AIR POWER AND ARMIES (Part 1)

AIR POWER AND ARMIES AIR POWER AND ARMIES To the memory of LIEUTENANT ANTHONY BRISTOW SLESSOR fifty-second LIGHT INFANTRY Died Mandalay nineteenth December thirty-two

INTRODUCTION

THIS book is based on a series of lectures delivered at the Staff College at Camberley between nineteen thirty-one and nineteen thirty-four. It deals with the action of the Royal Air Force in one special set of conditions, namely when the Empire is engaged in a war in which it has been necessary to send an Army and Air expeditionary force to fight in an overseas theatre of war. The first and most important commitment of the Royal Air Force is, of course, the defence of Great Britain against air attack; and intimately connected with this commitment is the provision of an air expeditionary force to co-operate with the army in a campaign overseas. And as long as we live in a world which maintains huge national forces numbering millions of men and consisting largely of the traditional arms-infantry, artillery, and cavalry, it is obviously important that all officers, at least of the army and the air force, should understand how the new power of the air is likely to affect the problems of land warfare.

It may be as well to anticipate two criticisms which may reasonably be directed against this book, both of which may arise from the fact that I have drawn largely on the recorded experience of the last war in order to illustrate my points. The first is that many of the comments upon and criticisms of the conduct of air operations in the last war are based on 'wisdom after the event'. They are-quite frankly and deliberately so. But there is no question of blaming anybody for any sins of omission or commission; my sole object has been to draw conclusions on which to base useful lessons for the future. After all, the really important function of any kind of military history is not primarily to serve as interesting material for the general reader, but to enable commanders and staff officers of the future to be wise before the event, and to learn not only from the successes but from the failures of their predecessors. There is a great deal in the history of the War in the Air which may serve as a model for the future. But there was inevitably also a certain amount which might have been done better-inevitably because we were all of us amateurs at a new art; and there could be nothing more dangerous than to sit back and assume

INTRODUCTION

complacently that all that we did was good. This book, therefore, is written in no spirit of destructive criticism. I believe that on the whole we had in the last war the best led, best trained, and most efficient air force in the world-with our late enemies the Germans a very good second. Since then we have made great progress in the art of air warfare. The technical efficiency of our aircraft is to-day extremely high, and beyond our wildest hopes in nineteen eighteen. Our training, and in particular our weapon-training, is of a very high order indeed; and we have to-day in our service manuals and training establishments the fruits of years of study and discussion on the strategy and tactics of air warfare. In the last war our commanders and staff officers had none of these advantages. The great air forces of which we then disposed were a mushroom growth; and the very rapidity of that growth, allied to their relative technical inadequacy, and the natural bent of minds to whom the problems and potentialities of air warfare were entirely new, had the inevitable result that they were not always used to what we should to-day consider the best advantage. Perhaps partly for this reason there is a tendency to forget that our only practical knowledge of air operations in first-class warfare is based on the experience in many theatres between nineteen fourteen and nineteen eighteen; and hence to ignore the many valuable lessons-some of them of a negative order- which emerge from a study of those campaigns.

From this may arise the second criticism which it is desired to anticipate. It will undoubtedly be said that modern developments have altered cases; that the conditions of the last war are unlikely to be repeated; and that a close study of an operation such as that of the Amiens battle of August nineteen eighteen, contained in Chapters eight to ten of this book, is a waste of time, because its essential characteristics are unlikely to be reproduced. It is obviously true that the sealed-pattern, trench-warfare, infantry and artillery battle on the nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen model will never be seen again. Whether or not warfare on anything akin to traditional lines is altogether a thing of the past is a question to which an answer is suggested in the concluding chapter of this book. It is fashionable nowadays to represent the war of the future as being inevitably an affair of lethal gases and bacilli rained from the air exclusively upon the female and non-combatant sections of the populace in open towns. I would prefer to abstain from prophecy on that head-further than to suggest that it is dangerous to take for granted that military operations of any nature on the ground are, as yet, only a matter for the reminiscences of a modern generation of Old Kaspars.

In this connexion there is one point in particular which must be referred to, because it is a point of primary importance in British defensive policy.

'The reasons why England in the reigns of William and Anne felt constrained to take part in the wars against Louis, are the same reasons that have periodically guided her action in great European crises and colonial rivalry ... the need to secure the safety of our small island by preventing the predominance of any one Power on the Continent-the Policy known as the Balance of Power; and the imperative demand on behalf of our maritime security that the Low Countries should not fall into the hands of a great military and naval Empire.'

The Policy of the Balance of Power is-theoretically at any rate-out of date in these days of the League of Nations. But if the freedom of the Low Countries has been a cardinal point in our policy for reasons of maritime security in the past, it may be no less vital to us to-day for the added reason of air security. In air defence a first essential is depth, because depth means time and space-time in which to get warning and enable our fighters to reach their fighting height, and space in which to establish our bomber aerodromes well forward in the vicinity of the hostile air bases and vital centres. And although the rapidly increasing ranges of bombers will in the near future diminish the importance of this factor, it will still remain true that a much more intensive attack against this country could be sustained from bases on the Channel coast.

It is difficult, for obvious reasons, to be more explicit on this point. It must be sufficient to suggest that to ensure the integrity of the Low Countries, to prevent the establishment of hostile air bases within fatally close range of these coasts, military operations on the ground-though inevitably of a very different character from those of nineteen fourteen to nineteen eighteen-may again be necessary in the future as they have so often been in the past.

Therefore, since we must assume that military operations on the ground may take place again, of however different a nature,