AirpowerMyths and Facts

PHILLIP S. MEILINGER

Colonel, USAF, Retired

Air University PressMaxwell Air Force Base, Alabama

December 2003

Air University Library Cataloging Data

Meilinger, Phillip S., 1948–Airpower : myths and facts / Phillip S. Meilinger.

p. ; cm.Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-58566-124-6 1. Air power. 2. United States. Army Air Forces.

3. United States. Air Force — History. 4. Bombing,Aerial. 5. Precision bombing — Effectiveness. I.Title.

358.4/009/04––dc22

ii

Air University Press131 West Shumacher AvenueMaxwell AFB AL 36112–6615http://aupress.maxwell.af.mil

Disclaimer

Opinions, conclusions, and recommendations expressedor implied within are solely those of the author and do notnecessarily represent the views of Air University, the UnitedStates Air Force, the Department of Defense, or any otherUS government agency. Cleared for public release: distri-bution unlimited.

Contents

Myth Page

DISCLAIMER . . . . . . . . . . . . ii

ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . ix

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

1 Between the world wars,even though the US ArmyAir Corps received morethan its fair share of fundsfrom the Army, itcontinued to complain,agitate, and ask for more. . . . . 1Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

2 Entering World War II,the Air Corps’s un-balanced doctrine andforce structure leanedtoo heavily towardsstrategic bombing. Thus,air support of groundforces was inadequate andlargely ignored by airmen. . . . . 17Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23

iii

Myth Page

3 The Air Corps enteredWorld War II with a“Douhetian” concept ofair war that emphasizedarea bombing and thewaging of war on womenand children. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29

4 Airmen thought theycould win the war alone. . . . . . 31Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36

5 The fact that Germanproduction, especially ofaircraft, continued toincrease throughout 1944proves that the CombinedBomber Offensive (CBO)was ineffective and thatthe resources devoted toit would have been betterspent elsewhere. . . . . . . . . . . . 39Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45

6 Bombing was ineffectivebecause it actually

iv

Myth Page

stiffened rather thanlowered enemy morale. . . . . . . 47Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50

7 The atomic bombs wereunnecessary because Japanwas about to surrender; even if it had not given up,an invasion or continuedblockade would havebeen more humane. . . . . . . . . . 53Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59

8 Overall, strategic bombing wasa wasted effort that pro-duced only minor effects. . . . . 63Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69

9 Airpower was a failure inVietnam, losing the warand letting the Armydown. Why even have anAir Force if it can’t beat afourth-rate power likeNorth Vietnam?. . . . . . . . . . . . 73Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81

v

Myth Page

10 Strategic bombing failed inVietnam because RollingThunder did not break thewill of Ho Chi Minh andhis cohorts to continue thewar in the south. . . . . . . . . . 85Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90

11 Airpower was an indiscrimi-nate weapon that killedexcessive numbers ofVietnamese civilians. . . . . . . 93Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96

12 Too focused on strategicattack during the PersianGulf War, the Air Forceprovided inadequate supportto ground forces. . . . . . . . . . . 99Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107

13 Air attack is nothing morethan “recreationalbombing”; pilots fly sohigh they can’tpossibly hit theirtargets accurately. . . . . . . . . 109Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113

vi

Myth Page

14 Despite all the talk by airmen,the employment of airpowerremains an indiscriminateuse of military force thatdeliberately targetscivilians. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115Notes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125

Illustrations

Figure

1 US Bomb Tonnage Droppedon Germany by Month . . . . . 33

2 Targets Struck by Category(Number and Percentage) inOperation Iraqi Freedom . . . . 104

3 US Airpower versus theWorld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106

Tables

1 Army and Air-ComponentBudgets, 1922–41 . . . . . . . . 3

vii

Table Page

2 Army and Navy AirBudgets, 1922–41 . . . . . . . . 4

3 Army Officer Manningbetween the World Wars,Total and by Branch . . . . . . 9

4 Key US Leaders duringthe Vietnam War . . . . . . . . . 76

5 USAF Combat Sorties inSouth Vietnam . . . . . . . . . . 78

6 Persian Gulf War: SortiesFlown by US Service/Total,by Mission Type . . . . . . . . . 100

viii

A 1970 graduate of the United StatesAir Force Academy, Col Phillip S.Meilinger, USAF, retired, received an MAfrom the University of Colorado and aPhD from the University of Michigan.After a tour at the Academy, ColonelMeilinger was assigned to the Air Staff’sdoctrine division in the Pentagon, wherehe wrote and edited numerous Air Forceand joint-doctrine publications, workedroles-and-missions issues, and partici-pated in the planning cell for InstantThunder during the Gulf War of 1991. Acommand pilot who flew C-130s and HC-130s in both Europe and the Pacific, hehas also worked as an operations officerin the Pacific Airlift Control Center at

ix

Aboutthe Author

Clark Air Base, Philippines. From 1992 to1996, Colonel Meilinger served as dean ofthe School of Advanced Airpower Studies(SAAS) (now the School of Advanced Airand Space Studies [SAASS]), the AirForce’s only graduate school for airpowerstrategists. After leaving SAAS, he servedas a professor of strategy at the Naval WarCollege.

His publications include Hoyt S. Van-denberg: The Life of a General (1989;reprint, Air Force History and MuseumsProgram, 2000); 10 Propositions Regard-ing Air Power (Washington, D.C.: AirForce History and Museums Program,1995); Airmen and Air Theory: A Reviewof the Sources (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: AirUniversity Press, 2001); and several dozenarticles and reviews on airpower historyand theory in journals such as ForeignPolicy, Armed Forces and Society, ArmedForces Journal International, ComparativeStrategy, Journal of Military History, andAerospace Power Journal. He also editedand contributed to The Paths of Heaven:The Evolution of Airpower Theory (MaxwellAFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 1997).

x

After he retired, Colonel Meilingerbecame the deputy director of the AERO-SPACENTER for Science ApplicationsInternational Corporation in McLean,Virginia, where he may be reached byE-mail at meilingerp@saic.com.

xi

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Preface

Airpower, especially strategic bombing,frequently generates controversy. Eversince the US Army bought its first “aero-plane” in 1909, debates have raged overthe utility, effectiveness, efficiency, legal-ity, and even the morality of airpower.These debates continue despite (or per-haps because of) the hundreds of booksthat have been written on the subject andthe scores of examples witnessed. As thesaying goes, certain topics tend to pro-duce more heat than they do light. Insome cases, the questions regarding air-power, strategic bombing, and theirroles in war remain unanswerable—or atleast people fail to agree on the answers.Soldiers, sailors, and airmen approachwar from different viewpoints and withdiffering service-cultural perspectives,which similarly influence others whowrite and speak about war. This is natu-ral and perhaps advantageous—freshideas are always useful. Unfortunately,

xiii

much of the debate regarding airpowerand strategic bombing has been coloredby accusations, misconceptions, inac-curacies, myths, and simple untruths.If airpower needs criticizing—and cer-tainly there are times when criticism isappropriate—it must be based on accu-rate information.

The concept for this essay occurred tome as a result of questions asked orstatements made to me over the years bystudents and faculty at the Naval WarCollege, Army War College, Air University,and Britain’s Joint Services Staff College.In addition, many scholars and militaryofficers, both active duty and retired,have raised such issues in print, bothhere and abroad; so I decided to explorethem in more depth. What follows arepoints and counterpoints that attemptto clear away some of the detritus thatobscures the subject, thus allowing moreinformed debate on the real issues con-cerning airpower and strategic bomb-ing. This in turn, hopefully, will give ourpolitical and military leaders a better

xiv

basis on which to form decisions in fu-ture conflicts.

xv

Phillip S. MeilingerColonel, USAF, Retired

Myth 1

On average, the Air Corps receivedless than 12 percent of the Army’sbudget between 1919 and 1941, with alow of 4.5 percent in 1924 and a high of

1

Between the world wars, eventhough the US Army Air Corpsreceived more than its fairshare of funds from the Army, itcontinued to complain, agitate,and ask for more.*

*See, for example, Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett,A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War (Cambridge,Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2000),32–33; James P. Tate, The Army and Its Air Corps: Army Policytoward Aviation, 1919–1941 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air UniversityPress, 1998), 98; Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For theCommon Defense: A Military History of the United States ofAmerica (New York: Free Press, 1984), 383; Edgar F. Raines Jr.,Eyes of Artillery: The Origins of Modern U.S. Army Aviation inWorld War II (Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History,United States Army, 2000), 14–29; and Lt Gen William O.Odom, After the Trenches: The Transformation of U.S. ArmyDoctrine, 1918–1939 (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&MUniversity Press, 1999), 102, 110, 159–63. According to Odom,the Air Corps “thrived” between the wars.

16.8 percent in 1939 (table 1). Anothersource notes, however, that the Air Corpsalso received funds for base construction,ordnance, radios, medical supplies, andso forth. When one includes these “indi-rect appropriations,” between 1920 and1934, the Air Corps received on average18.2 percent of the Army budget.1 Oneshould note that this is the Army budget,not the US defense budget, which also in-cluded funds for the Navy and MarineCorps. The Navy, incidentally, was evenmore niggardly towards its air arm.Combining the budgets for both the Armyand Navy, one finds that the total amountspent on aviation in the two services aver-aged a mere 8.04 percent of the US de-fense budget between 1922 and 1941(table 2).

To determine how the Army hierarchyviewed airpower, one need only examinean incident that occurred in 1932. Atthe Geneva Disarmament Conferencethat year, delegates advanced a numberof proposals regarding arms limitations.Nonetheless, Jay Pierrepont Moffat, anAmerican delegate, was stunned when

2

3

Tab

le 1

Arm

y an

d A

ir-C

om

po

nen

t B

ud

get

s,19

22–4

1(i

n m

illio

ns

of

do

llars

)

Year

Arm

yA

irA

ir %

of

Arm

yYe

arA

rmy

Air

Air

% o

f A

rmy

1922

$322

.7$2

3.1

7.2

1932

$344

.6$3

3.0

9.6

1923

277.

1 8.

16.

519

3329

8.4

21.9

7.3

1924

246.

1 11

.04.

519

3426

9.2

17.4

6.5

1925

251.

911

.74.

619

3536

5.9

20.3

5.5

1926

267.

314

.95.

619

3634

0.8

32.0

9.4

1927

265.

6 16

.86.

319

3738

1.5

41.1

10.8

1928

292.

719

.46.

619

3843

2.5

50.9

11.8

1929

315.

423

.37.

419

3949

6.1

83.2

16.8

1930

328.

728

.18.

519

4066

8.6

108.

216

.219

3134

5.3

38.7

11.2

1941

3,76

9.6

605.

416

.1

Ave

rag

e A

rmy

Bu

dg

et=$

514

Ave

rag

e A

ir B

ud

get

=$60

.9A

vera

ge

Air

%=1

1.9

Not

e:“A

rmy

Bud

get”

is t

he “

Tota

l Mili

tary

Est

ablis

hmen

t E

xpen

ditu

res”

port

ion

of t

he “

Tota

l War

Dep

artm

ent

Exp

endi

ture

s”—

“Civ

ilE

xpen

ditu

res”

mak

e up

the

diffe

renc

e.“A

ir B

udge

t”is

the

amou

nt a

ppro

pria

ted.

Gen

eral

ly, e

xpen

ditu

res

wer

e le

ss th

an th

e am

ount

appr

opria

ted

(onl

y 70

per

cent

from

193

4 to

194

2).T

hus,

the

actu

al A

rmy

expe

nditu

res

on th

e ai

r co

mpo

nent

wer

e so

mew

hat l

ess

than

tho

se li

sted

.

Sou

rce:

The

Arm

y A

lman

ac:A

Boo

k of

Fac

ts C

once

rnin

g th

e A

rmy

of t

he U

nite

d S

tate

s(W

ashi

ngto

n, D

.C.:

Gov

ernm

ent

Prin

ting

Offi

ce,

1950

), 6

92 (

fold

out)

.T

his

sour

ce g

ives

no

figur

es f

or 1

919–

21;

how

ever

, M

aure

r M

aure

r’s A

viat

ion

in t

he U

.S.

Arm

y,19

19–1

939

(Was

hing

ton,

D.C

.:O

ffice

of A

ir F

orce

His

tory

, 198

7), 4

75, g

ives

the

Air

Ser

vice

an

aver

age

of 8

.8 p

erce

nt o

f the

Arm

ybu

dget

for

thos

e th

ree

year

s.M

aure

r al

so li

sts

the

Air

Cor

ps s

hare

bet

wee

n 19

23 a

nd 1

941

as o

nly

8.8

perc

ent o

f the

Arm

y bu

dget

(475

–76)

.

4

Tab

le 2

Arm

y an

d N

avy

Air

Bu

dg

ets,

1922

–41

(in

mill

ion

s o

f d

olla

rs)

Year

Tota

l Arm

y an

d N

avy

Arm

y an

d N

avy

Air

% o

f A

rmy/

Nav

yE

xpen

ditu

res

Air

Exp

endi

ture

sE

xpen

ditu

res

1922

$ 93

4.5

$36.

93.

9619

2373

0.2

35.9

4.93

1924

689.

227

.94.

0619

2571

7.1

25.0

3.50

1926

676.

830

.84.

5519

2768

8.0

32.3

4.70

1928

732.

341

.85.

7119

2979

0.5

51.8

6.56

1930

839.

056

.86.

7819

3183

2.4

68.5

8.24

1932

833.

864

.77.

7619

3378

3.9

53.3

6.80

1934

705.

533

.54.

7619

3592

4.2

42.1

4.56

1936

1,14

7.4

55.0

4.79

1937

1,18

4.7

67.5

5.70

1938

1,24

0.3

111.

69.

0019

391,

367.

913

0.6

9.54

1940

1,79

8.6

157.

68.

7619

416,

252.

079

6.1

2.89

Ave

rag

e A

rmy/

Nav

y B

ud

get

=$1,

193.

4A

vera

ge

Air

Bu

dg

et=$

95.9

Ave

rag

e A

ir %

=8.0

4

Sou

rce:

Airc

raft

Indu

strie

s A

ssoc

iatio

n of

Am

eric

a, A

viat

ion

Fact

s an

d F

igur

es,

1945

, ed

.Rud

olf

Mod

ley

(New

Yor

k:M

cGra

w-H

ill,

1945

), 5

4.

on 4 April the Army chief of staff, GenDouglas MacArthur, told him that hewould support the abolition of all mili-tary aviation, stating that the Air Corps“was already receiving 25–35 percent ofthe Army budget and was constantlyasking for more.” The Air Corps was sim-ply too expensive: “Money spent on avia-tion was money thrown away.” Moreover,the general stated that the governmentshould not even subsidize civilian avia-tion, “directly or indirectly.”2 One ofMacArthur’s top subordinates expressedsimilar feelings.

In 1933 MacArthur directed the DrumBoard (chaired by Maj Gen Hugh Drum)to study the needs of Army aviation. Itconcluded that the Air Corps required2,320 aircraft to carry out the Army’s “AirPlan for the Defense of the United States.”At that time, the Air Corps possessed only1,685 aircraft—even less than the 1,800authorized by Congress; yet, the boardrecommended against increasing the AirCorps if expansion would come at the ex-pense of the other Army branches.3 In1934 the Army rank-ordered its priorities

5

for modernization: tanks, artillery, fieldforces, and then aircraft. Three yearslater, it moved another weapon to thehead of the list—antiaircraft artillery(AAA).4

In truth, an inherent part of theArmy’s culture calls for placing greateremphasis on men than on equipment.But this philosophy proved disastrous foran air arm dependent on new equipment:aircraft technology was advancing so rap-idly that a “procurement holiday” wouldsoon leave the Air Corps with hopelesslyobsolete planes. MacArthur acknowl-edged the Army’s philosophy, testifyingbefore Congress that he “endeavored de-terminedly” to maintain an adequate per-sonnel structure, even though that meant“continuing in service obsolete and inef-ficient equipment” and “slackening tech-nical development.”5 This type of resist-ance towards airpower from the Armyhierarchy caused Congress to interveneperiodically and insist that more fundsbe diverted to the air arm. In 1935 Armyintransigence towards modernization ledone congressman to ask if it were really

6

wise to “China-ize” the Army by buying“more men and more men and less equip-ment.” His colleagues tended to agree;therefore, each year from 1933 to 1941,Congress included in its appropriationsbills language insisting that certainsums be expended “for the production orpurchase of new airplanes and theirequipment and their accessories” andthat the bulk of these funds be used “ex-clusively for combat airplanes.”6 Inshort, Congress wanted to ensure thatthe War Department did not divert AirCorps funds for other purposes.

Even so, congressional oversight wassometimes thwarted. When Congressheld hearings on airpower, which it didon numerous occasions during the in-terwar period, Army leaders were notanxious to have airmen testify about thedismal state of their branch. For exam-ple, in 1934 President Franklin D.Roosevelt appointed a Federal AviationCommission chaired by Clark Howell tostudy the subject of military aviation. Inresponse, MacArthur had his staff pre-pare an 86-page document spelling out

7

War Department policy on the subject.He then ordered that all Air Corps offi-cers called to testify before the commis-sion were simply to read from the pre-pared text and volunteer no opinionscontrary to established Army policy.When the commission summoned six AirCorps officers to testify, the Army turnedup the heat, telling the officers that theycould indeed answer the summons butthat they would have to pay their ownexpenses to and from Washington. And,of course, they would have to clear theirtestimony in advance through the WarDepartment.7

Manning was also an issue within theair arm. Between 1923 and 1941, theArmy, on average, was manned at 93.2percent of its authorized strength. Theofficer corps fared slightly better at 95.7percent (table 3). One must keep two keystatistics in mind concerning thebranches: the actual manning level ofthat branch and the number of officerspossessing that specialty throughout theArmy. In other words, although onemight find the appropriate number of

8

9

Tab

le 3

Arm

y O

ffic

er M

ann

ing

bet

wee

n t

he

Wo

rld

War

s,To

tal a

nd

by

Bra

nch

(sel

ecte

d y

ears

an

d a

vera

ge,

1923

–41)

1925

1930

1935

1940

Ave

rage

(%

)

Off

icer

s (A

uth

ori

zed

)11

,999

12,3

2212

,403

16,7

19O

ffic

ers

(Act

ual

in A

rmy)

12,3

4612

,160

11,9

8513

,879

95.7

Infa

ntr

y (A

uth

ori

zed

)3,

555

3,31

23,

312

3,51

1In

fan

try

(in

Arm

y)3,

736

3,67

93,

608

3,57

710

6.8

Infa

ntr

y (i

n B

ran

ch)

2,63

02,

303

2,29

22,

078

68.5

Cav

alry

(A

uth

ori

zed

)90

074

974

985

2 C

aval

ry (

in A

rmy)

1,04

798

490

991

511

7.3

Cav

alry

(in

Bra

nch

)63

560

957

052

072

.2

Fie

ld A

rtill

ery

(Au

tho

rize

d)

1,41

11,

499

1,49

91,

444

Fie

ld A

rtill

ery

(in

Arm

y)1,

388

1,47

51,

569

1,70

010

3.9

Fie

ld A

rtill

ery

(in

Bra

nch

)1,

022

903

988

966

67.1

Co

ast

Art

iller

y (A

uth

ori

zed

)1,

000

945

945

1,07

2C

oas

t A

rtill

ery

(in

Arm

y)1,

009

995

1,02

01,

175

104.

6C

oas

t A

rtill

ery

(in

Bra

nch

)76

465

569

490

474

.1

Sig

nal

Co

rps

(Au

tho

rize

d)

268

260

260

299

Sig

nal

Co

rps

(in

Arm

y)21

825

624

929

293

.3S

ign

al C

orp

s (i

n B

ran

ch)

201

208

207

282

81.9

Air

Co

rps

(Au

tho

rize

d)

1,24

71,

650

1,65

02,

067

Air

Co

rps

(in

Arm

y)91

31,

207

1,30

32,

210

80.7

Air

Co

rps

(in

Bra

nch

)89

41,

271

1,22

62,

072

78.9

Sou

rce:

Com

pile

d fr

om R

epor

t of t

he S

ecre

tary

of W

ar to

the

Pre

side

nt(W

ashi

ngto

n, D

.C.:

Gov

ernm

ent P

rintin

g O

ffice

, 192

3–41

).

infantry or cavalry officers in the Army,the fact that many of them served in aheadquarters, on attaché duty, in fac-ulty positions, and so forth, meant thatthe number actually serving in theirhome branch would generally be lowerthan the authorized strength of thatbranch. This margin allowed an expert-ise to reside in the Army as a whole thatcould be called upon in the event ofwar—in other words, a “surge capabil-ity.” Thus, the infantry, on average, had106.8 percent of its authorized officersin the Army during the interwar period,but only 68.5 percent actually served inthe infantry branch during that sameperiod. The air arm found itself in ananomalous position because relativelyfew aviators had the rank or experiencedeemed necessary to serve in the staffbillets noted above. As a result, the AirService/Air Corps between the wars, onaverage, had only 80.7 percent of its au-thorized officer strength, while thebranch itself was manned at 78.9 per-cent—few additional airmen in the Armycould return to their branch in the event

10

of a crisis.8 When a “surge” became nec-essary, there was nothing to surge with.Indeed, until 1929 the cavalry branchwas manned with more officers and at ahigher percentage than was the AirCorps. One should also note that, on av-erage, between 1919 and 1941 the airarm comprised only 9.17 percent of theArmy’s total strength.9 Clearly, the airarm was not manned at the expense ofthe rest of the Army.

This low level of emphasis and sup-port becomes more understandablewhen one realizes that as late as 1939,of 793 regular colonels in the US Army,only 25 (3.2 percent) were in the AirCorps. Worse, of 68 general officers ofthe line in the US Army that year, notone belonged to the Air Corps.10 The AirCorps had general officers, usually threeor four at any given time, but their rankswere temporary and went with the posi-tions they occupied—not the individuals.Hence, when an officer left a general offi-cer’s position, he reverted to his “perma-nent” rank—a system that invited mis-chief. In 1935, for example, MacArthur

11

named Frank Andrews commander ofGeneral Headquarters (GHQ) Air Force,promoting him to the temporary rank ofbrigadier general and soon after to majorgeneral. Andrews, a believer in strategicairpower, pushed aggressively to buy thenew B-17 long-range bomber. The Armyhierarchy resisted such procurementplans, insisting instead on the purchaseof the Douglas B-18 medium bomber. (InWorld War II, the B-18 proved useless asa combat aircraft, so the 350 planespurchased were quickly relegated toduty on coastal patrol and as navigationtrainers.)

When MacArthur retired, Gen MalinCraig took his place. No supporter of ei-ther Andrews or airpower, Craig declinedto move Andrews into a general officer’sslot when he completed his tour at GHQAir Force. In fact, it appears that afterthe death of Maj Gen Oscar Westover,the Air Corps chief, in a plane crash,Andrews received consideration as hisreplacement. During an interview, Craigpointedly asked Andrews if he wouldcease his agitation for buying more B-17s

12

if selected as chief. Andrews rejected thebribe and, as a result, reverted to his per-manent rank of colonel; he was reas-signed as air officer for the VIII Corpsarea in San Antonio, Texas—the same po-sition, indeed the precise office, to whichBilly Mitchell had been exiled in 1925.11

Craig’s message was not a subtle one.No service today would consider 12

percent of another service’s budget asequitable or want all of its most seniorpositions occupied by officers from an-other service. Neither would it care tohave them selected by the officers of an-other service. Although one could arguethat airpower’s capabilities at the timedid not justify additional funds, that wasprecisely the airmen’s point: the paltrysums given to airpower allowed it no op-portunity to develop into a powerfulweapon.

Notes

1. Maurer Maurer, Aviation in the U.S. Army,1919–1939 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force

13

History, 1987), 477. No other source gives such ahigh figure for the Air Corps budget share.

2. Nancy H. Hooker, ed., The Moffat Papers:Selections from the Diplomatic Journals of JayPierrepont Moffat, 1919–1943 (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1956), 60, 63–64, 69, 92;and diary of Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson, 3June 1932, Stimson Papers, Yale University Library.The story is also told in James P. Tate, The Armyand Its Air Corps: Army Policy toward Aviation,1919–1941 (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press,1998), 97–98. See also E. R. Perkins, ed., ForeignRelations of the United States, 1932, vol. 1, General(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,1948), 65. In 1932 the Air Corps received 9.6 per-cent of the Army budget, not 25–35 percent asMacArthur stated.

3. John F. Shiner, Foulois and the U.S. Army AirCorps, 1931–1935 (Washington, D.C.: Office of AirForce History, 1983), 121; and Maurer, 297.

4. Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski, For theCommon Defense: A Military History of the UnitedStates of America (New York: Free Press, 1984), 380.

5. Elias Huzar, The Purse and the Sword: Controlof the Army by Congress through MilitaryAppropriations, 1933–1950 (Ithaca, N.Y.: CornellUniversity Press, 1950), 140.

6. Ibid., 299.7. DeWitt S. Copp, A Few Great Captains: The

Men and Events That Shaped the Development ofU.S. Air Power (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1980),250–62; and Martha Byrd, Kenneth N. Walker:Airpower’s Untempered Crusader (Maxwell AFB,

14

Ala.: Air University Press, 1997), 45–47. The six of-ficers, all of whom testified, included Maj DonWilson, Capt Harold L. George, Capt ClaireChennault, Capt Robert Webster, Capt Robert Olds,and Lt Ken Walker. In his memoirs, Chennaultmaintained that his testimony essentially ended hiscareer and forced an early retirement. See Claire LeeChennault, Way of a Fighter: The Memoirs of ClaireLee Chennault, ed. Robert Hotz (New York: G. P.Putnam’s, 1949), 18.

8. Report of the Secretary of War to the President(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,1923–1941).

9. Richard G. Davis, Carl A. Spaatz and the AirWar in Europe (Washington, D.C.: SmithsonianInstitution Press, 1992), appendix 1.

10. Official Army Register, 1939 (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1939), 2; andDavis, 11.

11. DeWitt S. Copp, “Frank M. Andrews:Marshall’s Airman,” in Makers of the United StatesAir Force, ed. John L. Frisbee (Washington, D.C.:Office of Air Force History, 1987), 43–71. At the timeof Pearl Harbor, the Air Corps still had fewer than200 B-17s in the entire inventory.

15

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Myth 2

The Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS) isoften depicted as a hotbed of radicalism,full of proselytizers for strategic airpower.

17

*See, for example, David E. Johnson, Fast Tanks andHeavy Bombers: Innovation in the U.S. Army, 1917–1945(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998); Timothy Moy,War Machines: Transforming Technologies in the U.S. Military,1920–1940 (College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press,2001); James A. Huston, “Tactical Use of Air Power in WorldWar II: The Army Experience,” Military Affairs 14 (December1950): 171–77; Russell F. Weigley, History of the United StatesArmy (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 411–15, 474–75; James W.Bradin, From Hot Air to Hellfire: The History of Army AttackAviation (Novato, Calif.: Presidio, 1994), 51–57; and BradGladman, “The Development of Tactical Air Doctrine in NorthAfrica, 1940–1943,” in Air Power History: Turning Points fromKitty Hawk to Kosovo, ed. Sebastian Cox and Peter Gray(London: Frank Cass, 2002), 188, 199–203.

Entering World War II, the AirCorps’s unbalanced doctrine andforce structure leaned too heav-ily towards strategic bombing.Thus, air support of groundforces was inadequate and large-ly ignored by airmen.*

In truth, ACTS was an Army branchschool, designed to teach the fine points ofthat specific branch, as did the Army’sother schools for artillery, infantry, cav-alry, and so forth. Nonetheless, 50 percentof the ACTS curriculum in the mid-1930sdid not even deal with air matters. Rather,it covered lessons applicable to otherArmy branches (taught by faculty instruc-tors from those branches) and naval af-fairs (taught by Navy officers).1 In addi-tion, because ACTS was a staff college, itdevoted much time to the rudiments ofbeing a staff officer—writing, briefing,logistics, administration, intelligence, andso forth. Only part of the 50 percent of thecurriculum devoted to air matters focusedon strategic bombing since it also coveredpursuit, attack, and observation. In the1935 curriculum, for example, 44 out of494 class periods (8.9 percent) weredevoted to “bombardment.”2 The schoolallocated far more time—158 periods—to“equitation” (horseback riding) that year.Certainly, ACTS took very seriously thebudding doctrine of strategic bombard-ment and considered it the highlight of

18

the academic curriculum. However,ACTS’s saying that it took strategic bom-bardment seriously is a far cry from main-taining that bombardment dominated thecurriculum. It did not.

As for official Army doctrine—whichthe Air Corps had to follow—Field Manual(FM) 1-5, Employment of Aviation of theArmy, dated 15 April 1940, stated that of-fensive air forces would receive their tar-gets from the “field commander,” a soldier.It also noted that the first priority forthose targets was to “decisively defeat im-portant elements of the enemy armedforces.” A revised version of FM 1-5 ap-peared in January 1943 but still empha-sized this targeting precedence.3 TheLouisiana and Carolina Maneuvers of1941 clearly demonstrated these priori-ties and command relationships whenthe Army field commander used the airassets at his disposal—600 aircraft—exclusively for support of the groundforces. The Army devised a scenario forthese games that required the service toexpel an invasion force that had alreadylanded in the United States. Since the

19

scenario did not address how or fromwhere the invaders arrived at ourshores, it specifically precluded strategicair operations.4

As for force structure, if it is true thatthe Air Corps favored strategic bombing,then one would expect to see that prefer-ence reflected in iron on the ramp. Butreality indicates otherwise. When WorldWar II broke out in Europe in September1939, the US Army Air Corps had a totalof 28 strategic bombers: 26 B-17s, oneexperimental B-15, and one experimen-tal B-19.5 The United States then beganto rearm, slating airpower for a largebuildup. Over the next two years, the AirCorps—soon to become the Army AirForces (AAF) in June 1941—purchasednearly 21,000 aircraft. Of those 20,914planes, 373 were strategic bombers: 197B-17s and 176 B-24s.6 Clearly, thosebombers—1.8 percent of the total air-craft bought during that crucial two-year period—do not represent a seriousimbalance in favor of strategic bombing.

In fact, “attack” aircraft—those specifi-cally designed to support ground forces—

20

were always a priority within the AirCorps and AAF. The first all-metalmonoplane in the Air Corps, the CurtissA-8 Shrike, entered the inventory in1932, nearly two years before the MartinB-10—the Army’s first modern bomber.7

In 1944 the AAF’s Ninth Air Force inEurope consisted of 4,500 aircraft—thelargest tactical air unit in history, evenlarger than the Luftwaffe’s entire combatstrength at the time.8 The Ninth had asits mission the support of Gen OmarBradley’s 12th Army Group. In additionthe Twelfth Air Force and the British 2dTactical Air Force supported Alliedground operations in France, as did, onoccasion, the heavy bombers of the RoyalAir Force’s (RAF) Bomber Command andEighth Air Force. Moreover, during thewar the AAF purchased nearly 23,000cargo aircraft, primarily using them totransport Army ground troops and sup-plies.9

Some people have argued that a“bomber mafia” dominated Air Corpsthinking, implying that this group con-trolled most of the key command and

21

staff positions before, during, and afterWorld War II.10 If that is so, then fighterpilots and tactical aviation in generalwould have suffered as a result. Even acursory look at the facts is sufficient torefute this allegation. A number of fighterand attack pilots rose to high rank dur-ing and after the war. Hoyt Vandenberg,a career fighter pilot who became the AirForce chief of staff in 1948, commandedNinth Air Force in Europe. Other tacticalairmen who achieved high rank includedNathan Twining (commander of Fifteenthand then Twentieth Air Forces, later AirForce chief of staff, and ultimately chair-man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [JCS]),George Kenney (commander of Far EastAir Forces under MacArthur and, afterthe war, the first commander of StrategicAir Command), Earle “Pat” Partridge(commander of Eighth Air Force at theend of the war, of Far East Air Forcesduring the Korean War, and then ofNorth American Air Defense Command),Ira Eaker (commander of Eighth AirForce, then of Mediterranean Allied AirForces, and the deputy commander of

22

the AAF after the war), Joe Cannon(commander of Twelfth Air Force, of USAir Forces Europe after the war, andthen of Tactical Air Command), Millard“Miff” Harmon (commander of all airforces in the Pacific Ocean areas beforedying in a plane crash near the end ofthe war), and Elwood “Pete” Quesada(commander of XIX Tactical Air Com-mand and of Tactical Air Command afterthe war). In fact, when Gen Henry “Hap”Arnold told Eaker that he had selectedhim as commander of Eighth Air Forcein England, Eaker asked why, since hehad flown fighters his entire career.Precisely for that reason, Arnold re-sponded: he wanted Eaker to instill “thefighter pilot spirit” in bomber crews.11

Obviously, tactical aviation and its prac-titioners did not suffer at the hands of abomber mafia.

Notes

1. Robert T. Finney, History of the Air CorpsTactical School, 1920–1940, USAF Historical Studies

23

no. 100 (1955; reprint, Washington, D.C.: Center forAir Force History, 1992), 35.

2. “Comparison of Courses,” Air Corps TacticalSchool, 1 July 1934. The “Air Force Section” alsohad lessons on bombardment; even if those are in-cluded, bombardment still equates to around only10 percent of the ACTS curriculum. See, for exam-ple, “Syllabus, 1938–39,” 27 April 1939, UnitedStates Air Force Historical Research Agency (here-after AFHRA), Maxwell AFB, Ala., file 248.2208B.

3. Field Manual (FM) 1-5, Employment ofAviation of the Army, 15 April 1940, 13; and FM 1-5, Employment of Aviation of the Army, 18 January1943, 14.

4. Christopher R. Gabel, The U.S. Army GHQManeuvers of 1941 (Washington, D.C.: Center ofMilitary History, United States Army, 1991), 55,179–82.

5. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate,eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 6, Menand Planes (1955; new imprint, Washington, D.C.:Office of Air Force History, 1983), 176. In 1933 theDrum Board reported that of the 1,685 aircraft inthe Air Corps inventory, 156 were bombers (9.2 per-cent); 453 were pursuit or attack planes (26.8 per-cent); and the largest number—503—were corps-ob-servation aircraft (29.8 percent). John F. Shiner,Foulois and the U.S. Army Air Corps, 1931–1935(Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History,1983), 121.

6. I. B. Holley Jr., Buying Aircraft: MaterielProcurement for the Army Air Forces (Washington,D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History,

24

Department of the Army, 1964), 550. Henry L.Stimson, the secretary of war, relates that when GenGeorge Marshall told President Roosevelt that therewere only 49 B-17s available in the entire UnitedStates for combat, “the President’s head went backas if someone had hit him in the chest.” Diary ofSecretary of State Henry L. Stimson, 27 September1940, Stimson Papers, Yale University Library.

7. “A”=attack; “B”=bomber; and “P”=pursuit,which later became “F”=fighter.

8. Ninth Air Force and Twelfth Air Force wereconsidered “tactical” air forces in that they consistedlargely of fighters and medium bombers. In con-trast, Eighth Air Force and Fifteenth Air Force werecomposed primarily of heavy bombers and theirfighter escorts; hence, they were considered “strate-gic” air forces.

9. Holley, 551.10. Lt Col Peter R. Faber, “Interwar US Army

Aviation and the Air Corps Tactical School:Incubators of American Airpower,” in The Paths ofHeaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory, School ofAdvanced Airpower Studies, ed. Col Phillip S.Meilinger (Maxwell AFB, Ala.: Air University Press,1997), passim.

11. James Parton, “Air Force Spoken Here”:General Ira Eaker and the Command of the Air(Bethesda, Md.: Adler & Adler, 1986), 128.

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Myth 3

Giulio Douhet, an Italian air theoristwhose major work—The Command of theAir—appeared in 1921, predicted futurewars that would employ gas bombs andhigh explosives against urban centers.1

27

The Air Corps entered WorldWar II with a “Douhetian” con-cept of air war that emphasizedarea bombing and the waging ofwar on women and children.*

*See, for example, John Keegan, A History of Warfare (NewYork: Knopf, 1993), 374–75; Timothy Moy, War Machines:Transforming Technologies in the U.S. Military, 1920–1940(College Station, Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 2001), 7;Walter Millis, Arms and Men: A Study in American MilitaryHistory (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1981),252–59; F. J. P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism: How theReversion to Barbarism in Warfare and War-Trials Menaces OurFuture (Appleton, Wisc.: C. C. Nelson Publishing Co., 1953),chap. 6; Herbert A. Johnson, Wingless Eagle: U.S. ArmyAviation through World War I (Chapel Hill: University of NorthCarolina Press, 2001), 216; and Stephen Peter Rosen, Winningthe Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, N.Y.:Cornell University Press, 1991), 150. Perhaps one can appreci-ate the quality of this last assessment by noting that Rosen ap-parently thought Douhet’s first name was Emilio.

No one in the Air Corps hierarchy duringthe 1930s advocated such an air strategy.On the contrary, for various military,legal, and humanitarian reasons, the AirCorps expressly rejected this type ofstrategy, opting for a doctrine of high-altitude, daylight, precision, and forma-tion bombing of industrial targets. It sin-gled out specific military targets forattack—key systems such as trans-portation networks; oil, electricity, andchemical facilities; and munitions facto-ries.2 In August 1941, Air War PlansDivision, Plan 1 (AWPD-1) called for thedestruction of Germany’s industrialstructure through a sustained bombingcampaign. Its objectives strikingly resem-bled those of the prewar theories ofACTS—no surprise since four formerACTS instructors had written the plan.

FM 1-5, the doctrine manual that AAFtook into the war listed several potentialtarget systems for attack after having suf-ficiently addressed the first priority(enemy forces): raw materials; rail, water,and motor transportation systems; powerplants, transmission lines, and other

28

utilities; factories; steel mills; oil refiner-ies; “and other similar establishments.”3 Itdoes not mention the targeting of popula-tion centers or civilian morale. (Contraryto popular belief, the RAF had almostexactly the same doctrine in the interwaryears. It was no more “Douhetian” thanthe AAF’s.4) On the other hand, the bleakrealities of war, coupled with the techno-logical limitations of contemporary air-craft and bombsights, the miserableweather over both Germany and Japan,and extremely stiff enemy defenses, ren-dered prewar doctrine insufficient. Butfew soldiers, sailors, or marines accu-rately predicted what the war would looklike either, as Pearl Harbor, Savo Island,Bataan, Kasserine Pass, and Tarawapainfully illustrated. All of the servicesneeded time to adjust to the war’s reali-ties.

Notes

1. A revised version of The Command of the Airwas published in 1927. This edition was translated

29

into English by Dino Ferrari, published in 1942, andreprinted by the Office of Air Force History in 1983.

2. Thomas H. Greer, The Development of AirDoctrine in the Army Air Arm, 1917–1941, USAFHistorical Study no. 89 (1955; reprint, Washington,D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1985), 57–60. Fortypical examples of ACTS lectures on the subject, see“ACTS: Bombardment Text,” 1 October 1933, AFHRA,file 248.101-9; and “ACTS: Bombardment Aviation,” 1January 1938, AFHRA, file 168.7001-28.

3. Field Manual (FM) 1-5, Employment ofAviation of the Army, 15 April 1940, 36.

4. For a discussion of RAF doctrine, see PhillipS. Meilinger, “Trenchard and ‘Morale Bombing’: TheEvolution of Royal Air Force Doctrine before WorldWar II,” Journal of Military History 60 (April 1996):243–70.

30

Myth 4

Airmen did not believe they could winthe war alone; rather, they thought air-power could play a dominant or decisiverole in Western Europe and the Pacific—just as soldiers and sailors believed theycould play such roles. Airmen realizedthe importance of the attrition that theGerman war machine was experiencingon the Eastern Front—where it had di-rected the vast bulk of its forces—as wellas the serious effects of the US Navy’s un-restricted submarine-warfare campaign

31

Airmen thought they could winthe war alone.*

*See, for example, Gian P. Gentile, How Effective IsStrategic Bombing? Lessons Learned from World War II toKosovo (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 31;Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: TheEvolution of British and American Ideas about StrategicBombing, 1914–1945 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UniversityPress, 2002), 33, 201–2; Carlo d’Este, Decision in Normandy(New York: Dutton, 1983), 215; and Malcolm Smith, “TheAllied Air Offensive,” Journal of Strategic Studies 13 (March1990): 71, 78, 82.

against Japan. Some airmen did maintainthat, given a higher priority, strategicbombing—in conjunction with these landand sea campaigns—could bring aboutGerman and Japanese surrender prior toan invasion of the Continent or of theJapanese home islands. This, in fact, hap-pened in the Pacific, and many believed itcould have happened in Europe. Whenone recalls that much of the Allied bomb-ing effort was diverted to support theBattle of the Atlantic; the invasions ofNorth Africa, Sicily, Italy, and Normandy;the attacks on the German missile sitesand submarine pens; the Okinawa cam-paign; and the B-29 mine-laying opera-tions in Japanese home waters, one canbetter understand the airmen’s argument.Indeed, 72 percent of all Allied bombs and84 percent of the AAF tonnage fell onGermany after 1 July 1944 (fig. 1).1 In thePacific, 96 percent of all bombs fell onJapan after 9 March 1945, during the lastfive months of a four-year war.2 Airmenhave often wondered what the resultswould have been with different priorities

32

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and with this “crescendo of bombing”occurring a year or more earlier.

The use of strategic airpower in thecampaigns noted above proved crucial totheir success. Gaining air superiority inEurope and the Pacific perhaps standsas the greatest achievement of strategicairpower. Without that superiority,Allied losses—on the ground, at sea, andin the air—would have been prohibitive.As Gen Dwight Eisenhower later admit-ted, without air superiority OperationOverlord could not have taken place:

The Normandy invasion was based on adeep-seated faith in the power of the airforces, in overwhelming numbers, to inter-vene in the land battle. That is, a faith thatthe air forces, by their action, could have theeffect on the ground of making it possible fora small force of land troops to invade a con-tinent. . . . Without that air force, without theaid of its power, entirely aside from its antic-ipated ability to sweep the enemy air forcesout of the sky, without its power to intervenein the land battle, that invasion would havebeen fantastic. . . . It would have been morethan fantastic; it would have been criminal.3

The contribution of airpower to the warat sea was also indispensable. Despite theserious losses to Allied shipping suffered

34

at the hands of German submarines inWorld War I, the Allies were unpreparedfor this threat when it reemerged inWorld War II. Before the war, neither theRoyal Navy nor the US Navy had builtescort carriers or long-range aircraftthat could find and destroy German andJapanese submarines far out to sea. TheBattle of the Atlantic, crucial to the sur-vival of Britain, remained touch and gountil mid-1943. At that point, long-rangeaircraft, notably Consolidated B-24Liberators, were employed in large num-bers to close the mid-Atlantic gap, whereGerman submarine wolf packs had longenjoyed sanctuary. Overall, airpower de-stroyed 368 U-boats and assisted in thedestruction of 48 more—60 percent of allGerman submarines lost to enemy ac-tion. Of the 368 sunk by airpower alone,307 were destroyed by land-based air.Escort carriers, finally put into action inmid-1943, got the rest.4

The merchant fleets of both Germanyand Japan also suffered grievous lossesdue to air attacks. Allied airpower wasresponsible for over 77 percent of all

35

German shipping lost between the Bayof Biscay and the North Cape.5 In thePacific, although US submarines sankthe lion’s share of Japanese shipping,Allied aircraft accounted for 47 percentof all Japanese losses.6 Moreover, aerialmining operations using the B-29s ofGen Curtis E. LeMay’s XXI BomberCommand took an ever-increasing toll—sinking 60 percent of all enemy shippingduring the last nine months of the war.In addition, these mining operationsproved far more cost-effective—both ineconomic terms and in the number ofUS casualties—than our submarine op-erations.7

Notes

1. United States Strategic Bombing Survey(USSBS), The United States Strategic BombingSurvey: Over-All Report (European War) (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 30 September1945), 10. President Roosevelt chartered USSBS in1944 to examine the effects of strategic bombing onGermany and Japan. The survey was headed byFranklin D’Olier, head of the Prudential InsuranceCompany, who had no previous experience with avi-ation. D’Olier divided the roughly 1,500 members of

36

the survey into groups corresponding to target sets:oil, chemicals, transportation, and so forth. Each ofthese divisions was headed by a distinguished civil-ian businessman, economist, engineer, or lawyer,including such later luminaries as Paul Nitze,George Ball, and John Kenneth Galbraith. The sur-vey even included Dr. Rensis Likert, a specialist inpublic-opinion sampling. After examining moun-tains of documents, interviewing thousands ofGerman and Japanese leaders, and visiting scoresof bombed sites, the USSBS produced 212 volumeson the strategic air campaign against Germany anda further 108 reports on Japan. Although the sur-vey has had some detractors over the years, espe-cially regarding internal squabbles between someof its members, no one has attempted to refute itsfindings—the survey’s research and documentationare simply too thorough and massive to contest.

2. USSBS, Statistical Appendix to Over-All Report(European War) (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, February 1947), 13; and idem,Summary Report (Pacific War) (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, July 1946), 16. In 1987Air University Press reprinted the European andPacific summary volumes together in one volume.

3. Senate, Testimony of Gen Dwight D. Eisen-hower, Department of Armed Forces, Department ofMilitary Security: Hearings before the Committee onMilitary Affairs on S. 84 and S. 1482, 79th Cong., 1stsess., 1945, 360.

4. John Terraine, The U-Boat Wars, 1916–1945(New York: Putnam, 1989), 772–73. Terraine notes

37

that 62 of those submarines were destroyed in portby Allied bombing.

5. Richard P. Hallion, “The Second World War asa Turning Point in Airpower,” in Air Power History:Turning Points from Kitty Hawk to Kosovo, ed.Sebastian Cox and Peter Gray (London: Frank Cass,2002), 100. For an excellent overview of this cam-paign, see Christina J. M. Goulter, A ForgottenOffensive: Royal Air Force Coastal Command’s Anti-Shipping Campaign, 1940–1945 (London: FrankCass, 1995).

6. Hallion, 111.7. Ibid., 113.

38

Myth 5

Production did increase in Germanythrough the first half of 1944; it thenbegan falling precipitously in virtually allcategories, starting in the autumn of thatyear. Most of the production increase re-sulted from a slack German economy—it

39

The fact that German produc-tion, especially of aircraft, con-tinued to increase throughout1944 proves that the CombinedBomber Offensive (CBO) was in-effective and that the resourcesdevoted to it would have beenbetter spent elsewhere.*

*See, for example, J. F. C. Fuller, The Conduct of War,1789–1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, andRussian Revolutions on War and Its Conduct (New Brunswick,N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961), 303; Hans Rumpf, TheBombing of Germany, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York: Holt,Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 167–72; Stephen A. Garrett,Ethics and Airpower in World War II: The British Bombing ofGerman Cities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 161–64;and Alan S. Milward, The German Economy at War (London:University of London, Athlone Press, 1965), 162–89.

had not been fully mobilized for war at theoutset of hostilities—and tremendous in-efficiency caused by the lack of centralizedcontrol over raw materials and productionassets. (Studies after the war, for example,revealed that the automobile industry—the largest sector of the German economyin the 1930s—operated at barely 50 per-cent of its capacity during the war.1) Theappointment of Albert Speer as ministerof armaments and war production in early1942 remedied many of these maladies.Speer quickly reorganized the entireGerman armaments industry, making itfar more efficient and responsive.

The real issue is what German leadersexpected to produce in 1944 versus whatthey actually did produce. The differencebetween those figures is largely attributa-ble to the effectiveness of the CBO. InJanuary 1945, Speer reported that dur-ing the previous year, Germany had pro-duced 35 percent fewer tanks, 31 percentfewer aircraft, and 42 percent fewertrucks than planned.2 (Recall the statis-tics, mentioned previously, regarding theperiod of time when the preponderance of

40

bombs actually fell on Germany.) Germanindustry could surge in 1943 and early1944 largely because it had not yet un-dergone serious attacks; when the at-tacks came, the results were dramatic. AsSpeer later wrote, “I shall never forget thedate May 12 [1944]. . . . On that day thetechnological war was decided. Until thenwe had managed to produce approxi-mately as many weapons as the armedforces needed, in spite of their consider-able losses. But with the attack of ninehundred and thirty-five daylight bombersof the American Eighth Air Force uponseveral fuel plants in central and easternGermany, a new era in air war began. Itmeant the end of German armamentsproduction.”3 Events bore this out. InJanuary 1945, Speer wrote Adolf Hitlerthat “the war was over in the area of heavyindustry and armaments. . . . From nowon the material preponderance of theenemy can no longer be compensated forby the bravery of our soldiers.”4

As for aircraft production, the man-ufacture of fighters presumably did in-crease in 1944 but did so at the expense

41

of bomber and cargo aircraft production—65 percent of all planes accepted by theLuftwaffe in 1944 were single-enginefighters.5 In 1942 bombers accounted forover half of all aircraft produced, but by1944 that number had dropped to 18percent. The CBO forced Germany to stopbuilding offensive weapons and concen-trate instead on defensive ones in an un-successful effort to stop the Allied bomb-ing campaign.

Even so, the supposed increase infighter production is suspect. Large dis-crepancies existed between the numberof fighters allegedly produced and thenumber actually employed by theLuftwaffe. One can offer three explana-tions for this anomaly: (1) the aircraftwere not actually built at all; frightenedfactory managers simply padded thenumbers to avoid recriminations fromthe gestapo; (2) the factory counted re-paired aircraft as “new” ones (theLuftwaffe didn’t count that way); or (3)even if the factories actually built newaircraft, the Allies destroyed them enroute to the airfields—accounting for up

42

to 20 percent of total production.6 In re-ality, despite all of these production andacceptance statistics, one can best un-derstand the weakness of the Luftwaffeby realizing that by April 1944 theGermans had only 300 fighters in thewest to oppose 12,000 Allied aircraft—and only 500 in the east to oppose13,000 Soviet aircraft.7 As a conse-quence, on D day the Luftwaffe flew only319 sorties—most of which failed toreach the beachhead and none of whichinflicted significant damage—comparedto the Allies, who flew 12,015.8 Only sixdays after the landings, Prime MinisterWinston Churchill and the combinedchiefs of staff thought the air situationsafe enough that they actually visitedthe beachhead. At the same time, Hitlerspent more and more time in bunkers toavoid Allied bombs.

One should also note that becauseAllied bombing had so disrupted theLuftwaffe’s oil supply, new pilots enteredcombat with barely 50 hours of flyingtime, making them little more than can-non fodder for the well-trained Allied

43

fighter pilots.9 In fact, by mid-1944 Alliedpilots commonly flew dozens of combatmissions without even seeing an enemyaircraft.10 Essentially, the Luftwaffe hadbeen eliminated as a threat to the Alliedinvasion, despite what the production fig-ures allegedly illustrated.

Even if we sweep all those argumentsaside, let us revisit the basic charge: thatbecause production increased, the CBOwas a failure. Consider the fact that in1939 the German army consisted of 120divisions. Yet, despite four years of warand the combined efforts of the Soviet,American, British, and French armies, ithad grown to 318 divisions by 1944.11

Using the logic of the production argu-ment, the actions of the Allied armiesamounted to a dismal failure—no matterhow hard they fought, the German armycontinued to grow. Such (fatuous) logicwould force us to conclude that the Allieswould have been better off spending theirmoney on something besides groundforces.

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Notes

1. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London:Jonathan Cape, 1995), 203. Overy is recognized asone of the world’s top military historians, but he isalso an economic historian, which makes him espe-cially authoritative on discussions of airpower or seapower as forms of economic war.

2. Ibid., 131.3. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs,

trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York:Macmillan, 1970), 346. Ultra intercepts revealedthat the day after the attack—13 May—AAA batter-ies were urgently redeployed to protect the oil re-fineries; the day after that, motor transport units,including combat units, received orders to switchfrom gasoline to wood gas in an effort to conserveprecious fuel. United States National SecurityAgency/Central Security Service, ULTRA History ofU.S. Strategic Air Force Europe vs. German Air Force,National Security Agency Special Study SRH-013(June 1945; copy, Washington, D.C.: 1978?), 178–80.

4. Speer, 424.5. United States Strategic Bombing Survey

(USSBS), The United States Strategic BombingSurvey: Over-All Report (European War) (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 30 September1945), 18; and Overy, 129.

6. USSBS, 18–22.7. Overy, 124.8. John Keegan, Six Armies in Normandy: From

D-Day to the Liberation of Paris, June 6th–August25th, 1944 (New York: Viking Press, 1982), 143.

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9. USSBS, Oil Division Final Report (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, August 1945), 2.

10. One P-47 pilot stated that he flew 70 combatmissions with the Ninth Air Force between July 1944and the end of the war but saw an enemy aircraft ononly one mission. Robert V. Brulle, Angels Zero: P-47Close Air Support in Europe (Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000), 122, 156.

11. David T. Zabecki, ed., World War II inEurope: An Encyclopedia, vol. 1 (New York: GarlandPublishing, 1999), 625.

46

Myth 6

In truth, the United States StrategicBombing Survey (USSBS) reported that“bombing appreciably affected theGerman will to resist. Its main psycho-logical effects were defeatism, fear, hope-lessness, fatalism, and apathy. It did littleto stiffen resistance through the arous-ing of aggressive emotions of hate andanger. War weariness, willingness to sur-render, loss of hope in German victory,distrust of leaders, feelings of disunity,

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*See, for example, Thomas R. Phillips, “Preview ofArmageddon,” Saturday Evening Post, 12 March 1938, 12;Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion inWar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 269–73;Hans Rumpf, The Bombing of Germany, trans. EdwardFitzgerald (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963),233; and Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics and Airpower in WorldWar II: The British Bombing of German Cities (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 1993), 158–61.

Bombing was ineffective becauseit actually stiffened rather thanlowered enemy morale.*

and demoralizing fear were all morecommon among bombed than among un-bombed people.”1 In addition, air at-tack had an enormous effect on Germantroops, representing “a chronic cause offear, discouragement and confusion,and a potentially serious disrupter ofdiscipline. . . . Air power when employedagainst lines of communication andtransportation plays a vital role not onlyin producing the more obvious militaryisolation of the battlefield, but intensi-fies feelings of anxiety and frustration.”2

Regarding the Japanese population,the USSBS observed that “civilian moralewas predominantly, but not completely,destroyed. Just before the end of the warthere was still roughly one-fourth of thecivilian population with some confidencein victory and willingness to go on.”3 Inother words, 75 percent of the Japanesehad given up hope. Although it is proba-bly true that, initially, morale spikedamong the enemy population (applyingpressure to an object generally tends toconsolidate that object before fracturingit), overall no evidence exists to support

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the claim that air attack bolstered enemymorale.

As for the actual performance ofGerman and Japanese workers, impor-tant criteria involve factors such as ab-senteeism. Whether or not a factoryworker admits to bad morale, if he orshe fails to show up for work because ofthe bombing campaign, then bombing isachieving one of its goals. In mid-1945,when the bombing campaign againstJapan reached its height, absenteeism inJapanese factories approached 50 per-cent. Nearly 8.5 million people had fledthe cities to escape the bombing cam-paign nationwide; of those, nearly one-third were factory workers—certainlynot an indication of increasing morale.4

In Germany, absenteeism averaged 20 to25 percent in many key factories.5 Thus,performance suffered greatly in bothGermany and Japan, as did morale.Three-quarters of the German peoplethought the war was lost by the begin-ning of 1944; when asked by Galluppollsters after the war about the hardestthing they had to endure, 91 percent

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pointed to the Allied bombing.6 A classicstudy conducted after the war confirmedthe USSBS findings. This work, whichstudied morale during bombing, alsoconcluded that the people directed theiranger at their leaders for failing to pro-tect them—not against Allied airmen.7

Notes

1. United States Strategic Bombing Survey(USSBS), The United States Strategic BombingSurvey: Over-All Report (European War) (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 30 September1945), 95–96.

2. USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing onGerman Morale, vol. 2 (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, December 1946), 41–42.

3. USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing onJapanese Morale (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, June 1947), 32.

4. Ibid., 13; and USSBS, The Effects of StrategicBombing on Japan’s Urban Economy (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, March 1947), 25.

5. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London:Jonathan Cape, 1995), 133. Interestingly, approxi-mately 2.7 million British civilians left the major in-dustrial cities during the war to escape Germanbombing, which was on a far lower scale than wasthe Allied bombing of Germany. Richard M.Titmuss, History of the Second World War, vol. 2,

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Problems of Social Policy (London: His Majesty’sStationery Office, 1950), 345.

6. USSBS, Over-All Report (European War), 96;and Overy, 132.

7. Irving L. Janis, Air War and Emotional Stress:Psychological Studies of Bombing and CivilianDefense, RAND note (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951),see especially chap. 7, “Aggression and WartimeMorale.” Janis also notes that the willingness to en-dure bombing was proportional to the distance fromthe bombing. In other words, people living in thecountryside did not believe that bombing affectedtheir morale; those in the cities being bombed feltotherwise. For a similar appraisal, see Fred CharlesIklé, The Social Impact of Bomb Destruction (Norman:University of Oklahoma Press, 1958), 27–34.

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Myth 7

Nothing indicates that anyone in au-thority within the Japanese governmentwas seriously contemplating surrender inlate July or early August 1945. On 26July, the Japanese rejected PresidentHarry Truman’s Potsdam Declaration,

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The atomic bombs were unneces-sary because Japan was about tosurrender; even if it had notgiven up, an invasion or contin-ued blockade would have beenmore humane.*

*See, for example, Fleet Adm William D. Leahy, I WasThere: The Personal Story of the Chief of Staff to PresidentsRoosevelt and Truman (New York: Whittlesey House, 1950),441; Fleet Adm Ernest J. King and Walter Muir Whitehill,Fleet Admiral King: A Naval Record (New York: W. W. Norton,1952), 621; B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the Second WorldWar (New York: Putnam’s, 1970), 696–98; D. Clayton James,The Years of MacArthur, vol. 2, 1941–1945 (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1975), 775 (James quotes MacArthur as saying thebombs were “completely unnecessary”); and E. B. Potter,Nimitz (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1976), 386 (accord-ing to Potter, Nimitz thought the atomic bomb “indecent” andunnecessary). See also Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air

which called on Japan to surrenderbut also suggested that survival of theemperor was acceptable. Intercepts of TopSecret Ultra messages in June and Julyrevealed that the Japanese expected—indeed, hoped for—an invasion. Theyassumed that the prospect of such abloodbath (based on casualty figures atIwo Jima and Okinawa) would deter theAmericans from launching an invasion,thus affording the Japanese better peaceterms.1

As for an invasion, according to USintelligence at the time, the Japanese hadincreased the number of defenders toover 600,000 on the island of Kyushu—where our first landings, involving ap-proximately 767,000 personnel, werescheduled to occur in November 1945.In reality, postwar findings revealed that

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Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell UniversityPress, 1996), 134–36. The intensity of the debate over theatomic bombs has scarcely abated over the years. For alook at the highly visible and messy flap that developed at theNational Air and Space Museum over its proposed display ofthe Enola Gay—the B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb onHiroshima—see Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying theHistory of Enola Gay (New York: Copernicus, 1996).

the enemy had readied closer to 900,000defenders.2 An invasion of the main is-land of Honshu, which would includeover 1 million Allied soldiers, sailors, air-men, and marines, was already sched-uled for March 1946. Over 2 millionJapanese regulars defended this island.

These statistics, combined with thefactors below, suggest what an invasionwould have meant:

• Japanese soldiers did not surrenderbut fought to the death—95 percenton average throughout the war,with 97 percent at Saipan and 99percent at Iwo Jima. Using the pre-vious Pacific campaigns as exam-ples, we can conclude that Japanesemilitary losses due to US invasionswould have numbered around 3million dead.3

• Based on the Okinawa campaign,US casualties ran about 35 percentof the number of troops engaged.4

Thus, of the 1.77 million men sched-uled to assault the Japanese homeislands, we should have expected inexcess of 500,000 casualties. During

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World War II, about 30 percent ofthe US Army’s combat casualtieswere deaths; based on that ratio,the invasions would have killedaround 150,000 US troops.5

• Japanese civilians tended to getcaught in the way when US andJapanese forces fought duringWorld War II. As many as 150,000Japanese civilians died during theOkinawa campaign, as well as10,000 Koreans who had beenbrought in to perform heavy labor.6

No doubt, hundreds of thousands ofJapanese civilians would have been“caught in the way” and killed in themassive ground assaults scheduledfor late 1945 and early 1946.

Canceling the invasion and simplymaintaining the blockade would haveentailed a very long-term strategy withtwo highly negative effects. First, itwould have slowly starved the Japanesepopulation to death, as happened to theGermans in World War I when over800,000 civilians died as a direct result of

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the Allied starvation blockade.7 Deliberatestarvation is no more humane thanbombing. Second, while we held back andwaited for the blockade to take effect, wewould have condemned millions of Asiansthen under an oppressive Japanese occu-pation to privation and death. How manymore Koreans, Vietnamese, Indonesians,Malays, Chinese, and so forth wouldhave died had we simply waited? As itwas, as many as 6 million Asians diedunder Japanese rule.8 Critics undoubt-edly would have later branded a US pol-icy of waiting as a deliberately raciststrategy. In addition, more than 558,000Allied prisoners of war (POW) and in-ternees remained in captivity in August1945. Japanese prison camps were no-toriously deadly to their unfortunate in-habitants: nearly 40 percent died there.Waiting the Japanese out would almostcertainly have condemned these menand women to death.9

As for the contentious issue of whatrole bombing—specifically, the atomicbombs—played in the Japanese deci-sion to surrender, one would do well to

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consider some statements made by keyJapanese leaders at the time:

• Prince Fumimaro Konoye, presidentof the Great East Asia League andformer premier: “Fundamentally, thething that brought about the deter-mination to make peace was theprolonged bombing of the B-29s.”10

• Baron Kantaro Suzuki, premier:“Merely on the basis of the B-29salone I was convinced that Japanshould sue for peace.”11

• Adm Osami Nagano, supreme navaladvisor to the emperor: “If I were togive you one factor as the one lead-ing to your victory, I would give youthe Air Force.”12

• Chief Cabinet Secretary HisatsuneSakomizu: “The chance had come toend the war. It was not necessary toblame the military side, the manu-facturing people, or anyone else—just the atomic bomb. It was a goodexcuse.”13

• Emperor Hirohito, radio addressannouncing surrender, 14 August1945: “The enemy has begun to

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employ a new and most cruel bomb,the power of which to do damage is,indeed, incalculable, taking the tollof many innocent lives. Should wecontinue to fight, it would not onlyresult in an ultimate collapse andobliteration of the Japanese nation,but also would lead to the total ex-tinction of human civilization.”14

The bombing of Japan was a tragedy,and it is regrettable that it had to occur.Undoubtedly, many innocent people diedin these air attacks, but, as noted, the al-ternatives were even deadlier, to bothcombatants and noncombatants. Waroften forces a choice between bad alterna-tives: wise leaders attempt to choose thelesser evil.

Notes

1. Bruce Lee, Marching Orders: The Untold Storyof World War II (New York: Crown Publishers, 1995),see chaps. 18–20 for a thorough examination of thevarious Ultra/Magic messages that discussed theissue of Japanese surrender. The best overalltreatment of this contentious issue, which focuseson Japanese sources, is Sadao Asada’s “The Shock

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of the Atomic Bomb and Japan’s Decision toSurrender—A Reconsideration,” Pacific HistoricalReview 67 (November 1998): 477–512.

2. Edward J. Drea, MacArthur’s ULTRA:Codebreaking and the War against Japan, 1942–1945(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 222.For a detailed and sobering examination of the actualUS invasion plans, see Thomas B. Allen and NormanPolmar, Code-Name Downfall: The Secret Plan toInvade Japan and Why Truman Dropped the Bomb(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

3. Lee, 491; and Richard Overy, Why the AlliesWon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995), 301.

4. Drea, 210.5. “Almanac,” Defense, September/October

1989, 47. These numbers are probably conservative.For the best discussion of this issue, see D. M.Giangreco, “Casualty Projections for the U.S.Invasions of Japan, 1945–1946: Planning and PolicyImplications,” Journal of Military History 61 (July1997): 521–82.

6. George Feifer, Tennozan: The Battle ofOkinawa and the Atomic Bomb (New York: Ticknor &Fields, 1992), 533.

7. The British official history states that762,736 German civilians starved to death duringthe war and another 66,466 died of tuberculosisand other lung diseases caused by the lack of fat,oils, and milk in their diets—the absence of whichwas due to the blockade. A. C. Bell, A History of theBlockade of Germany, and of the CountriesAssociated with Her in the Great War: Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, 1914–1918 (London:

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His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1937), 672. TheGermans maintained that the number of dead wasfar higher, but in any event, the total does not in-clude the civilians killed in Austria-Hungary andTurkey, where the effects of the starvation blockadewere far more severe.

8. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government:Genocide and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers,1994), table 8.1, 148.

9. Van Waterford, Prisoners of the Japanese inWorld War II (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994),146. In contrast, the POW death rate in the Naziprison camps (excluding Soviet prisoners, whosemortality rate was 60 percent) was only 4 percent.Rummel states that 539,000 people died inJapanese prison camps, 13,083 of whom were USand British military POWs (p. 152), whereasWaterford gives a figure of 365,250 dying inJapanese camps. Another source lists the US mili-tary POW mortality rate at 34 percent, theAustralian at 33 percent, and the British at 32 per-cent. Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWsof World War II in the Pacific (New York: WilliamMorrow, 1994), 360.

10. US Army Air Forces (AAF), MissionAccomplished: Interrogations of Japanese Industrial,Military, and Civil Leaders of World War II(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,1946), 40. One should also note that Eighth Air Forcehad changed to B-29s and had recently deployed toair bases on Okinawa. Because of the shorter dis-tances from these bases, versus the distance for

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Twentieth Air Force’s aircraft based in the MarianaIslands, these planes could carry less fuel and morebombs. Thus, the conventional bomb tonnagedropped on Japan was scheduled to triple, beginningin September 1945. United States Strategic BombingSurvey (USSBS), The United States Strategic BombingSurvey: Summary Report (Pacific) (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, July 1946), 17.

11. AAF, Mission Accomplished, 39.12. Ibid.13. USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on

Japanese Morale (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, June 1947), 99.

14. “The Emperor’s Rescript,” Current History,September 1945, 191–92.

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Myth 8

One could easily make strategicbombing’s overall effectiveness in WorldWar II and its decisiveness in victory thesubject of several papers, indeed books.Unquestionably, the combined efforts ofall the services and all the Allies pro-duced victory. Even so, at the risk ofoversimplifying the issue, I offer somemore statistics derived from the USSBSand Richard J. Overy’s Why the AlliesWon:

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Overall, strategic bombing wasa wasted effort that producedonly minor effects.*

*See, for example, Stephen A. Garrett, Ethics andAirpower in World War II: The British Bombing of GermanCities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 161–64, 198;Adm Sir Gerald Charles Dickens, Bombing and Strategy: TheFallacy of Total War (London: Sampson Low, 1947), passim;Marshall Andrews, Disaster through Air Power (New York:Rinehart, 1950), passim; and Max Hastings, BomberCommand (New York: Dial Press, 1979), 346–52.

• By December 1944, the followinghad occurred:• German rail traffic was down 50

percent.1

• Aviation-fuel production wasdown 90 percent, which in turncaused a catastrophic collapseof the chemical, rubber, and ex-plosive industries as well. Dueto the lack of fuel, new Germantanks and armored vehicles hadto be towed to the front by oxen.2

• Steel production in the Ruhr,Germany’s industrial heartland,was down 80 percent.3

• German coal supplies were down50 percent.4

• By mid-1943, Italian industrial pro-duction was down 60 percent (Italysoon surrendered, but Germanythen occupied the country and con-tinued to fight for another twoyears).5

• The Germans were using 75 percentof their 88s (Germany’s best artillerypieces and best tank killers) as anti-aircraft guns.6

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• AAA absorbed 20 percent of all am-munition produced by Germany, aswell as one-third of all optics andmore than one-half of all radar andsignals equipment. The aluminumused to make AAA shells could havebuilt an additional 40,000 air-planes.7

• By D day, defense against Allied airattack absorbed fully one-third ofthe entire German war economy—ashare greater than the entireGerman economy in June 1941,when Hitler invaded the SovietUnion.8

• Two million Germans were engagedin the repair of damaged factories;half a million were trying to moveGerman factories underground; 1million were assigned to reproducecivilian goods destroyed by air at-tack; and another million were ded-icated to the production and man-ning of air-defense equipment.(Germany had over 55,000 AAAbatteries in 1943.) What if those 4.5million (20 percent of the German

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work force) had been buildingtanks or bombers or submarinesor, worst of all, had been put in uni-form and stationed in France to de-fend against an Allied invasion?9

One should also note that these pro-duction losses did not result fromGerman industrial areas being overrunby Allied troops. The Soviets did not cap-ture Silesia until late January 1945, andthe Allies neither crossed the Rhine atRemagen until 7 March 1945 nor over-ran the Ruhr until April 1945. Indeed,the liberation of German-occupied terri-tory resulted in a drop of only 4 percentin German munitions production for allof 1944. In the first quarter of 1945, pro-duction fell a further 13 percent due toliberation. In contrast, bombing causeda production drop of triple that amount,and Nazi leaders knew this.10 In the wordsof Col-Gen Alfred Jodl, Wehrmacht opera-tions chief, “So I would say that the deci-sive factor was not so much the very un-pleasant effect of your air attacks at thefront, as the destruction of the homeland,

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almost without resistance.”11 One expertstudy of the German railway system ar-gues that trains were essential to the en-tire German economy because theytransported the one commodity neces-sary for all production—coal. Thus,when the strategic air campaign de-stroyed the railway system, the entireGerman economy collapsed.12 Indeed,railways and land transportation in gen-eral attracted the most attention fromAllied bombers. Of the approximately2.7 million tons of bombs dropped inthe European theater, nearly one-third(31.6 percent) were directed at land-transportation targets.13

As for the situation in Japan by July1945, the USSBS and Overy make thefollowing observations:

• Aluminum production was down to9 percent of the wartime peak.14

• Steel and oil production were downto 15 percent of the wartime peak.15

• Production in cities not bombed inJapan was at 94 percent of thewartime peak but at 27 percent incities that had been bombed.16

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• Overall, Japanese productiondropped 53 percent between Novem-ber 1944 and July 1945, promptingthe USSBS to state that “by July1945 Japan’s economic system hadbeen shattered. Production of civil-ian goods was below the level of sub-sistence. Munitions output had beencurtailed to less than half thewartime peak, a level that could notsupport sustained military opera-tions against our opposing forces.The economic basis of Japan hadbeen destroyed.”17

This is not to say that airpower alonecaused this catastrophic collapse. The USNavy’s unrestricted submarine-warfarecampaign, as well as the tough groundfighting involving hundreds of thousandsof Allied troops, was crucial to ultimatevictory.

Regarding costs, the United Statesspent $183 billion on armaments duringWorld War II, of which the AAF’s shareamounted to $45 billion (24.6 percent).Of that amount, the AAF spent $9.2

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billion on bombers (20.4 percent of theAAF total, 5 percent of the US total). TheAAF bought 230,175 aircraft, of which34,625 were heavy bombers (15 percent);as a percentage of aircraft weight, heavybombers came to 35 percent of the total.18

In Britain 50 percent of the defensebudget during the war went to the army,33 percent to the navy, and 17 percent tothe RAF—Bomber Command’s share was7 percent.19 Were the 5 percent spent onbombers by the AAF and the 7 percent bythe RAF excessive?

Notes

1. Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London:Jonathan Cape, 1995), 125.

2. United States Strategic Bombing Survey(USSBS), Oil Division Final Report (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, August 1945),1–3. By late 1944, the lack of synthetic nitrogen,produced as a by-product in the hydrogenationprocess, was so acute that the Germans filled theirartillery shells with 70 percent rock salt.

3. USSBS, The United States Strategic BombingSurvey: Over-All Report (European War) (Washington,D.C.: Government Printing Office, 30 September1945), 37.

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4. Overy, 125.5. Ibid., 129.6. Ibid.7. Ibid., 131; Albert Speer, Inside the Third

Reich: Memoirs, trans. Richard and Clara Winston(New York: Macmillan, 1970), 278–79; and SebastianCox, ed., The Strategic Air War against Germany,1939–1945 (London: Frank Cass, 1998), xxxiv.

8. Burton Klein, Germany’s Economic Prepara-tions for War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1959), 233.

9. Overy, 129–31; and USSBS, Over-All Report(European War), 37. Of the 1 million personnel man-ning air-defense batteries, approximately one-fourthwere Luftwaffe troops; the remainder were factoryworkers—termed “pre-military age” youths from 16to 18 years of age—and Russian prisoners perform-ing menial tasks.

10. Cox, 90, 163.11. Richard Overy, Interrogations: The Nazi Elite

in Allied Hands, 1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2001),281.

12. Alfred C. Mierzejewski, The Collapse of theGerman War Economy, 1944–1945: Allied Air Powerand the German National Railway (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 184.Mierzejewski affirms this point in The Most ValuableAsset of the Third Reich: A History of the GermanRailway System, 1920–1945, vol. 2 (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 158–61.

13. By way of comparison, other target systemsand their percentages of the total tonnage droppedin Europe include the following: oil (8.1 percent),

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naval targets (including submarine pens and yards,4.0 percent), aircraft factories (2.0 percent), and V-weapon sites (1.8 percent). Ball bearings were welldown the list with only .25 percent of the total.USSBS, Statistical Appendix to Over-All Report(European War) (Washington, D.C.: GovernmentPrinting Office, February 1947), 49–59.

14. USSBS, The United States Strategic BombingSurvey: Summary Report (Pacific) (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, July 1946), 18.

15. Ibid.16. USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombing on

Japan’s Urban Economy (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, March 1947), 11.

17. USSBS, The Effects of Strategic Bombingon Japan’s War Economy (Washington, D.C.:Government Printing Office, December 1946), 2.

18. Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate,eds., The Army Air Forces in World War II, vol. 6, Menand Planes (1955; new imprint, Washington, D.C.:Office of Air Force History, 1983), 360; and I. B.Holley Jr., Buying Aircraft: Materiel Procurement forthe Army Air Forces (Washington, D.C.: Office of theChief of Military History, Department of the Army,1964), 550.

19. Cox, xxv.

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Myth 9

Like World War II, the Vietnam Warhas engendered much emotion andmisunderstanding, although the great

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Airpower was a failure in Viet-nam, losing the war and lettingthe Army down. Why even have anAir Force if it can’t beat a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam?*

*See, for example, Jeffrey Record, “Into the Wild BlueYonder: Should We Abolish the Air Force?” Foreign Policy 52(spring 1990): 50–54; and Col Thomas Garrett, “Close AirSupport: Which Way to Go?” Parameters 20 (December 1990):29–43. After accusing the Air Force of being insufficiently sup-portive of close air support for decades, Garrett concludes hisdiatribe with, “Come on Air Force! Get down, get funky!” Seealso George and Meredith Friedman, The Future of War: Power,Technology, and American World Dominance in the 21st Century(New York: Crown Publishers, 1996), especially chap. 10,“Vietnam and the Failure of Airpower”; and Earl H. Tilford Jr.,Crosswinds: The Air Force’s Setup in Vietnam (College Station,Tex.: Texas A&M University Press, 1993). Tilford’s thesis main-tains that the Air Force “failed” in Vietnam because it “fell vic-tim to its own brief history and to the unswerving commitmentof its leadership to the dubious doctrine of strategic bombing”(xviii).

successes of airpower in the Persian GulfWar and the years since have muted agreat deal, but not all, of such talk.Attacks on airpower’s performance inVietnam continue.

During the Vietnam War, 8.7 millionAmericans served in uniform. Of those,4.4 million were in the Army, 1.8 millionin the Navy, 1.7 million in the Air Force,and nearly 800,000 in the Marines. Inaddition, at any one time nearly 1 millionSouth Vietnamese soldiers—includingregulars, reserves, and provincial troops—served their country. At the same time,the allied countries of Thailand, theRepublic of Korea, Australia, and NewZealand had as many as 70,000 groundtroops in South Vietnam.1 In 1967 over1.3 million allied ground troops operatedin South Vietnam—a country the size ofWisconsin. Yet, even all those soldiersand marines could not control the coun-tryside. During this period, at the time ofour greatest ground presence, we failedto detect, much less prevent, the mas-sive Vietcong ground offensive duringthe Vietnamese Tet (New Year) holidays

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of 1968. If the Air Force, with its 1.7million personnel, failed in Vietnam,then the 9 million military personnel ofthe other services and South Vietnamfailed even more dismally.

Moreover, it is important to note whowas in charge of US political and mili-tary strategy during this war. From 1963to 1973, 20 men occupied seven posi-tions of key leadership (table 4).

Of these 20 leaders, only one—RobertS. McNamara—had served in the AirForce (as a staff officer in the AAF). Tenothers (counting Taylor twice) had beenor were still in the Army; nine others, in-cluding all three presidents, were or hadbeen Navy officers; and one, AmbassadorEllsworth Bunker, had no military experi-ence.2 Furthermore, during the RollingThunder air campaign against NorthVietnam from 1965 to 1968, the strategy,targets, and often even the tactics, weredetermined during Tuesday lunch meet-ings in the White House. No airman everreceived an invitation to those meetings.Gen Earle G. Wheeler, an infantryman,

75

76

Table 4Key US Leaders during the Vietnam War

Presidents

John F. Kennedy 1961–63 Navy officer in WWIILyndon B. Johnson 1963–69 Navy officer in WWIIRichard M. Nixon 1969–73 Navy officer in WWII

National Security Advisors

McGeorge Bundy 1961–66 Army officer in WWIIWalt W. Rostow 1966–69 Army officer in WWIIHenry M. Kissinger 1969–73 Army NCO in WWII

Secretaries of Defense

Robert S. McNamara 1961–68 AAF officer in WWIIClark M. Clifford 1968–69 Navy officer in WWIIMelvin C. Laird 1969–73 Navy officer in WWII

Chairmen, JCS

Maxwell D. Taylor 1962–64 Army officerEarle G. Wheeler 1964–70 Army officerThomas H. Moorer 1970–74 Navy officer

Theater Commanders (Pacific Command)

Harry D. Felt 1958–64 Navy officerU.S. Grant Sharp 1964–68 Navy officerJohn S. McCain Jr. 1968–72 Navy officer

Subtheater Commanders (US Military Assistance Command,Vietnam)

Paul D. Harkins 1960–64 Army officerWilliam C. Westmoreland 1964–68 Army officerCreighton W. Abrams 1968–72 Army officer

Ambassadors to South Vietnam

Henry Cabot Lodge 1960–64 Army officer in WWIIMaxwell D. Taylor 1964–65 Army officerEllsworth Bunker 1965–73 No military

experience

attended instead and purportedly gave“the air point of view.”3

There is much blame to go around re-garding how we planned and fought theVietnam War, and airmen must share re-sponsibility for defeat. But airpowerplayed only one small part of a fatallyflawed strategy, and airmen had virtuallyno direct role in formulating that strategy.It is also noteworthy that the most vocalmilitary critic of our Vietnam War policy atthe time was Gen Curtis E. LeMay, the AirForce chief of staff. For his pains, he wasforced into early retirement.4

As for letting the Army down, the AirForce flew 3.9 million combat air sorties inSouth Vietnam in support of the Army; ofthose, 633,180 were “attack” sorties, in-cluding 67,477 B-52 strikes, each deliv-ering up to 30 tons of bombs (table 5).5

Gen William Westmoreland, commanderof US Military Assistance Command,Vietnam (MACV) from 1964 to 1968, be-lieved that Vietnam was primarily aground war and that the purpose of air-power was to support the ground effort.He therefore sought control of all air

77

78

Tab

le 5

US

AF

Co

mb

at S

ort

ies

in S

ou

th V

ietn

am

Year

Taca

irG

unsh

ipB

-52

Esc

ort

Rec

ceH

elo

Oth

erTo

tal

1962

1,58

974

559

112

,921

15,8

46

1963

4,01

51,

865

3,04

521

,568

30,4

93

1964

2,71

815

1,60

47,

939

39,7

5552

,031

1965

36,0

2327

61,

538

1,78

526

,755

93,5

7915

9,95

6

1966

69,6

101,

036

4,30

75,

804

61,4

1923

9,18

138

1,35

7

1967

111,

704

4,85

66,

609

6,11

594

,748

616

474,

082

698,

730

1968

129,

896

4,99

416

,505

2,96

982

,385

7,44

659

5,92

284

0,11

7

1969

91,7

964,

726

11,4

942,

017

129,

022

6,56

452

1,22

376

6,84

4

1970

46,1

711,

893

3,69

734

369

,674

5,82

939

8,64

052

6,24

7

1971

11,7

5884

2,38

620

27,1

396,

221

237,

876

285,

484

1972

38,0

313,

070

19,2

891,

046

12,1

9175

070

,010

144,

387

1973

1,24

619

41,

652

249

1,16

45,

008

9,51

3

Tota

l54

4,55

721

,144

67,4

7724

,562

516,

072

27,4

262,

709,

765

3,91

1,00

5

Sou

rce:

“US

AF

Com

bat

Sor

ties

in S

outh

east

Asi

a, J

anua

ry 1

962

thru

Dec

embe

r 19

73”

(cha

rt)

(Was

hing

ton,

D.C

.:H

eadq

uart

ers

Uni

ted

Sta

tes

Air

For

ce/X

OO

CO

AB

, 5

Apr

il 19

74).

assets operating in Southeast Asia, butthese efforts were rebuffed by his superiorin Hawaii, Adm U. S. Grant Sharp, whoinsisted on retaining control of the air waragainst North Vietnam. Nonetheless,Westmoreland determined the targets inSouth Vietnam for Air Force, Navy,Marine, and Army aircraft—includingthe tens of thousands of B-52 Arc Lightstrikes, usually directed against “sus-pected enemy locations.” In a compro-mise worked out with Sharp, Westmore-land also chose the targets in RoutePackage 1—the area just north of the de-militarized zone.

The Air Force had only token repre-sentation on the MACV staff, despite thefact that a full general—the commanderof Seventh Air Force—was Westmore-land’s “air deputy.” When Seventh AirForce aircraft went north of “Route Pack”1, the targets came from HeadquartersPacific Command in Hawaii (after ap-proval in Washington). The Seventh hadno control over Navy, Army, Marine, orSouth Vietnamese aircraft operating inSouth Vietnam.6 During the siege of

79

Khe Sanh in 1968, Gen William Momyer,the Seventh Air Force commander,pushed for control of all air assets inSouth Vietnam so as to protect the be-leaguered marines most effectively.Washington initially denied such controleven though Westmoreland strongly sup-ported it; only a decision by the secretaryof defense to consolidate airpower undera single air commander—temporarily—allowed the use of a system that put thelives of the troops under fire above theparochial interests of the services.7

After the war, a retired Army generalwith a PhD in political science wrote tohis colleagues who had served in com-mand positions in Vietnam, asking themto complete a survey on their experiencesin the war. Of the 173 Army general offi-cers still alive, 67 percent responded.When asked what they thought of theclose air support provided to them inVietnam, 64 percent said it was “aboutright.” More interesting, 28 percent saidit was “too much considering the natureof the war.”8 Indeed, one general main-tained that the excessive amount of air

80

support seriously derogated the infantry’straditional doctrine of closing with theenemy. Instead, the infantry would lo-cate the enemy, back off, and call in anair strike. He concluded that the Armyneeded to be weaned away from its over-reliance on airpower.9 Another surveyquestion concerned relations with theother services. Sixty percent of the Armygenerals characterized their relationswith the Air Force as “outstanding,” andonly 2 percent said it was “not satisfac-tory.”10

Notes

1. “Almanac,” Defense, September/October 1989,47; Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York:Oxford University Press, 1978), 455; Harry G.Summers Jr., Historical Atlas of the Vietnam War(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 169; and FrancesFitzGerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and theAmericans in Vietnam (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972),342.

2. Walt Rostow was an unusual case. As anArmy major in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),he was assigned to the Economic Objectives Unit inLondon, where he studied the German economy todetermine appropriate targets for Allied strategic

81

bombers. In addition, Admirals Felt and Moorerwere aviators.

3. Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: TheU.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966–1973(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,2000), 23–24. President Johnson once boasted that“they can’t even bomb an outhouse without my ap-proval.” Gen William C. Westmoreland, A SoldierReports (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 119.

4. Thompson, 21. Most Air Force chiefs serve afour-year tour, although two (Hoyt Vandenberg andJohn McConnell) served longer. George Brown leftafter one year when he was elevated to chairman ofthe JCS; Mike Dugan was relieved after less thanfour months in office for his intemperate remarks inthe months before the Persian Gulf War; and RonFogleman retired in protest after three years due tothe handling of the Khobar Towers terrorist attack.LeMay lasted three-and-one-half years.

5. Most of the Air Force’s Medal of Honor recip-ients in Vietnam (seven of 13) received the award foractions taken in support of ground forces.

6. Dr. Graham A. Cosmas, “General Westmore-land and Control of the Air War,” in Naval HistoricalCenter, Command and Control of Air Operations inthe Vietnam War: Colloquium on ContemporaryHistory, January 23, 1991 (Washington, D.C.: NavalHistorical Center, Department of the Navy, 1991),29–38, on-line, Internet, 3 September 2003, avail-able from http://members.salts.navy.mil/vtu0615/vtu615cch4.html#General; and Thompson, 14–19.Momyer was opposed to the Army’s targeting of theB-52s, arguing that such missions were wasteful

82

and indiscriminate. His arguments were wavedaside: “Westmoreland’s zeal for Arc Light strikes re-mained undiminished despite Air Force objectionsand a paucity of measurable results.” JohnSchlight, A War Too Long: The USAF in SoutheastAsia, 1961–1975 (Washington, D.C.: Air ForceHistory and Museums Program, 1996), 31.

7. Willard J. Webb, “The Single Manager for Airin Vietnam,” Joint Force Quarterly 1 (winter1993/1994): 88–98. The concept of a joint air com-ponent commander is now codified in US joint mili-tary doctrine.

8. Brig Gen Douglas Kinnard, The WarManagers (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of NewEngland, 1977), 47.

9. Lt Gen Dave Richard Palmer, Summons of theTrumpet: US—Vietnam in Perspective (San Rafael,Calif.: Presidio Press, 1978), 143–46. Palmer re-ferred to this problem as “firebase psychosis.”

10. Kinnard, 63. In contrast, only 29 percent ofthe Army generals rated their relations with theNavy as “outstanding”; with the Marines, it was evenworse: 22 percent thought them “outstanding.”

83

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Myth 10

Rolling Thunder, the air campaignagainst North Vietnam that lasted from1965 to 1968, did not involve strategicbombing. Rather, it was an interdictioncampaign—and a halfhearted one at that.Approximately 90 percent of all targetsstruck during Rolling Thunder weretransportation-related—most of themlocated south of the 20th parallel, wellbelow the industrial and transportation

85

Strategic bombing failed in Viet-nam because Rolling Thunder didnot break the will of Ho Chi Minhand his cohorts to continue thewar in the south.*

*See, for example, John Prados, The Hidden History ofthe Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1995), 180–92;Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion inWar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996), 174–210,316–26; and William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon,and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon andSchuster, 1979), 209–19.

centers of Hanoi and Haiphong. Becausethe latter—North Vietnam’s major portthrough which it received 85 percent of allsupplies—was not closed by mining until1972, US forces could not halt suppliesnear their source. Indeed, both cities usu-ally remained off-limits to bombing duringRolling Thunder and had restricted zonesplaced around them—up to 30 miles forHanoi and 10 miles for Haiphong.Furthermore, 16 bombing halts occurredbetween 1965 and 1968. Finally, eventhough a principle of air war concernsthe necessity of achieving air superiorityas a first priority (without it, air opera-tions become far more difficult), theadministration would not allow attackson North Vietnamese airfields until April1967—more than two years after thestart of the Rolling Thunder campaign.1

In addition, surface-to-air missile (SAM)sites were often off-limits to Americanair strikes—unless and until those sitestook hostile action against our aircraft.

When the administration first dis-cussed US air strikes in November 1964,the North Vietnamese had no jet aircraft,

86

no SAMs, around 20 air-defenseradars, and perhaps 1,500 AAA guns.By February 1965, the North Vietnamesehad 60 MiGs, and the number of air-defense radars and AAA sites had dou-bled. They were also being supplied withSAMs. The first US loss to a MiG occurredin April 1965, and the first aircraft lostto a SAM in July. Eventually, nearly1,000 US aircraft and 800 crewmenwere lost over North Vietnam, many be-cause the rules of engagement hadplaced airfields, radars, and SAM sitesoff-limits.2

In mid-to-late 1964, the JCS pro-posed various plans that included a se-ries of air strikes against 94 key targetsin North Vietnam, to be conducted overa period of 16 days; the strike aircraftwould include B-52s. In addition, theJCS (note that these were joint, not AirForce, plans) also proposed the blockadeof North Vietnam and the mining ofHaiphong harbor, as well as the intro-duction of US ground troops into SouthVietnam to combat the insurgency. Theadministration rejected these plans.3

87

Eventually, US aircraft hit most of the94 targets but did so over a period ofthree years—not the 16 days called forby the JCS. A tenet of airpower doctrinecalls for the quick and powerful applica-tion of force. A campaign of gradual es-calation robs airpower of both its physicaland psychological impact. Indeed, suchpiecemeal attacks generally prove coun-terproductive. This tenet, however, was ig-nored. One cannot assume that the JCSplans would have been successful if theyhad been approved and implemented.Rather, one can only note that the planssubmitted by the country’s top militaryexperts were rejected. Certainly, PresidentLyndon Johnson had cogent political rea-sons for ignoring the advice of his topmilitary advisors—his fear of Chineseintervention, for example. The result,nonetheless, made it extremely difficult todevise options that could both navigatepolitical shoals and provide military suc-cess. The options actually implementedwere failures.

US forces attempted strategic bombingagainst North Vietnam just once—during

88

the 11-day Linebacker II air campaign ofDecember 1972, when B-52s struck tar-gets in and around Hanoi and Haiphongin a series of massive raids. LinebackerII did not “win the war” for the UnitedStates and South Vietnam, but it didforce the North Vietnamese governmentto return to the negotiating table andsign an agreement that both parties hadagreed to “in principle” but had notsigned two months before. At the sametime, Linebacker II reassured the SouthVietnamese government—erroneously asit turned out—that the United States re-mained committed to that regime’s con-tinued survival.

People still debate whether or notLinebacker II coerced the North Viet-namese into signing an agreement.Although the December settlement re-sembled the one negotiated two monthsearlier, Hanoi’s leaders did not sign thataccord. It is impossible to know if theywould have done so without theChristmas bombing. Note the remarks oftwo expert observers regarding the sig-nificance of those attacks:

89

• Vice Adm James B. Stockdale, POWand Medal of Honor winner: “Onelook at any Vietnamese officer’s facetold the whole story. It telegraphedhopelessness, accommodation, re-morse, fear. The shock was there;our enemy’s will was broken.”4

• Adm Thomas H. Moorer, chairmanof the JCS, 1973: “I am convincedthat Linebacker II served as a cata-lyst for the negotiations which re-sulted in the cease fire. Air power,given its day in court after almost adecade of frustration, confirmed itseffectiveness as an instrument ofnational power—in just nine and ahalf flying days.”5

Notes

1. Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: TheU.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966–1973(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,2000), 63. There was also a buffer zone 30 nauticalmiles deep along the Chinese border that US aircraftcould not violate.

2. Marshall L. Michel III, Clashes: Air Combatover North Vietnam, 1965–1972 (Annapolis: Naval

90

Institute Press, 1997), 7–8, 29, 32, 41; and Craig C.Hannah, Striving for Air Superiority: The Tactical AirCommand in Vietnam (College Station, Tex.: TexasA&M University Press, 2002), passim.

3. John P. Glennon, ed., Foreign Relations of theUnited States, 1964–1968, vol. 1, Vietnam, 1964(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office,1992), 112–18, 713–17, 847–57. For background onthese plans, see Jacob Van Staaveren, GradualFailure: The Air War over North Vietnam, 1965–1966(Washington, D.C.: Air Force History and MuseumsProgram, 2002), chap. 2.

4. Jim and Sybil Stockdale, In Love and War(New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 432.

5. Adm Thomas H. Moorer, “The Decisiveness ofAirpower in Vietnam,” Air Force Policy Letter forCommanders, supp. no. 11 (November 1973), 9,quoted in The Linebacker Raids: The Bombing ofNorth Vietnam, 1972 by John T. Smith (WellingtonHouse, London: Arms & Armour Press, 1998), 174.

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Myth 11

Sen. George McGovern called theLinebacker II campaign of December 1972“the most murderous aerial bombard-ment in the history of the world.” TomWicker, a New York Times writer, termedit “a holocaust,” and Anthony Lewis, an-other New York Times reporter, labeled it“a crime against humanity.” In truth,however, even Hanoi admitted that thestrikes caused only 1,623 deaths in Hanoiand Haiphong—a remarkably small toll,given the intensity of the air campaign.1

93

Airpower was an indiscriminateweapon that killed excessivenumbers of Vietnamese civilians.*

*See, for example, Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War:Vietnam, the United States, and the Modern HistoricalExperience (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 441; ErwinKnoll and Judith Nies McFadden, eds., War Crimes and theAmerican Conscience (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1970), 55–61; and Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, eds.,The Air War in Indochina (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), passim.

Guenter Lewy has provided the mostauthoritative casualty statistics avail-able on the Vietnam War—although headmits that these numbers are esti-mates. Around 587,000 North and SouthVietnamese civilians were killed in thefighting. Of those, 39,000 were assassi-nated by the Vietcong and another65,000 died in US bombing operationsover North Vietnam. Therefore most ofthose who died—483,000—were killed inSouth Vietnam as a result of fighting be-tween the Vietcong and North Vietnamesearmy on one side, and the SouthVietnamese army and US forces on theother. Trying to determine the cause ofdeath is difficult, but based on the num-ber of people admitted to hospitals inSouth Vietnam between 1967 and 1970,Lewy estimates that 66.5 percent of all in-juries resulted from mines, mortars, guns,and grenades. The other 33.5 percentwere injured by shelling or bombing. Ifwe use these percentages for the entirewar, and if we assume that the numberof individuals injured by shelling orbombing is equal (Lewy doesn’t break

94

this category down), and if we assumethat those killed met their fates in thesame percentages as did those who werewounded (and all of those assumptionsare big ifs), then of the 587,000Vietnamese civilians, both North andSouth Vietnamese, that Lewy states werekilled during the war, around 146,000 (25percent) died from air attacks. The other75 percent—over 440,000 people—werekilled by either ground or naval action.2

When General Westmoreland wasasked what would provide an answer tothe insurgency in South Vietnam, hereplied simply, “Firepower.”3 The USArmy declared certain areas in SouthVietnam “free fire zones” open to unre-stricted use of artillery and mortar fire:“anything that moved could be killedand anything that stood could be lev-eled.”4 While US and South Vietnameseaircraft dropped five million tons of ord-nance on South Vietnam, the Army andMarine Corps shot eight million tons ofartillery rounds there.5 Except duringthe Tet offensive of 1968, situations oflight or inactive combat accounted for

95

70 percent of all US artillery roundsfired—referred to as “harassment andinterdiction” fire.6 For example, the policyof Maj Gen Ellis Williamson, commanderof the 25th Infantry Division, called forshooting 1,000 rounds of artillery forevery one received by the enemy. One ismoved to ask at exactly what these1,000 rounds were aimed. Interestingly,the Vietcong used the 27,000 tons ofdud artillery rounds fired by the Armyand Marines to build booby traps thatcaused 6,000 US casualties in the firsthalf of 1967 alone.7 A great deal of fireand steel rained down on SouthVietnam, but aircraft did not drop themajority of it.

Notes

1. Martin F. Herz, assisted by Leslie Rider, ThePrestige Press and the Christmas Bombing, 1972:Images and Reality in Vietnam (Washington, D.C.:Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1980), 42, 47; andGuenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York:Oxford University Press, 1978), 451. Given thatMcGovern had piloted B-24s over Europe duringWorld War II, this is a pretty remarkable statement.

96

2. Lewy, 442–51.3. Col Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., The Army and

Vietnam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1986), 197.

4. Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John PaulVann and America in Vietnam (New York: RandomHouse, 1988), 540. Officially, the Army euphemisti-cally termed these “specialized strike zones.”

5. Wayne Thompson, To Hanoi and Back: TheU.S. Air Force and North Vietnam, 1966–1973(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press,2000), 5–6.

6. Krepinevich, 201.7. This number represented 17 percent of all US

casualties during that period. Micheal [sic]Clodfelter, Vietnam in Military Statistics: A History ofthe Indochina Wars, 1772–1991 (Jefferson, N.C.:McFarland, 1995), 232; and Krepinevich, 201. TheUS Army shot 20 million artillery rounds in SouthVietnam.

97

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Myth 12

Despite the success of US forces inOperation Desert Storm and thereafter,criticisms of airpower continue. Severaladditional charges bear this out.

Strategic attack made up only a smallpart of the coalition air campaign (table 6).In fact, the air tasking order that codes

99

Too focused on strategic attackduring the Persian Gulf War, theAir Force provided inadequatesupport to ground forces.*

*See, for example, Richard M. Swain, Lucky War: ThirdArmy in Desert Storm (Fort Leavenworth, Kans.: US ArmyCommand and General Staff College Press, [1994]),181–82, 185; Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Powerand Coercion in War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press,1996), 211–53, 316–26; Capt Michael Ott, “Aviation: It’sabout Support,” US Naval Institute Proceedings 118(November 1992): 112; Brig Gen Robert H. Scales Jr.,Certain Victory (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief ofStaff, US Army, 1993), 178–81, 187–89; and JeffreyRecord, Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of the Gulf War(Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1993), 103–18.

100

Tab

le 6

Per

sian

Gu

lf W

ar:

So

rtie

s F

low

n b

y U

S S

ervi

ce/T

ota

l,by

Mis

sio

n T

ype

Mis

sion

Typ

eA

ir F

orce

Nav

yM

arin

esS

OC

CE

NT

Arm

yTo

tal

Inte

rdic

tio

n24

,292

5,06

04,

264

320

38,2

77C

AS

2,12

021

3,95

631

06,

128

CA

P4,

558

4,24

50

00

13,0

75O

CA

6,42

21,

936

757

00

10,6

70A

irlif

t16

,628

09

1920

122

,064

Rec

ce1,

311

1,43

13

214

73,

236

Ref

uel

ing

11,0

242,

782

461

560

15,8

95S

OF

134

31

808

094

8S

up

po

rt20

341

714

640

1,07

1E

W1,

578

265

343

8456

82,

918

C3

604

1,14

315

70

01,

989

Trai

nin

g17

426

214

76

068

6S

urf

ace

CA

P0

198

00

023

8O

ther

358

916

490

01,

466

Tota

l69

,406

18,3

0310

,683

1,26

291

611

8,66

1

Sou

rce:

Tho

mas

A.

Kea

ney

and

Elio

t A

.C

ohen

, G

ulf

War

Air

Pow

er S

urve

y,vo

l.5,

A S

tatis

tical

Com

pend

ium

and

Chr

onol

ogy

(Was

hing

ton,

D.C

.:D

epar

tmen

t of

the

Air

For

ce,

1993

), 2

32–3

3.N

ote:

The

diff

eren

ce in

num

bers

of

sort

ies

flow

n by

US

ser

vice

san

d th

ose

in t

he “

tota

l”co

lum

n on

the

rig

ht r

efle

cts

the

sort

ies

flow

n by

coa

litio

n pa

rtne

rs.

SO

CC

EN

T=

Spe

cial

Ope

ratio

nsC

ompo

nent

, C

entr

al C

omm

and;

CA

S=

clos

e ai

r su

ppor

t;C

AP

=co

mba

t ai

r pa

trol

;O

CA

=of

fens

ive

coun

tera

ir;

SO

F=

spec

ial o

pera

-tio

ns fo

rces

;EW

=el

ectr

onic

war

fare

;C3 =

com

man

d, c

ontr

ol,

and

com

mun

icat

ions

.

all air missions by type does not evenhave a “strategic attack” category. Thus,missions that struck chemical-weaponsbunkers in northern Iraq or an electricalpower plant in Baghdad were coded as“air interdiction.”1 Such a classificationsystem seems incongruous if airmen re-ally wished to emphasize strategic attackas their primary mission.

Even so, some targets were unofficiallyconsidered as having a strategic nature:leadership (especially telecommunica-tions); key production facilities (electric-ity and oil); transportation infrastructure(railroads and bridges); and nuclear, bio-logical, and chemical research, produc-tion, and storage facilities. Using thesecategories, one finds that of the 41,039strike sorties flown by coalition aircraft,only 5,692 (13.9 percent) would be clas-sified as “strategic.”2 Moreover, becauseheavy bombers like the B-52 dropped adisproportionate share of the bomb ton-nage during the war (32 percent) and be-cause almost all of those strikes wentagainst the Iraqi army, the vast majority

101

of all bombs fell on enemy ground forcesand their equipment.3

One must also consider the weight ofordnance actually falling on Baghdad—the epitome of a strategic center of gravity.In 43 days, US forces delivered a mere330 weapons (244 laser-guided bombsand 86 Tomahawk cruise missiles)against Baghdad targets. Those weaponsrepresented 3 percent of all the precisionordnance used during the war, which inturn amounted to 7.4 percent of all theair weapons expended. As a conse-quence, the total tonnage falling onBaghdad during the war amounted to ascant 287 tons—a minute fraction of thetotal of 84,200 tons dropped by the AirForce.4

This massive air campaign directedagainst the Iraqi ground forces had anenormous effect. US Central Commandwanted airpower to attrit all Iraqi front-line divisions below 50 percent of theirassumed combat strength in tanks, ar-tillery, and armored vehicles beforeground operations began. The com-mand’s intelligence determined that

102

airpower had indeed met this goal by24 February 1991; in addition, it hadreduced rear divisions by 25 percent.Detailed examinations by US intelli-gence agencies after the war confirmedthese percentages. Given that a mili-tary unit becomes “combat ineffective”when it has lost 40 percent of itsstrength, it is small wonder that over80,000 Iraqi soldiers deserted duringthe aerial pounding and another86,000 surrendered virtually without afight.5

Charges of an Air Force focus onstrategic attack to the detriment ofsupport of ground forces continuedafter the Gulf War.6 Actually, the weightof the air effort directed at enemyground forces remains extremely high.In Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003,coalition aircraft attacked nearly20,000 discrete targets, 79 percent ofthem Iraqi military units and equip-ment (fig. 2). The next highest categorystruck was Iraqi command and controltargets, which attracted 9 percent ofthe strikes.7

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Notes

1. Eliot Cohen, ed., Gulf War Air Power Survey(GWAPS), vol. 5, A Statistical Compendium andChronology (Washington, D.C.: Department of theAir Force, 1993), 227.

2. Ibid., 418.3. Eliot Cohen and Thomas A. Keaney, Gulf War

Air Power Survey (GWAPS): Summary (Washington,D.C.: Department of the Air Force, 1993), 15.

4. William M. Arkin, “Baghdad: The UrbanSanctuary in Desert Storm?” Airpower Journal 11(spring 1997): 5–6; and GWAPS: Summary, 226.

5. GWAPS: Summary, 105–6.6. Robert Coram, “The Hog That Saves the

Grunts,” New York Times, 27 May 2003, A25.7. “Operation Iraqi Freedom—By the Numbers”

(Shaw AFB, S.C.: US Central Command Air Forces[CENTAF], 30 April 2003), 5.

8. Center for Defense Information, “Fiscal Year2003 Budget: FY ’03 Request for Selected WeaponsSystems” (Washington, D.C.: Center for DefenseInformation, 4 February 2002); and John R.Guardino, “Outlook 2001: The Military’s ManifestDestiny,” Rotor and Wing 35 (January 2001): 20–25.In October 2002, the Defense Department decidedto cut the proposed Comanche buy nearly in half,thus saving about $10 billion from the total pro-gram—although the unit cost is thereby driven up to$60 million. But the money thus “saved” will beused to further upgrade the Apaches in the Army’sinventory. Robert Wall, “New Comanche Plan Gets

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Green Light,” Aviation Week and Space Technology,28 October 2002, 27–30.

9. The actual superiority is even greater thanapparent. Qualitatively, US airpower far outstripsanything else in the world. Specifically, although theChinese have many airframes, over half areVietnam-era MiG-19s and -21s. Due to severebudget constraints over the past decade, evenRussia is unable to keep most of its air force opera-tional or its pilots proficient.

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Myth 13

In operations such as the war withSerbia to free Kosovo in 1999, politicalleaders deemed it fundamental thatNorth Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO) casualties be kept to an absoluteminimum.1 The alliance, shaky from thestart, undoubtedly would have split if ithad sustained heavy casualties. Hence,early on, President Bill Clinton and

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Air attack is nothing more than“recreational bombing”; pilotsfly so high they can’t possiblyhit their targets accurately.*

*See, for example, Jeffrey L. Gingras and Tomislav Z. Ruby,“Morality and Modern Air War,” Joint Force Quarterly 7 (sum-mer 2000): 107–11. See also endnote no. three. The term recre-ational bombing was used by an officer at a US war collegewhere I was conducting a seminar. During his campaign for thepresidency in 2000, Sen. John McCain, who had been a Navypilot in Vietnam, stated that it was “immoral” for NATO pilotsto drop ordnance from above 15,000 feet. McCain had neveremployed precision-guided weapons and was obviously un-aware of the parameters necessary for their accurate delivery.

NATO leaders declared a ground invasionout of the question. The number of per-sonnel involved (Gen Hugh Shelton, JCSchairman, stated that as many as200,000 troops would be necessary), com-bined with the memories of vicious fight-ing in the Serbian mountains duringWorld War II, indicated that an invasionwould mean heavy losses for NATO as wellas massive casualties and collateral dam-age for the Serbs.2 Instead, alliance forceswould use airpower as the weapon of firstresort. Yet, the need to limit casualties onboth sides remained a primary considera-tion for NATO leaders.

As a consequence, allied aircraft hadorders to remain at medium altitude—usually above 15,000 feet—so as to stayabove the range of most enemy groundfire. Some critics argued that this policyinduced inaccurate bombing, thus in-creasing collateral damage and civiliancasualties. For example, Sen. DianneFeinstein commented, “I don’t believe youcan win wars by tossing bombs aroundlike popcorn.” Writer Norman Mailer saidthat bombing without putting airmen at

110

serious risk is “obscene.” And former pre-sident Jimmy Carter stated that thebombing in Kosovo was “senseless and ex-cessively brutal.”3

These people were either misinformedor, more accurately, uninformed. A preci-sion-guided munition (PGM) is most accu-rate when dropped from midaltitude—15,000 to 23,000 feet—which allowsenough time for the weapon to correct it-self in flight. If dropped from a lower alti-tude, the weapon will have less kinetic en-ergy and its steering fins less opportunityto correct the aim; thus, the weapon willusually land short of the target. From thepilot’s perspective, medium altitude al-lows time to identify the target at suffi-cient distance, “designate” it (if laserguided), and launch the weapon. In short,for PGMs delivered on a fixed target withan established position—true of most ofthe targets struck in Serbia—the optimumaltitude to ensure accuracy lies at orabove 15,000 feet.

The most favorable drop altitude for theaccurate employment of nonguided muni-tions is lower than that for a PGM. Even

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so, target acquisition remains a limitingfactor: coming in too low at 500 knotsmakes it nearly impossible to acquire thetarget, line up the aircraft, and place thebomb accurately. As a result, the compro-mise altitude for the delivery of unguidedbombs is around 5,000 feet. However, fly-ing at this altitude places the delivery air-craft right in the thick of ground fire.Commanders in Operation Allied Forceresolved this dilemma by keeping aircraftat medium altitudes but restricted the useof non-PGMs to areas where the risk ofcivilian casualties or collateral damagewas minimal or nonexistent.

Difficulty arises in identifying and at-tacking mobile targets. On 14 April 1999,near Korisa, Kosovo, NATO pilots attackedwhat intelligence sources had identifiedas—and which indeed appeared to be—amilitary column. We now know that thecolumn also contained civilian refugees,several dozen of whom died in the airstrikes.4 This is the only instance in the78-day air campaign when NATO intelli-gence sources and aircraft at medium al-titude combined to misidentify a target,

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thereby causing civilian casualties.Could the aircraft have avoided this ac-cident if they had flown at a lower alti-tude? Probably. Indeed, NATO changedthe rules after this incident, allowing air-craft in certain circumstances to flylower to ensure target identification.Such instances, however, involve atrade-off: if flying lower increases therisk to aircrews due to enemy groundfire, at what point does the risk ofmisidentifying a target override the riskof losing a plane and its crew? If friendlylosses meant the shattering of the al-liance, were they preferable to allowingSlobodan Milosevic to continue hisatrocities unchecked?

Notes

1. Gen Wesley K. Clark, Waging Modern War:

Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat (New York:

Public Affairs, 2001), 183.

2. John F. Harris, “Advice Didn’t Swing Clinton on

Airstrikes,” Washington Post, 1 April 1999, A1, A20;

and Johanna McGeary, “It’s Flight or Fight,” Time, 3

May 1999, 56. The French and German governments,

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who estimated that a ground invasion would require500,000 troops, were adamantly opposed to such amassive operation. Sebastian Ritchie, “Air PowerVictorious? Britain and NATO Strategy during theKosovo Conflict,” in Air Power History: Turning Points

from Kitty Hawk to Kosovo, ed. Sebastian Cox andPeter Gray (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 325.

3. Washington Times, 16 May 1999, C9;Washington Post, 24 May 1999, A25; and New York

Times, 27 May 1999, A33. Michael Walzer, a philoso-pher, offered the rather bizarre opinion that “you can’tkill unless you are prepared to die.” Michael Walzer,“Kosovo,” in Kosovo: Contending Voices on Balkan

Interventions, ed. William Joseph Buckley (GrandRapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing,2000), 334.

4. Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign (NewYork: Human Rights Watch, 7 February 2000), 9–10.

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Myth 14

Various books and articles continue toperpetuate this myth. Although one mustkeep in mind Mark Twain’s cautionarystatement regarding lies, damned lies,and statistics, the following statistics arefairly unambiguous. In The TwentiethCentury Book of the Dead, Gil Elliot esti-mates that 110 million people—militaryand civilian—is “a reasonably conserva-tive estimate” of the number who died inwars during the first seven decades of thetwentieth century.1 More than half of

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Despite all the talk by airmen,the employment of airpower re-mains an indiscriminate use ofmilitary force that deliberatelytargets civilians.*

*See, for example, Michael A. Carlino, “The Moral Limitsof Strategic Attack,” Parameters 32 (spring 2002): 15–29;Conrad C. Crane, “Sky High: Illusions of Airpower,” NationalInterest 65 (fall 2001): 116–22; and Gen Gordon R. Sullivan,“Lessons That Still Apply,” Washington Times, 3 March 2001,A10. Sullivan is a former US Army chief of staff.

those people died due to genocide andforced starvation. Of the 46 million vic-tims of “technology,” Elliot lists the causesof death as small arms (24 million), “bigguns” (18 million), “mixed” (3 million), andaerial bombing (1 million).2 He notes thatthe figure of 1 million dead due to air at-tack may be higher but is certainly lessthan 2 million.3 Thus, even if we add thenumbers of those who have died sinceElliot wrote in 1972, the number of non-combatants dying due to air attacks dur-ing the entire twentieth century would notexceed 2 million.

Other researchers have produced afigure of 170 million dead in both inter-nal and external wars during the twenti-eth century.4 Those who advance highercasualty figures usually attribute theadditional deaths to dictators even morevicious than those assumed by Elliot.Gerhard Weinberg, for example, statesthat 60 million people died in World War II(10 million more than most estimates) andthat those extra deaths occurred largelyas a result of the finding that more civil-ians starved and were massacred on the

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Eastern Front and in China than origi-nally thought.5 One should bear in mindthat 15 million Russian civilians died dur-ing the war—and that virtually noGerman bombing took place on theEastern Front. Similarly, over 1 millioncivilians died in the siege of Leningrad, inwhich air attack played a negligible role.6

Similarly, one of the pervasive mythsfrom World War II concerns the deathtoll at Dresden, Germany. One findswildly inflated figures regarding thenumber killed, but in truth, fewer than30,000 died there. David Irving, one ofthe first historians to study the subject,initially gave a figure of 135,000 dead.Later, however, he lowered it to 25,000.Unfortunately, many commentators con-tinue to cite his first number.7 Even so,as terrible as that smaller death toll is,more than five times as many civiliansdied in the ground fighting on Okinawain April and May of 1945.

If we accept the staggering figurespresented above, of the 170 million peo-ple who died in wars during the twenti-eth century, the overwhelming majority

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were victims of military operations byarmies, navies, and paramilitary “police”forces. Perhaps 3 million people, militaryand civilian (less than 2 percent of thetotal) succumbed to air attack. More sta-tistics relative to warfare since WorldWar II are instructive:

• According to Green Peace, 3,000civilians died in the six-week DesertStorm air campaign; later studieslower that figure to 1,000.8

• The United Nations InternationalChildren’s Emergency Fund (UNI-CEF) reported in 1999 that the infantmortality rate in Iraq more than dou-bled in the decade following the im-position of United Nations (UN) sanc-tions. Worse, the mortality rate forchildren under five jumped from 56deaths per 1,000 live births to 131.Consequently, between 1990 and1998, over 225,000 Iraqi childrendied as a direct result of “bloodless”sanctions imposed by the UN.9

• Milosevic told US ambassadorRichard Holbrooke that perhaps 25Serbs died in the 1995 air campaign

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over Bosnia; NATO lost one aircraft,whose two crew members were cap-tured and later released.10

• Human Rights Watch states thatapproximately 500 civilians died inthe 78-day NATO air campaign overSerbia/Kosovo; NATO suffered nocasualties.11

• Eighteen US Army Rangers died inMogadishu, Somalia, and another80 or so were wounded; but at least500 Somali civilians were killed, andanother 500 wounded during the24-hour firefight of October 1993.12

• The International Campaign to BanLandmines claims that between15,000 and 20,000 people, many ofthem children, were victims ofland-mine detonations in 71 differ-ent countries in 2000.13 The UnitedStates is not a signatory of the MineBan Treaty.

Certainly, it is most regrettable thatany civilians are killed or injured by airattack, but we must be realistic. Innocentpeople always die in war—tens of millions

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of them over the past century. Given thatless than 2 percent were victims of airattack, to charge that airpower is an in-discriminate or inhumane weapon seemsrather peculiar. Unfortunately, some crit-ics still do so. Yet, the arithmetic and factsare clear. The biggest killers of the twenti-eth century were small-arms fire, block-ades, sanctions, sieges, artillery fire, landmines, and—worst of all—despotic leaderswho inflicted genocide and starvation onfriend and foe alike.

War is indeed hell and always hasbeen, but there are ways to mitigate itseffects on the innocent. Airpower advo-cates and theorists have maintainedsince the advent of flight that the air-plane offered a form of war that was lessdeadly, to both sides, than traditionalmeans of war on land and sea. Historyhas proven these prophets correct.Moreover, the ability of aircraft to projectforce in a discriminate manner so as tominimize civilian casualties and collat-eral damage has continued to increaseover the past two decades. Airpower isnot the answer to all problems, and it

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can still inflict most grievous harm. Yet,recent conflicts have made clear that thecenturies-old desire to wage war withhumanity and discrimination is finallybecoming possible.

Notes

1. Gil Elliot, Twentieth Century Book of the Dead(New York: Scribner’s, 1972), 249.

2. Ibid., 1543. Ibid., 161.4. R. J. Rummel, Death by Government: Genocide

and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century (NewBrunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994),table 1.2, 4. See also William Eckhardt, “War-RelatedDeaths since 3000 B.C.,” Bulletin of Peace Proposals22 (fall 1991): 437–44.

5. Gerhard Weinberg, A World in Arms: A GlobalHistory of World War II (New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1994), 894.

6. Harrison E. Salisbury, The 900 Days: TheSiege of Leningrad (New York: Harper & Row, 1969),514–16. Salisbury states that over 1 million died dueto starvation, with a total of between 1.3 and 1.5million dying from all causes. Another source alsoclaims over 1 million civilian dead, noting that lessthan half that number (455,325) of Soviet militarypersonnel also died at Leningrad. David M. Glantz,The Battle for Leningrad, 1941–1944 (Lawrence:University Press of Kansas, 2002), 543, 547.

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7. David Irving, in The Destruction of Dresden(London: W. Kimber, 1963), 163, cites a figure of135,000 killed. Later, he wrote a letter to the LondonTimes, 7 July 1966, stating that his original figurewas a propaganda number supplied by the commu-nists. After the book’s publication, he discovered inthe East German archives the report of the Dresdenfire commissioner written shortly after the attack,stating that no more than 25,000 were killed. Irvingalso notes that Nazi propaganda statements at thetime gave figures of over 300,000 dead. Althoughthis number has no basis in fact, it has been re-peated by sloppy historians on several occasionssince. Editors Frederic Solomon and Robert Q.Marston in The Medical Implications of Nuclear War(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986),75, give a figure of 135,000 to 250,000 dead, andStephen A. Garrett in Ethics and Airpower in WorldWar II: The British Bombing of German Cities (NewYork: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 20, cites the numberkilled as 200,000. Michael S. Sherry gives a truly as-tonishing figure of 600,000 killed at Dresden—thusdoubling the figure of Joseph Goebbels himself! TheRise of American Air Power: The Creation ofArmageddon (New Haven, Conn.: Yale UniversityPress, 1987), 260.

8. John G. Heidenrich, “The Gulf War: How ManyIraqis Died?” Foreign Policy 90 (spring 1993): 108–25.

9. UNICEF, Iraq Child and Maternal MortalitySurvey, 1999, Preliminary Report, July 1999, 10,on-line, Internet, 3 September 2003, availablefrom http://www.unicef.org/reseval/iraqr.html; andFourth Freedom, Morbidity and Mortality among Iraqi

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Children from 1990 through 1998: Assessing theImpact of the Gulf War and Economic Sanctions,March 1999, 1, on-line, Internet, 3 September 2003,available from http://www.fourthfreedom.org/php/t-si-index.php?hinc=garf-index.hinc.

10. Col Robert C. Owen, ed., Deliberate Force: ACase Study in Effective Air Campaigning (MaxwellAFB, Ala.: Air University Press, 2000), 161.

11. Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign(New York: Human Rights Watch, 7 February 2000), 5.

12. Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story ofModern War (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press,1999), 333. Bowden notes that many of the fright-ened US soldiers stated that they simply shot atanything that moved, spraying bullets at every win-dow, door, street, and person: “especially people.They were all going down. It was a free-for-all now.All semblance of an ordered retreat was gone.Everybody was just scrambling” (287).

13. International Campaign to Ban Landmines,“Landmine Monitor Report 2001: Toward a Mine-Free World,” August 2001, on-line, Internet, 3September 2003, available from http://www.icbl.org/lm/2001.

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THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Abrams, Creighton W., 76air attack, 48–49, 65, 109, 116–20Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), 17–19, 28aircraft

A-8, 21Allied, 36, 43, 110Apache, 105attack, 20AV-8, 105B-10, 21B-15, 20B-17, 12, 20B-18, 12B-19, 20B-24, 20, 35B-29, 32, 36, 54, 58B-52, 77–79, 87, 89, 101Black Hawk, 105cargo, 21, 42Comanche, 105F/A-18, 105Joint Strike Fighter, 105MiG, 8, 87Soviet, 43V-22, 105

air interdiction, 85, 96, 100–101, 104Air Service, 3, 10air superiority, 34, 86, 104air support, 17, 19–20, 73, 77, 80, 99–100, 103Air War Plans Division, Plan 1 (AWPD-1), 28

125

Index

Andrews, Frank, 12–13, 63antiaircraft artillery (AAA), 6, 65, 87Arc Light, 79Army Air Forces (AAF), 20–21, 23, 28–29, 32, 68–69,

75–76Army aviation, 1, 5, 17, 27Arnold, Henry “Hap,” 23atomic bombs, 53–54, 57–58

Battle of the Atlantic, 32, 35blockade, 53, 56–57, 87Bomber Command, 21, 36, 63, 69bomber mafia, 21, 23bombing, xiii, xiv, 17–18, 20, 27–28, 31–34, 39,

42–43, 47, 49–50, 53, 57–59, 63, 66, 73, 85–86,88–89, 94, 99, 109–11, 116–17

Bosnia, 119Bradley, Omar, 21budget, 1–5, 69Bundy, McGeorge, 76Bunker, Ellsworth, 75–76

Cannon, Joe, 23Carter, Jimmy, 111center of gravity, 102Churchill, Winston, 43civilian casualties, 110, 112–13, 120Clifford, Clark M., 76Clinton, Bill, 109close air support, 73, 80, 100, 104coalition air campaign, 99collateral damage, 110, 112, 120Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), 2, 39–40, 42, 44command and control, 104

126

Congress, 5–7Craig, Malin, 12–13

D day, 33, 43, 65doctrine, 1, 17–19, 28–29, 73, 81, 88Douhet, Giulio, 27Dresden, 117Drum, Hugh, 5

Eaker, Ira, 22–23Eastern Front, 31, 117Eighth Air Force, 21–23, 41Eisenhower, Dwight, 34Elliot, Gil, 115–16

Far East Air Forces, 22Federal Aviation Commission, 7–8Feinstein, Dianne, 110Felt, Harry D., 76Field Manual (FM) 1-5, Employment of Aviation of

the Army, 19, 28Fifteenth Air Force, 22fighter pilots, 22–23, 44

General Headquarters (GHQ) Air Force, 12Geneva Disarmament Conference, 2Germany, 28–29, 32–33, 35, 39–42, 47, 49, 64–65,

117gradual escalation, 88

Haiphong, 86–87, 89, 93Hanoi, 86, 89, 93Harkins, Paul D., 76Harmon, Millard “Miff,” 23Headquarters Pacific Command, 79hearings, airpower, 7

127

Hirohito, 58Hitler, Adolf, 41, 43, 65Ho Chi Minh, 85Holbrooke, Richard, 118Howell, Clark, 7

interwar period, 7, 10, 29invasion

of Japan, 32, 53–56of Normandy, 32, 34, 44, 66of Serbia, 110

Iraq, 101, 118Irving, David, 117

Japan, 29, 32, 35–36, 48–49, 53–59, 67–68Jodl, Alfred, 66Johnson, Lyndon B., 76, 88Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS), 22, 76, 87–88, 90, 110

Kennedy, John F., 76Kenney, George, 22Khe Sanh, 79Kissinger, Henry M., 76Konoye, Fumimaro, 58Korean War, 22Kosovo, 17, 31, 109, 111–12, 119

Laird, Melvin C., 76laser-guided bombs, 102LeMay, Curtis E., 36, 77Lewis, Anthony, 93Lewy, Guenter, 94–95Linebacker II, 89–90, 93Lodge, Henry Cabot, 76Luftwaffe, 21, 42–44

128

MacArthur, Douglas, 5–7, 11–12, 22, 53manning, 8–9, 65McCain, John S., Jr., 76McGovern, George, 93McNamara, Robert S., 75–76Mediterranean Allied Air Forces, 22Milosevic, Slobodan, 113, 118mining operations, 36, 87Mitchell, Billy, 13Moffat, Jay Pierrepont, 2Mogadishu, 119Momyer, William, 80Moorer, Thomas H., 76, 90morale, 3, 29, 47–50

Nagano, Osami, 58XIX Tactical Air Command, 23Ninth Air Force, 21–22Nixon, Richard M., 76North American Air Defense Command, 22North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), 109–10,

112–13, 119North Vietnam, 73, 75, 79, 85–89, 94

Okinawa, 32, 54–56, 117operations

Allied Force, 112Desert Storm, 99, 118Iraqi Freedom, 103–4Overlord, 34

Overy, Richard J., 63, 67

Partridge, Earle “Pat,” 22Persian Gulf War, 74, 99–100, 103

129

Potsdam Declaration, 53precision-guided munition (PGM), 111

Quesada, Elwood “Pete,” 23

Rolling Thunder, 75, 85–86Roosevelt, Franklin D., 7Rostow, Walt W., 76Route Package 1, 79Royal Air Force (RAF), 21, 29, 69Royal Navy, 35rules of engagement, 87

Sakomizu, Hisatsune, 582d Tactical Air Force, 21Serbia, 109, 111, 119Seventh Air Force, 79–80Sharp, U. S. Grant, 76, 79Shelton, Hugh, 110Southeast Asia, 78–79South Vietnam, 74–80, 87, 89, 94–96Speer, Albert, 40–41Stockdale, James B., 90Strategic Air Command, 22strategic air operations, xiii, xiv, 12, 17–18, 20,

31–34, 47, 63, 67, 73, 85, 88, 99, 101, 103, 115surface-to-air missile (SAM), 10, 13, 29, 43, 63, 74,

86–87, 89, 95Suzuki, Kantaro, 58

Tactical Air Command, 23tactical aviation, 22–23, 78Taylor, Maxwell D., 75–76Tet offensive, 74, 95Tomahawk cruise missiles, 102

130

Truman, Harry, 53Twelfth Air Force, 21, 2312th Army Group, 21Twentieth Air Force, 2225th Infantry Division, 96XXI Bomber Command, 36Twining, Nathan, 22

U-boats, 35United Nations (UN), 118United Nations International Children’s Emergency

Fund, 118United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS),

47–48, 50, 63, 67–68US Air Forces Europe, 23US Army, xiii, xiv, 1–12, 17–21, 27, 44, 56, 69,

73–77, 79–81, 94–96, 99–101, 105–6, 115, 119US Army Air Corps, 1–3, 5–12, 17, 19–21, 27–28US Central Command, 102, 104US Marine Corps, 2, 29, 55, 74, 79–80, 95–96, 100,

105–6US Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV),

77, 79US Navy, 2, 4, 18, 31, 35, 68–69, 74–76, 79, 100,

106, 109

Vandenberg, Hoyt, 22Vietcong, 74, 94, 96Vietnam, 73–80, 85–89, 93–96, 109Vietnam War, 73–74, 76–77, 85, 93–94

War Department, 3, 7–8weapons of mass destruction, 104Weinberg, Gerhard, 116Westmoreland, William C., 76–77, 79–80, 95

131

Westover, Oscar, 12Wheeler, Earle G., 75–76Wicker, Tom, 93Williamson, Ellis, 96World War I, 27, 35, 56World War II, 1, 12, 17, 20, 22, 27, 31, 35, 39, 47,

56, 63, 68, 73, 110, 116–18

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Airpower:Myths and Facts

Air University Press Team

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