Air Power’s Century of False Promises
By DANIEL SWIFT
NYT
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
A HUNDRED years ago today, an Italian airman named Giulio Gavotti dropped three hand grenades out of his monoplane onto a camp of Arab and Turkish troops at Ain Zara, just east of Tripoli, during the Italian-Turkish War. It was the world’s first aerial bombardment. Each grenade weighed three pounds, and it is likely that no one was hurt. “I came back really pleased with the result,” Lieutenant Gavotti wrote to his father. Italian newspapers raved about the sortie: “Terrorized Turks Scatter.”
From this modest beginning, the air raid as a style of war grew both in scale and imagination. Popular novelists like H. G. Wells had been fantasizing about war by airship and flying machine since the late 19th century. When the First World War began, these science fiction scenes recurred in the policy assessments of military planners, who assumed that victory and defeat in a bombing war would be absolute and immediate.
In 1914, Rear Adm. Paul Behncke, deputy chief of the German naval staff, noted that a raid upon the government buildings in the Whitehall section of London would “cause panic in the population which may possibly render it doubtful that the war can be continued.” In January 1915, the raids began; by the end of the war, German zeppelins had dropped 6,000 bombs on Britain — and killed 556 people. In 1917 Gen. Jan Smuts predicted, “The day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centers on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war.”
Bombing always promised to transform war. “No longer will the tedious and expensive process of wearing down the enemy’s land forces by continuous attacks be resorted to,” argued Billy Mitchell, the father of the United States Air Force, in the 1920s. He went on to insist that bombing must surely cause “the amelioration and bettering of conditions in war because it will bring quick and lasting results.”
(More here.)
NYT
Saratoga Springs, N.Y.
A HUNDRED years ago today, an Italian airman named Giulio Gavotti dropped three hand grenades out of his monoplane onto a camp of Arab and Turkish troops at Ain Zara, just east of Tripoli, during the Italian-Turkish War. It was the world’s first aerial bombardment. Each grenade weighed three pounds, and it is likely that no one was hurt. “I came back really pleased with the result,” Lieutenant Gavotti wrote to his father. Italian newspapers raved about the sortie: “Terrorized Turks Scatter.”
From this modest beginning, the air raid as a style of war grew both in scale and imagination. Popular novelists like H. G. Wells had been fantasizing about war by airship and flying machine since the late 19th century. When the First World War began, these science fiction scenes recurred in the policy assessments of military planners, who assumed that victory and defeat in a bombing war would be absolute and immediate.
In 1914, Rear Adm. Paul Behncke, deputy chief of the German naval staff, noted that a raid upon the government buildings in the Whitehall section of London would “cause panic in the population which may possibly render it doubtful that the war can be continued.” In January 1915, the raids began; by the end of the war, German zeppelins had dropped 6,000 bombs on Britain — and killed 556 people. In 1917 Gen. Jan Smuts predicted, “The day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centers on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war.”
Bombing always promised to transform war. “No longer will the tedious and expensive process of wearing down the enemy’s land forces by continuous attacks be resorted to,” argued Billy Mitchell, the father of the United States Air Force, in the 1920s. He went on to insist that bombing must surely cause “the amelioration and bettering of conditions in war because it will bring quick and lasting results.”
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home