Big Week: Six Days That Changed the Course of World War II Read Online Free Page A

field of usefulness of the aeroplane will be rather limited. Because of its small carrying capacity, and the necessity for its operating at great altitude, if it is to escape hostile fire, the amount of damage it will do by dropping explosives upon cities, forts, hostile camps, or bodies of troops in the field to say nothing of battleships at sea, will be so limited as to have no material effects on the issues of a campaign.”
    Between 1914 and 1918 in the skies over World War I battlefields, the young men of Gavotti’s generation would prove the fallacy of the venerable journal’s assumptions.
    In that conflict, aircraft were, indeed, first used as observation platforms, but air-to-air combat was a natural step in the evolution of aerial warfare. Both sides had airplanes and aviators, and soon they encountered one another over the trenches. The first confrontations were gentlemanly, indeed, probably chivalrous, for the knights of the air had something in common with other airmen that their respective countrymen on the ground could only dream of.
    It didn’t take long, however, for the realization to sink in that theenemy in the trenches, with his Mauser trained on your skull, saluted the same flag as the silk-scarved enemy gliding by in his lacquered Albatros. Somebody took his sidearm aloft, the first airplane went down, and air combat was born.
    Soon, like Gavotti, aerial observers flying over the enemy’s lines realized that they could as easily drop something that exploded. Tactical bombing, as a doctrine, was born. To use
Scientific American
’s phrasing, aerial bombing had actually started to have “material effects on the issues of a campaign.”
    Meanwhile, there were some farsighted airpower theorists who began imagining that aviation might potentially be deployed in such a way as to have “material effects”
beyond
the battlefield, thereby shaping the course and outcome of the war itself. This is what came to be known as
strategic
airpower.
    Tactical bombing, simply stated, is aerial bombardment of enemy targets, such as troop concentrations, airfields, entrenchments, and the like, as part of an integrated air-land battlefield action at or near the front. Tactical airpower generally is used toward the same goals as, and in direct support of, naval forces or ground troops in the field.
    Strategic airpower, by contrast, seeks targets without a specific connection with what is happening at the front. Strategic airpower is used to strike far behind the lines, at the enemy’s
means
of waging war—such as factories, power plants, cities—and ultimately, the enemy’s very
will
to wage war.
    Strategic aircraft naturally differ from tactical aircraft in that they have a much longer range and payload capacity—certainly more than the average 1914 airplane.
    It was not until around the time of World War I that aviation technology had developed to the point where such large aircraft were practical. One of the original pioneers of strategic airpower was a Russian engineer and aviation enthusiast. The year was 1913, and the man was Igor Sikorsky, the same man who would amaze the world thirty years later with the first practical helicopters. The airplane was named the Ilya Mourometz (or Muromets) after the tenth-century Russian hero, and it was the world’s first strategic bomber. The big plane was designed as an airliner but wasadapted as a bomber when the war began. It was powered by four engines, as no other plane before it had been, with the single exception of its own prototype, the unarmed Russky Vityaz (Russian Knight).
    By the winter of 1914–1915, a sizable number of these big bombers were in action against German targets. The bomb load of each plane exceeded half a ton, and with a range of nearly four hundred miles, they were able to hit targets well behind German lines. The Russians conducted more than four hundred raids without the Germans mounting a similar campaign in retaliation, but in the end,