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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent survey, September 23, 2005
The title explains the book. It is intended as a detailed investigation of the evolution of both British and American ideas on strategic bombing in the first half of the twentieth century. It succeeds admirably.
It is, in fact, an extremely thoughtful and perceptive analysis and one which any modern warrior struggling with buzz-words such as "transformational warfare", "network centric", or "Revolution in Military Affairs", could and should read with profit. All these jargon-laden phrases come down in the end to how the military marries new technologies and the opportunites they present, with the conceptual framework necessary to utilise them properly. This book is concerned with how US and British airmen addressed these conceptual difficulties following the inception of military air power in the First World War.
The author shows very clearly how rhetoric too often exceeded reality, and how doctrine was too often allowed to degenerate into dogma. The causes are many and varied, and in the British case at least had nothing to do with Army control, since the RAF had been independent since 1 April 1918. The book makes clear the unwisdom of simply debating original and revolutionary concepts, whilst ignoring the need to develop essential training programmes and the equipment to support them. The RAF in the inter-war years could "talk the talk", but in 1939 it could not "walk the walk". Specifically it had neglected the primary art of navigation. The USAAF fared little better when its rhetoric was exposed to the fires of war. Both Air Forces eventually modified both their rhetoric and, as the author makes clear, once the neglected fundamentals were addressed, air power proved of decisive importance in winning the war.
In part this story has been told before, but seldom with such impressive depth of research and scholarship. Anyone who believes they know the story of strategic air power would be well advised to read this book to discover how much they have missed. Biddle reveals, for example, the extent to which very early US official writings on strategtic air power drew, verbatim at times, on British documents provided to the Americans in the First World War.
In sum this is an excellent book, combining elegant prose and thoughtful analysis with impressive research. It should be compulsory reading for Air Force officers and all those concerned with military procurement programmes.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
History in a Straight Jacket, April 12, 2007
This appears to be a meticulously researched book that has been carefully compiled. Yet is this enough to produce a really good history? Perhaps it is not. This book is virtually devoid of any real analysis. It could have, for example, compared, not just identified, the similarities and differences between the U.S. Army Air Corps and the Royal Air Force (RAF) that in the end produced remarkably similar ideas about the use of air power. In reading the chronology presented in this book one would think each service operated in a vacuum, never influencing the other. A little more thought on the author's part would have also revealed that although official doctrine emphasized the role of air power in the tactical support of infantry, the Air Corps was a pretty independent institution. Its budget through the fiscally lean inter-war years usually took a disproportionate amount of the funds appropriated for the army as a whole. In point of fact the Air Corps very much was able to pursue the development of heavy bombers for strategic bombardment in the face of official doctrine. The author hints at this, but appears reluctant to really investigate why this was so. The author could have also investigated more insightfully, in the face of the general failure of strategic bombing to crush civilian morale in the UK, Germany or Japan, why the doctrine of strategic bombing persists to this day. Finally the book is filled with missed opportunities to connect the dots so to speak. For example after WWI, the RAF with the encouragement of Winston Churchill, in the colonel office, undertook to police both Iraq and Trans-Jordan using what was called `air control'. In practice it was really air-armored control since in addition to aircraft the RAF used armored cars extensively to supplement its aircraft. Did this lesson in the necessity for combined arms impact RAF doctrinal thinking in any way or was it ignored as an aberration? In the same manner the Army Air Corps assumption of a coastal defense mission, mentioned in passing by the author, caused a good deal controversy at the time with both the Army Coast Defense Corps and the U.S. Navy. What was the impact, if any, of this on Air Corps doctrinal thinking? In short this is an adequate history, but could have been the definitive history of the development of the concepts air power in the U.S. and UK.
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10 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rhetoric and Reality about RHETORIC AND REALITY., June 23, 2003
This review is from: Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton Studies in International History and Politics) (Hardcover)
.... RHETORIC AND REALITY does not really deliver on the promise in the title, as academic work or as popular writing. As an academic work, it does not really involve what I would call empirical research. Sure, she scrutinized tons of documents and R&R contains 1000 references. Stunning to me, book has notes but no bibliography. What is really proven by this book? OK. the early advocates of air power oversold their promises. No one, especially during 1920s or 1930s could really predict what air power could, or could not, accomplish. Although TBD states in the intro that she will show how "psychology" can explain the weird behavior of air power advocates, no evidence is shown. No psychological explanations are used. A better explanation for the overselling of early Air zealots is institutional. The air power people found themselves under the oppressive thumb of armies, who initially had little sympathy for wild airpower theories (as Mitchell). The air power people needed an institutional framework of their own, they needed resources, they did not need the army. They wanted to do their own thing. Naturally and logically they chafed under the army so they oversold their promises in a blatant attempt to obtain the independence they wanted, needed, dreamed of. None of this is really newsworthy. To sum up, Ms Biddle's book does not really explain anything that is not already known. Therefore, it does not make solid research. As popular writing, it makes for a dry, fact-filled read. If you want to read the history of strategic bombing, it is already there in the Journal Air Power History, the Strategic Bombing Survey, Neillands, many more. search Amazon, etc.
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