably it would clash with later concerns about the morality of unrestricted bombing.
Morality was a constant factor in criticism of strategic airpower, and Britain especially rejected terror bombing, having been on the receiving end in 1915–1918. In 1938 RAF doctrine stated, “A direct attack upon an enemy civil population . . . is a course of action which no British air staff would recommend and no British cabinet would sanction.”
In World War II, the Allies’ moral objection to urban bombing emerged mostly in Britain, where some 60,000 civilians died under German bombs and rockets. The bishop of Chichester was a particularly vocal opponent of strategic bombardment, though he supported tactical air operations. He and a handful of others insisted that Britain—and, by extension, America—would lose “the moral high ground” by bombing cities.
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