Refining the Ideals: The Air Corps Tactical School

Mitchell’s prophecy not only endured among air leaders, it also was the fundamental underpinning of the Air Corps Tactical School (acts), the focal point of American air power study during the in­terwar years.55 The school provided an intense, nine-month, air power-focused curriculum to the Air Corps’ top mid-level officers, and graduated 261 of the 320 generals serving in the Army Air Forces at the end of World War II.56 Initial classes were small. An average of 22 students attended while the school was located at Langley Field from 1920 to 1931, and they learned “the air tactics and techniques necessary for direction of air units in cooperation with other branches of the armed forces.”57 By 1926 the curricu­lum’s focus had begun to shift to independent air operations, and by 1935 it stressed the bomber as a war-winning weapon.58

In concert with the new emphasis, the school moved to Max­well Field, Alabama, and also acquired more students: the aver­age increased to fifty-nine in 1931, and jumped to one hundred in 1939, when a series of four twelve-week courses began.’9 Mitchell had been instrumental in founding the school, and his bombing manual still served as a textbook in 193 9.60 Many of the school’s officer-instructors were his proteges. Sherman, Dargue, George, Olds, and Walker—the latter two had served as Mitchell’s aides— filled key positions on the faculty, and all promoted Mitchell’s vi­sion of independent air power founded on the bomber.

From the student perspective, the Tactical School opened new vistas in air power thought. Laurence S. Kuter, who left the Forty- ninth Bombardment Squadron at Langley Field to begin school in the class of 1934-35 as a new first lieutenant (and the second youngest member of the class), later commented that “imagina­tions were released, aroused at Maxwell, when they were dormant at Langley. I think I’m speaking for all of my generation at the time. We had our first introduction to any sort of air strategy.”61 Major Ira C. Eaker, a distinguished pilot sporting a Southern Cal­ifornia journalism degree who graduated from the Tactical School in 1936, remarked: “If military education may be likened to a bad pill, it is not too much to say that a very satisfactory sugar coat­ing is put on it at Maxwell Field.”62

Students attended classes Monday through Friday from 0900- 1200, with afternoons reserved for flying and Wednesday after­noons off. For much of the 1930s horsemanship was a mandatory course, although most of the curriculum explored more serious subjects. Between 1931 and 1938, courses the first half of the year focused on specific branches of the Army, such as the infan­try, cavalry, and artillery, while naval topics also received atten­tion. The study of air power dominated the second half of the curriculum. The Department of Air Tactics and Strategy was re­sponsible for that instruction, and the “Air Force” section was its primary subdivision. Other branches included “Observation,” “Attack Aviation,” “Pursuit,” and “Bombardment,” with the most hours devoted to “Bombardment.” A faculty and staff consisting of twenty-two officers in 1935 oversaw the school’s program. Of that total seventeen were in the Air Corps.63

The Air Corps officers serving on the Tactical School faculty played an enormous role in shaping air power convictions. Most students arriving at Maxwell needed little convincing that Air Corps autonomy was a worthwhile goal, although the notion of a separate air force did not receive an overriding emphasis in fly­ing squadrons.64 Entering students also likely agreed that the inde­pendent application of air power was the key to achieving separa­tion from the Army. What the Tactical School—“the only common location of experienced air corps officers who had enough time for creative thinking”65—provided them was a distinctive meth­odology for applying air power to achieve victory independently of surface forces, and hence a rationale for service autonomy. The officers who developed the unique approach were an eclec­tic group, possessing disparate backgrounds and large amounts of flying time. Lieutenant Kenneth Walker, who began teaching the “Bombardment” course in 1929, had developed bomber forma­tion tactics just before his arrival at Maxwell while serving as the Second Bombardment Group’s operations officer; Major Donald Wilson, who taught the “Air Force” course from 1931 to 1934, had worked for American railroads before entering the military. Walker and Wilson typified those who passionately believed in an independent air force and who openly debated its merits in the kitchens of student and faculty quarters late at night over ma­son jars of moonshine. Yet in the classrooms—which contained a smattering of students w’ho were not airmen—the appeal for air autonomy rested on the logic of the school’s unique approach to bombing.66

No instructor made that pitch better than Major Harold Lee George. Before teaching at the Tactical School, George flew day bombers in World War I, helped Billy Mitchell sink the Ostfries – land and testified at his court-martial, and served as a bomber test pilot at Aberdeen Proving Ground. He directed the school’s Bombardment section from 1932 to 1934, and then doubled for two years as the director of Air Tactics and Strategy and its “Air Force” subdivision. The holder of a George Washington Univer­sity law degree and winner of a national competition in typing and shorthand, he played a major role in structuring the curriculum that formed the basis of America’s World War II strategic bomb­ing doctrine. His progressive views on the nature of war and air power paralleled those of Mitchell—with whom he corresponded frequently—and were manifest in his opening lecture for the “Air Force” course. He began by telling his students:

The question for you to consider from today onward, to have con­stantly before you as you continue your military careers, is substan­tially this:

Has the advent of air power brought into existence a method for the prosecution of war which has revolutionized that art and given to air forces a strategical objective of their own, independent of ei­ther land or naval forces, the attainment of which might, in itself, ac­complish the purpose of war; or has air power merely added another weapon to the waging of war which makes it in fact only an auxil­iary of the traditional military forces?67

George then outlined the probable answer. “Modern inven­tions” such as the machine gun and rapid-fire artillery signifi­cantly increased the power of defensive land warfare, he asserted, and a conflict similar to the world war “might mean a breakdown of civilization itself.” Yet he also argued that achieving victory did not require defeating an enemy’s army. Pointing to 1918, he stated that Germany surrendered because its populace lost the will to resist, not because its army had been destroyed. Overcoming hostile will was the true object of war. “The continuous denial of those things which are essential, not only for the prosecution of war but to sustain life itself” compelled the German people to yield. The Allied blockade threatened Germany with starvation, but George did not believe that such drastic measures were nec­essary to cause national will to collapse. “There is plenty of indi­cation that modern nations are interdependent,” he maintained, “not so much for the essentials of life as for those ‘non-essentials’ needed to conduct their daily lives under the existing standards of living.” Because most aspects of modern society were not self – sufficient—for example, many workers in large cities depended on public transportation to get to work, and many factories and homes received electric power from distant locations—eliminat­ing the interdependent features of normal life might suffice to crack civilian morale.68

Moreover, George insisted, the key elements that sustained nor­mal life were the same ones that enabled a nation to wage modern war. Interrupting this economic web would likely defeat a nation, and air power could attack it directly, preventing an exhaustive ground campaign or a time-consuming sea blockade. “It is possi­ble that the moral collapse brought about by the break-up of this closely knit web would be sufficient fto cause defeat],” he pos­tulated, “but connected therewith is the industrial fabric which is absolutely essential for modern war. To continue a war which is hopeless is worse than an undesirable peace, because the lat­ter will come soon or late anyway; but to continue a modern war without machinery is impossible.”69

Despite his obvious conclusion, George stopped short of say­ing that air power could win a war single-handedly. He noted that the prospect remained “an academic question,” but added: “That the air phase of a future war between major powers will be the decisive phase seems to be accepted as more and more plausible as each year passes.”70

The belief, widely shared among Tactical School instructors, that the industrial apparatus essential to a state’s war-making ca­pability was also necessary to sustain its populace was a funda­mental tenet of the school’s “industrial web theory.” In brief, its main points were: (i) in “modern warfare,” the military, polit­ical, economic, and social facets of a nation’s existence were so “closely and absolutely interdependent” that interruption of this delicate balance could suffice to defeat an enemy state; (2) bomb­ing, precisely aimed at these “vital centers” of an enemy’s industrial complex, could wreck the fragile equilibrium and hence destroy the enemy state’s war-making capability; and (3) such destruction would also wreck the enemy nation’s capacity to sustain normal day-to-day life, which would in turn destroy the will of its pop­ulace to fight.71 Those notions would guide American strategic bombing for the next half century.

Although seemingly straightforward, the industrial web the­ory stemmed from a hodgepodge of ingredients, and the Tactical School cooks who stirred them together sometimes added more of one item than another. Clausewitzian frameworks and Marxist economics, set against the backdrop of World War I’s totality, fla­vored the instructors’ thoughts on war. George’s lecture echoed a 1926 school publication that viewed the objective of war as “un­dermining the enemy’s morale, his will to resist,”72 yet George also noted that destroying the capability to fight might be the key to wrecking will. The school attempted to differentiate between the “national” objective of wrecking will and the “military” aim of destroying “the enemy’s material and moral means of resis­tance,” but the multi-layered goals overlapped and distinctions between them were subtle—especially when discussing air power that promised victory in one fell swoop.73

According to the Tactical School, the capability to fight mod­ern war stemmed from a nation’s economic prowess, and eco­nomic concerns generated war’s impetus. А Г934 lecture asserted that “world conflicts arise over outlets for over-production”; an­other added that modern wars “are essentially economic wars, caused by the clash of rival production machines.”74 Using air power to destroy those machines would eliminate the motive for conflict—hence removing the will to keep fighting. “Air power is the only means of waging war which has the capability of strik­ing directly at the will to resist of a hostile nation, by paralyzing its economic structure and threatening its very existence,” con­cluded a school text.75 Instructors further elaborated: “The prin­cipal and all important mission of air power, when its equipment permits, is the attack of those vital objectives in a nation’s eco­nomic structure which will tend to paralyze that nation’s ability to wage war and thus contribute directly to the attainment of the ultimate objective of war, namely, the disintegration of the hos­tile will to resist.”76

Besides Clausewitz and Marx, the industrial web theory hear­kened to Nap Gorrell and Billy Mitchell. In 1935 the mustachioed Lieutenant Kuter, now an instructor in the school’s Bombardment section after graduating first in his class, discovered a copy of Gor – rell’s plan and decided to devote an entire lecture to it. He con­tacted Gorrell—who had become president of the American Air Transport Association—to verify that the lecture conveyed the es­sence of the 1917 proposal, and Gorrell invited him to his Chi­cago office to discuss it. When Kuter arrived he found that the re­tired colonel had distributed copies of the lecture to many senior officers from the First World War. All expressed satisfaction that it accurately represented the past, as did Gorrell himself.77 An in­vigorated Kuter then returned to Maxwell. “No principle or doc­trine in the Confidential Air Force text that is being written today was missed in that plan,” he proclaimed to his students. “We may return to our steel desks considerably refreshed by the knowledge that our school plans and our theories are not only supported by, but identical with the plans of the level-headed commanders in the field when the grim realities of actual war demanded effec­tive employment.”78

Like both Gorrell and Mitchell, most Tactical School instruc­tors equated the will of the nation to the will of its populace. They also presumed that civilian will was fragile, and that bombs could crack it without killing large numbers of people. Air power would instead break morale by putting people out of work. “The effects of an attack against the industrial facilities on the social life of a nation can not be overestimated,” stated a 1934 text. “The psy­chological effect caused by idleness is probably more important in its influence upon morale than any other single factor.”79 Un­employment further offered a gauge to determine when civilian will was on the verge of collapse. “The effectiveness of an air of­fensive against a nation may find its yard stick in the number of people which it will deny work,” a 1936 lecture asserted. “Idle­ness breeds discontent—and discontent destroys morale.”80

Tactical School instructors considered the prospect of destroy­ing enemy will by attacking the populace directly, but dismissed the idea because they believed it less effective than an attack on key industries. In addition, many thought that such an approach was inhumane. Major Muir S. Fairchild, like George a veteran of World War I day bombers, told students in 1938 that “the direct attack of civilian populations is most repugnant to our humani­tarian principles, and certainly it is a method of warfare that we would adopt only with great reluctance and regret. . . . Further­more, aside from the psychological effects on the workers, this at­tack does not directly injure the war making capacity of the na­tion.” Fie also argued that it was difficult to determine the amount of bombs needed to terrorize a population to such a degree that it forced its government to surrender. Thus, Fairchild advocated at­tacks on the industrial web, which would have “the great virtue of reducing the capacity for war of the hostile nation, and of ap­plying pressure to the population both at the same time and with equal efficiency and effectiveness.”81

To George, efficient bombing was the overriding concern. He rejected the direct attack on populations, “not because of the fact that it might violate some precept of humanity,” but because at­tacking the industrial web promised greater dividends, and prom­ised them sooner, than killing civilians. Railroads, refineries, elec­tric power, and key industries were his targets of choice; “no highly industrialized nation could continue existence” without them. Yet George also provided a caveat that left the door ajar for attacks that did more than just disrupt normal life. He remarked that “any sane nation” would capitulate once the key threads of its indus­trial web were severed. If surrender did not occur—implying that the enemy was not rational—as a last resort the attacker might de­stroy the enemy’s water supply system. George acknowledged that doing so would have grave implications. “The results and conse­quences of such an attack are too terrible for any nation to bring about unless it offered probably the only means in which it could be successful in the prosecution of the war,” he cautioned.82

Much like Mitchell, the Tactical School instructors presumed a uniform code of rationality for both the government and the pop­ulace of any modern nation attacked from the air. The government would “sense” the discomfort of its people and would act to end their pain. Accordingly, the attacker should avoid bombing gov­ernment centers, because “the political establishment must remain intact if the attitude of the people at large is to be rapidly sensed and given appropriate consideration.”83 Instructors expected the attitudes of a beleaguered government and its populace to resemble

those projected for “the greatest industrial nation in the world— the United States.” Major Fairchild observed that America’s vul­nerability to a well-conceived air offensive mirrored that of other industrialized powers. He asserted that the key elements of Amer­ican production were 11,842 “critical” factories, almost half of which were located in New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachu­setts. Destroying the factories in those three states, or the trans­portation or power systems linking them, would “apply tremen­dous pressure to our civilian population while at the same time seriously imparing [sic] our ability and capacity to wage war.”84 Tactical School instructors thought that such destruction would fatally affect American morale. “With life unbearable or perhaps not even supportable, it seemed that even the sturdiest people in our own Northeast country with their army and navy could soon be persuaded to yield to the will of an enemy with effective inde­pendent air action,” Kuter remembered.85

The school devoted much time to determining which particu­lar elements in the industrial web would have the greatest impact if destroyed. Here too, the United States served as the predom­inant example for the theorizing. Fairchild noted that without adequate raw materials and the power to drive machinery, the American industrial complex could not function. A precarious balance held the system together even in peacetime; a strike in a small factory producing door latches for automobiles had halted production in many automobile factories across the country. The demands of war strained that balance to the utmost, as could be seen from the failure of American industry to provide more than token support to the Allied cause in 1917-18.

“A careful and complete scientific analysis” would identify the proper targets, Fairchild insisted.86 The key was to pinpoint ba­sic commodities essential for both public services and war-fight­ing. Once identified, air power could attack them in a variety of

ways. Factories manufacturing essential commodities were usually found in specific locales, adjacent to raw materials, markets, la­bor, or lines of communication. They were generally large enough to allow easy identification from the air and too numerous to al­low “an efficient local defense.”87 Examples included the steel in­dustry in Pittsburgh and Birmingham, and the brass industry in Connecticut. Besides destroying the factories, air power could eliminate essential commodities by attacking the raw materials needed to produce them. Removing either coal or iron ore would prevent the production of steel. A school text concluded: “Air power could thus defeat a nation by depriving it of just one com­modity, [such as] steel, because no nation can successfully wage war without it.”88

Because Tactical School instructors based the industrial web theory on American projections, they have since been criticized for “mirror-imaging”—substituting America’s economic and social make-up for that of all other industrialized nations. Kuter later remarked that they had little choice. A small number of officers (seventeen total) from Britain, Canada, Mexico, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey attended the school, and their presence prevented in­structors from focusing their analysis on potential enemies Ger­many and Japan. “It would have been unthinkable in peacetime to have U. S. Army Air Corps officers estimating the national fab­ric of an industrial nation, searching for critical and vulnerable elements and concluding how many long range heavy bombers would be required to overcome their will to resist our objectives,” Kuter recalled. “Not only would it have been politically unthink­able to assume that another nation was our enemy, but at the acts it would have been downright embarrassing.”89 Haywood S. Han – sell, a first lieutenant fighter-pilot-turned-bomber-advocate who taught with Kuter in the Bombardment section, remembered that instructors deemed target selection a problem for industrial econ­omists. Since the school had none, it “did the best it could. It rea­soned that other great nations were not unlike our own, and that an analysis of American industry would lead to sound conclu­sions about German industry, or Japanese industry, or any other great power’s industry.”90

Yet in the final analysis, Hansell, Kuter, and their compatriots did not project American characteristics onto the socioeconomic infrastructure of their potential enemies. They instead replicated their perceptions of the United States, and those perceptions in all likelihood did not conform to reality. Like Billy Mitchell, the in­structors assumed that the American populace had a low thresh­old of pain, that it would demand surrender once key industrial centers in the Northeast were destroyed, and that the government would acquiesce to the request. Such assumptions ignored—as had Mitchell—the nature of the enemy and its war aims, and Amer­ica’s own goals in the conflict, which may have been that high – priced survival was preferable to occupation. Those assumptions also underestimated the resilience of industrial complexes and the possibility that dispersal and deception might keep them running in spite of bombs. In short, the enemy state portrayed by the Tac­tical School was a generic one, stripped of fundamental elements like culture and ideology. Overcoming its “will to resist” became a straightforward goal with quantifiable results.91

The instructors realized that their vision of the future rested on theory rather than fact, but countered that the lack of proof for their claims was no certainty that air power could not achieve them.92 To bolster their convictions they relied on large doses of progressive philosophy. “Air power is the natural enemy of a well-organized state,” they asserted in 193 5.93 Technological ad­vance had made the various facets of a modern state interdepen­dent, linked together by strands of a delicate web. Air power was the ideal means to severe those threads quickly. “The more speed­ily a war is over and the world can revert to its normal peace­time pursuits, the better it is for the entire world,” George re­marked.94 Mitchell had said much the same, and so had Douhet, whose translated works were available at Maxwell.95 Yet neither Mitchell nor Douhet placed the overriding emphasis on accurate bombing that came from the Tactical School. Although Mitchell stressed precision attacks against a hostile fleet, he also advocated the development of “aerial torpedoes,” self-propelled, remotely controlled bombs accurate enough only to “hit great cities.”96 For Douhet, population centers were legitimate targets, and victory would come from terrorizing the enemy populace into demand­ing peace. Tactical School instructors believed that such random bombing could not rapidly snip away the key strands of the in­dustrial web.

In 1930, the school shunned night bombing as inefficient; texts stated that daylight was necessary to pinpoint key targets.97 But attacking in daylight exposed aircrews to enemy defenses, forc­ing them to attack at high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft artillery (aaa) and in formation for mutual protection against enemy fight­ers. High altitude bombing was also inherently more inaccurate than that conducted at lower levels, and in 1930 the Air Corps did not possess a bombsight that assured a reasonable degree of precision. Nor did it possess a bomber that could deliver a sub­stantial bomb load against an enemy’s economic web. Neverthe­less, Tactical School instructors continued to refine the industrial web theory, confident that air technology would ultimately pro­vide them with a means to implement it without suffering crip­pling losses.

In the days before radar, air maneuvers appeared to show that even antiquated bombers could attack targets in daylight and emerge relatively unscathed. The defending fighters often failed to locate the bomber formations, and if they did so, it was often too late to intercept them. Major Walter H. Frank, the Tactical School’s Assistant Commandant, remarked after watching Г929 air maneuvers in Ohio: “There is considerable doubt among the umpires as to the ability of any air organization to stop a well – organized, well flown air attack.”98 Mitchell’s former aide, Lieu­tenant Kenneth Walker, echoed this sentiment as a Bombardment instructor from Г929 to 1933, and the notion found its way into Tactical School texts. Most instructors believed that the defensive firepower of tight formations would ward off any fighters that happened to intercept a bomber attack. Still, they considered the possibility of an escort fighter that could accompany bombers to target, but dismissed the notion for two reasons: (r) they could not envision an aerodynamic design that successfully melded a fighter’s speed and maneuverability with a bomber’s range; and (2) money for both fighter and bomber development simply did not exist during the Depression, and fighters were not going to gain the independent victory that would lead to an autonomous air force.99 Major Claire Chennault, who directed the Tactical School’s Pursuit section from Г934 to Г935, adamantly opposed using fighters as escorts—in his mind, their sole mission was air defense.100 Dogmatic views also prevailed regarding anti-aircraft artillery. Kuter recalled teaching that “anti-aircraft gunfire may be important but should be ignored.” He also remembered that in classroom exercises instructors deemed “bombing inaccuracy”— not enemy defenses—the greatest threat to a successful air offen­sive. “Nothing could stop us,” he reflected. “I mean this was a zealous crowd.”101

The confidence displayed by faculty and students at the acts would intensify during the decade with the development of the four-engine в-17 “Flying Fortress” and the sophisticated Norden bombsight. Together, those technological marvels seemingly of­fered the means to validate the industrial web theory. Yet before that theory could be put to the test, the Army’s leaders had to en­dorse it. A difficult challenge loomed for the believers in progres­sive air power—one that was far more demanding than Mitchell faced in sinking the Ostfriesland.