Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945

Description

This appears to be a meticulously researched book that has been carefully compiled. Yet is this enough to produce a really good history? Perhaps it is not. This book is virtually devoid of any real analysis. It could have, for example, compared, not just identified, the similarities and differences between the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force (RAF) that in the end produced remarkably similar ideas about the use of air power. In reading the chronology presented in this book one would think each service operated in a vacuum, never influencing the other. A little more thought on the author's part would have also revealed that although official doctrine emphasized the role of air power in the tactical support of infantry, the Air Corps was a pretty independent institution. Its budget through the fiscally lean inter-war years usually took a disproportionate amount of the funds appropriated for the army as a whole. In point of fact the Air Corps very much was able to pursue the development of heavy bombers for strategic bombardment in the face of official doctrine. The author hints at this, but appears reluctant to really investigate why this was so. The author could have also investigated more insightfully, in the face of the general failure of strategic bombing to crush civilian morale in the UK, Germany or Japan, why the doctrine of strategic bombing persists to this day. Finally the book is filled with missed opportunities to connect the dots so to speak. For example after WWI, the RAF with the encouragement of Winston Churchill, in the colonel office, undertook to police both Iraq and Trans-Jordan using what was called `air control'. In practice it was really air-armored control since in addition to aircraft the RAF used armored cars extensively to supplement its aircraft. Did this lesson in the necessity for combined arms impact RAF doctrinal thinking in any way or was it ignored as an aberration? In the same manner the Army Air Corps assumption of a coastal defense mission, mentioned in passing by the author, caused a good deal controversy at the time with both the Army Coast Defense Corps and the U.S. Navy. What was the impact, if any, of this on Air Corps doctrinal thinking? In short this is an adequate history, but could have been the definitive history of the development of the concepts air power in the U.S. and UK.