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War
전쟁(戰爭)
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The Theory and Conduct of War |
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3 THE CONDUCT
OF WAR
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Powered aircraft
were first used in war in 1911, by the Italians against the Turks near Tripoli,
but it was not until the Great War of 1914-18 that their use became widespread.
At first, aircraft were unarmed and employed for reconnaissance, serving
basically as extensions of the eyes of the ground commander. Soon, however, the
need to deny such reconnaissance to the enemy led to air-to-air combat in which
each side tried to gain superiority in the air. Fighter planes were armed with
fixed, forward-firing machine guns that allowed the pilot to aim his entire
aircraft at the enemy, and the effective range of these weapons (no more than
about 200 yards) meant that the first aerial combat took place at very short
range. (see also air
warfare, air power, aerial
reconnaissance, fighter aircraft ) |
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By the second year of the war fighter
tactics emerged on all sides emphasizing basic concepts that, with modification,
remained applicable through the jet age. First was the surprise attack; from the
very beginning of aerial warfare in World War I,
"jumping" or "bouncing" unsuspecting victims accounted for
more kills than did the spectacular aerobatics of dogfighting. Because a pilot's
only warning system was the naked eye, attacking fighters, whenever possible,
approached from the rear or dove out of the sun, where they could not be seen.
The German ace Max Immelmann, in exploiting the superior abilities of his Fokker
Eindeker to climb and dive quickly, helped expand aerial combat from the
horizontal into the vertical dimension. Immelmann developed what became known as
the Immelmann turn, in which an attacking fighter dove past the enemy craft,
pulled sharply up into a vertical climb until it was above the target again,
then turned hard to the side and down so that it could dive a second time.
Fighters operated at least in pairs, flying 50 to 60 yards apart, so that the
wingman could protect the leader's rear. Flying speed averaged 100 miles per
hour, and communication was by hand signaling, rocking the wings, and firing
coloured flares. |
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The next role to emerge for military
aircraft was ground attack, in which planes, by
strafing with machine guns and dropping rudimentary bombs, aided an advance on
the ground, helped cover a retreat, or simply harrassed the enemy. By the late
stages of the war, ground-attack aircraft had forced almost all large-scale
troop movements to be carried out at night or in bad weather. |
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By war's end a fourth vision of air
power arose--that of an independent air force attacking the enemy far from the
front lines, the purpose being to destroy essential elements of the enemy's war
capability by bombing factories, transportation and supply networks, and even
centres of government. This role, never effectively implemented in World War I,
was spurred largely by the German air attacks on London. Carried out at first by
zeppelin airships, the bombing was later done by aircraft such as the Gotha
bomber, which, by flying at night and often as high as 20,000 feet (forcing the
crew to breathe bottled oxygen through a tube in the mouth), operated beyond the
ceiling of many defensive fighters. |
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Thus, the basic roles that aircraft
would play in modern war were presaged in World War I: reconnaissance, air
superiority, tactical ground support, and strategic bombing. |
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The all-metal monoplane represented a
huge increase in performance and firepower over the aircraft of World
War I, and the effects were first seen in fighter tactics. |
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Airspeeds of the new fighters jumped to
more than 400 miles per hour, and some planes could operate at altitudes of
30,000 feet. Wing-mounted machine guns and aerial cannon were lethal at 600
yards, and pilots communicated with one another and the ground via the radio
telephone. These developments--especially the greater speeds--led Germans
participating in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39)
to fly their Me-109 fighters in loose, line-abreast Rotten,
or pairs, about 200 yards apart. Two of these Rotten
formed a Schwarm, and this flexible
formation--called "finger-four" by English-speaking airmen--was
eventually adopted by all the major air forces in World War II. |
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Attacking out of the sun was still
favoured, both because it preserved the element of surprise and because diving
added speed. An alert defending fighter pilot, however, might use his attacker's
speed to his own advantage by executing a scissors maneuver, in which he would
turn sharply one way and then the other, reducing his forward motion so that the
speeding attacker would overshoot and find the intended victim on his tail.
Tight maneuvers such as the scissors were most effective when attempted with
such agile fighters as the British Spitfire and the Japanese "Zero."
Fighters such as the Me-109 and the U.S. P-47
Thunderbolt, which were noted for their speed, best escaped by diving hard and
pulling back up when the attacker had been shaken. |
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A diving maneuver called the split-S,
half-roll, or Abschwung was frequently
executed against bombers. Heavily armed fighters such as the British Hurricane
or the German Fw-190, instead of approaching from the side or from below and to
the rear, would attack head-on, firing until the last moment and then rolling
just under the big planes and breaking hard toward the ground. The object was to
break up the bomber formations so that individual ships could be set upon and
destroyed. |
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Defensive fighter squadrons were
directed by radar control stations on the ground
to the vicinity of the bombers, at which point the pilots would rely once more
upon the naked eye. This was adequate for day fighting, when enemy bombers could
be seen miles away, but at night the pilots had to get within a few hundred
yards before spotting a bomber's silhouette against the sky or against the
conflagration on the ground. For this reason, night fighting was ineffective
until radar was installed in the planes themselves. This beginning of the age of
electronic warfare required a novel teamwork between pilot and navigator, and it
was best carried out in two-seat aircraft such as the British Beaufighter and Mosquito
and the German Ju-88 and Me-110. Some of these
long-range, twin-engined night fighters also served as "intruders,"
slipping into enemy bomber formations, following them home, and shooting them
down over their own airfields. |
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The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe,
was configured primarily to fly in support of ground forces, and, in the Spanish
Civil War and the first years of World War II, the Ju-87
Stuka dive-bomber was its principal ground-attack craft. In a typical Stuka
attack, several planes would circle above the target, then one plane after
another would peel off to dive almost vertically before releasing its bombs,
pulling up, and returning to the circle to dive again. In the Pacific Theatre,
carrier-based dive-bombers such as the U.S. Dauntless and Helldiver and the
Japanese Type 99 "Val" applied this maneuver to naval warfare.
Dropping straight down from a cruising altitude of about 15,000 feet and
releasing their bombs from below 2,000 feet, these planes destroyed or damaged
many battleships and aircraft carriers. During the assault phase of amphibious
landings, U.S. dive-bombers helped compensate for the flat trajectories of naval
guns in disabling Japanese shore defenses. Because dive-bombers generally had
top speeds in level flight of less than 300 miles per hour, they were most
effective where air superiority had been secured by fighters such as the Zero or
the U.S. F6F Hellcat. Spitfire pilots of the RAF
made such short work of unescorted Stukas that they referred to these one-sided
dogfights as "Stuka parties." |
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A Lockheed P-38 Lightning
By
courtesy of Lockheed Corporation
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Ground attack was most devastating when
conducted by fighter-bombers, which were often converted air-superiority
fighters. Taking advantage of their speed, British Spitfires
and Mosquitos and U.S. P-51 Mustangs and P-38
Lightnings (see photograph), flying very low to
avoid radar detection, bombed and strafed countless airfields and infantry
columns. Pilots of the P-51, after escorting bombers into Germany (see section
immediately below), often freely attacked ground targets while racing back to
England at treetop level. In North Africa in 1942-43, the Royal
Air Force (RAF) perfected close-air support by concentrating its air
power under a centralized control that was exercised jointly by the senior
ground and air commanders in the theatre of operations. This system, by
concentrating maximum force at decisive points as the desert campaigns unfolded,
achieved a flexibility of employment that later emerged as the central tenet of
air power. |
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World War II saw massive bombing of
military targets and major cities. The big, slow-moving bombers operated in
formations (sometimes numbering 1,000 or more) that were intended not to evade
enemy defenses but to beat them back or simply swamp them with numbers. |
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The key to bombing during the day was to
provide an escort of fighters adequate to turn
back defending fighters. (Antiaircraft artillery was of little hazard to bombers
flying above 20,000 feet.) During the Battle of Britain
(1940-41), a typical formation of German He-111
and Do-217 bombers would cross the English
Channel at about 15,000 feet. Close escort would be provided by Fw-190s weaving
in and out of the formation, while high and top cover would be provided by
Me-109s stacked behind the bombers up to about 25,000 feet. The added height
would enable the Me-109s to jump the RAF's Spitfires and Hurricanes while they
were still climbing. Even more effective were fighter sweeps, in which Me-109s
would leave the bombers and attack distant airfields before the defending
fighters could get off the ground. But the Luftwaffe, in one of the major
miscalculations of the aerial war, usually confined its fast, deadly fighters to
a closer escort of the bomber formations. |
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The U.S. Army Air Force learned the
value of fighter sweeps in its long-range daylight bombing of Germany, but not
before placing an unfounded faith in the capacity of its B-17
Flying Fortress and B-24 Liberator bombers to
defend themselves with their own heavy armament. In late 1942 and early 1943
these bombers began to fly in what became known as the "combat box"
formation, devised by Colonel (later General) Curtis E.
LeMay. In such a formation, a single combat wing of about 48 bombers
would be divided into three groups, with the lead group flying at 20,000 feet
and the others trailing in echelon at intervals of 500 to 1,000 yards and at
slightly higher altitudes. Within each group would be three squadrons, composed
of two elements of three aircraft each, and the bombers would be staggered in
such a way as to give their guns as free a field of fire as possible to cover
themselves and their fellows. |
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The defensive formation was sorely
tested in 1943, when, flying beyond the radius of the fighter escorts then
available (less than 200 miles), U.S. bombers suffered losses too severe to be
borne regularly. Activity over Germany was curtailed until the arrival in force
the next year of P-51s equipped with droppable external fuel tanks that enabled
the fighters to fly escort the 1,000 miles to Berlin. With enough fighters to
allow one escort for every bomber, some P-51s were cut loose to sweep the
airspace hundreds of miles away. In this way, the Luftwaffe was finally
overwhelmed. |
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Night bombing relieved bombers of the
fighter threat (at least until effective radar was installed in planes), but it
presented difficulties in finding and hitting targets. With visual navigation
impossible except on the clearest moonlit nights, electronic aids became vital.
In the blitz of London and other cities, the Luftwaffe used a system called Knickebein,
in which bombers followed one radio beam broadcast from ground stations on the
continent until that beam was intersected by another beam at a point over the
target. Lead bombers dropped incendiary bombs, which set fires that guided other
bombers carrying high explosives as well as more incendiaries. (see also night
fighter) |
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The RAF used two radar-beam systems
called Gee and Oboe to guide its Lancaster and Halifax bombers to cities on the
Continent. In addition, the bombers carried a radar mapping device, code-named H2S,
that displayed reasonably detailed pictures of coastal cities such as Hamburg,
where a clear contrast between land and water allowed navigators to find the
target areas. In order to "spoof" the Germans' radar warning system,
RAF planes dispensed "window," which consisted of clouds of tinfoil
strips that masked the bombers' movements. (see also H2S) |
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Because Japan had no radar, U.S. B-29
Superfortresses did not face dangerous opposition in their long-range assaults
on the Japanese home islands beginning in November 1944. Nevertheless,
unpredictable weather over the target areas, plus the action of the jet stream
on bombs dropped from 30,000 feet, made high-altitude bombing imprecise. In
response, LeMay ordered low-level bombing runs. Flying at night to avoid enemy
defenses, B-29s dropping incendiary bombs from 5,000 to 9,000 feet devastated
more than 60 cities between March and July 1945. |
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Toward the end of World War II, the
first operational jet fighter, the German Me-262,
outflew the best Allied escorts while attacking bomber formations. This
introduced the jet age, in which aircraft soon flew at more than twice the speed
of sound (741 miles per hour at sea level and 659 miles per hour at 36,000 feet)
and easily climbed to altitudes of 50,000 feet. At the same time, advanced
electronics removed the task of early warning from the pilot's eye, and guided
missiles extended the range of aerial combat, at least in theory, to beyond
visual range. |
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Flying at supersonic or near-supersonic
speeds, often climbing into the thin air of the stratosphere, jet fighters were
far less maneuverable than their propeller-driven predecessors. This made
necessary a formation even more flexible than the finger-four. One solution was
the fluid-four, in which two fighters flying 300 yards apart would be trailed by
another pair flying 2,000 to 3,000 yards to the side, 600 yards back, and 1,000
yards above. Separation of a mile or more would allow the trailing pair to cover
the lead pair from surprise attack. The basic fighting element remained the
pair, often favouring a "loose deuce" formula in which either pilot,
depending upon the combat situation, could adopt the role of lead fighter while
the other covered as wingman. |
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Because jet fighters had excellent
climbing but poor turning ability, fighting in the vertical plane became more
important than ever. The scissors maneuver acquired a vertical variation, in
which two fighters would execute a series of climbing turns or barrel rolls,
each with the aim of slipping behind the plane that climbed too fast.
Speed--usually the greatest asset of the fighter--could easily become a
liability, and many maneuvers were developed to preserve its advantage. One such
maneuver was the "high-speed yo-yo," in which an attacking fighter, in
pursuing a more maneuverable opponent in a tight circle, would pull up while
turning; this would reduce his speed, allowing him to remain within the circle
while placing him in a position to swoop down from above. |
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Supersonic speed actually accounted for
a tiny fraction of flying time, since igniting the jet's afterburner could
consume a fighter's fuel in minutes. Military cruising speed was almost always
subsonic, with the afterburner being used only for pursuit or escape. In fact,
fuel became such a pressing concern in jet warfare that fighters often could
spend no more time flying combat air patrol than they spent flying to and from
the patrol area. |
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Beginning in the 1960s, radar-directed
antiaircraft weapons proved so dangerous that they threatened to sweep aircraft
from the sky. By flying low and fast, jinking (making quick, irregular changes
in direction and speed), or diving in a steep spiral, aircraft often succeeded
in evading these weapons, but only at the price of spoiling the mission. Air
defenses had to be destroyed; in order to do this, aircraft had not only to
outfly and outgun the weapons but also to foil their guidance mechanisms with electronic
countermeasures (ECM). |
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In the Vietnam
War the North Vietnamese deployed a formidable air-defense system based
on Soviet-made anti-aircraft guns and SA-2 surface-to-air missiles (SAMs). In
response, the U.S. Navy and Air Force mounted complex air strikes employing
aircraft of multiple types and capabilities. One such operation might begin with
F-4 Phantom II fighter-bombers entering the target area first to drop clouds of
radar-reflecting metallic fibres called chaff. These would be followed by F-105
Thunderchiefs modified into "Wild Weasels" by the addition of radar
homing and warning devices designed to jam some enemy radars and locate others.
The Wild Weasels would guide other F-105s armed with radar-homing missiles,
which would destroy the radars and SAM sites and clear the target area for the
main strike force. |
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That air warfare in the jet age had
effectively become electronic warfare was confirmed by the Arab-Israeli
War of October 1973. In the first two days of that conflict, Israel lost
40 aircraft to Egyptian and Syrian air defenses. In June 1982, however, the Israeli
air force displayed a new mastery of tactics in the electronic age by destroying
Syrian SAM sites in al-Biqa' Valley, Lebanon. The attack began with a
wide array of ECM equipment--Boeing 707s modified into electronic warfare
aircraft, E-2C Hawkeye early warning aircraft, and A-4 Skyhawks flying
reconnaissance--to confuse and deceive Syrian communications and the radars of
Syrian SA-2, SA-3, SA-6, and SA-8 SAM units. Small remotely piloted vehicles
were sent over the valley; when the Syrians fired on these, Israeli F-4s spotted
the SAM sites and destroyed them with radar-homing missiles and cluster bombs.
Israeli F-15 Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons then destroyed the Syrian air
force, downing more than 80 MiG-21s and MiG-23s. |
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The importance of ECM in long-range
bombing became apparent in 1972, when U.S. B-52
Stratofortresses struck targets in North Vietnam. By flying under escort at
night and at about 30,000 feet, the B-52s were reasonably safe from MiG fighters
and antiaircraft guns, and Wild Weasel and chaff-dropping aircraft helped
suppress the SA-2s. But the most important ECM was provided by jammers built
into the bombers. These flew in cells of three in order to create
"blankets" of radar suppression that largely foiled the SAMs. |
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The next generation of variable-wing
bombers, such as the U.S. B-1 and the Soviet Tu-26
Backfire, were designed to avoid more sensitive electronic warning
systems by penetrating enemy airspaces at extremely low altitude. Flying in
groups was to be abandoned, since the large radar cross section and radio
communication of several bombers would be easily detected. Instead, the new
bombers were designed for solo missions and carried standoff weapons such as
nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which could be launched beyond the range of SAMs
guarding the target areas. (D.MacI.) |
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