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

T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1
and hasty writer, was not always consistent. His works, usually slanted
toward the organizational dispute and polemic in nature, were not
without exaggeration in detail. His thought underwent important
modifications between I 919 and 1930 as technological improvements
(and perhaps the heat of controversy) led him to logical conclusions
which had been only implicit in his earliest statements. But one axiom,
with its corollaries, never varied. T o him the airplane was first and
last an offensive weapon. In the vast theater of the air there were no
frontiers, no battle lines, no terrain features. Subject only to limita-
tions of bases, operating range, and weather (and he was not inclined
to overstress any as an adverse factor), the airplane with its speed and
mobility could be applied against any enemy objective. Consequently,
there could be no fixed defenses against aviation: “the only defense
against an air force is another air force,’’ and the destruction of the
enemy’s aviation is the necessary preliminary to a successful air of-
fensive. It is only in respect to the nature of the air offensive that his
thought shows any considerable development.
which had
guided the Air Service in those battles described in the preceding
chapter shows how completely air employment had been dedicated
to the immediate support of the ground armies. Save for units attached
to army corps for observation and local defense, the Air Service had
conceived as its primary mission the gaining of “complete ascendency
. . .in the air.” On any desired front this was to be accomplished by
adhering to principles of surprise, mobility, and concentration of
forces. Available units of whatever category were to be massed into
a striking force, but the significance attached to the air battle itself
led Mitchell to speak of pursuit as “the most important branch of avia-
tion. . . which fights for and gains control of the air,’’ and to calculate
a well-balanced air force as comprising 60 per cent pursuit, 20 per
cent attack, and 20 per cent bombardment air~raft.~’Yet control of
the air was in itself but a negative thing, a means to some other end.
For the Air Service in 1918,that end had been limited. Air ascendancy
would free U.S. troops from enemy air attack and allow U.S. aviation
to be employed offensively against the enemy’s “ground troops, his
trains, his depots of ammunition and supplies, and his railroad stations
and lines of comm~nications’~and airdromes.“
Mitchell referred to his striking force as “our independent or what
might be termed strategical aviation,” 7 2 but its operations were
His analysis in 1919 of the “theory of operations”
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