Editors’ Introduction

Long before the age of powered flight, men dreamed of employing aerial craft as weapons of war. When in the late eighteenth century the Montgolfier brothers demonstrated free flight by means of a balloon near Paris, others almost immediately speculated about its application to battle. In 1794 the French government established an army balloon unit for the purposes of reconnaissance. Through the nineteenth century, other military establishments experimented with lighter-than-air ships, not only for observation but for attack, including one effort by an Austrian lieutenant to bomb the city of Venice. By the time of the Wright brothers’successful flight in 1903, the world was anticipating military aviation. Within a decade, in a war between Italy and Turkey, powered flight for the first time became integral to the conduct of military operations. As instruments of war able to leap over armies and ignore many of the physical barriers of terrain and water, airplanes and dirigibles stirred public imagination and sufficient controversy to force soldiers to ponder the role the airplane would play in future conflict.

Few thinkers of that era, or any other, were more prominent in air-power thinking than the Italian soldier and writer, Giulio Douhet. Born in Gaserta in 1869 and commissioned into the Italian Army in Artillery in 1882, Douhet in 1909 began thinking seriously about the impact of aircraft. He commanded one of the first army air units and directed the army’s Aviation Section; by 1915, the year Italy entered World War I, he had already formulated a substantial portion of his theories, in particular the idea of forcing an enemy nation to capitulate by means of a bombing campaign directed against the morale of its population. When the Italian army became locked in a bloody stalemate with Austria, Douhet proposed just such an attack against Austrian cities by an independent bomber force of 500 aircraft. His ideas were rejected, and for criticizing Italian military leaders in memoranda to the cabinet, he was court-martialed and imprisoned for a year. In 1918 he was recalled to service to head the Italian Central Aeronautical Bureau. Exonerated finally in 1920, and promoted to general officer in 1921, the same year he published Command of the Air, Douhet soon retired from the service. Except for a brief few months as the head of aviation in Mussolini’s government in 1922, he spent much of the rest of his life writing and publicizing his ideas on airpower.

Much of what Douhet propounded was not original with him, but his were perhaps the most coherent, the most systematic, and the most prophetic airpower writings of the era. More than any other thinker, Douhet addressed the basic issues that military theorists have grappled with since the beginning of organized combat. In Douhet’s thinking, aircraft altered the fundamental character of warfare, and he argued the case at a level of abstraction and generalization that elevated argument to principle and the body of thought as a whole to theory. In that theory,airpower became the use of space off the surface of the earth to decide war on the surface of the earth. He discussed the organization and employment of aircraft in generalities independent of time, place, technology, and even independent of the nature of warfare itself. (Douhet virtually assumed the prevalence of total war.) He believed that the first effort of air forces was“to conquer the command of the air — that is, to put the enemy in a position where he is unable to fly, while preserving for one’s self the ability to do so. . . .” His method of gaining superiority was to attack the enemy air force on the ground. For Douhet, aircraft were only useful as instruments of the offense. By bombing cities and factories instead of military forces (except air forces), the enemy could be defeated through shattering the civilian will to continue resistance.He argued that the character of airplanes — their speed and mobility — and the vastness of the ether would prevent the defense from ever stopping a determined bomber offensive. But in order to mount such an effort, and because air forces had little significance as“auxiliaries” to armies and navies, air forces had to be independent of ground and naval forces, and armed, structured,and deployed for the decisive strategic role.

After his death in 1930, Douhet’s writings were translated into French, German, Russian,and English and widely disseminated in western military establishments. According to some military leaders at the time, his thinking had great impact on air doctrine and organization.Certainly the leadership of the U.S. Army Air Corps considered him important. A translation of Command of the Air was available at the Air Service Tactical School as early as 1923, and extracts of his works were circulated at the School in the early 1930s. In 1933, the Chief of the Air Corps, Major General Benjamin Foulois, sent 30 mimeographed copies of an article on Douhet’s theories to the chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, calling the study“an excellent exposition of certain principles of air war.”

Today the extent of his influence and the originality of his thinking remain in much dispute among scholars and airmen. But virtually all of them agree that he“synthesized and articulated a body of thought that had occurred in whole or in part to many others,” that“his theories had a sweeping boldness and grandeur that his critics could not match,” and that airmen“found him useful in arguing for an independent air force and supplying a conceptual framework for the next year. ...”“Douhet stated the case for airpower as no one else did — with all the stops out,”wrote another historian recently.“Those who read Command of the Air, early or late, often found bold confirmation of ideas stirring in their own minds.”

Much that he predicted, of course, turned out to be incorrect. Tactical aviation altered the nature of land and naval warfare and so contributed to the outcome of World War II that a few historians have suggested that its influence outweighed that of the strategic bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan. Douhet neglected almost entirely the issue of target selection. He vastly overestimated the physical destructiveness of a ton of bombs and equally underestimated the ability of the defense to defeat attacking air forces. Writing in 1953, the late Bernard Brodie, the greatest of the American military strategists of the post-war era, said that the“Battle of Britain resulted in an outright victory for the defense — and the attacking Germans were at that time quite literally following Douhet’s precepts.” Brodie called Douhet’s“demonstrable errors . . . considerable and sometimes very crude.” Yet at the same time“his insights are more impressive than his failures,” and his“thoughts are actually more valid today than they were during his lifetime.” Comparing him to Billy Mitchell, Brodie concluded that Mitchell’s“thinking was tactical rather than strategic, and events have so fully confirmed and vindicated him that his writing is today completely dated in a way that Douhet’s is not.”

This reprint of the 1942 English translation of Douhet’s works, while titled Command of the Air, actually consists of five separate works: the original 1921 edition of Command of the Air, a second edition of 1927, a 1928 monograph titled“Probable Aspects of Future War,” a polemical article of 1929 called“Recapitulation,” and the 1930 study“The War of 19 —.”The volume is reprinted by the Office of Air Force History as part of Project Warrior. By transporting ourselves back to the 1920s, past not only the Vietnam and Korean Wars, but nearly two decades before World War II, we become silent observers of the unfolding drama of airpower’s history. Knowing what transpired after Douhet wrote, we can test our understanding,find the assumptions and conclusions of Douhet that proved false, and read with wonder those that proved true. Some of what he wrote today seems almost timeless,“principles” perhaps of the employment of aircraft in war. Giulio Douhet was a prophet. From the perspective of today,he still bears pondering. Serious thinking about the nature of war and the role of aerospace power will not in our lifetime cease to be of value.

R. H. K.

J. P. H.