Everything about Air Power totally explained
Aerial warfare is the use of
military aircraft and other flying machines in
warfare, including military airlift of
cargo to further the national interests as was demonstrated in the
Berlin Airlift. Developing from unpowered observation
hot air balloons in the 18th century and even older
Kite, aerial warfare has become a
high-technology affair that has led to many advances in technology and techniques such as
propulsion,
radar, and use of composites and engineered materials such as
carbon fibers.
Kite warfare
The earliest documented aerial warfare took place in ancient China, when a manned
Kite was set off to spy for military intelligence and communication .
Balloon warfare
Balloon warfare in Ancient China
In or around the 2nd or 3rd century, a prototype
Hot air balloon, the
Kongming lantern was invented in China serving as military communication.
Balloon warfare in Europe
Some minor warfare use was made of balloons in the infancy of aeronautics. The first instance was by the
French Aerostatic Corps at the
Battle of Fleurus in 1794, who used a tethered balloon,
L'entreprenant, to gain a vantage point .
Balloons had disadvantages. They couldn't fly in bad weather, fog, or high winds. They were at the mercy of the winds and were also very large targets .
American Civil War
Union Army Balloon Corps
The American Civil War was the first war to witness significant use of aeronautics in support of battle. Thaddeus Lowe made noteworthy contributions to the Union war effort using a fleet of balloons he created. In June 1861
Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe left his work in the private sector as a scientist/balloonist and offered his services as an aeronaut to President Lincoln, who took some interest in the idea of an air war. Lowe's demonstration of flying his balloon
Enterprise over Washington, DC, and transmitting a telegraph message to the ground was enough to have him introduced to the commanders of the Topographical Engineers; initially it was thought balloons could be used for preparing better maps.
Lowe's first action was at the
Battle of Bull Run in July 1861 with General
Irvin McDowell and the Grand Army of the Potomac.
Enterprise did a free flight observation of the
Confederate positions.
In another demonstration, Lowe was called to Fort Corcoran by artillery General W. F. Smith. Lowe ascended to a given altitude in order to spot rebel encampments at Falls Church, Virginia He then sent dispatch from Mechanicsville to Gaine's Farm calling for the immediate inflation of the large balloon
Enterprise, which would aid him in overlooking the imminent battle.
When Lowe arrived at Gaine's Farm,
Intrepid will still far from being inflated. In a quick work of inventive ingenuity, Lowe had the bottom of a camp kettle cut out and joined the valve ends of the
Intrepid and the partially inflated
Constitution hooked together, thereby transferring the gas from the latter into the former. Within 15 minutes he was in the air to oversee the battle.
Lowe fell prey to malaria during Fair Oaks and was out of commission for more than a month. On his return he found the Balloon Corps had been stripped of horses and wagons and left out of service for
Antietam. Lowe was called back into service at
Sharpsburg and later responded to Gen. Burnside's army at
Vicksburg. The ensuing defeat of the Union Army in what was referred to as the "Mud March" led to Gen.
Joseph Hooker relieving Burnside. By this time, the Balloon Corps had been assigned to the Engineers Corps, and a newly promoted Captain Comstock cut Lowe's pay dramatically. As coke gas wasn't always available in Richmond, the first balloons were made of the
Montgolfier rigid style, cotton stretched over wood framing and filled with hot smoke from fires made of oil-soaked pinecones. They were piloted by Captain John R. Bryant for use at Yorktown. Though Bryant's performance wasn't all that bad, his handlers were poorly experienced and his balloon was left in the air spinning like a top. Another incident had one of the handlers becoming entangled in the ascending tether rope which had to be chopped loose, leaving the Captain free-flying over his own Confederate positions whose troops threatened to shoot him down.
Attempts at making gas-filled silk balloons were hampered by the South's inability to obtain any imports at all. They did fashion a balloon from dress silk (purportedly silk for making dresses, not from silk dresses themselves). A second balloon did see action until summer 1863, when it was blown from its mooring and taken by Union forces only to be divided up as souvenirs for members of the Federal Congress. As the Union Army reduced its use of balloons, so did the Confederates—much to their relief.
Zeppelins, airships and blimps
As powered aircraft with wings dominated military aviation during WWI, rigid
dirigibles and
zeppelins were used by the Germans to attack cities. After WWI, the United States Navy researched the use of
airships, including their use as a base for fighter aircraft, but efforts were cancelled after losses in storms. In WWII, barrage ballons were used as obstacles against aircraft, and blimps were used as observation and radar platforms.
Before World War I
The armies of many countries evaluated the use of aircraft for observation purposes. Naval aviation was pursued as well; several tests were made in which
floatplanes were launched by catapult from ships at sea, and recovered later by crane.
The
U.S. Navy had been interested in naval aviation since the turn of the 20th century. In 1910-1911, the Navy conducted experiments which proved the practicality of carrier-based aviation. On
November 14 1910, near
Hampton Roads, Virginia, civilian pilot
Eugene Ely took off from a wooden platform installed on the scout cruiser
USS Birmingham (CL-2). He landed safely on shore a few minutes later. Ely proved several months later that it was also possible to land on a ship. On
January 18 1911, he landed on a platform attached to the American cruiser
USS Pennsylvania (ACR-4) in
San Francisco harbor.
The first use of airplanes in an actual war occurred in the 1911
Italo-Turkish War with the Italian Army Air Corps bombing a Turkish camp at Ain Zara,
Libya, and in the 1912
First Balkan War with the
Bulgarian Air Force bombing Turkish positions at
Adrianople. Airplanes were also used by the U.S. against Pancho Villa. Air
reconnaissance was carried out in both wars too. The
first air-dropped bomb in military history was developed by Captain
Simeon Petrov of the
Bulgarian Air Force, extensively used during the
First Balkan War (including in the first ever night bombing on 7 November 1912), and subsequently shared with the
Imperial German Air Service during
World War I.
World War I
» See also: World War I Aviation
Initially during that war both sides made use of tethered balloons and airplanes for observation purposes, both for information gathering and directing of
artillery fire. A desire to prevent enemy observation led to airplane pilots attacking other airplanes and balloons, initially with small arms carried in the cockpit, but due to the technology of the time pilots couldn't have forward facing machine guns.
Although the addition of deflector plates to the back of propellers by French pilot
Roland Garros and designer
Raymond Saulnier in the Morane-Saulnier monoplane was the first example of an aircraft able to fire through its propeller, it wasn't until the Dutch aircraft designer
Anthony Fokker developed the
interruptor gear in 1915 that it became possible to aim the gun and the airplane at the same time.
Eventually the Allies were able to capture a
Fokker Eindekker with an interruptor mechanism intact and reverse engineer it, leading to the birth of the
dogfight. Tactics for dogfighting evolved by trial and error. Eventually the German ace
Oswald Boelcke created eight essential rules of dogfighting, the
Dicta Boelcke. Both sides also made use of aircraft for
bombing,
strafing,
sea reconnaissance,
antisubmarine warfare, and dropping of
propaganda. The German military made use of
Zeppelins and, later on, bombers such as the
Gotha, to drop bombs on
Britain.
By the end of the war airplanes had become specialized into bombers, fighters, and observation (reconnaissance) aircraft.
Between the wars
Between 1918 and 1939 aircraft technology developed very rapidly. In 1918 most aircraft were biplanes with wooden frames, canvas skins, wire rigging and air-cooled engines. Biplanes continued to be the mainstay of air forces around the world and were used extensively in conflicts such as the
Spanish Civil War
. Most industrial countries also created
air forces separate from the army and navy. However, by 1939 military biplanes were in the process of being replaced with metal framed
monoplanes, often with stressed skins and liquid cooled engines. Top speeds had tripled; altitudes doubled; ranges and payloads of bombers increased enormously.
Some theorists, especially in
Britain, considered that aircraft would become the dominant military arm in the future. They imagined that a future war would be won entirely by the destruction of the enemy's military and industrial capability from the air. The Italian general
Giulio Douhet, author of
The Command of the Air, was a seminal theorist of this school, which has been associated with
Stanley Baldwin's statement that "
the bomber will always get through"; that is, regardless of air defenses, sufficient raiders will survive to rain destruction on the enemy's cities. This led to what would later be called a strategy of
deterrence and a "bomber gap", as nations measured air force power by number of bombers.
Others, such as General
Billy Mitchell in the United States, saw the potential of air power to augment the striking power of naval surface fleets. German and British pilots had experimented with aerial bombing of ships and air-dropped torpedoes during World War I with mixed results. The vulnerability of capital ships to aircraft was demonstrated on
21 July 1921 when a squadron of bombers commanded by General Mitchell sank the ex-German battleship
SMS Ostfriesland with aerial bombs; although the
Ostfriesland was stationary and defenseless during the exercise, its destruction demonstrated the potency of airplanes against ships.
It was during the
Banana Wars, while fighting bandits and insurgents in places like
Haiti, the
Dominican Republic and
Nicaragua, that
United States Marine Corps aviators would begin to experiment with air-ground tactics making the support of their fellow Marines on the ground their primary mission. It was in Haiti that Marines began to develop the tactic of
dive bombing and in Nicaraugua where they began to perfect it. While other nations and services had tried variations of this technique,
Marine aviators were the first to embrace it and make it part of their tactical doctrine
Germany was banned from possessing an air force by the terms of the WWI armistice. The German military continued to train its soldiers as pilots clandestinely until Hitler was ready to openly defy the ban. This was done by forming a and training pilots as civilians, and some German pilots were even sent to the
Soviet Union for secret training; a trained air force was thus ready as soon as the word was given. This was the beginning of the
Luftwaffe.
World War II
Military aviation came into its own during the Second World War. The increased performance, range, and payload of contemporary aircraft meant that air power could move beyond the novelty applications of WWI, becoming a central striking force for all the combatant nations.
Over the course of the war, several distinct roles emerged for the application of air power.
Strategic bombing
Strategic bombing of civilian targets from the air was a first proposed by the Italian theorist General
Giulio Douhet. In his book
The Command of the Air (1921), Douhet argued future military leaders could avoid falling into bloody World War I-style trench stalemates by using aviation to strike past the enemy's forces directly at their vulnerable civilian populations. Douhet believed such strikes would cause these populations to force their governments to surrender.
Douhet's ideas were paralleled by other military theorists who emerged from World War I, including Sir
Hugh Trenchard in Britain. In the interwar period, Britain and the United States became the most enthusiastic supporters of the strategic bombing theory, with each nation building specialized heavy bombers specifically for this task .
Luftwaffe
In the early days of WWII, the
Luftwaffe launched devastating air attacks against the besieged cities of Warsaw and Rotterdam. In the case of Warsaw, the bombings had little effect, but in the case of
Rotterdam, the psychological effect of the bombings did have the intended effect—a relatively rapid ending of Dutch resistance (Buckley 129).
During the
Battle of Britain, the
Luftwaffe, frustrated in its attempts to gain
air superiority in preparation for the planned invasion, turned to bombing of London and other large English cities. However, the
Luftwaffe found these raids didn't have the effect predicted by prewar airpower theorists.
Royal Air Force
The British, started in kind - using a strategic bombing campaign in 1940 that was to last for the rest of the war. Early British bombers were all twin-engined designs and were lacking in defensive armament. Therefore,
Bomber Command quickly turned to a policy of night bombing, for which the crews were untrained; their inaccuracy meant they were forced to adopt area bombing, never able to hit specific targets such as factories or power plants .
Soviet Red Air Force
Although the rapid industrialization the Soviet Union experienced in the 1930s had the
potential to enable the
Voyenno-voznushnyye sily (VVS) to be effective against the Luftwaffe,
Stalin's purges left the organization intellectually and morally weakened. However, when Germany invaded in June 1941 (
Operation Barbarossa), the massive size of the VVS, in both planes and people, allowed it to absorb "horrendous" casualties and still maintain capability.
Like Japan was to do in December of that year, Nazi Germany had awoken a
sleeping giant which was too large to destroy despite the
Wehrmacht's superior experience and the Luftwaffe's superior training. Despite the near collapse of both the Red Army and Red Air Force, Germany's 1941 assault failed to destroy either one, and as the massive resources of the Soviet Union were reorganized toward war, Germany's impending destruction become ever more apparent.
As during the
Battle of Britain, fundamental flaws in the Luftwaffe were exposed during Germany's war with the Soviet Union. Although strategic bombing requires that the enemy's industrial war capacity be neutralized, some Soviet war factories were moved as much as east—far out of reach of the Luftwaffe's bombers. And even factories and VVS facilities that were in reach of the Luftwaffe had to be ignored much of the time because the Luftwaffe's resources were needed for more critical duty in supporting the German army. The Luftwaffe became overstretched, and even victorious battles damaged the overall capability of Germany's air force due to attrition. The VVS's fighter-capability rested on the
Yakovlev Yak-9 and
Lavochkin La-5, and its primary bombers were the
Ilyushin 2 Shturmovik and
Petlyakov Pe-2. Utilizing overwhelming numerical superiority, Soviet forces were able to drive the Germans out of Soviet territory and take the war to Germany.
U.S. Army Air Force
When the U.S.
Eighth Air Force arrived in England in 1942, the Americans were convinced they could do what the RAF and the Luftwaffe could not. The Eighth was equipped with
B-17 Flying Fortresses and
B-24 Liberators, both high-altitude four-engined designs. Flying in daylight in large, close formations, U.S. doctrine held tactical formations of heavy bombers would be sufficient to gain
air superiority in the absence of escort fighters. The intended raids would hit hard on chokepoints in the German war economy such as
oil refineries or
ball bearing factories.
The U.S.A.A.F. was compelled to change its doctrine since bombers alone, no matter how heavily armed, couldn't achieve air superiority against single-engined fighters. Loss rates rose from five to twenty
per cent in a series of missions between
August 17 and
October 14 1943, when raids against
Regensburg and Schweinfurt, penetrating beyond the range of fighter cover, resulted in the loss of 60 bombers on one mission.
Air superiority
During the Battle of Britain, many of the best
Luftwaffe pilots had been forced to bail out over British soil, where they were captured. As the quality of the
Luftwaffe fighter arm decreased, the Americans introduced the long-range
P-38 Lightning and
P-51 Mustang escort fighters, carrying drop tanks. Newer, inexperienced German pilots—flying potentially superior aircraft, such as the
Focke-Wulf Fw 190,
Heinkel He 162, and the
Messerschmitt Me 262—gradually became less and less effective at thinning the late-war
bomber streams. Adding fighters to the daylight raids gave the bombers much-needed protection and greatly improved the impact of the strategic bombing effort.
Over time, from 1942 to 1944, the Allies' air forces became stronger and stronger while the Luftwaffe became weaker and weaker. During 1944, the Luftwaffe experienced a 78 percent reduction in its strength, and Germany's air force lost control over Germany's skies. As a result
nothing in Germany could be securely protected—not stationary army units, nor moving army units, nor war factories, nor their workers, nor civilians in cities such as
Hamburg and
Dresden, nor the nation's capital—Berlin. Germans had to watch as their soldiers and civilians began to be slaughtered in the thousands by aerial bombardment—much as what the Germans had done to Poland, Rotterdam, Britain, and the Soviet Union.
Effectiveness
Strategic bombing by non-atomic means didn't win the war for the Allies, nor did it succeed in breaking the will to resist of the German (and Japanese) people. But in the words of the German armaments minister
Albert Speer, it created "a second front in the air." Speer succeeded in increasing the output of armaments right up to mid-1944 in spite of the bombing. Still, the war against the British and American bombers demanded enormous amounts of resources: antiaircraft guns, day and night fighters, radars, searchlights, manpower, ammunition, and fuel. On the Allied side, strategic bombing diverted material resources, equipment (such as
radar) aircraft, and manpower away from the
Battle of the Atlantic (where even a couple of squadrons of B-24s could be priceless) and Allied armies. As a result, German army groups in Russia, Italy, and France rarely saw friendly aircraft and constantly ran short of tanks, trucks, and anti-tank weapons. The only option left was to create World War I-style slit trench defenses quite unlike the
blitzkriegs of 1939-1941.
Tactical air support
By contrast with the British strategists, the primary purpose of the
Luftwaffe was to support the Army. This accounted for the presence of large numbers of
dive bombers on strength and the scarcity of long-range heavy bombers. This 'flying artillery' greatly assisted in the successes of the German Army in the
Battle of France (1940) . Hitler determined air superiority was essential for the
invasion of Britain. When this wasn't achieved in the Battle of Britain, the invasion was canceled, making this the first major battle whose outcome was determined primarily in the air .
The war in Russia forced the Luftwaffe to devote the majority of its resources to providing tactical air support for the beleaguered German army. In that role, the Luftwaffe used the
Junkers Ju 87,
Henschel Hs 123 and modified fighters—
Bf 109 and
FW 190.
The Red Air Force was also primarily used in the tactical support role, and towards the end of the war was very effective in the support of the
Red Army in its advance across
Eastern Europe . An aircraft of importance to the Soviets was the
Ilyushin Il-2 Shurtmovik—appropriately called "flying artilery"; the Il-2 was able to make life very difficult for
panzer crews, and the Il-2 was an important part of the Soviet victory at
Kursk—one of the biggest tank battles in history.
Military transport aviation and use of airborne troops
Military transport aviation was invaluable to all sides in maintaining supply and communications of ground troops, and was used on many notable occasions such as resupply of German troops in and around Stalingrad after
Operation Uranus, and employment of
airborne troops.
After the first trials in use of airborne troops by the Red Army displayed in the early 1930s many European nations and Japan also formed the airborne troops, and these saw extensive service on in all Theatres of the Second World War. However their effectiveness as
shock troops employed to
surprise enemy static troops proved to be of limited success. Most airborne troops served as
light infantry by the end of the war despite attempts at massed use in the Western Theatre by US and Britain during the Operation
Market Garden.
Naval aviation
Aircraft and the
aircraft carrier first became important in naval battles in
World War II, particularly:
