Airpower’s Century presents an excellent interview with Walter Boyne about the history of airpower. Boyne points out that reconnaissance aircraft quickly proved their worth, and soon aircraft found a related role:
Well, the Germans had overextended themselves on two fronts, and they had to depend upon superior artillery on the Western Front to hold their line. Long-range artillery has to be precise to be effective; you have to hit what you’re aiming at, and to do this, you have to know where your shots fall. It didn’t take long for both sides to figure out that with an airplane you could bring your guns on target very quickly. So observation planes became critical, and that meant you needed fighter planes to shoot them down. Then you needed fighters to fight those fighters, so an entirely new generation of aircraft, the fighter airplane, grew out of it. They got all the glory, but they were an afterthought. They were necessary only because airborne observation had changed the nature of war.
Naturally, when we think of WWI, we think of WWI flying aces — but strategic bombing got its start in WWI:
The odd thing is that while the First World War saw almost every sort of airpower that would be used in the Second — even the cruise missile — the only things we remember are the dogfights and the aces. We think of strategic bombing — striking targets designed to destroy a whole nation’s will to fight, as opposed to simply winning a battle — as a development of World War II. But it wasn’t. The German bomber and Zeppelin raids on London during World War I were an immense campaign. It’s been almost entirely forgotten, but it made a lasting impression on both belligerents. The Zeppelins dropped more than 200 tons of bombs and killed over 500 people, while the bombers killed another 800 and wounded over 2,000. The Germans thought that this was a very small return for a large investment, so German planners stayed away from strategic bombing when they prepared for the next war. But the British, who, after all, had had the bombs fall on them, thought the campaign was a success. They believed strategic bombing would be vastly more destructive in the next war, and as a result, the British — and we Americans — eventually developed devastating strategic bombing forces. Germany never did. Moreover, Britain had a pretty good air defense system in place in time for the 1940 Blitz.
German Zeppelins dropped more than 200 tons of bombs on London. Wow.
Americans and the British both had the wrong idea about fighter planes. They thought: We’ll send fighters over to Germany, and the Germans will come up, and we’ll shoot them down. But the Germans would just sit on the ground, because the Allied fighter planes weren’t doing any harm. The only way you could get the Germans in the air was to attack a target sufficiently valuable that they had to come up and defend it. [...] Even those massive portions of the strategic bombing campaign against targets that didn’t matter, or couldn’t be destroyed — the cities, or the will of the Germans to fight — nonetheless forced the relocation of the Luftwaffe’s fighters to Germany, away from the fronts, which allowed them to be destroyed, and hugely contributed to the Allied victories on the ground.
Allied strategic bombing pulled a lot of German resources away from both (ground) fronts.
Hitler would probably have been better advised to say, “We’ll accept the damage. We won’t make the choice for anti-aircraft guns instead of anti-tank guns, because the air campaign isn’t gaining any territory and the tanks are.”The thousands of gunners, the tens of thousands of shells they required, and the 88-millimeter guns taken away from the front: All these had an immense effect, and in the west, possibly a decisive one.
Read the whole article.