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Technology to strategy and to discuss the effectiveness of bombing campaigns on the belligerents–both military and civilians
Please take a special emphasis on the question at the bottom.
For this Discussion, answer one of the instructor-provided questions by 11:55pm, ET, Thursday and respond to 3 other students’ postings by 11:55pm, ET, Sunday. This is considered to be a scholarly discussion. Unlike social media, it is good practice to include some form of reference to the sources of information because it strengthens the argument, but it is not required. You are also welcome to reference resources other than the course textbook.
In the course of this Discussion we’re going to focus on technological developments in World War II. We’ve already touched on some new systems such as radar, but this discussion should give is a much broader understanding of the rapid changes in air power. Gone were the bi-planes of the Great War. Now B-17s and 29s, Junkers, Heinkles and Lancasters flew over Europe This opened the possibility of air campaigns such as the Battle of Britain, and strategic bombing of Germany and Japan by the Allies.
Discussion Question
This is a good time for us to discuss the relationship of technology to strategy and to discuss the effectiveness of bombing campaigns on the belligerents–both military and civilians.
T A B L E O F C O N T E N T ST A B L E O F C O N T E N T S
Cover
Title Page
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Contents
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Preface to the new edition
Preface to the 9rst edition
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A World at Arms : A Global History
of World War II
by Gerhard L. Weinberg
P U B L I S H E RP U B L I S H E R
Cambridge University Press
D AT ED AT E
2005-03-28
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Means of Warfare
Though we have no records of ancient man’s interest in flight we definitely can go back to the great Leonardo Da Vinci and sketches of a mechanical winged device and the Ornithopter. In the ensuing years, man developed hot air balloons. First used during the Napoleonic Wars, the US Army used them during the Civil War, and the French government used them while the Prussians laid siege to Paris in 1870. With such a graphic demonstration of the new options they presented, the British, French, Austrians and Germans developed Balloon Corps within their military establishments. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin developed the first dirigible with a rigid frame—the zeppelin—in 1900. All these are lighter than air inventions. Simultaneous to their development, scientists and inventors examined the possibilities for heavier than air flight. Sir George Cayley studied the physics of flight and developed a practical glider. Sir William Henson built on Cayley’s work and developed a prototype for a steam-driven aircraft. Francis Wenham built the first wind tunnel. Alphonse Penaud and Victor Tatin developed monoplanes and Russian Alexander Mozhaiski flew a steam-powered monoplane 98 feet.[1]However, all these models had significant difficulties with the controls and were subject to the vagaries of the atmosphere and terrain.
The Wrightflyer
It was the Wright brothers who finally developed mechanical means of controlling pitch, role and yaw. Rather than looking at a steam engine, they developed a light-weight internal combustion engine for their plane. They succeeded in conducting the first controlled flight of a powered engine at Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina on December 17, 1903.[2] The years between that first flight and the outbreak of the Great War saw tremendous development of aircraft throughout Europe, and most of the Armies kept close tabs on those developments, many of them operating their own aircraft programs.
Aircraft were a part of the arsenals of all the belligerents in the Great War, but they had very limited use. One of the most important of their capabilities was intelligence gathering. Able to fly above the battlefield, and behind enemy lines, pilots could provide important information on enemy troop movements and artillery placement to their headquarters. Occasionally they dropped hand grenades on the enemy. Once they had developed proper gun synchronization (to prevent the pilot from destroying the propeller as he fired his machine gun) pilots of the various belligerents engaged in “dog fights.” Flyers became the new heroes of the 20th century, though regardless of the “romance” of the airman, aircraft had little impact on the outcome of World War I. Take a look at some of the early planes and pilot training in this documentary from World War I.
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World War I Aircraft (WWI Documentary, 1953)
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Use of Air Power in War
Hugh Trenchard and Giulio Douhet
However, during the inter-war years, military interest in aircraft shifted from the tactical to strategic uses. Men such as Gulio Douhet, Sir Hugh Trenchard and William Mitchell developed the theory of what came to be known as Strategic Bombing. (Mitchell also ended the belief that battleships were immune to attack from the air as seen in the video below. They believed that by bombing infrastructure, military installations, defense plants and even some civilian targets, the population would eventually find the assault unbearable, and force the government to sue for peace.
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1921/1923 GENERAL MITCHELL BOMBS BATTLESHIPS
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Initially Germany seemed to be as successful in the air as blitzkrieg was on the ground. The Luftwaffe wrecked havoc on Poland and the Low Countries, and even on France. After the fall of France, while Germany prepared for the invasion of Britain that never was, the Luftwaffe began what came to be known as the Battle of Britain. However, there were some distinct differences with this campaign, most notably distance. While flights to Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium and France were relatively short hops, the flight to Britain was longer, requiring aircraft capable of greater range and carrying more fuel. Access to airfields in France made little difference since they were not built to support German aircraft, and were subject to bombing from Great Britain. Nonetheless, Hermann Goering, a World War I ace himself and now head of the Luftwaffe, believed there would be little problem subduing the British Isles.
Spotter on a London rooftop with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background
The British usually date the beginning of the Battle of Britain as July 10, 1940, when German aircraft began to implement orders to gain air superiority over the Royal Air Force (RAF) as part of a plan to force Britain to come to terms. They began by targeting RAF installations, inflicting significant damage. However, the British had the “home court advantage.” Many fliers who were shot down survived and it was not unheard of for a man to ditch in the Channel, be rescued and fly again that afternoon. They also had the advantage of a well-developed (for that era) system of radar which provided early warning for the RAF. Fortuitously for Britain the Germans shifted their tactics and began the Blitz–the strategic bombing of London and fifteen other cities including Portsmouth, Birmingham, Liverpool and Southampton. The question “Why did the Germans shift their approach?” remains a topic of serious discussion to this day.
How should the British respond to the Blitz? Other than costly pinpricks such as Trondheim and Dieppe (a Canadian operation as seen below), Britain could not conduct land operations in Europe at that point. The Royal Navy maintained a blockade of Germany but it had little impact on the Luftwaffe’s assault on the British Isles. With such limited options, the British decided to retaliate in kind, bombing ports, infrastructure and defense plants in Germany. Despite the belief that “the bombers will always get through,” casualties became unsustainable. One solution was to bomb at night. While night bombing was much harder to defend against, it made hitting the target, already a very inexact proposition, almost impossible. Crews would often drop their payloads where they thought they should and head home, only to learn that they had missed the target by miles and hit civilian areas.
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THE DIEPPE RAID.mpg
Even after the Battle of Britain ended, (we usually consider October 1940 as marking the close of the campaign) the British continued to bomb Germany, and with the formal entrance of the United States into the war, the US Army Air Corps joined in the efforts. Britain continued to bomb at night, while US air crews operated in daylight. Fighter escort for the bombers also began to expand as new aircraft, aided by drop-tanks which expanded their fuel capacity, came on line. Take a look at some of the designs here. They look primitive compared to the B-2 or the Tupolev “White Swan” but they were state of the art at the time.
Whatever the results of the Allied operations over Germany, there was a secondary reason for the continuation of strategic bombing. By the summer of 1941 Germany and the Soviet Union were in an existential struggle in European Russia. The Soviet Union became an ally of the United States and Great Britain virtually overnight, and Stalin began demanding that the Allies open a second front. But geography limited and the level of preparedness limited the Western Allies’ actions. Lend Lease supplies arrived from the US at Murmansk and Archangel (as seen below), but a cross-channel invasion simply was not possible at this point. It remained three years away. In the interim, there was little the Allies could do but continue to bomb Germany, forcing the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe to divert troops from the Eastern Front to defend the Motherland. (Interestingly the Soviets had a relatively small air force which didn’t play much of a role in their struggle against Germany at all.) Do you think Allied bombing efforts made a difference on the Eastern Front? The answer to that question could have an impact on our ultimate evaluation of the importance of Strategic Bombing.
CriticalPast
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Arctic convoy of British ships underway in the North Sea carrying weapons to Russ…HD Stock Footage
We also need to remember that air power played an important role in the Pacific Theater. In fact the Japanese air assault on Pearl Harbor triggered the US entrance into World War II. The logistics of air operations in the Pacific were starkly different from those in Europe because of the vast expanses of ocean between bases and targets. This drove the development of the aircraft carrier—in effect a movable island from which to launch air strikes. Some argue that the development of the aircraft carrier vastly diminished the importance of the battleship, expected to be the decisive class of naval vessels since the days of Mahan. What do you think of that argument? In fact, if we look at the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway, were fought exclusively by aircraft from carriers, and are often said to mark the turning point in the Pacific war. This brief oral history of the Coral Sea is quite impressive. Watch this video for more information.
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Battle of the Coral Sea Commemoration 2014
Strategic Bombings
Curtis LeMay
Despite the importance of the carriers, we need to note that the Allies, basically the US, did conduct strategic bombing over the Japanese home islands, with aircraft based in China. They achieved similar results as the early operations over Germany, until Curtis LeMay transferred to the XXI Bomber Command in the Marianas. The weather over Japan was such that the winds often blew the payloads off course. LeMay’s solution was to implement low-altitude bombing which resulted widespread destruction. The use of incendiary bombs on cities where the main construction material was wood led to firestorms such as that which devastated wide sections of the capital, Tokyo. Ultimately, it was the atomic bomb which marked the end of the conflict, but that is for a later discussion.
Throughout this survey we’ve noted a consistent change and improvement in technology. Drop tanks, radar, the Norden bomb site, etc., increased the impact of the bombing campaign. But it was quantity of aircraft almost as much as quality which made the successful air war possible. Thanks to the ingenuity of men like William Knudsen who adapted techniques used on assembly lines for aircraft production, hundreds of thousands of men and women worked at enormous plants such as Willow Run in Michigan seen in this video, and the North American Aviation plant in Kansas City turned out a continuing stream of aircraft without which victory might not have been possible.
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The Willow Run Story, B-24 Liberator Production WWII 1945
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There is no question that Strategic Bombing degraded infrastructures and production capacity, diverted valuable manpower and resources to protect targeted areas and devastated large swaths of urban areas. Yet there is little evidence that even the firebombing of Dresden, Coventry and Tokyo even led to widespread calls among the population for an end to the war or overthrow of the regime. The question remains, did it have significant impact on the length of the war? We need to examine the theory and implementation to see if there was any validity to it at all.
References
[1] Philip Jarrett, ed. Pioneer Aircraft: Early Aviation before 1914. (London: Putnam Aeronautical Books, 2002).
[2] James Tobin. To Conquer The Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.)
