At the same time, the war on the ground had run into the sand, the front had stabilized, and there would be only insignificant advances and retreats until the armistice. As Jean de Bloch had already foreseen before the war, the tremendous firepower of modern artillery favoured the defensive, and soldiers began to shelter in fortresses and trenches and behind barbed wire. The military doctrines of all the warring powers, however, continued to promote the tactical offensive as the only way to victory on the battlefield: ‘to win is to advance’, in the words of the Italian tactical manual of 1915.19 The other high commands followed more or less the same line.20 The essential challenge now was to ‘motivate’ soldiers to emerge regularly from their trenches, simply to get killed by the tens of thousands by machine guns and artillery fire.21 Heroically braving death now meant consenting to being butchered like a sheep.
The myth of aerial combat emerged at a time when the absence of any tactic of air warfare was combined with military despair: on the one hand, aerial reconnaissance gave rise to combats which were initially duels between two aircraft that encountered one another more or less by chance; on the other hand, all attempts by ground troops to break the front failed in the face of deadly fire. In these conditions, salvation could only be hoped for with a later development, the ability to overfly the no man’s land between the trenches and in this way break the paralysis that had seized the battlefield.22 The infantryman had no better friend than the earth to protect them from a danger that might arrive from anywhere at any time: he pressed against it, it welcomed him, and for a few seconds gave him the sentiment of being protected from mortar shells, a situation well described by Erich Maria Remarque in All Quiet on the Western Front:
The earth is more important to the soldier than to anybody else. When he presses himself to the earth, long and violently, when he urges himself deep into it with his face and with his limbs, under fire and with the fear of death upon him, then the earth is his only friend, his brother, his mother, he groans out his terror and screams into its silence and safety, the earth absorbs it all and gives him another ten seconds of life, ten seconds to run, then takes hold of him again – sometimes for ever.23
Aviation thus crystallized a series of dichotomies: between earth and sky, man and machine, above and below, movement and paralysis, boldness and fear, power and impotence.24 The experience of trench warfare was more than men were capable of enduring. They began to fantasize the arrival of a saviour to redeem the earthly creature clinging to the soil, revenge him, and raise him to the stars; the aviator fitted this role.
The airman, for his part, can know, the airman is capable of so many things. He is superior to the enemy, or rather, he is a being of superior order, a further step in the slow evolution of that vertebrate we call man. And while he is there, rooted in the earth – for where to take refuge from the bullets that he only hears whistle? – while his ankles are stuck in the ground, while water fills his boots, while he is there stretched like a marten ready to leap, an idea takes hold of him: ‘No, it is not the sky that is the obstacle, it is the earth, this dunghill on which we are born, on which we are condemned to crawl until we die and fall back into it.’
In another great novel of the First World War, Outside Verdun, Arnold Zweig sums up his Lieutenant Eberhard Kroysing’s delirium of aerial omnipotence:
And in that moment he reached a firm decision: he’d become an airman. Just wait until this mess was over and everything was cleared up, until an iron fist had knocked the French flat for daring to stick their nose into German territory, and a certain someone would throw in this sapper business and join the air force. Crawling around in the dirt was good enough for the likes of Süssmann and Bertin, men with no fighting instinct, no fire in their punches, old men, He, however, would metamorphose into a stone dragon with claws, a tail and fiery breath, which smoked little critters out of their hideaways – all the Niggls and other such creatures. He’d have a fragile box beneath him, two broad wings and a whirling propeller, and hey ho, up above the clouds he’d soar like a Sunday lark – admittedly not to sing songs but to drop bombs on the people crawling around below, to splatter them with gas and bullets as part of a duel from which only one person returns.25
Better than any other sources, literature makes visible the dichotomies that structured not only perception but also, to a large degree, strategic and doctrinal thinking. It also shows us another use of aviation of which the hagiographic sources only rarely speak, being in flagrant contradiction with the chivalrous image of the duel: bombing.26 There are exceptions, however, such as the ‘Red Baron’, Manfred von Richthofen, who describes the pleasure he felt in dropping bombs and machine-gunning humans on the ground.27 It is clear that Richthofen, at least, saw himself not as a knight but rather as a soldier practising his trade of killing without reservation.28
Given the rather unsuccessful results of the first bombs dropped before 1914, one may naturally wonder why the idea of aerial bombing was not dismissed right from the start. The answer is a double one, relating to two types of bombing, ‘tactical’ and ‘strategic’. Tactical bombing was first practised empirically, with bombs dropped more or less randomly. It soon appeared that planes could be used as an extension of artillery, to strike targets situated far behind the front, inaccessible to the largest of guns. Since military success on the front depended largely on rail communication and the ability to rapidly bring up men and materiel, the idea of attacking the logistic infrastructure behind the front – storage facilities, railway stations, encampments – was a logical conclusion. Nonetheless, the difficulties in striking precisely were underestimated. To take just one example, between 1 March and 20 June 1915, the Allies tried 141 times to bomb German railway stations, but only hit their target three times.29 Other attempts were abandoned on account of anti-aircraft fire, were blocked by enemy fighter planes; or failed due to technical problems, or indeed, more commonly, because the airmen simply missed their target. The bombs then landed in the countryside, leaving craters in the Flanders mud.
This tactical use of aviation, known as ‘interdiction’, was supplemented, particularly from 1917 on, by another use that was also tactical: ‘close support’, in other words simultaneous attacks by ground troops and aircraft.30 These operations were both hard to coordinate and dangerous, since the planes had to fly at low altitudes, and the targets, i.e., enemy troops, were in a position to respond. It was the German army that counted particularly on this tactic, which would become the basis of the blitzkrieg strategy after the First World War;31 the British air force, however, generally rejected subordination to the needs of land troops.
Alongside tactical bombing – whether interdiction or close support – there was strategic bombing, with a completely different history. The term ‘tactics’ referred traditionally to the art of winning a battle, while ‘strategy’ was the art of winning a war. Tactical bombing could thus mean the use of bombers in operations that also involved land or sea forces. Strategic bombing, on the other hand, was the doctrine that the air force would be sufficient in itself to vanquish the enemy. The tactical use of bombing was by and large invented, or improvised, during the First World War, before being largely forgotten in the inter-war years, even if its military effectiveness could not reasonably be doubted.32 Strategic bombing contrasted with tactical bombing all along the line: