battle’. They envisaged tank-heavy striking forces moving far and fast into the enemy’s
rear. Alas, Stalin’s purge of the officer corps in 1937–9 put a stop to radical ideas for the
exploitation of mechanized forces: at least 30,000 out of a total officer corps of 75,000
were executed or imprisoned. When the Germans invaded on 22 June 1941, much of the
Red Army was caught out of position geographically and it had far from recovered from
the damage to its effectiveness wrought by Stalin in his wholesale military purge.
Air power
Unlike the tank, the half-track and the truck, aircraft possessed a genuinely revolutionary
potential. At least, that is what some theorists maintained. The Great War effected an
acceleration of technical and tactical advance in the air, such that by 191 8 the shape of
wars to come seemed to have been revealed. The air power RMA took different forms in
different countries. National choices among air power alternatives reflected differences
in resources, in geostrategic context and in strength of existing army and navy doctrines
of warfare. Following a brief dalliance with the strategic bomber, Nazi Germany decided
that it lacked the industrial strength, the technology and really the strategic need to build
a long-range bomber force. As a result, the new Luftwaffe constructed an outstanding
force of short- and medium-range bombers, as well as dive bombers. However, British
and French observers somehow failed to notice the blatant deficiencies of the German
bomber force, and especially its unsuitability as an instrument of coercion in the strategic
bombing role. In the 1930s, and particularly at the time of Munich in September 193 8 ,
both the British and the French governments were intimidated by the latent menace of
German air attacks on London and Paris. An important reason why Britain at last elected
to say ‘no’ to Hitler in 1939 was that it believed it had constructed an effective answer to
the threat of the ‘knockout blow’ from the air. Air rearmament favouring fighter aircraft
together with the technological marvel of radar, all bound together in the world’s first air-
defence system, promised credibly to neutralize, or at least severely blunt, the potential
strategic effect of the German bomber force.
Only two countries in the interwar decades subscribed to the theory, then the doctrine,
of strategic air power: Britain and the United States. Germany, France and Russia all took
an understandably continental view of air power. They intended that their air forces
should assist their armies in what today is known as ‘joint’ warfare. Just how important
aircraft would be as a factor in war on land and at sea remained to be demonstrated
convincingly. However, the theorists of strategic air power did not offer a concept of joint
warfare, which means land–air or sea–air cooperation. Instead, they maintained that air
power alone could win future wars, and that most of the resources expended on armies
and navies would be wasted.
The best known, certainly the most coherent, of the theorists of strategic air power
was an Italian general, Giulio Douhet. His theory insisted that the first duty of an air
force was to win command of the air – the title of his 1921 book (Douhet, 1972) –
an accomplishment to be secured by destroying an enemy’s air force on the ground.
Once the enemy could not threaten from the air, one would be at strategic liberty to
assault its civilian population with poison gas, incendiaries and high explosives dropped
from planes. As a result of this coercive bombardment, or perhaps just the threat of it,
the enemy’s public would demand that the government surrender, or at least seek terms
118 War, peace and international relations