The Changing Face of Aerial Warfare (eBook)

INTRODUCTION

HERR HITLER’S MESSERSCHMITT

Leutnant Johann Böhm was flying his Messerschmitt Bf 109 over Dover with three others when they were pounced on by Supermarine Spitfires of No 74 Squadron. Their formation scattered in a desperate bid to escape. Böhm dived down toward the Elham valley with a Spitfire piloted by Sergeant Tony Mould in hot pursuit. No matter what he did, Böhm could not escape his pursuer nor their blazing guns. In his combat report Sergeant Mould recounted the dramatic encounter:

A dazed Böhm, who had crash-landed on Bladbean Hill, clambered from his stricken aircraft having received a nasty blow to his head. His damaged grey-green camouflaged Bf 109 was adorned with a shield decorated with a comic crying bird with an umbrella under its wing. Two of the propeller props had been bent back by the impact of the hard landing. Böhm looked at the trail of devastation left behind as he had ploughed through a flock of sheep. A farmer was later to complain he lost ten ewes. The date was 8 July 1940 and Böhm’s Messerschmitt from Jagdgeschwader 51 had the dubious honour of being the very first German fighter shot down over Britain. It was first blood to the Spitfire.

Across the English Channel, JG 51 and JG 26 deployed in the Pas de Calais had been placed under First World War fighter ace ‘Uncle’ Theo Osterkamp, known as Kanalkampfführer or Channel Battle Leader. His job was to secure air superiority over the Straits of Dover and prevent British convoys using the Channel by attacking shipping with bombers. For the first time in early July 1940 German bombers had started flying inland on armed reconnaissance missions and by hiding in the cloud some had even reached the London area. The Battle of Britain had begun.

From the Luftwaffe’s Eagle Day massed attack on Britain to NATO’s assault on Gaddafi’s Libya, aerial warfare has changed almost beyond recognition. The piston engine has been replaced by the jet and the pilot in some cases completely replaced by the microchip. Carpet bombing became global positioning system and laser pinpointed strikes using precision-guided munitions. Whereas a bomber’s greatest enemies were once fighters and flak, these threats morphed into air-to-air and surface-to-air missiles delivered from beyond visual range.

Nonetheless, The Few of RAF Fighter Command continue to capture the popular imagination and admiration of successive generations. The idea of these gallant young fighter pilots rising up into the skies over southern England in 1940 to save the nation is compelling. The Spitfire and its cousin the Hawker Hurricane became national icons of this desperate struggle. The fact that Adolf Hitler never really intended to invade Britain is immaterial to their incredible courage. They showed that Britain would not be cowed and that the Luftwaffe could be defeated. American pilots did exactly the same at Midway when they proved the Imperial Japanese Navy was not invincible and decisively avenged Japan’s surprise air attack on Pearl Harbor.

The development of the aircraft into a weapon of war occurred during the First World War with the emergence of the fighter and bomber derived from early reconnaissance biplanes. This gave rise to the very first fighter aces, who became national heroes. Men such as Theo Osterkamp, who claimed thirty-two kills. However, the conflict came to a close before the aircraft could be developed into a truly war-winning instrument. By mid-July 1940 Osterkamp had claimed six victories, making him one of the few pilots to achieve air-to-air kills in both world wars.

The nature of the air war changed during the Second World War as did the public’s perception of what it could achieve. After the Battle of Britain the ‘Bomber Barons’ such as ‘Bomber Harris’ and General Spaatz became the focus with their campaign to bring Hitler’s Germany to its knees by bombing his weapons factories into oblivion. This gave rise to the notion that bombers could win wars. Instead, Hitler’s factories were eventually overrun. The cruel irony was that Germany would have run out of raw materials and manpower before the efforts of the bombers ever began to have a real effect on weapons production.

In the meantime, the crews of RAF Bomber Command in their Lancasters risked their lives night after night, while the crews of the United States Army Air Force in their Flying Fortresses did the same by day. Their combined sacrifice was enormous, the results questionable. However, they took the war to Hitler at a time when there was no Second Front and the Allies were still struggling in North Africa and the Mediterranean. Likewise, RAF Coastal Command took the fight to the enemy during the Battle of the Atlantic, when the U-boat menace sought to strangle Britain.

At sea during the Second World War a fleet’s role was to protect its carriers so that their naval aircraft could attack enemy ships. The epitome of this was the Battle of Midway, fought by American and Japanese carriers in the Pacific. This single engagement was a turning point. However, by the late twentieth century a carrier’s role was increasingly to conduct littoral warfare or coastal warfare, whereby a carrier’s aircraft attacked land targets in the support of an army. The Korean, Vietnam, Falklands, Gulf and Balkan wars were prime examples of how naval air power had become subordinate to the ground war.

There is a general view that the air war in 1940–45 was a very crude affair and that it was not until the Korean and Vietnam conflicts that pilots became reliant on more advanced technology. Actually, the Battle of Britain started a brains arms race. There was a rapid evolution in air war science that significantly impacted on the course of the Second World War. Most notably, Britain had an early warning radar system that greatly assisted RAF Fighter Command to intercept Hitler’s bombers.

In turn, the Germans used a fairly sophisticated beam system to guide their bombers to their targets. They also employed both short- and long-range radars to counter the Allied bomber offensive. The latter’s bombers were fitted with airborne radars to warn of approaching enemy fighters and detect enemy towns. Either side’s night fighters made use of airborne radar to track their foes in the darkness. For every scientific measure the boffins came up with there were countermeasures. Radars and navigation aids had to be jammed or even better deceived. The Germans also developed flying bombs and ballistic rockets.

The role of massive air forces remained all pervasive throughout the Cold War. Both sides were armed to the teeth, with their bomber fleets poised to strike at a moment’s notice. Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb epitomised the paranoia of the Cold War and the threat posed by long-range bombers carrying nuclear payloads. The film culminates in a B-52 bomber pilot riding his nuclear bomb rodeo style to its target. Fortunately, this never happened for real. However, the B-52 was to inflict appalling death and destruction in Laos and Cambodia using conventional bombs in a bid to cut the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War. Similarly, it was later used to pulverise targets in Afghanistan and Iraq. The use of the helicopter as a weapon of war also came of age during the Vietnam conflict.

While the fundamental experience of combat pilots may be very similar, technology has increasingly moved to distance them from their mission. No longer do pilots shoot at each other using cannons; since the 1960s it has been via missiles that use targeting radar. The last air combat where pilots visually engaged each other with cannons was in Korea. The real impetus to make aerial warfare clinical and stand-off was the Vietnam War, where Second World War-style heavy bombers jostled alongside precision-guided munitions to deliver their old-fashioned ‘iron’ free-fall bombs. Thanks to the constant glare of the media, public opinion finally made carpet bombing unacceptable.

By the twenty-first century some pilots were often operating from air-conditioned offices tens of thousands of miles away while their unmanned aerial vehicles or drones did the dirty work. The driving factor behind the rise of the deadly Reaper and Predator and the so-called ‘Drone Wars’ was the war on terror and the hunt for 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. These were designed to deliver bunker-busting missiles into terrorists’ lairs with pinpoint accuracy. They are now the future of aerial warfare.

The aim of the game has become to kill your enemy both in the air and on the ground with clinical precision and as little collateral damage as possible – that euphemistic phrase for civilian casualties, the spectre of which has haunted every air force commander since the days of the Second World War and the terrible firestorms of Dresden and Hamburg. Inevitably, though, civilians still get caught in the crossfire or are mistakenly targeted.

Ever since the Second World War, argument...