Review

General Books

An active duty armor officer in the United States Army who holds a Ph.D. in history from Stanford University, Gian P. Gentile has written a well researched, revisionist analysis. He begins by examining the Army Air Force (AAF) agenda behind the questions posed in World War II to produce the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS) and the Survey's subsequent impact upon the formulation of U.S. airpower theory. Gentile argues convincingly that despite claims by AAF analysts that they designed the Survey to provide impartial parameters for evaluating strategic bombing in Western Europe, they had, in reality, produced a heavily partial methodology calculated to ensure conclusions that would support the AAF's future push to achieve coequal status with the Army and the Navy as an independent air service. Gentile supports his contentions with substantial primary and secondary evidence. He notes early examples, showing that before forwarding to President Franklin D. Roosevelt a survey produced in 1943 by prominent historian Carl Becker and the Committee of Historians, AAF Commander General Henry H. Arnold opted to modify the historians' conclusions, making it appear that Nazi Germany could be defeated by strategic air power alone, disregarding the eventual ground invasion recommended by the historians. The notion that air power could win wars by itself, however, did not originate with the AAF in World War II. Outspoken and influential air-power visionaries such as Italian General Guilio Douhet and US Army Air Corps Brigadier General William Mitchell, to name a few, had argued during the inter-war years that military aircraft had already altered forever the nature of warfare, rendering ground forces and naval surface fleets obsolete. This idea was rapidly accepted in air circles and had become the standard AAF perception by 1941.	1
Following the end of WWII, adroit manipulation of USSBS results gave rise to what Gentile sees as the American conceptual approach to strategic bombing—the use of strategic air power to destroy the enemy's capacity and will to resist. This played an instrumental role in shaping contingency plans for a defensive war against America's foremost potential adversary, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All of the early post-war plans, PINCHER (1946), BOILER (1947), and CRANKSHAFT (1948), called for a rapid and highly destructive strategic bombing attack, relying largely upon atomic bombs, to force the Soviet Union to accept US national war objectives. Gentile notes that the USSBS figured prominently in the Armed Services Unification Hearings convened periodically throughout 1946 and 1947, pitting naval leaders fearful that an independent air service would siphon money from an already shrinking defense budget and diminish Navy prestige against airmen determined to create an independent service. Despite the Navy's efforts, the independent US Air Force became a reality when President Harry S. Truman signed the National Security Act into law in 1947.	2
Gentile demonstrates that since the USSBS appeared, its conclusions have been viewed frequently as absolute truths instead of interpretations of strategic bombing in World War II. This erroneous perception, says Gentile, led to the mistaken belief among airmen that had the Linebacker air campaigns, initiated by President Richard M. Nixon in 1972, been launched in 1969, the Vietnam War would have ended that same year. Hoping to obtain unequivocal evidence for air power's decisive combat role, the Air Force commissioned a civilian-led study in 1991 known as the Gulf War Air Power Survey (GWAPS), to evaluate the use of airpower in the Persian Gulf War. Unlike the USSBS, GWAPS analysts produced their findings shielded from Air Force special interests. This study, completed in 1992, concluded that the air campaign against Iraq had been fairly successful, but only because US-led United Nations air-power resources and time had been virtually unlimited. In other words, the findings were inconclusive because the Persian Gulf conflict was a limited war against a marginal foe, thus the findings could not be extrapolated to apply to a struggle with an enemy possessing military capabilities comparable to those of the USSR. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization air campaign against Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslav forces during 1998-1999, achieved ambiguous results. Thus, the debate over the efficacy of strategic bombing continues unabated.	3
Gentile's monograph is not aimed at the typical undergraduate student, but his analysis should be useful to instructors preparing lectures for US history surveys and upper-division history courses that examine issues such as Containment of the USSR or US foreign policy after 1945. The author's study is most appropriate for use as assigned reading for students in graduate seminars covering a series of topics, including US military history and international relations.	4
Rogers State University Paul B. Hatley

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