Command of the Air [Giulio Douhet, Charles a. Gabriel] on *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Reprint of the translation by staff of the. The Command of the Air is the greatest military treatise on air war ever written – a dogmatic manifesto promising victory through strategic. Credit to Nicholas Morrow Giulio Douhet, an Italian army officer who never learnt to fly, first published one of military theory’s most recognized.

| Author: | Tygobei Kalabar |
| Country: | Guinea-Bissau |
| Language: | English (Spanish) |
| Genre: | Software |
| Published (Last): | 2 February 2004 |
| Pages: | 334 |
| PDF File Size: | 6.92 Mb |
| ePub File Size: | 14.71 Mb |
| ISBN: | 333-7-67724-710-3 |
| Downloads: | 2131 |
| Price: | Free* [*Free Regsitration Required] |
| Uploader: | Tozil |
![]()
In such a case, an air force should logically be accorded equal importance with the army and navy and bear the same relation to them as they now bear to each other. Crowl Annapolis, Maryland Gen. Twelve years ago, 6 when the very first airplanes began to hedge- hop between field and air, hardly what we would call flying giulo all today, I began to preach the value of command of the air.
Air Force Art Collection in The most effective method would be to destroy the eggs and the nests systematically, because, strictly speaking, no species of bird can remain continuously in flight without alighting. The construction of aerial bombs does not call for high-grade steel, other special metals, nor for pre- cision work. And everything I argued for then has come dpuhet just as I predicted it in This supposition is consistent with present practice.
After this point the curve drops off abruptly in a new direction, breaking off all continuity with the past.
Command of the Air – University of Alabama Press
Nonetheless, even a false prophet often preaches partial truth. In like manner, pursuit squadrons under army command have the specific duty of policing the sky above the land surface; those under navy command, of policing the sky over the sea surface. The greatest advantage of the offensive is having the initiative in planning operations— that is, being free to choose the point 16 The Command of The Air of attack and able to shift its maximum striking forces; whereas the enemy, on the defensive and not knowing the direction of the attack, is compelled to spread his forces thinly to cover all possible points of attack along his line of defense, relying upon being able to shift them in time to the sector actually attacked as soon as the intentions of the offensive are known.
So far, an aerial force able to command the air does not exist anywhere in the world. Maximum bombing power 2.
Giulio Douhet
Operations of June 17 pp. For this reason air power is a weapon superlatively adapted to offensive operations, because it strikes suddenly and giuulio the enemy no time to parry the blow by calling up reinforcements.
But in order to be effective, these dispositions for defense must provide means of warfare suited to the character and form future wars may assume. Neither anti-aircraft guns nor fighter aircraft could provide effective defence, and resources devoted to them drained strength from the decisive arm: Since they were the fastest planes and designed for aerial acrobatics, hence the most difficult to handle, they were assigned to the most daring of the pilots.
The result is war. Giulio Douhet was a prophet. The Causes of the Conflict p. And it is certain that if the armies engaged in that struggle had been armed only with muzzle-loading muskets, we should have seen neither reinforced concrete trenches nor barbed-wire entangle- ments; and the war would have been decided in a few months.

If we stop to think that upon this necessary quantity of active material depends the number of bombers to a unit, thf things being equal, we can easily see how great an advantage it would be to make use of the most efficient active materials. If we look at the map in “The Martyrdom of Treviso” which shows the distribution of tge hits and the photographic reproductions of the damage done, we can readily see that if those 75 or 80 tons of bombs, correctly appor- tioned among explosive, incendiary, and poison-gas types, had been dropped in one day, Treviso would have been completely destroyed and very few of her inhabitants saved.
Viulio, a douheh years ago, we first encountered the term “flying service,” it seemed a real triumph for the new instrument of war. The future must be approached from a new angle. They were used primarily to shoot down enemy ma- chines on observation patrol or directing artillery fire, and to defend important centers from bombardment. What could a navy do when it could no longer take refuge in its own ports, when its bases were burned or blown up, its arsenals and auxiliaries destroyed?
And even if her guns could fire at such an angle, it would be almost impossible to hit a fast-moving plane diving almost vertically— a plane can do just that— at the ship. Considering the nature of our boundaries, made up for the most part of high mountain peaks, we need warplanes with ceilings high enough to surmount the entire Alpine range at any point without difficulty; which means ceilings between 6, and 7, meters.
Dissertation, University of Oklahoma, Fighters had the problem of getting aloft and finding their enemy before damage could be yhe. Very few possibilities of this new instrument of war were recognized when it first appeared. In our own lifetime we have seen how rhe an influence the introduction of small-caliber, rapid-fire guns— to- gether with barbed wire— has had on land warfare, and how the submarine changed the nature of sea warfare.
In his second edition of The Hte of the Air he maintained such aviation was “useless, superfluous and harmful”.

Douhet’s theories about forcing the population to start a revolution, when subjected to practical application, were shown to be ineffective. Chemistry, which has already provided us with the most powerful of explosives, will now furnish us with poison gases even more potent, and bacteri- ology may give us even more formidable ones.
In my opinion, the normal radius of action of a bombing plane today should be between and kilometers.
Giulio Douhet – Wikipedia
The function of pursuit planes, then, was to seek out other types of enemy plane and to protect their own planes from enemy pursuers.
The Material Preparation—France and Belgium pp.
The entire population was in the front line of an air war and they could be terrorized with urban bombing. A thou- sand such planes, estimating the cost of each at a million lire, would be a round billion lire, or about the cost of a single dreadnought. He is the one who seeks battle, who makes the attack. Thus the surface of the earth gradually became covered with lines of easy transit intersect- ing at various points, at others separated by zones less easy of access, sometimes impassable.
What could an army do faced with an offensive power like that, its lines of communication cut, its supply depots burned or blown up, its arsenals and auxiliaries destroyed?
