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

other factors intervened. After initial victories, the Russian Army was defeated on the ground by 1917, the tsar had abdicated, and the events leading to the Russian Revolution were rapidly under way. The Ilya Mourometz had been successful in what it did, but it played only a minor part in one of mankind’s biggest dramas. Igor Sikorsky emigrated from Russia to the United States, and the theory of strategic airpower would remain largely dormant in Russia until after the next world war.
    Strategic air operations on the western front were soon to follow those in the east, with British aircraft launching strikes against German positions in occupied Belgian coastal cities in February 1915. The Germans countered with zeppelin attacks on Paris and on British cities as far north as Newcastle. On the night of May 31, after ten months of war, London looked upon its own dead for the first time. About a week later, Austrian aviators launched the first long-range strategic mission on the southern front, causing several fires in and around the Piazza San Marco in Venice. By 1917, the Germans were using long-range, fixed-wing Gotha bombers against London.
    In April 1918, shortly after being established as an independent service, Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) conducted a series of raids on German cities in the Ruhr and even ranged as far south as Frankfurt, though the raids were more a strategic bombing
experiment
than a strategic bombing
offensive
. A full-scale strategic air offensive against Germany
was
scheduled for the spring of 1919, with Berlin on the target list, but the war ended in November 1918 with the plan untried.
    Though the intervention of United States manpower in World War I may have been of pivotal importance to the Allies, the involvement ofAmerican
air
power was not extensive and consisted almost entirely of tactical operations. Nevertheless, the
idea
of strategic airpower made a great impression on the commander of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) air units in the war, Colonel Billy Mitchell.
    Mitchell’s boss, General John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, the overall commander of the AEF, saw airpower strictly as tactical ground support, the conventional view of the time. Mitchell, however, saw the potential for a broader application. He wanted to see the AEF airmen striking the enemy at his source of supply, rather than being simply another weapon for ground commanders to use as they would use artillery.
    Mitchell became the first major American exponent of strategic airpower, but his ideas were never implemented during the war. Part of the reason was that strategic bombing, though experimental in British and French doctrine, was not yet accepted by the American military establishment at all.
    “Aircraft move hundreds of miles in an incredibly short space of time, so that even if they are reported as coming into a country, across its frontiers, there is no telling where they are going to go to strike,” the prescient Mitchell wrote, describing a method of warfare that was still many years in the future. “Wherever an object can be seen from the air, aircraft are able to hit it with their guns, bombs, and other weapons. Cities and towns, railway lines and canals cannot be hidden. Not only is this the case on land, it is even more the case on the water, because on the water no object can be concealed unless it dives beneath the surface.”
    After the war, Mitchell, now a brigadier general, became the central figure in the crusade for strategic airpower. Mitchell argued that strategic bombers were cheaper to build and operate than battleships, and they could be used faster and more easily to project American power wherever it might be needed around the world.
    “Neither armies nor navies can exist unless the air is controlled over them,” Mitchell wrote in 1925. “Air forces, on the other hand, are the only independent fighting units of the day, because neither armies nor navies can ascend and fight twenty