Winged Victory: How the Great War Ended: The evolution of Giulio Douhet’s theory of strategic bombing

A war’s conclusion can impact strategic thinking even when the outcome is misinterpreted or an outlier. For a century, Giulio Douhet in Command of the Air, 1921 and a 1926 revision, has been the prophet for the utilitarian morality of bombing cities to gain decisive victory. His earlier work, Winged Victory: How the Great War Ended, written in 1918, has been ignored where he argued for the interdiction of enemy lines of communication. His theory changes by how the Great War ends with the collapse of the German population’s will. Had it ended differently, he could have reached a different conclusion that could have impacted the development of air power theory in the twentieth century.

Re-Ordering the World from the Skies? The Emergence and Justification of Aerial Warfare

Thomas Hippler’s contribution focuses on the justifications of aerial bombing in the context of the inception of air warfare in the early twentieth century, especially, but not exclusively, in the realm of strategic thinking. The main purpose of the chapter is to point out the conceptions of international order behind the different justifications of aerial warfare and air strikes, in particular with regard to the strategic choice to target civil populations, which was first implemented through the concept of colonial ‘police bombing’ before being employed in strategic bombing campaigns. Hippler’s short genealogy of aerial bombings and their justifications interestingly reminds one of the local practices of declaring war and peace by early modern conquistadores (Arnulf Becker Lorca’s chapter) and nineteenth-century imperial agents (Lauren Benton’s chapter): as Thomas Hippler argues, with aerial warfare a new form of governance emerged, which (not least in its justification) points to a disturbing link to democracy.

Politics of Resilience

The resilience of urban populations has been a state concern at least since the US strategic bombing surveys of World War II, but resilience really entered national security strategies and “all hazards” approaches to security and disaster management in the mid-2000s, when it was adopted as a concept for resolving the insecurities of the “war on terror” and climate change. The entry of resilience-thought into politics has several intellectual roots. Psychologically, the notion refers to individuals’ and societal groups’ capacity to recover from, or resist, misfortune speedily and easily. In the political uses of resilience, it has come to denote not only recovery from stresses and disturbances, or “bouncing back” to a previous normalcy, but also a “bouncing forward” effect through adaptation that can be considered desirable despite the general negativity attached to being vulnerable to continuous external shocks. While resilience has been a political concern since the 2000s, much of resilience research does not take politics into account when discussing, analyzing, and promoting resilient systems and practices for societies. This can lead to a normative contestation of resilience that stems from the normalization and essentialization of resilience as a universal and neutral public good for all, when it in actuality is saddled with conflicting values and involves both power and politics. Furthermore, resilience can also take on “perverse” forms where the resilience of internal elements of a system can work against the sustainability or viability of its whole, or where resilience maintains socially unjust or ecologically unhealthy practices. Even authoritarian political orders can display resilience. Accordingly, studies that focus on the politics of resilience tend to take a critical view of it, and of the politics it produces or maintains. When examining resilience with such critical awareness, questions such as resilience of what, to what, and for whom become relevant. Furthermore, when researching resilience, it is prudent to ask what it does politically and socially, what kinds of subjectivities and objectivities it produces, what kinds of values are inscribed and prescribed in its use, and who or what puts forth resilience speech and practices. One of the main critical viewpoints on the politics of resilience has been that it is a form of neoliberal governmentality that shifts responsibility to individuals and vulnerable groups for their own survival while simultaneously removing their political agency to affect change in regard to the continuous perturbations they face. Still, some suggest that resilience as such should not be conflated with the resilience politics of particular states and societies, but instead be examined more broadly, maintaining the possibility that it can also serve progressive agendas. To get a grasp on such angles of approach to resilience, the present bibliographical article presents an overview of what the politics of resilience is thought to be in its literature, what the origins and genealogy of resilience are, and what kind of debates and topics the literature has produced on the politics of resilience.

The Birth of the École supérieure de guerre aérienne and the Strategic Education of the French Air Force

This chapter endeavors to analyze the creation of the Regia Aeronautica in 1923, with a special focus on Italian military education and the Air Force academy, the Accademia Aeronautica. The creation of a third military service did not happen in a vacuum, but was heralded by important air power theorists. Among these, Giulio Douhet stands out as the most controversial. His book, The Command of the Air, heralded the study of airpower theory by underscoring the potentially revolutionary effect of heavier-than-air aircraft for military purposes, namely for strategic bombing. Contrary to popular belief Douhet's theories were critically debated during the 1920s and 1930s but were not universally endorsed in the Italian military community. In particular, his overarching view of the air force as an independent service ruffled more than a few feathers even in the newly-created Accademia Aeronautica.

5. The Second World War

‘The Second World War: the air war in the Pacific’ describes the maritime and air operations in the Pacific that were truly epic in scale. It outlines the strategic bombing in the Far East as well as the two atomic raids carried out on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Prior to the atomic strikes on Japan, strategic bombing to coerce capitulation had failed in the combined operations against Germany. Even then, it seems likely now that the atomic raids contributed to rather than caused Japanese surrender. Command of the air was indispensable. However, air power alone could not deliver success. When used as a component of an integrated pragmatically founded strategy, it was nonetheless vital.

3. Theory and practice

The years after WW1 saw theorists looking at how this promising new military dimension might be deployed most effectively. ‘Theory and practice: the interwar years 1919–1939’ considers the new structures, the ideas that informed them, and technical developments, and how all were brought together in the Spanish Civil War. It describes how theorists thought air power could win wars alone, either by terrorizing citizens in order to force their governments to capitulate, or through demolishing a state’s industrial capability to sustain a war. This was, and is, termed ‘strategic bombing’. Most importantly, air power offered the possibility that future conflict might be cheaper than the ‘old’ wars, in both lives and money.

On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the United States Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War*

How did it become ‘normal’ to bomb civilians? Focusing on the aerial bombardment of China, Germany, Britain, and Japan in 1937-45, this essay spotlights the role of transnational learning in the construction and destruction of ‘home fronts’. Belligerents vigorously studied each other's strategies to destroy the enemy's cities and ‘morale’, while investigating efforts to defend one's own home front by means of ‘civilian defence’. The inclusion of Japan, as bomber and bombed, contributes to a more global, connected history of the Second World War. Japan's sustained bombardment of Chinese cities not only reflected emerging transnational ideas of strategic bombing and total war, but also imparted new ‘lessons’ to Western air forces. Moreover, the devastating US firebombing of Japanese cities in 1945 challenges widely accepted judgments that bombing was generally ineffective, serving only to stiffen civilian morale. Why Japanese cities were bombed, and how they were bombed, was not an exceptional story, but was intimately connected to what the Allies had learned from bombing European urban areas.

Determining the Effects of the Allied Air Offensive

This essay deals with the massive report chartered by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944 to measure the effects of strategic bombing on Germany and Japan—the US Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS). Ascertaining the effects of air strikes was critical, and airmen took steps to ensure that data would be amassed and analyzed to determine if the strategic bombing campaign was successful and worth the effort. USSBS was a massive effort employing over 1,500 personnel that conducted a detailed examination of the evidence both in Europe and the Pacific. Its unimpeachable findings and answers were fairly clear-cut, as detailed in the statistical findings published in over 300 reports. This essay closely examines the bulk of the surveys and reveals what they actually said.