There was much that Mackinder shared with Mahan. International relations were understood in terms of relentless competition among naturally expansive great powers. What Mackinder introduced was a way of thinking about the geographical dimension that showed how the land and sea could be understood as part of the same world system, and as a source of continuity even as political and technological change affected its relevance. He was not a geographical determinist, accepting that power balances would also depend on “the relative number, virility, equipment, and organization of the competing peoples.”33 What Mackinder offered was a way of rooting the higher-level strategic discourse in the interaction between states and the enduring features of their environment.
Mackinder never used the term “geopolitics.” It was coined by the Swede Rudolf Kjellén, who was a student of Friedrich Ratzel, the first geographer to focus on political geography. Kjellén’s works were translated into German and picked up by Karl Haushofer, a former General who founded the German geopolitical school.34 Although he was not a Nazi, Haushofer reflected a world view that thought naturally in terms of distinctive ethnic groups occupying sufficient space to exercise economic independence (autarky). The logic of “lebensraum” (the need to expand living space) became part of Nazi ideology. Such associations left geopolitics discredited.35 Mackinder’s more nuanced approach provided a context for the parochial concerns of individual states but also reinforced anxieties that there might be a route for a hostile power (for this option was not available to Britain) to eventual world domination. This idea influenced the titanic struggles of the coming century. It encouraged the view that there were a number of timeless imperatives arising out of the structure of international politics that states ignored at their peril. These encouraged a focus on the more conservative notions of nationality and territory and played down considerations of ideology and values, though these might well have been the most important factors when it came to deciding what was worth fighting for and with whom it was desirable to forge and maintain alliances. So, while geopolitics appeared to move strategy to a higher plane than one which concentrated solely on the operational art, it suffered from the same defect of failing to attend to the wider political context.
CHAPTER 10 Brain and Brawn
Quiet people go out in the morning, and see air-fleets passing overhead—dripping death—dripping death!
—H. G. Wells, The War in the Air, 1908
FEW EPISODES REVEALED the limitations of military planning more than the German offensive of August 1914. The general staff controlled what they could, but their plans had paid insufficient attention to what France might do to disrupt these plans—especially as logistics and communications lines became extended. The plan’s schedule soon proved impossible to meet, especially as Belgium put up some resistance. This led to brutal dealings with civilians (a pattern which continued through the war), including forced labor, denial of food supplies, and wanton destruction.1 Within weeks, the offensive had been halted. Yet the failure to knock France out of the war and the need to then cope with the Russians and the British (because of the attack on Belgium) did not lead to a fundamental reappraisal of war aims or strategic principles. The search was still on for a decisive victory, relying on superiority in temperament, refusal to countenance a hint of timidity, and faith in some new technique that could turn the tide. The first of these was the use of gas warfare. The next drastic move was unrestricted submarine warfare, reflecting optimistic views about the inability of civil shipping to cope with the threat. This had the predictable effect of bringing the United States into the war. The final gamble was the offensive of March 1918 that left the army extended and exposed.
Delbrück had applauded the initial offensive and thought it would succeed, but once it stalled he quickly revised his thinking. If Germany could not annihilate it would have to exhaust the enemy, although Delbrück struggled to assess the relative economic impacts on the belligerents. He argued for a deal with Britain and France in order to concentrate on Russia. The uncompromising political and military stance led him to despair. Germany had “in a sense the whole world leagued against us,” he wrote in 1917, adding that “fear of German despotism is one of the weightiest facts with which we have to reckon, one of the strongest factors in the enemy’s power.”2
In the middle of this great stalemate, when there seemed to be few obvious means of breaking the deadlock other than by persevering with the costly and futile combination of artillery bombardment and infantry charges, plans began to be drawn up for more daring strategies. In each case the intention was to realize the potential of a new technology—the tank on the ground or the airplane in the air—to break the will of the enemy. In both cases the presumed impact of the new weaponry was assumed to be psychological as much as physical. The aim was to cause what would in effect be a collective nervous breakdown on the enemy side. This directly challenged the assumption that a decisive victory had to involve the annihilation of the enemy army. In neither case were the plans realistic: the technologies were still in their infancy, the production capacity limited and the tactics underdeveloped. Nonetheless, in both cases these early plans set the terms for the intense postwar debates about future strategy.
Air Power
The Germans were early converts to the value of long-range bombardment and to the view that its success would lie less in the amount of physical injury caused and more in the enemy’s willingness to continue to prosecute the war. When the first Zeppelin raids occurred in 1915, the actual results were meager, though in London the ability of the Zeppelins to fly overhead was considered humiliating in itself and bad for morale. As the British learned to deal with the Zeppelins, German aircraft took over with greater effect. In the summer of 1917, a time when morale was already fragile, the first attack on London killed 162 people and injured 432. Up to this point, the British had concentrated their own aircraft in support of the army in France. This remained the priority, but after the London raids the government promised revenge and a degree of protection to the public. At the time, the Royal Flying Corps’ main interest beyond the French trenches was the German lines of supply that fed the front. The commander General Hugh Trenchard was trying to develop a vision of how best to use a still scarce resource as an independent force that could mount concentrated attacks against chosen targets in sufficient numbers and with sufficient continuity to make a decisive impact. Although he judged that bombers of greater range could eventually target Berlin, the only initial response to the attacks on England was some very limited and rather indiscriminate bombing of Germany.
Trenchard’s vision had a strong influence on the group of American airmen who arrived just after the German raids, as their country entered the war. Captain Nap Gorrell, one member of this team whose task was to set out requirements for American aircraft production, began to develop a plan for an air campaign. In line with Trenchard’s thinking, Gorrell argued that “a new policy of attacking the enemy” was needed. This he described as “strategical bombing” geared to impeding the flow of supplies from Germany to the front. The assumption was that there was a linked industrial complex, involving a limited number of vital targets, upon which Germany’s war effort depended. Gorrell also assumed that civilians would be demoralized and reluctant to return to work in the aftermath of such attacks. They might even find air attack so unendurable that they would pressure their governments to seek terms. To achieve this he envisaged a massive armada of thousands of aircraft, flying night and day, moving systematically from one set of targets to another. The plan did not prosper. It was too visionary in the light of the pressing demands to protect and support the armies at the front, and far too ambitious in terms of production capability.3
The importance of Gorrell’s plan was that it drew upon the views of the key figures who were all to become vociferous advocates of strategic airpower after the war. These included not only Trenchard but also the American General Billy Mitchell, whose campaigning for an independent air
corps would lead to his court-martial, and Giulio Douhet, then struggling to get the Italian military to accept his futuristic views of air power. The connection with Douhet was through his friend, the Italian aircraft designer Gianni Caproni. It was Mitchell’s stridency in pursuit of institutional independence more than his innovative ideas that got him into trouble with his superiors. Against the backdrop of America’s industrial strength, he was less worried about “tactical” missions distracting from the “strategic.” Douhet reported for the Italian army on the first known combat use of aircraft, in Libya in 1911, and published his landmark book Command in the Air in 1921.4 The ideas he expressed were by no means unique to him, but he provided the most systematic—and the most strident, especially by the time of the book’s second edition in 1927—presentation of the apparent strategic logic of air-power.5 This logic was really a continuation of Mahan’s, which was in turn a continuation of Jomini’s. Mahan assumed a decisive naval battle would allow for command of the sea; Douhet applied this to the air and assumed that decisiveness there would produce command of the air.
As Azar Gat has demonstrated, behind the enthusiasm for the new engines of war, whether on land or in the air, was a modernist fascination with the possibility of a rationalist, technocratic super-efficient society built around machines, linked to elitism in political theory and futurism in art, and feeding naturally into fascism.6 This did not mean, however, that those who developed new strategic theories around these weapons adopted the whole package. Many did not. They were imagining a future not necessarily far away but still well beyond current capabilities. Their theories developed around a combination of optimism about technology and pessimism about humanity.
With some variations, postwar airpower advocates relied on five core propositions. First and most important was the conviction that appropriately deployed airpower provided an independent route to victory. The corollary of this was that it needed its own independent command and should not be subordinate to the needs of either armies or navies. This was reflected in the references to “strategic” aviation, which suggested that long-range bombardment missions were superior to merely “tactical” auxiliary applications. They could on their own attain the purposes of war.
Second, the defense was likely to remain dominant in land warfare, which meant that defeating the enemy army in battle—the classical route to victory—was now prohibitively expensive in terms of blood and treasure. Fortunately, it would no longer be necessary to defeat the enemy army because aircraft could fly right over the front lines to reach the heart of the enemy. Trenchard explained: “It is not necessary, for an air force, in order to defeat the enemy nation, to defeat its armed forces first. Airpower can dispense with that intermediate step.”7
Third, in contrast to surface warfare, in the air the offense would be stronger than the defense. As Douhet put it, the aircraft was “the offensive weapon par excellence.” This thought was later most graphically expressed in 1932 by British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin when he warned the “man in the street” that there was “no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.” As late as 1937, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, commander of the Royal Air Force fighter command, stated that bombing attacks on London would cause such panic that defeat could occur “in a fortnight or less.”8
Fourth, these potentially decisive effects would be achieved less by the actual destruction of people and property than by the consequences of this destruction on the ability of governments to function and prosecute a war. Popular pressure would oblige the enemy to sue for peace. Trenchard wrote in 1928 how the goal of air action was “to paralyse from the very outset the enemy’s production centres of munitions of war of every sort and to stop all communications and transportation.” More could be achieved by attacking the enemy’s “vital centres” than attacking the forces that sought to protect them.9 In this, the more people-friendly version, it was the loss of vital infrastructure that would make it progressively difficult to feed the nation’s war machine. In the less people-friendly version, it was assumed that the effects would come through popular demoralization, demotivation, and even panic on such a scale that the government would have to abandon the war.
Fifth, the advantage would go to the side that attacked first. For Douhet, the “command of the air” would come when it was possible to “prevent the enemy from flying while retaining the ability to fly oneself.” This would be achieved by aggressively bombarding the enemy’s air bases and factories (“destroying the eggs in their nest”), a tactic that favored attacking as soon as possible—even preemptively, before the enemy air force was already on its way. There would be no time for a formal declaration of war. As we have seen with land warfare, the main reason to take this sort of risk would be the expectation that the first blows could be translated into a decisive victory.
There were practical issues connected to all these propositions. Offensive long-range bombers would have to carry fuel as well as ordnance and could be vulnerable to faster, more agile fighter aircraft. If they flew in daylight these bombers were more likely to be spotted en route to their targets. They might be safer flying at night but would find it harder to hit targets with accuracy. Then there was the risk of retaliation. Douhet assumed that a war would start with a competition to inflict as much as damage as possible on the enemy society, and the victor would be the first to pound the other into submission. That was a dire prospect, especially if neither side managed a decisive blow. The logic of this prospect of mutual destruction was mutual deterrence, since both sides would presumably be anxious to protect their people from revenge attacks. Even during the Allied discussions of a long-range bomber offensive in 1917, French enthusiasm waned as they contemplated their own vulnerability to German retaliation. Unless it was assumed that first blows could lead to the physical collapse of the war economy, which was unlikely, a lot was resting on the assumption that an early victory would result from the impact on civilian morale.
Unlike soldiers who were trained to deal with attack, Douhet assumed that civilians would be helpless.
A complete breakdown of the social structure cannot but take place in a country being subjected to … merciless pounding from the air. The time would soon come when, to put an end to horror and suffering, the people themselves, driven by the instinct of self-preservation, would rise up and demand an end to the war.10
Douhet was dismissive of anything that detracted from the most massive early offensives—there was no point in investing in air defenses or keeping anything in reserve, let alone preparing for auxiliary missions in support of the army or navy. He recognized that this would put a premium on getting the targeting right, yet he was strikingly vague on targeting priorities. There could be no “hard and fast rules” because much would depend on the “material, moral, and psychological” circumstances.11
Nor did he or the other advocates have much evidence upon which to base their claims, other than extrapolations from the first responses of Britain and France to German bombs. This led to some curious social theory on the general softness of the lower classes, the respective resilience of British and German workers, and the consequence of the presence of panicky aliens. Prior to the war there had been a lot of interest in crowd psychology, inspired in particular by the Frenchman Gustave Le Bon. He provided a quasi-scientific basis, taken extraordinarily seriously at the time, for those who feared the entry of the masses into political life and also those who became excited by the possibility of harnessing popular emotions. Chapter 22 considers this more carefully. For the moment all that is important to note is Le Bon’s claim that individuals lost their distinctive personalities in crowds, and that this collective was highly suggestible. There was no particular reason, however, why an essentially irrational crowd would demand surrender. The mood might push in the opposite direction. In 1908, the British author H. G. Wells, who was well aware of Le Bon’s work, wrote War in the Air. His as
sumption was that the crowd (in this case, New Yorkers) would not so much panic as turn extremely belligerent. The authorities in his novel wanted to surrender but the people, roused to anger, disagreed. With the head “conquered and stunned,” the body was “released” from its rule.
New York had become a headless monster, no longer capable of collective submission. Everywhere it lifted itself rebelliously; everywhere authorities and officials left to their own initiative were joining in the arming and flag-hoisting and excitement of that afternoon.
The result was that the Germans were forced to make good their threats. New York was wrecked “because she was at once too strong to be occupied and too undisciplined and proud to surrender in order to escape destruction.”12
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