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The War in the Air
Significance of Air Warfare
A new dimension had come to warfare; as Napoleon had
predicted, "He who holds the high ground will win." The true
lessons of World War I air warfare, however, were blurred by the fact
that the aircraft employed, despite amazing improvement during the four
years of combat, never achieved the desired level of technological development.
Like the tank, they remained short-ranged, relatively slow, and mechanically
unreliable weapons, seldom capable of independent action, and therefore
only auxiliaries (if important ones) of the infantryman and the gunner.
Only a few military leaders had the vision to see the future possibilities
of either of these emerging weapons, although 21 years later, the air-armor
team swept across Europe, and air superiority became the key to victory.
World War I trained the air force commanders of World
War II: Hermann Goering, Sir Charles Portal, Arthur Travers Harris,
Henry H. Arnold, Carl Spaatz, and many others. It taught hard lessons
for those willing to learn: the need for a strong industrial base, ready
for quick conversion from peacetime manufacturing to the production
of air armaments; the importance of keeping planes and engine types
to a minimum, both to speed up aircraft production and to simplify problems
of maintenance and supply; and the value of vision and imaginative leadership.
Above all it demonstrated that, in Trenchard's words, "the airplane
is an offensive weapon."
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