Page 344 - Airpower in 20th Century - Doctrines and Employment

344 airpower in 20 Century doCtrines and employment - national experienCes
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air defenses were so weak that the Americans could even give the Japanese public
a list of cities to be bombed without fear that the warnings would lead to bomber
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losses. Indeed, the American 20 Air Force lost far more B-29 bombers to the rigors
of long distance flying than to enemy action.
The American city busting campaign culminated in the dropping of two atomic
bombs on Japan in August 1945. The use of the atomic bomb immediately ended the
war, but also symbolized the end of one era of airpower and the start of another. For
the next twenty years the United States airpower thinking centered on how the United
States might employ these devastating weapons in strategic and tactical attacks to
paralyze and annihilate any major attack by the Soviet Union or its satellites.
The World War had seen American airpower develop from a small air force to an
enormous force organized into a large bomber force, tactical air forces, air defense
forces and air transport forces. Airpower was American’s trump card. At sea, the
aircraft carrier replaced the battleship as capitol ship of the navy. The World War
proved that no navy could survive if its opponents controlled the air and the U.S.
Navy developed its own large and capable air arm capable of controlling the sea,
defeating enemy navies and attacking land targets. Like the Air Corps, the U.S. Navy
developed its own concepts of airpower employment that proved largely successful
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in World War II. Armies might still function in conditions of aerial inferiority, but
a decisive advantage in airpower such as the Americans and British possessed in the
skies over France in 1944 meant that an enemy such as the Germans were severely
limited in their logistics, movement and operational flexibility. Essentially, no ground
force could prevail against enemy air superiority.

Postwar American Airpower and the Atomic Age

While the newly independent U.S. Air Force retained cadre forces for all the major
roles of airpower --ground attack, air defense, air transport and strategic bombing—
it was strategic bombing that received the funding priority and attention of the
leadership in the post World War II era of drawdown and demobilization. Armed with
the atom bomb, the new Strategic Air Command (SAC), headed by General Curtis
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LeMay, became the primary American military force. As the strategic bomber force
grew into a true intercontinental bomber force and was equipped with fast jets in the
early 1950s, a school of new theories of atomic warfare arose. From the late 1940s
into the early 1960s strategic thinkers such as Bernard Brodie and Hermann Kahn

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On U.S. Navy airpower concepts see David Mets, “The Influence of Aviation on the Evolution of
American Naval Thought,” in Paths of Heaven, pp. 115-149.
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A good overview of this period is found in Walton S. Moody, Building a Strategic Air Force (Wash-
ington DC: Air Force History and Museum Program, 1996).