Raf Electronic Hardware
Lessons from the first century of air warfareA.D. Harvey
DURING the hundred years that have elapsed since Orville Wright's first forty-yard flight near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903, air power has been a dominant factor in warfare. And though for most of the last half-century it has been the long-range rocket (first employed in September 1944) which has preoccupied the fearful imaginings of the majority of the world's population, much of the actual experience of air warfare since 1945 has been along lines thoroughly explored during aviation's first four decades. Even today the B-52 heavy bomber, an essential element in the USAF's arsenal, dates back to the early 1950s, having first flown on 15 April 1952; the RAF's Nimrod electronic warfare aircraft have airframes based on the De Havilland Comet which first flew on 27 July 1949; nine national airforces around the world still employ the Douglas DC-3, which first flew on 17 December 1935. Despite evident continuities however, our understanding of the history of air warfare has suffered from the emphasis given to strategic bombing in the historiographical tradition favoured by the RAF and USAF, and by the way the lessons of warfare in the jet age, though incorporated into current operational doctrine, have been incompletely matched up with the lessons to be drawn from the history of air warfare in the piston-engined era.
The key aspects of air warfare may be considered under seven heads:
1. Air Superiority
A few triumphantly successful air superiority campaigns--by the British in Syria, the Germans in Russia, the Japanese in Malaya and the Philippines in 1941; by the Israelis in the Middle East in 1967--were icing on the gingerbread of campaigns actually won by ground forces. In Malaya and the Philippines, the Japanese made virtually no use of their air superiority, once it was achieved, to influence the ground fighting; in Sinai in 1967 Israeli aircraft made significant attacks on Egyptian army formations on only two days, and pilots complained of the lack of information they received from their army colleagues as a factor in limiting the effect of these attacks. Other air superiority campaigns were substantive failures--in September 1939, for example the Luftwaffe, despite its overwhelming numerical and technical preponderance, failed to prevent a single one of the fifty or so Polish Air Force attacks on German ground units. Similarly, the British Harrier jump jets dominated the skies over the Falklands, but were unable to stop the Argentinians from sinking two Royal Navy destroyers and two frigates. 'Big Week' in February 1944 demonstrated that the USAAF had established a numerical and qualitative advantage over the Luftwaffe, but even till the very end of the war the USAAF could not guarantee the safety of its heavy bombers from Luftwaffe fighter attacks, let alone protect them from flak.
2. Ground Support
During the 1939-45 war ground attack was always much less accurate than artillery. The huge losses said to have been inflicted on German armour by rocket-firing Hawker Typhoons at Mortain in August 1944 have now been shown to have been the result of wildly optimistic reporting. A case can also be made for supposing that the vast numbers of Ilyushin Il-2 Shturmovik ground-attack aircraft employed by the VVS on the Eastern Front 1942-45 had more to do with their impact on frontline troops' morale than with any practical effect on the Wehrmacht's hardware. Advances in technology since 1945 may have transformed the equation between investment and result but data from Kosovo suggest that air attacks on enemy ranks still usually miss. Against lightly armed troops, as in Vietnam, the apparent success of fighter-bomber strikes and covering fire from helicopter gunships is largely predicated on the enemy's lack of suitable weaponry with which to defend itself against air attack. In Vietnam the USAF and the US Army's own helicopter gunships were able to make over-kill-level interventions again and again in the ground fighting, with minimal losses; but victory is more than a matter of spectacular newsreel: the US still lost that war.
There can be no doubt that the US and its allies won the First Gulf War in 1991, though there is still some questions whether the Iraqi Army can be regarded as having made any sort of determined resistance: a Russian general, Anatoliy Malyukov commented, 'this was the first time we saw a war like this, in which aviation practically bore by itself all fundamental missions'; but both photographs and eye-witness reports indicate that much of the bombed-out traffic left by the Iraqi Army on the Kuwait City-Basra road consisted not of military vehicles but looted civilian material, 'school buses, station wagons, tank trucks, luxury sedans, fire engines ...'. The US cannot always count on having such opponents.
3. Strategic Bombing
Strategic bombing programmes had a significant weakening effect on Germany, North Korea and North Vietnam but were clearly not decisive: North Vietnam, which in relative terms may have suffered most from this form of attack, actually came out victorious. In the case of Italy, Japan, and, probably, Afghanistan, bombing seems to have been a decisive factor, but its success was predicated in the inferiority (or non-existence) of air-defence and civil defence provision. In the case of Japan also, the bombing of cities may have been a less effective use of the B-29 bomber than its employment in mine-laying to strengthen the sea blockade of the Home Islands.
All sustained strategic bombing campaigns, moreover, depend on a disproportion between the economic resources of the attacking and defending sides. It was essentially sheer weight of numbers that enabled the USAAF and RAF, despite mortifying losses, to overwhelm German day and night defences in 1943-45. No doubt it was an error on the Germans' part not to invest more heavily in air crew training and the mass-production of night fighters at an earlier stage, but they were heavily committed to a losing war on the Eastern Front throughout the Anglo-American strategic air offensive. Similarly it was shortages of material resources as much as lack of forward planning which caused the Japanese to have insufficient numbers of 120 mm anti-aircraft guns, high-altitude fighters and night fighters with airborne radar to confront America's B-29s when they began their attacks in 1944. It is possible that the effectiveness of the B-52 raids in Afghanistan derived almost entirely from the demoralization resulting from being attacked by an enemy whom one lacked any means of striking back at: in many ways the air assault in Afghanistan in 2001 was simply an upscaling of the RAF's 'police' campaign against the recalcitrant villagers in Iraq in the 1920s. On the other hand well-equipped air defences can be a serious worry for an attacking air force, as in the Schweinfurt (17 August 1943) and Nuremberg (30 March 1944) raids and over Hanoi in December 1972. One should be very careful of the lessons to be learnt from using a powerful air force to attack the cities of a country that lacks the military resources to defend itself: throughout history the most serious wars have been between nations that were more or less evenly matched.
4. Air Defence
As already pointed out, Germany in 1943-45 was essentially overwhelmed quantitatively in a race for production, though it also failed to overtake the British in their qualitative lead in electronic devices: but there had been no way Germany was strong or productive enough to overwhelm British defences in 1940-41. Obviously some weapon systems are more effective than others, but the efficaciousness of air defence measures depend basically on the gap between the technological/industrial investment and output of the competing sides.
It might be noted that bombing campaigns that depend on secondary missions to suppress anti-aircraft artillery or surface-to-air missiles, which appear to be a feature of Allied operations in the Gulf, imply a huge preponderance of strength on the attacking side. Where the two sides are equally matched missions to suppress enemy air defences are likely to be very costly.
In a short campaign between forces unevenly matched in terms of technological skills and investment, the stronger side might suffer significant losses as a result of the weaker side making ingenious use of cheaper weaponry. An instance of this is the employment of grenade-launchers against American helicopters in Somalia in October 1993, as well as in the last few weeks in Iraq. In the long term it will always be possible to improvise tactics for employment against improvised weapons but there is no escaping from the basic fact about multi-million dollar aircraft: if they can fly they can crash.
5. Long Range Attack
Since Bleriot's flight across the English Channel in 1909 the aeroplane has always offered the promise of eliminating the constraints of geography. During the Second World War, up to and including the early daylight raids by B-29s on Japan, ultra-long range missions generally achieved poor results in no way commensurate with the investment of effort. The longest non-stop bombing mission of the war, the twenty-four-hour, 3700-mile flight completed by a single Savoia Marchetti SM 75 GA from Gandurra on the island of Rhodes to Gura in Eritrea and back, on 23-24 May 1943, failed even to find its target: the US 83rd Air Depot Group, which then occupied the former Italian airbase at Gura, has no record of ever having been bombed. Later the B-29 fire raids on Japan's cities had a significant impact on Japan's war-making capacity: but they depended on a vast effort by the US Army and Navy to secure bases close enough to fly from. It was the B-52 which fulfilled the World War II dream of a truly intercontinental bomber: but again ultra-long range missions are very much a rich boy's toy. The sixteen-hour 7772-mile mission by a Royal Air Force Vulcan to bomb the runway at Port Stanley on 30 April-1 May 1982 required the support of eleven Victor air-refuelling tankers. Only two of the twenty-one 1000 lb bombs carried hit the runway. For most purposes aircraft carriers are a more practical means of bringing one's air power close to the theatre of operations: but then, if the aircraft carrier is close enough to attack from, it is close enough to attack.
6. Air Supply
The Berlin airlift of June 1948-May 1949 showed what is possible--providing the other side does not interfere. The Luftwaffe's attempts to supply the Sechste Armee at Stalingrad failed, and British air supply of Slim's beleaguered 14th Army at Imphal, April-June 1944, depended on overwhelming Allied air superiority.
7. Airborne Assault
The World War II technology of glider-borne troops and artillery and mass parachute drops has of course been superseded by the employment of helicopters but the basic lessons of Holland 1940, Crete 1941, North Burma, March 1944, and Arnhem, September 1944, remain valid: however useful airborne assaults may be behind or on the fringes of a main battle front, against enemy ground forces organized and in strength airborne forces are likely to suffer disproportionate losses during the flying-in phase and, unless they succeed in defeating the enemy's principal formations before they have regrouped, will be at a serious disadvantage with regard to heavy artillery, armour and (where relevant) ground transportation.
Precisely because air warfare is such an expensive way of making war, it is the sphere where the richer side can most effectively assert its advantage over the poorer side. Vietnam showed that even an enormous advantage in economic and technological resources may not necessarily be decisive: in the overall picture of a war other factors may predominate. But even Vietnam, and earlier Korea, fit into a pattern already detectable in the very first employment of aircraft in warfare, during Italy's invasion of Libya in 1911-12, clearly evident since the final phases of World War II, and ever more inescapable since 1990: the current practice of air warfare consists of richer and more technologically advanced societies imposing their will on weaker and less adequately mobilized antagonists. We should be wary of supposing that the lessons to be learnt from this will stand us in good stead when, later in this century or in the next, we move back into a world order characterized by the confrontation of continent-dominating super-powers or economic power blocs.
Taking Flight: Inventing the Aerial Age from Antiquity through the First World War. Richard P. Hallion. Oxford University Press. [pounds sterling]20.00. 531 pages. ISBN 0-19-516035-5. Whilst this title, first published in New York, naturally benefits from this year's commemoration of the Wright Brothers' flight, it covers a far wider range than that event. The author, who was the official Historian of the U.S. Air Force, sets out to demolish several old myths and underlying prejudices and to put the achievements of twentieth century inventors into perspective. His aim is 'to reassess and re-examine the early history of flight' and to integrate and interpret 'the early international history of flight' from balloons and air-ships to aeroplanes. At every stage in his exhaustive coverage he shows how innovators and dreamers related to their times and backgrounds. 'Flight was', he writes, 'an international achievement born of the attitudes, technological outlook and previous accomplishments of a largely European-rooted culture'. Despite the horrors of the fanatical Mohammedan attacks in September 2001, air travel remains an invention that has done more good than harm. This is a masterful survey, widely researched and comprehensive in its scholarship. (G.F.R.)
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