Mr. Sibert is one of what must be a very small handful of living veterans of the Ploesti raids. What a career. He not only had a front row seat for history during his interesting times, he also made some.
Part I – April 9, 1942
The ominous roar of flying squadrons in the skies of Europe and Asia Heralded the commencement of the Spring offensives yesterday as air power – weapon of destiny – started 1942’s decisive struggle for the domination of the world.
The air raids over Western Europe, the fighting in the skies of Libya and the Japanese carrier-based raids on India are plainly a preface to all-out campaigns in which land power and sea power will be joined with air power in the conflict.
The plane, which already has revolutionized war and altered the whole meaning of our civilization, will undoubtedly continue to play a major role in 1942’s battles. For the plane-tank team on land has spearheaded the Nazi advance across Europe just as the plane-ship team at sea has spearheaded the Japanese drive into the southwestern Pacific. The successful British attack at Taranto, the Battle of Cape Matapan, the destruction of the Bismarck, the Battle of France, the conquest of Crete, our losses at Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse have all shown what should have been obvious – that the plane is an indispensable instrument of modern global power. It is a truth that we have learned late and slowly but we are learning it well.
It must be emphasized, however, that the plane cannot today be a soloist in the symphony of battle. There is far more to air power than planes, and air power alone has not won any of the major campaigns of this war; land power and sea power and air power closely allied and coordinated have been the “combat team” that have provided military victory.
What the plane can do in war has been illustrated in part by the headlines of this war; what it is capable of doing must be judged in part by those achievements, in part by its present combat capacity and technical characteristics. Just as this capacity and these characteristics have been often grossly underestimated in the past, partly because of the conservatism of the general staff mind, so this capacity and these characteristics are frequently overestimated today. What the plane can do tomorrow no man can say with certainty, though what the plane can do today and in the foreseeable future – say within the next two to five years - is possible to estimate from an actual technical study of the characteristics of modern planes.
Such a study brings the role of the plane in war within proper perspective. It eliminates immediately grandiose claims for the plane made by ardent extremists; it pushes far into the realm of future wars – if indeed such a scheme is ever practical – what has been seriously suggested by one man as a means of winning this war; the transoceanic bombardment of Japan from bases in Alaska and the Aleutians. Such a study illustrates as nothing else can do that today armies and navies without planes are “gone goslings”; but planes without armies and navies are also futile. Indeed, the danger of basing a war-winning strategy on one without the other is in no way better epitomized than by paraphrasing the remarks of a British committee that once studied the question of air attack upon capital ships:
“The advocates of the extreme air [or land or sea] view would wish this country to maintain no armies or navies [or air fleets] – other powers still continuing to maintain them. If their theories turn out well founded, we have wasted money; if ill founded, we would, in putting them to the test, have lost the war.”
Part II – April 11, 1942
The importance of the plane in modern war was again emphasized by yesterday’s news that another proud ship bearing the White Ensign was sunk by Japanese carrier-based planes in the Indian Ocean.
But despite these and similar successes for air power – over sea and over land – the plane is not a self-sufficient weapon; it has limitations. What it can do today and what it may be expected to do in the immediate tomorrows has been brilliantly explained recently by Edward Warner, former assistant secretary of the Navy for aeronautics, now vice chairman of the Civil Aeronautics Board, writing in the January issue of Foreign Affairs. He said: The modern plane, and the plane of our immediate tomorrows, will find great difficulty in achieving speeds higher than 450 miles per hour. “Actually, there is no fixed barrier beyond which speed cannot increase.” However, resistance mounts so much in these high speed brackets that “we may consider it at least four times as difficult to increase the speed of an airplane from 500 miles an hour to 550 miles an hour as it was to make the increase from 350 to 400.” Today, only a relatively few of the world’s fastest fighters make 400 miles an hour.
The bomber, Mr. Warner finds, obviously also has strict limitations in performance. If a bomber flies at 200 miles an hour at 20,000 feet altitude, a fully loaded 40,000-pound plane – carrying about 10 per cent of its total weight, or 4,000 pounds, of bombs – should be able to raid targets at a maximum distance of about 1,500 miles away and return to its base.
This distance – 1,500 miles – represents about the maximum practical for raiding today; raids have been made, and will be made, at distances greater than this, but such raids are generally militarily inefficient and uneconomical since the bomb load that can be carried decreases rapidly with increased distance flown. Indeed, the lessons of the war have shown that raids against target more than 500 miles away have generally been unprofitable or of limited effect. Continuous and large-scale bombing raids are generally the only kind that militarily matter, and heavy and continuous bombing – day after day, night after night – against targets much in excess of 500 miles distance are not yet practical
The special pleaders for air power who have urged that a single type of plane – such as the heavy bomber or the long-range fighter - would “win the war,” find no encouragement in Mr. Warner’s article.
“The airplane that accepts the handicap of carrying bombs will always be at a disadvantage as against the machine that carries only offensive armament and the crew to operate it,” he wrote. “The airplane specialized for a single function will continue to maintain superiority in that function over the machine designed with some other objective, or with a multiplicity of objectives.”
Air power quite clearly is more than a single type of plane; it is all types, plus thoroughly trained air crews and ground crews – seven to fifteen men per plane; plus a great nexus of airfields and ground facilities; plus anti-aircraft guns and ground troops in considerable numbers to protect the airfields; plus surface transport for bombs and gasoline and other supplies; plus industrial facilities without end to provide planes, engines, and replacements; plus training fields for personnel.
Part III – April 13, 1942
The influence of air power upon war was again demonstrated last week over Western Europe, in the Indian Ocean and in Burma.
The operations in the various theatres of action illustrate the three principal ways in which the plane can be used. Perhaps the most spectacular has been the use of the plane in conjunction with, or in support of, naval forces against naval forces of the enemy. Another principal use is in conjunction with, or support of, land forces against land forces of the enemy.
The third use, which some writers have called “pure air warfare,” typified by the British and Germans’ exchange of bombing raids – is in independent missions, not against the enemy’s armed forces, but against enemy industrial centers, cities, railroads, and other facilities on the Home Front, against the ability and will of the enemy people to fight.
The role of the plane used in conjunction with land power is now rather clear. Air superiority, or at least air equality, is now a sine qua non for success in land fighting. There have been some few exceptions to this generalization, where terrain, the lop-sided superiority of one side in land forces, superior tank strength, or other special factors temporarily nullified – as in the early days of the Burma and Bataan campaigns, and in periods of the last Libyan campaign – the enemy’s air superiority.
The plane-tank team has spearheaded the German conquests in Europe and has revolutionized war; the plane, used as flying artillery and for “vertical envelopment” – with parachute troops and air-borne infantry – is indispensable to modern armies; indeed, used in this role, it is one of the two principal weapons of land warfare.
Used in ”pure air warfare,” the plane has by no means as yet reached its ultimate evolution, nor have Douhet’s and Mitchell’s theories received their final test. Range, speed and power will all increase, and in future years and future wars the devastating attacks of the plane – unless some defense is found against it, which is probable – may in themselves force decisions without the assistance of land or sea units.
But that day is not yet. Today the technical limitations of the plane make most bombing raids at distances much in excess of 1,500 miles from base to target uneconomical and militarily inefficient; indeed, bombing raids at distances of much more than 500 miles from base to target only occasionally pay military dividends.
Continuous and heavy bombing assaults – day after day, night after night – are the only kind that can hope to win a decision in “pure air warfare” and no nation today has enough heavy, long-range bombers or other facilities to keep intensive raids of this type going over great distances. They will get them, the United States probably first. Bombing ranges will increase as the war continues and in time, perhaps in future wars, bombers will shuttle back and forth across the oceans as they now leap across the English Channel.
But we have to fight this war with the planes we now have and are building and with the best we can design, not with blueprints of the future. And the best are not good enough to win a war by themselves, although they are so good they will be a major factor, perhaps the preponderant factor (but not the only factor), in tipping the scales toward victory.
Part IV – April 15, 1942
Wings over the sea have modified Mahan’s traditional concept of sea power. Sea power is now a three-dimensional element; it is idle to talk of control of the sea unless one also controls the air above it and the depths beneath the surface.
Air power shares with sea power the function of controlling ocean lines of communication. The two are indivisible elements of modern global power. Either is incomplete without the other.
The old argument that “planes can sink ships” is as much beside the point as it ever was. No proof of that statement was ever needed – though, for the doubting Thomases the headlines have offered redundant proof. But sunken ships – no matter how sunk – no more invalidate the concept of the ship as a commerce carrier and man-of-war than wrecked planes invalidate the concept of the plane as a commerce carrier and aerial man-of-war.
Any ship ever built, no matter how strong, can be sunk by air attack if enough force can be concentrated against it. Planes and fleets of planes can be destroyed if enough force can be concentrated against them.
The air extremists have now dismissed navies and merchant navies as obsolescent, if not obsolete, just as the surface-ship conservatives in the past blocked the full development of naval air power. Neither is right. The plane is a commerce carrier and an aerial man-of-war; but, despite the predictions of a few air extremists, it probably will never totally replace – certainly not within the foreseeable future – the surface ship in either function.
The quantity of air freight carried will unquestionably increase in the future, but today and tomorrow and probably throughout our generation the red-leaded tramp and the humble, smoking freighter will continue to carry the great majority of the world’s bulk freight. Heavy machinery, heavy munitions, wheat, manganese, railroad rolling stock, crude rubber, oil, gasoline – indeed, nearly all of the important international commodities except those items relatively light in weight and small in bulk – will certainly continue to be carried by surface carriers.
In the same way it is certain that aerial men-of-war, at least for the duration of this war, will continue to supplement, but never to replace, surface men-of-war. Neither can exercise effective control of the sea without the other.
What form the surface man-of-war must take to meet the menace from the skies and to adjust itself to the new meaning of sea power is a different question It is already possible to discover part of the answer to that question in past events.
Today the capital ship, or principal ship of surface navies, may well be the aircraft carrier, in so far as its actual operational use or value is concerned, yet battleships – the new ones just launched and the old ones that are the heritage of another war and another era of naval thought – still possess primary strategical importance. For the battleship is the backbone of the “fleet in being” school of naval strategy; so long as any belligerent possesses a battleship fleet, it will hold in reserve a powerful potential threat to its enemies.
This is in no way better illustrated than by contemporary events. It was the battleship that was the target of the British at Matapan and Taranto. It was the battleship against which the Japanese concentrated the full force of their attack at Pearl Harbor. It was the loss of the Prince of Wales and Repulse that upset the balance of naval power in the Southwestern Pacific. It was the battleship against which the British concentrated such efforts and which the Germans strove so ardently to save when the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau escaped up-Channel.
It was the battleship against which great air power and great sea power were concentrated. It was the battleship Bismarck – capital ship of the new sea power, not of an age that is gone – that withstood, before sinking, a minimum of seven and a maximum of ten torpedo hits and scores of hits from 16-inch and 14-inch shells and smaller projectiles. And it is the battleship that the navies of our enemies are carefully conserving for possible use as their trump card in the war at sea.
Part V – April 16 1942
As the bitter and unending struggle for control of the oceans – the struggle that may decide this war – continued during the week, there was slowly emerging from the crucible of conflict some faint outline of the new sea power.
It was an outline that was still blurred, for the technical lessons of this war are by no means ended and the weapons of defense – particularly against air attack – have not yet caught up with the weapons of offense.
But it is plain that the influence of air power upon war has greatly emphasized the importance of the aircraft carrier. It is the carrier, accompanied by fast cruisers and destroyers, and organized in a striking group or task force, that has been the major naval factor of the war in the Pacific. Today it is the carrier that is tactically the most important naval type. This is true, not only because of the plane launched from the carrier deck greatly extends the hitting range of navies, but because the carriers of our fleet and their protective light forces are faster than any of our battleships – even including the new North Carolina and Washington – and modern naval tactics demand speed that our battleships do not possess. It is true because for the time being, at least, the torpedo and the bomb, rather than the gun, are the principal naval weapons.
Yet when all this is said, the battleship – even the old ones that compose the bulk of our own and Japan’s battleship fleet – retains considerable strategic importance, though it is a potential importance and one that may never be realized in this war. Yet both the battleship and the carrier are in an evolutionary state. Naval design and naval tactics are in flux, violent flux; changes of greater import than any since the substitution of steam for sail are now in the making. The capital ship of tomorrow will certainly not be either the carrier of the battleship of today.
The battleship, if it is to survive even in vestigial form, must meet the menace of the torpedo to its unarmored underwater hull (the Bismarck class has come closer to doing this than any other, but the problem is not solved) and the carrier of yesterday and today is slowly becoming an armored ship with side belt and armored decks, and a thoroughly sub-divided, compartmentalized underwater hull. Thus, the two types – battleship and carrier – are in one sense merging to make the capital (principal) ship of tomorrow. The question still remaining for decision is whether the gun will regain its former ascendancy as a principal naval weapon, or whether the plane-carried weapons – torpedo and bomb – will retain their present ascendancy. The capital ship of tomorrow may well be the heavily armored carrier equipped with medium three-fourth-sized guns (six inch to eleven inch), though many designers believe that compromise types of this sort are always unsuccessful. The two types may therefore continue in separate and distinct evolution, with the new battleship a heavily armored ship of somewhat lesser gun power, but with far greater anti-aircraft protection, far greater speed, and far better protection than today’s battleships, and with the new carrier larger, and more heavily protected.
Viewed against this perspective it seems clear that the proportion of carriers to other ships should be very greatly increased; the thirteen regular carriers we are building, plus the sixteen to thirty auxiliary carriers we are converting from merchant ships, should be many times increased. The construction time of carriers has been greatly decreased, and the giant battleships that we had planned do not now have comparable priority. It is questionable, moreover, whether battleships of such size and gun power are worth the cost and effort; it is more probable that the design of tomorrow’s battleship should be modified. But certain it is that that sea power that possesses in goodly number both the new carrier and the new battleship – regardless of which is the capital ship of the new navy – will win the struggle of the seas.
And certain it is that the surface ship is not only indispensable for control of the seas, but without it the United States can never develop in this war a decisive offensive
The war has shown the smashing tactical strength of air power, used independently or cooperatively. But the United States lies behind two oceans – and we cannot hope in this war to develop a bombing offensive across those oceans. Defensively, against any forces coming across the seas to attack this country, American air power can be used to great strategic purpose. But today, given the limitations of the plane, air power can develop a decisive strategic offensive, particularly against Japan, only when used in conjunction with sea power. It is around the plane-ship team that we must build our hopes of controlling the seas – and consequently our hopes of eventual victory.