General Giulio Douhet - Command Of The Air

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Text originally published in 1942 under the same title.

Pickle Partners Publishing 2014, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publishers Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Authors original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern readers benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

The Command of the Air

By

Gulio Douhet

Translated by Dino Ferrari

Contents

In the pantheon of air power spokesmen, Giulio Douhet holds center stage. His writings, more often cited than perhaps actually read, appear as excerpts and aphorisms in the writings of numerous other air power spokesmen, advocatesand critics. Though a highly controversial figure, the very controversy that surrounds him offers to us a testimonial of the value and depth of his work, and the need for airmen today to become familiar with his thought.

The progressive development of air power to the point where, today, it is more correct to refer to aerospace power has not outdated the notions of Douhet in the slightest In fact, in many ways, the kinds of technological capabilities that we enjoy as a global air power provider attest to the breadth of his vision. Douhet, together with Hugh Boom Trenchard of Great Britain and William Billy Mitchell of the United States, is justly recognized as one of the three great spokesmen of the early air power era. This reprint is offered in the spirit of continuing the dialogue that Douhet himself so perceptively began with the first edition of this book, published in 1921. Readers may well find much that they disagree with in this book, but also much that is of enduring value. The vital necessity of Douhets central visionthat command of the air is all important in modern warfarehas been proven throughout the history of wars in this century, from the fighting over the Somme to the air war over Kuwait and Iraq.

Dr. Richard P. Hallion

The Air Force Historian

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 armys 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 Mussolinis 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 Douhets 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 airthat is, to put the enemy in a position where he is unable to fly, while preserving for ones 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 airplanestheir speed and mobilityand 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, Douhets 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 Douhets theories to the chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, calling the study an excellent exposition of certain principles of air war.