by CY Caldwell
NAVAL SUPPORT
War experience has demonstrated that no army can function without the support of airpower; no navy keep the seas lacking air support. Yet airpower, in its turn, is dependent for its existence upon the support of armies and navies. While the power of the air arm is increasing, at a much greater rate than that of surface forces, no air force in the world today is truly independent, able to defend a nation by its own unsupported efforts, or able even to supply itself and remain in existence as a fighting force.
The Royal Air Force, for example, does not function solely because it has airplanes, armament, bombs, and a magnificent fighting spirit. It also requires, among other things, gas and oil. And no oil is produced in the British Isles. It must be brought to Britain in the holds of tankers, convoyed against the menace of the submarine and German air raiders by units of the Royal Navy and the U. S. Atlantic Fleet, aided by shore-based aircraft of the British Coastal Command. Nor is this the only consideration. The entire population of Britain, including the armed forces and the people who build planes for the RAF, must be maintained by a. continuous stream of shipping carrying tens of thousands of tons of supplies. These ships without whose cargoes Britain must collapse through exhaustion and starvation, must be guarded by naval and air forces working as a team. Air cargo carriers cannot now, or at any time in the forseeable future, take over this huge tonnage and maintain Britain by air transport alone. They can carry only part of the load.
United States airpower, for another example, cannot fly off to battle from the shores of New York or California. Even though our long range bombers may fly to any part of the globe where man is now industriously destroying himself and all his works. Bombers of themselves do not constitute airpower, which requires gasoline, oil, bombs, ammunition, ground bases, and thousands of tons of supplies, including food, and even bottled beer for the proper sustenance and encouragement of the fighting spirit. This part of airpower, the basic part, including also short-range fighter planes, must steam ingloriously to war in the holds of humble cargo vessels wallowing along for thousands of miles at speeds surpassed by all but the most indolent of fish. In all of that journey the ingredients of airpower must be guarded by naval units, including even the once-mighty battleship, now apparently reduced to the status of nurse-maid to a collection of tramp steamers. The mastadon passed away without suffering that indignity.
Not only American airpower, but practically all of America's war effort, including supplying our Allies with war equipment and food, must move across the surface of the sea, subject to attack from the air and from under the sea, and sometimes from the surface of the sea. It is therefore a matter of grave concern to the United States and to all of the United Nations that the power of the airplane to sink or seriously damage the surface ship, whether warship or merchant ship, is increasing day by day. With every mile added to the range of bombers, with every ton added to the load they can carry, the threat to our war effort increases; for if we cannot transport our equipment and supplies to the far-flung fighting fronts, and transport also the men in our own fighting forces, then our war effort is blocked by destruction in transit.
THE VANISHING BATTLESHIP
War experience has demonstrated the vulnerability of every type of surface vessel to air attack. The British sunk two Italian battleships and a cruiser at anchor in Tarento harbor; Japanese torpedo planes and bombers sunk two American battleships and other warships at Pearl Harbor; Japanese torpedo planes and bombers accounted tor a British battleship and a battle cruiser off Malaya; one American bomber alone accounted for a Japanese battleship. The old battleship-airplane controversy has gone to the bottom of the sea in the shattered hulks of more than half a dozen battleships whose huge guns and crews of more than a thousand officers and men had been impotent to defend them against the attacks of their relatively tiny flying antagonists.
The entire naval strategy of all nations has been disrupted and disorganized by airpower, ship-based or shore-based. The conception of the battleship as the backbone of the fleet has been discredited; the aircraft carrier has taken its place as the hardest-hitting ship in the navy. Of what use is the battleship if it cannot bring its huge guns to bear upon another of its kind. before torpedo planes and bombers from accompanying carriers, or aircraft from Army bases ashore, have sunk the enemy battleship? So far in this struggle no battleship has fired a shot at another in a fleet action. The Bismarck was brought to bay by damage inflicted by torpedo planes from aircraft carriers, slowing it down and thus permitting superior naval forces to1 close with it and finish it off.
AIRPOWER DEFINED
In the Coral Sea, Midway, and Solomon battles it was airpower that won the decision. And right here it might be well for convenience sake to define airpower as force exerted from the air; seapower as force exerted on the surface or under the surface of the sea; and landpower as force exerted on land. Airplanes carried by a navy are regarded as a part of seapower, because they fly under naval control and. are transported by naval vessels. But when they are in action it makes no difference whether they came from carriers or from land bases, operated by the army or by the navy; they function as airpower. If all the world's navies discarded their big guns and carried airplanes instead, they might still term themselves navies; but actually they then would be air forces, with the ships serving merely as floating aerodromes. The airplanes would function as well over land as over the sea. The plain fact is that the airplane itself, as a flying platform from which a blow can be delivered to the enemy, has brought a new power to war. It is airpower, irrespective of whether an admiral or a general gave the order that sent it off on its task; irrespective of whether it left the deck of a naval vessel, or the concrete runway of a Pacific island.
Considered in these simple terms, airpower exerts control over seapower. It menaces or protects, from the air, all vessels on the surface and under the surface. It is the ascendant force, and it is steadily and quickly going up in power and range and destructive ability, while the power of the surface vessel using guns to hurl its blows is going down in direct ratio to the rise of the airplane.
While there is little doubt in the minds of airmen that airpower eventually must control all movements on land and sea, the instruments for such absolute control do not yet exist. Navies are in process of evolution. The increasing emphasis on carrier construction and on the use of land-based aircraft supporting fleet actions, indicate clearly that the gun is losing ground, the bomb and the torpedo gaining ascendancy as the most effective way of delivering a blow to the enemy. But carriers do not spring into being overnight; huge land-based air forces are not quickly constructed and transported to Pacific islands or to Russia or to England or China. We must fight this war with the weapons we have on hand, using the destroyer, the cruiser, and even the reluctant battleship, while adding as rapidly as possible to the air arm. So long as surface ships ply the seas, so long as submarines menace their passage, surface war-ships will be required for their protection, and airplanes for the protection of both. Surface and air forces in our fighting services should be considered, not competitors for place, but partners in a united effort.
It seems probable that the battleship is doomed to extinction, to be supplanted by the airplane carrier. However, all carriers yet built are extremely vulnerable to bomb and torpedo attack. Their speed is no protection against enemy aircraft; and their hull construction renders them less resistant to underwater damage than the battleship. It is probable that new carrier construction will incorporate some of the protective features of battleships, at a sacrifice of speed. It would seem more essential that a carrier should remain afloat after severe damage than that it should be able to steam so quickly to a position where any determined air attack must sink it. The most reliable aircraft "carrier" in the Pacific is an island, that does not move at all, but is unsinkable.
VULNERABLE NAVAL BASES
Surface navies are menaced not only by airpower but by armies. A navy does not steam from the beginning to the end of a war; it must return at frequent intervals to land bases to replenish its supplies and to effect repairs to damaged warships. In Hong Kong, at Singapore, at Manila, the British and American navies lost their bases chiefly through the action of the Japanese Army, supported by air and naval forces. In a theater of war where the Japanese held supremacy on the sea, in the air, and on land, it is difficult to apportion credit to any one for the huge territorial gains achieved so rapidly. However, it is significant that the basic strategy of the war in the Orient, as in Europe, was planned by Army officers who by tradition and by experience naturally conceive each move of a war in terms of land positions to be wrested from the enemy. This is a conception as old as war itself, and as valid today as it was before airpower had been conceived.
Thus, in each move, the basic strategy was to place Jap troops in positions opposed to an always inferior number of defendants. Naval and air forces acting in support of these land operations also held the advantage of numerical superiority. Large balanced task forces met smaller and invariably unbalanced forces—the lack of balance particularly noticeable in airpower. It would be possible to argue that the Jap navy was the dominant factor, or that Jap airpower was the decisive element. The accomplished fact nevertheless remains that troops occupied the positions; they could then be fortified and used as bases for further moves. Man, after all, is a land animal. He uses the air and the sea as a means of gaining land on which he may firmly plant himself.
In the eastern Mediterranean, German landpower assisted by airpower may capture the bases of English naval power, in which event the Royal Navy must move from that theater. The Navy cannot protect Alexandria and Suez. That is a task for ground forces. Of course, the ground troops are not independent. They are dependent on the support of airpower. German and British land forces also must depend upon sea transport, protected by naval and air forces, for their supply and maintenance. All three arms work together to gain the objective, which, in the final analysis, is land. Lacking the opposition of British ground troops with their tanks and artillery, the mechanized divisions of Rommel long since would have occupied Suez. Of course, it is conceivable that vastly superior airpower alone might have won for either contestant; but no such power existed. Wars are fought with the forces available at the time. Blueprints for victory through airpower play no part in the war until they have been translated into physical weapons and into the men trained to use them.
THE ARM OF SPACE
Airpower is the arm of space. It can fly over the strongest armies guarding a nation's frontiers and rain destruction upon the industrial heart of that nation. It is subject to interference only by an opposing air force and by the action of anti-aircraft fire from the ground. Its range of action is limited only by the cruising range of the airplane; its power of destruction only by the plane's carrying capacity. Neither seas nor fortifications can stay its course. Theoretically, if its land bases can be held, and it can be supplied with all of its requirements, from aircraft and armament and bombs, to gasoline and oil and food, airpowcr alone can smash a nation's capacity to wage war. But how much British and American airpower is required so to smash Germany? How much German airpower is needed to smash Britain?
It seems obvious that if either contestant could gain air mastery and could send a thousand or more bombers a night to blast .ejremy cities and smash the war effort at its industrial source, airpower then would win the decision. Ground forces would have only to march in and occupy the devastated nation. But no such condition exists in England or in Germany today. Neither has air mastery.
With the strong air forces opposing each other, airpower takes on many of the characteristics of landpower, with all of its limitations. Granted equal forces, the nations could trade blow for blow, match destruction with destruction. It would be, in effect, the air war of attrition, each endeavoring to wear down the other by destroying his resources and by battering against the will of the nation to continue in the war. It is a game at which two can play.
As this is written, in September, 1942, the air advantage lies with the British air force, with the American force only preparing to take an active pan. There are heavy raids over German and occupied countries, only occasional light German raids over English cities. But more than half of the German air force is heavily engaged with the Russians. It is the obvious German strategy to put the air war with Britain on ice for the time being and devote most of German airpower to the task of knocking out the Russians. If the Russians can be defeated, or driven back and immobilized, a large percentage of the German air effort can be diverted to the attack on Britain which, so far as we are concerned, must be regarded as the onlv advanced air base from which we can attack Germany. The present air advantage, therefore, has been vouchsafed to the United Nations chiefly by the action of the Red Army and Air Force.
BRITAIN AS AIRPOWER BASE
Viewed as an air base for huge aerial attacks on the mainland of Europe, the British Isles are not an impregnable position. Their chief weakness is that of supply, both through submarine and air attacks on the ships en route, and through air bombardment of British ports. The eventual bottleneck of British-American airpower may be the gradual destruction of port facilities, the sinking of ships at the docks and in the harbors, resulting in the inability to unload sufficient supplies not only to run the air forces, but also to maintain other military forces and the civilian population. Docking facilities once destroyed cannot be replaced quickly; sunken ships cannot be refloated and repaired in a short time. It should be recalled that during the past three years the amount of new shipping built has not kept pace with the tonnage of shipping sunk by submarine and air action; and that docking facilities in nearly every British port are less than they were at the start of the war. To aggravate this already strained situation, we are sending large military forces to England, all to be based there for an indefinite period, all to be supplied by sea. Thus the problem of supply looms larger and larger as the war goes on, a fact that cannot have escaped the notice of the Nazis. Air cargo carriers can have no appreciable effect upon this situation for a long time to come; that is a matter not of months, but of years.
German war strategy, based primarily on the objective of acquiring territory, has been so successful that the Germans now occupy most of Europe. This gives them the power to exploit conquered nations in every way, from the seizure of raw materials to the conscription of labor to work for the German war machine. It gives them also the room to disperse their war industries in all parts of Europe, from France to Poland, an advantage not enjoyed by Britain whose industries must remain concentrated targets for German bombardment. Thus German air bombardment can be concentrated against a relatively small area; British and American bombardment must be dispersed over a wide area. To offset this, however, British defense is concentrated, German defense necessarily dispersed. In an air war of attrition it therefore might be expected that advantages will to a great extent be offset by disadvantages. American war production, for example, not yet subject to any damage by bombardment, suffers continual wastage in completed material by the hazards of transportation.
MASTERY OF THE AIR
There is one way, and only one way, for the United States and Great Britain to avoid this air war of attrition, of bombardment and counter-bombardment whose eventual outcome no man can foresee. That way is to concentrate upon assembling in the British Isles a joint Anglo-American air force of such power that it must win mastery of the air over Britain and over Europe. A preponderance of British and American bombers and fighters is not enough to guarantee victory; we must achieve an overwhelming superiority.
Various estimates have been made of the number of heavy bombers required to knock out the German war effort at its source in German factories. Time magazine estimates that a force of 3000 heavy bombers, with continuing replacements of plane and crew losses, would be required to stage 1000-plane nightly raids, weather permitting. Such a force could drop from 30000 to 50000 tons of bombs a month on German cities, could continue the destruction indefinitely. In ninety days that force could blast thirty German key cities, dropping from 6000 to 10000 tons on each—or twenty times as much on each city as the Germans dropped on Birmingham in two nights. However, as there is no patent on airpower or on air thinking, it is reasonable to assume that the Germans have made similar calculations, based on the damage suffered by Cologne, Dusseldorf, Bremen, Duisburg, and many other cities. Last summer's raids by the RAF have probably made Germany the most air conscious nation in the world. Hence we may safely assume that they are making strenuous efforts to replace their air losses on the Russian front and to build a large force of heavy bombers for a renewal of the air offensive against Britain. There is no certaintv that the present advantage enjoyed by the RAF and the small American force will continue forever. In fact, thinking that it must continue is merely another form of the complacency that so far has resulted in defeat after defeat for our side.
I remarked at the beginning that there is not yet in the world a great airpower nation: a nation that can gain control of the air as Britain and the United States gained control of the seas. Merely to be stronger in the air does not mean to have control! of the air. Mastery of the air means to be in a position to deny freedom of action to the enemy, while winning freedom of air action against the enemy. Thus the British-American objective should be to assemble a force of such power that it can deny to German bombers the air over Britain. British industry and ports-especially ports-must be made too costly in losses for German bombers to continue their attacks; and British bombing over Germany must be made with such an intensity and in such magnitude that the defending German fighter forces will be worn down and frittered away. The air action therefore must be both defensive and offensive; there must be a balance between bombers and fighters. The objective of an air force must be not only destruction of enemy industry but also destruction of the enemy air force, in the air and on the ground. Once mastery of the air has been gained, the nation having such mastery can methodically destroy everything within range of its bombers until the enemy nation admits defeat, even though its army, like the German army, still remains undefeated; or its Navy, like the Royal Navy, still holds the seas.
Germany sprawls across the continent of Europe, forced to police it and hold it in subjection, thus dispersing its armed might, but growing stronger by seizing most of the resources of Europe. Against this growth, however, must be set the continual wearing down and gnawing away of German military power, of land and air, by the stubborn resistance of the great Russian bear. Eventual victory in the cast mav leave the Germans too weakened to achieve victory also in the west; and complete victory in the east never may be achieved. The cost in German blood, in German misery and sorrow at home, must have a weakening effect on German morale. Superior British-American airpower well may add the hammer blows that will prove the vital factor in German defeat.
England stands off the coast of Europe, territorially a David challenging a Goliath, but in spiritual strength a united people, aided now by the Americans, descendants of those who left the shores of Europe to escape older tyrannies, older privations. These free peoples face a Europe in chains, a Europe of conquered peoples, sullen, embittered, with an evergrowing hatred of the Nazi oppressor whose present overlordship is based, not upon spiritual strength, but upon tanks and guns and airplanes.
Modern war may not be decided by military force alone. For this is a war in which military forces fight not only each other, but also fight civilians, from the workman at the lathe to the infant in the cradle, knowing nothing of and caring nothing about what they may destroy. It is the war of military force arrayed against the human spirit. And in this sphere of action airpower plays the dominant role. Here is the one arm against which there is no certain defense, against which no barrier may be erected, against whose onslaughts no one is safe. The curve of. its destructive power is rising, rising faster than the power of armies or of navies, and rising, perhaps, beyond the powers of resistance of a nation on which, its shadow falls.
