Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

LESSONS BEFORE WORLD WAR I1
learned over the course of the conflict that there were two abiding principles-concentration
of force and the priority of counterair operations.
However, the daily demands of combat prevented emergence of a single
architect of doctrine at this time. Achievement of air superiority over the
battlefield was obviously an extension of superiority on the battlefield. Senior
leaders saw attainment of both through offensive massing of firepower,
weaponry, and men at the principal point of engagement. Aviators, like
their ground superiors, therefore favored concentration of military striking
power, rather than parceling out assets among smaller organizational elements.
Trenchard, for example, mirrored Field Marshal Douglas Haig’s
principle of the massed offensive; only in Trenchard’s case, the mass would
be of aircraft in the air. Consequently, both generals earned the label of
“butcher” by those subordinate to them. Yet, Haig and Trenchard represented
a generation of military leaders who remained disciples of the offensive
and sought to use any new tool such as the airplane to underpin this
faith.’
Trenchard’s Royal Flying Corps became the benchmark for Allied air
efforts by 1916 and 1917. French air assets had been decimated during
costly land battles, thus relinquishing primacy of effort to their British
comrades. German aviators also suffered from the same attritional struggles
in the air, struggles as bloody and debilitating as those incurred in the
trench fighting on the ground. But Trenchard clung tenaciously to his tenets
of careful preparation for combat: training in rear areas before initiation to
Fokker Eindecker.
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