(1907–46)
This entry is a subentry of U.S. Air Force.
On 1 August 1907, the U.S. Army's chief signal officer established an Aeronautical Division within the Signal Corps. Two years later the Signal Corps accepted an airplane from the Wright brothers, and by 1911 Lt. Thomas DeWitt Milling had begun early experimentation with an aircraft bombsight. Despite these developments, army attitudes to aircraft remained conservative: the role of aircraft, like that of dirigibles, would be to assist in observation and reconnaissance. Most army officers remained unmoved by the extensive body of predictive literature—of which H. G. Wells's novel, The War in the Air (1908), was only one example—which assumed that aircraft would be the most important tools in the wars of the future.
Between Orville and Wilbur Wright's triumph in 1903 and the beginning of World War I, the Europeans generally outpaced the Americans in aviation. The U.S. Army failed to use aircraft successfully in its 1916 attempt to punish Mexican outlaw Pancho Villa, exposing the inadequate nature of its aerial program. Nonetheless, upon entry into World War I in 1917, the Americans quickly developed plans to produce a major air force. But such plans turned out to be overambitious since they implicitly assumed that essential technological and bureaucratic structures might be put into place almost overnight. Ultimately the Americans were able to supply trainer airplanes, aircraft engines, and pilots—but they had to rely heavily on the Europeans for material and expertise.
The most important World War I air action for the Americans took place in September 1918, when Gen. Billy Mitchell, of the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Force, commanded American, British, and French squadrons in support of the U.S. First Army at St. Mihiel. This action brought the Americans important experience in the realm of tactical—or battlefield—aviation, but they did not have an opportunity to develop similar experience in what was then called “strategical” (later strategic) bombing, which focused on the use of long‐range bombers to fly over the heads of an opposing army and directly undermine the enemy's capacity and will to fight.
Nonetheless, the Americans were able to observe European efforts and even developed a plan for the future use of long‐range bombers—though it leaned heavily on the work of a leading British planner, Lord Tiverton. Indeed, the Americans were interested enough to undertake their own postwar survey of long‐range bomb damage in Europe. Heeding the arguments of the British Air Staff, the Americans concluded that the most effective planning would be achieved by making a careful study of the enemy's war economy, identifying those industries most vital to its continued functioning, and aiming to destroy them.
Without direct experience of aviation other than for purposes of reconnaissance and battlefield support, American airmen were not in a strong position to push for postwar independence from the army. The determined aerial stunts of General Mitchell raised the public profile of aviation, but his insistent demand for service independence angered army leadership and brought his career to a premature end. In the 1920s, when military budgets were tight and the nation's foreign policy was isolationist, American airmen were compelled to keep their more futuristic ideas to themselves. Despite a number of interwar congressional bills proposing a separate service, the airmen remained part of the army. Gradual change commenced in 1926, when new legislation transformed the Air Service into the slightly more autonomous Air Corps. In the early 1930s, the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) gained a new home at Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama. The 1931 MacArthur‐Pratt agreement divided land‐based and naval aviation between the army and the navy, and gave the former an officially sanctioned use for long‐range bombers: defenders of the American coastline. Increasingly, instructors at ACTS defied army ideological constraints by developing a set of ideas about the independent use of long‐range bombers against an enemy's industrial economy; these ideas ultimately would serve as the foundation of American bombing strategy in World War II.
Viewing advanced industrial societies as complex and interdependent entities subject to economic disruption, American air planners sought out those “bottleneck” targets that might be central to an enemy's functioning in wartime. They posited that if these could be attacked with swiftness and precision, then the enemy might be defeated. This theory was bolstered by the development of new technologies that seemed to make the plan feasible, specifically the B‐17 long‐range bomber and the Norden bomb‐sight. Both the B‐17 and the Norden bombsight (a product of the navy's in‐house designer, Carl Norden) were originally designed to help the United States defend itself from hostile threats at sea. Being able to hit a hostile target at sea naturally put a premium on accuracy, and this in turn reinforced American confidence in the notion of what would come to be referred to, optimistically, as “precision bombing.”
As the threat of war loomed increasingly large in the summer of 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to invest heavily in the newly renamed U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF). His decision, not unlike the decision undertaken on America's entry into World War I, probably rested on the appeal of a high‐technology mode of war fighting, which seemed to promise reduced casualties and quicker results. In August 1941, a handful of American air planners (former instructors at ACTS) devised a plan for massed bombers to fly in daylight against critical targets in the German war economy. Like their British Allies, the Americans generally had come to believe that the bomber “would always get through.” They assumed that the speed and multiple guns of the B‐17 “Flying Fortress” would enable them to fly in self‐defending groups—without long‐range fighters to fly alongside as protective escorts.
As in World War I, gearing up for total warfare proved to be more complicated and time‐consuming than anticipated. It took most of 1942 for the Americans to train the pilots, and to build the planes and infrastructure for a large‐scale bombing offensive. In the meantime, the efforts of Britain's Bomber Command had increased steadily in scale and destructiveness. The British had discovered that strategic bombing was a difficult and complicated enterprise. The unexpected effectiveness of German defense forced them to fly under cover of night, and the difficulty of finding targets led them to concentrate on those places they could find reliably: cities. Fearful that the Americans would experience the same problems, Prime Minister Winston Churchill urged his ally to join the night bombing offensive. Stubbornly clinging to their theory of air warfare, the Americans resisted.
American faith in the self‐defending bomber was badly shaken in the summer and fall of 1943. In two separate raids against ball bearings factories deep in German territory at Schweinfurt, the Americans suffered huge losses. The USAAF was now forced to make changes, too. Still wedded to the idea of daylight “precision” bombing, the Americans sought to solve their problem by bringing large numbers of escort aircraft into the European theater. Equipped with jettisonable fuel tanks for range, these could fly over enemy territory with the bombers, and engage German defensive aircraft head‐on. American bombers drew German fighters into the air, and through the winter and spring of 1944 the two air forces fought ferocious battles of attrition. In the end, the Americans were able badly to erode Luftwaffe strength—a result that greatly facilitated the Anglo‐American D‐Day landing at Normandy in June, and exposed German factories and cities to the full weight of Allied bombardment.
By the autumn of 1944 and continuing into 1945, Bomber Command and the USAAF were in a position to pummel targets in Germany with near impunity. In heavy strikes against railway lines and synthetic oil plants, the Allied air forces sought to halt the German war effort by crippling its ability to move men and supplies, and by eliminating its fuel supply. Convinced that the Germans would capitulate in the face of vast destruction, Bomber Command chief Sir Arthur Harris chose to continue attacks on cities as well. But if Harris and the Americans differed over priorities, the line between British “area bombing” and American “precision bombing” was not always so clean as the Americans claimed. On those frequent occasions when they were forced to bomb through cloud (rather than visually), the Americans achieved accuracy rates not much different from—indeed, sometimes rather worse than—the British. And in the Pacific theater, the Americans ultimately adopted bombing tactics which had much in common with Bomber Command's incendiary raids on German cities.
In the Far East, the Americans initially tried to use the same “precision” tactics they had employed in Europe. But heavy, incessant cloud cover prevailed over Japan, and the strong winds of the Pacific jet stream bedeviled formation flying. By the winter of 1944–45, the American bomber fleet (equipped with powerful B‐29 bombers) had little to show for its efforts. Abandoning their preferred tactics, the Americans—now under the field command of Gen. Curtis E. LeMay—began to fly low‐level, nighttime incendiary attacks against Japanese cities. Some sixty‐six Japanese cities were firebombed in the months prior to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In concert with the navy's blockade of Japan and mining of its harbors, the objective of the devastating air campaign was to weaken the enemy army and the entire nation prior to invasion, and, if possible, bring about Japanese capitulation. Because of the often indiscriminate nature of strategic bombing during World War II, the Anglo‐American air campaigns have been the subject of emotional postwar debate.
Members of the USAAF believed that their performance in World War II put them in a strong position to argue for independence from the army. In addition, their new role as the first service able to deliver atomic bombs moved them to a position of central importance in the postwar American defense establishment. The precise nature and organization of that establishment, however, remained to be determined. Its initial form was hammered out in lengthy and often acrimonious debates—held from 1945 to 1947—in which the navy fought hard to resist a centralized defense department, and to maintain authority over aircraft with sea‐related missions. American airmen finally achieved their long‐standing goal of autonomy when the National Security Act of July 1947 gave the newly named United States Air Force coequal status with the army and the navy within the broader framework of a national military establishment headed by a civilian secretary. The act was a problematical compromise, though, and had to be amended in 1949. The amendments strengthened the power of the secretary of defense over the services, but did not end the debates, which continue to this day, over roles and missions, and how the services should divide up control over the aircraft they need for their individual tasks.
[See also Department of Defense; Strategy: Air Warfare Strategy; Tactics: Air Warfare Tactics.]
Bibliography
- Thomas Greer, The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm, 1917–1941, 1955.
- Alfred Goldberg, A History of the United States Air Force, 1907–1957, 1957.
- Eugene Emme, The Impact of Air Power, 1959.
- Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, 1907–1964, 1971.
- Robin Higham, Air Power: A Concise History, 1972.
- Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power, 1987.
- Richard G. Davis, Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe, 1993.
- John Gooch, ed., Air Power: Theory and Practice, 1995
