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...maintained several tenets. that during the interwar years a fixation upon strategic bombardment diverted attention away from tactical air power, and second, that in North Africa the U.S. adopted the British system for tactical air power, more or less in toto. Both of those theories have been modified somewhat by more recent scholarship. This newer work argues that while the U.S. Army Air Corps unquestionably emphasized strategic bombardment in the interwar years, they did not ignore tactical air power either. Likewise, the widespread view of a "British save" of U.S. tactical air power in North Africa has been challenged. One might call this the "U.S. nativist" school of thought--the theory that in the interwar period the U.S. independently developed all of the doctrinal ideas instituted in North Africa.
This paper will argue that while the nativist school of thought is quite correct in its specific assertions, overall it is insufficiently nuanced. There was a complex series of developments between 1940 and 1942, the record for which it is difficult to disentangle, but a careful examination of the record shows that while the U.S. had cultivated a doctrinal background for tactical air power in the interwar years, this was rather broad and abstract. When it came time to assemble an actual working mechanism for tactical air power, they were indeed strongly influenced by the British model at the working level.
The Original Conventional Wisdom
As one of the seminal histories of U.S. air power put it in the early 1950s, "the development of the heavy bombers and its doctrine of employment ... had a retarding effect upon attack, pursuit, and all other aviation activities." (1) This was the view expressed by the U.S. Air Force's own official historians and by most prominent U.S. air power historians since. (2) This is often explained on the grounds that it was only strategic bombing that could justify an independent air force.
Similarly, it was long believed that because of this interwar neglect of tactical air power, the inaugural performance of U.S. tactical air forces was poor, and only redeemed when they learned from the battle-hardened British. In North Africa the Americans stumbled into the big leagues when they first met the Afrika Korps, who soundly defeated them at Kasserine Pass in February 1942. At the time and in many arguments since, this defeat was blamed in large part upon poor employment of the available tactical air power, which had been decentralized. Shortly after Kasserine, there was a reorganization of the Air Forces in the theater, which had the effect of bringing the U.S. tactical air effort under the wing of the veteran British commander of the Western Desert Air Force, Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham. (3) The classic story is that "Mary" Coningham quickly brought order to the tactical air forces with his tried and tested methods (4), and based upon that experience the U.S. Army Air Forces (USAAF) published new doctrine in the form of Field Manual (FM) 100-20 Command and Employment of Air Power. (5) FM 100-20 has been called a "declaration of independence" by the fledgling USAAF; it set out the principles of centralized command of all air assets by a single air commander, and the absolute importance of first obtaining air superiority. All of those principles, in the original conventional view, grew from the painful experience in North Africa.
Some More Recent U.S. Scholarly Revision
The first point to be made is that rumors of tactical air power's death in the interwar Air Corps were greatly exaggerated. Debate and thought was dedicated to the tactical role throughout not only the 1920s, but also the supposedly heavy bomber obsessed 1930s. For example, a considerable portion of the instruction syllabus at the Air Corps Tactical School was in fact devoted to tactical air power, and perhaps most tellingly of all, throughout the period the Air Corps continued to order aircraft types specifically dedicated to the tactical function. (6) As one air power historian has pointed out, if the writings and theory of the time seem to have emphasized strategic roles over the tactical, this was only because all U.S. airmen took it as a given that tactical air power constituted a major portion of their bread and butter. (7) In sum, a close examination of the historical record reveals that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the U.S. Army Air Corps did not in fact ignore tactical air power or allow it to languish in the interwar period.
A second major revisionist argument has been to challenge the assumption that the Americans copied their doctrine for tactical air power from the British in North Africa. In the wonderfully titled paper, "A Glider in the Propwash of the RAF?" the distinguished U.S. air power historian David R. Mets argued most forcefully that the Americans did not learn their basic doctrine from the British in North Africa. (8) Mets concludes that the senior American airmen all came to the war with essentially the same doctrinal tenets as those the British were espousing in North Africa. What happened, in Mets' view, was that the prestige the British had won with their victories since El Alamein lent weight to this view of tactical air power. The U.S. airmen drew upon this British reputation in order to convince their Army masters of the basic tactical air principles they already believed for their own reasons. (9)
Is the nativist school of thought correct? Doubtless in their specific assertions they are, for the U.S. had not completely ignored tactical air power in the interwar years and had inculcated the basic doctrinal tenets for tactical air power prior to their arrival in North Africa. However, it is important to distinguish between two related but separate issues: an air force's broad philosophy for air power on the one hand, and an actual system for implementing that philosophy on the other. Most of the historical debate has been focused upon the former, while ignoring the later. The American nativist school's argument boils down to the assertion that the broad philosophy contained within FM 100-20 did not have to be learned from RAF tutors. This is doubtless true, but it relates more to broad philosophy than concrete system. As the air power historian Vincent Orange observed, even after FM 100-20 was published, "communications links and procedures for setting priorities in answering calls for air support had still to be worked out." (10) The record suggests that at this more concrete level, the American practice of tactical air power was indeed strongly influenced by the British model.
What Was the British System and Where Did It Come From?
If we are to determine the British influence on U.S. tactical air power, the first thing to nail down clearly is the history of the British development of their system for air support. As we shall see, it was long and convoluted, but there are no records suggesting a U.S. influence on the British.
What would come to be called "tactical" air power was in fact the primary focus of British air experience in the Great War. (11) However, after that early start cooperation with the Army quickly deteriorated. Right from the RAF's birth in 1919, there were inter-service rivalries with the two older services that were far more pronounced and bitter than anything that had been seen before between the Army and Royal Navy. (12) A major factor at the root of this was the fervent belief of the RAF's founders that they had found a "better way" to win wars, and that, indeed, they had rendered the two older services obsolescent, if not obsolete. In the future, air power's new apostles argued that wars would be won not by massed armies or fleets, but by massed bombers, striking directly at the heart of any enemy's homeland. It has been widely noted that this sort of strategic bombing, as an instrument of state policy independent of the other two services, was the raison d'etre for the RAF at its birth. (13) In consequence, until the mid 1930s, the RAF gave scant attention to air support of armies in the field. (14) Even when the British government began seriously to rearm in the second half of the 1930s, the Air Ministry steadfastly opposed War Office requests for dedicated air support, (15) Army-RAF cooperation had scarcely improved by 1939. Convinced of the strategic importance of independent bombing, the Air Ministry continued to resist any "diversion" of resources from heavy bombers.
The fall of France did not greatly change the RAF's mind, but the Army could not be completely ignored and shortly after Dunkirk, "Army Cooperation Command" was formed. However, it came last in the RAF's priorities, and as late as the spring of 1941 the Chief of the Air Staff, was still officially arguing to Cabinet that: "The Army has no primary offensive role ... We aim to win the war in the air, not on land." (16)
Fortunately, work to improve interservice cooperation and air support to ground forces had been proceeding at the lower levels, at least on technical matters. In neglected Army Cooperation Command, in the far backwater of Northern Ireland, a small group of officers had been brought together under the leadership of Group Captain Wann and Brigadier Woodall. Veterans of the recent debacle in France, both were determined to do better. (17) They produced what came to be called the "Wann-Woodall" report, which outlined a system of control for air support that formed the basis of the eventual tactical air doctrine. (18) The essentials of the Wann-Woodall system was the establishment of a joint Army-RAF headquarters which would control a composite force of aircraft, and the creation of a radio network outside of the normal Army chain-of-command specifically dedicated to air support. In their original report, submitted in December 1940, they envisioned this forward control of aircraft being effected through an organization they termed a "Close Support Bomber Control," which would be co-located with the army at corps level. (19)
The first implementation of the these new ideas came in the Western Desert, far from the doctrinal squabbling at Whitehall. In early 1941, after the sobering experience of the Tobruk battles, the British leadership in the theater initiated a series of joint conferences between the army and RAF to review the problem of air support from first principles. (20) This resulted in a system similar to the Wann-Woodall proposals, which the local RAF and Army forces then reorganized themselves to actually test and implement. On September 30, 1941, this culminated in a directive on "Direct Support" which was published jointly by the RAF and British Army in the Middle East. (21) This spelled out a system whereby the sort of forward communications detachments envisioned in the Wann-Woodall report were controlled by what was now labelled an "Air Support Control" or ASC, once again at corps level. (29) These communications detachments were commonly known as "tentacles," since this was what they so resembled on the radio network organization charts. (23) The cause-and-effect relationship between the Wann-Woodall report and developments in the North Africa is unclear, and given the records extant will probably remain so. One of the participants in the UK based development process has argued that the system was designed in the British Isles, based upon the Wann-Woodall report, and then lifted in toto to North Africa for application. (24) Most historians have concluded that while there must certainly have been influence from the Wann-Woodall developments in Britain, there was also independent parallel development in North Africa. (25) Regardless of the truth in this matter, the key point for our purposes is that there is no suggestion in the record of any influence from American theory.
By 1942, the system's final form was virtually complete, with the RAF elements operating in North Africa being organized into the Desert Air Force or "DAF". In 1943, further elaboration of this system continued, not only in the North African and Tunisian campaigns, but in Sicily and Italy as well. In Italy, a system known as "ROVER DAVID" was developed. This was a means for arranging even faster and more responsive direct air support at the front than the ASCs could provide. A senior controller was sent forward with a signals truck equipped with VHF radios that could communicate with aircraft, and was allocated immediate control of some number of aircraft. The initial controller for this was one Group Captain David Heysham, hence the term "ROVER DAVID" (26) In November 1943 the ROVER DAVID system was used during operations along the River SangTo to control the first ever CABRANK. (27) This was a system in which a package of fighter-bombers circled overhead, available to swoop down upon a target as soon as the forward controller called for support. (28) To maintain a CABRANK, aircraft were sent to replace those that expended their ordnance or ran low on fuel, in a continuous relay. All aircraft were given an alternate target, which they would attack if not...
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