The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

T H E A R M Y A I R A R M B E T W E E N T W O W A R S
and with the rapid technological improvements of the next two
decades the process of revision continued sporadically. It might there-
fore appear simple to trace in the successive training directives and
manuals the evolution of the combat doctrines of the Army air arm.
That procedure, if followed literally and exclusively, would hardly
repay the not inconsiderable effort involved in assembling a complete
file of an Army publication. For, however accurately the manuals
may reflect current teachings on the details of aerial combat, they
seldom represent the most advanced thought within the Army air arm
on the broader problems of air power. T o this conservatism of thought
-or expression-several factors contributed. Formulation of doctrine
within the W a r Department was a function of the General Staff, and,
while the air arm wrote its own manuals, those had to be watered
down to make them acceptable to the ruling hierarchy of ground
officers. Prevailing national sentiment encouraged the tendency to
discuss war publicly only in terms of national defense in its narrowest
sense, an attitude not wholly compatible with the offensive nature of
the air weapon, and to keep all talk of attacks on nonmilitary objectives
sotto voce. Finally, the whole subject of aircraft in national defense
involved delicate Army-Navy relations, and in that dread no-man’s-
land prudent men trod softly.
So it was that the training guides, as textbooks for young officers,
were not only dull in the inimitable style of Army manuals; on con-
troversial issues they were at best noncommittal and at worst mislead-
ing. Joint Army-Navy agreements were so ambiguous as to permit
widest latitude in interpretation. And hence, paradoxically, we must
seek the air arm’s underlying philosophy of warfare not in the official
pronouncements but first in the public utterances of its radicals and
later in the less widely disseminated thought of its most advanced
school. This approach is not wholly satisfactory, but it is the only way
to explain, other than by supposing a sudden reversal of opinion, the
emergence shortly before World W a r I1 of a well-developed theory
of warfare in which strategic bombardment played the predominant
role. In its most essential features this theory was evolved by Mitchell
in the mid-twenties; by 1939it had become an article of faith privately
held if not publicly proclaimed by the Air Corps.
Mitchell’s concept of air power is more difficult to analyze than is
that of his Italian contemporary, Giulio Douhet. Mitchell, a prolific
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