Hippler - Governing From the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing

Tripoli, 1 November 1911. I decided that today I would try to drop bombs from the aeroplane. No one had ever tried such a thing, and if I succeed I shall be happy to have been the first, Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father. The engineer from Genoa had obtained his pilots wings just at the time that the Italian government decided to embark on the conquest of a colonial empire in Libya. Gavottis record to date was limited to an unauthorized flight above the Vatican, which led to his detention for a few days, and to second place in a race between Bologna and Venice. But in late September 1911 things began to hot up in Libya: the Sublime Porte had refused to cede Tripoli and Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Less than a week later, the city fell into the hands of the Italians. As a member of a small airmens flotilla, Gavotti was posted to Africa a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday.

At dawn on 1 November, Gavotti took off in his plane and headed for the Mediterranean. He had no specific mission order, but he did have a definite idea. He made a wide turn above the sea before heading for the small oasis of An Zara, some fifteen kilometres south-east of Tripoli, where he had noticed a troop of Arab fighters on an earlier reconnaissance flight:

I held the joystick with one hand, and with the other I untied the cord that held the cover of the box. I took a bomb from the box, which I placed on my knees. Transferring the joystick to my other hand, with the free one I removed a detonator from the small box. I put it in my mouth. I closed the box, placed the detonator in the bomb and looked down. I was ready. I was about one kilometre from the oasis.

The Ottoman army, caught unawares by the Italian aggression, met with considerable difficulties. So much so that Fethi Bey, the Ottoman military commander of the Tripoli region, decided to withdraw his troops and call on indigenous units to use guerrilla tactics. Gavottis task in Libya was to undertake strategic reconnaissance missions and keep the general staff informed of the manoeuvres of the enemy forces. But guerrilla fighters do not act like a regular army: they do not concentrate their forces in the same fashion, and can move among the civilian population like fish in water. In such conditions, strategic reconnaissance was completely useless and the Italian airmen had to invent new missions for themselves. Hence the initiative of Giulio Gavotti. It would have a long posterity.

Tripoli, 1 November 2011. NATO planes had stopped their bombing a day ago. The air strikes on Libya, which had begun on 19 March, ended on 31 October, one day short of a century since the very first bombing by plane. By a strange historical and geographical coincidence, the bombs launched by the NATO planes fell in the same places as those of Gavotti a hundred years earlier. History repeated itself, seeming to invite us to revisit a century of air bombardments. The historiography of air warfare, which has focused above all on the question of the legitimacy and utility of strategic bombing in the Second World War, finds it hard to take into account the importance of the colonial precedent, most often viewed as simply a dress rehearsal Yet the history of air bombing is full of this kind of geographical coincidence: the regions subjected to such bombing in the inter-war years particularly included Iraq, Syria, and the Indian north-west frontier: Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan.