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and Japanese entered the conflict with highly trained pilots, and until 1942 most of the Luftwaffe’s aircraft were superior to those of the RAF or USAAF; the Japanese and Italians also had some good types. ‘With the start the Germans had, it was a miracle we ever caught up,’ said British bomber group commander Edward Addison. The Luftwaffe’s close support for the Wehrmacht was a key factor in German victories between 1939 and 1942. Goering’s squadrons failed, however, as a strategic bomber force. Before the blitz on Britain, senior airmen of most nations were imbued with a mystical faith. They deluded themselves that societies would succumb to panic in the face of the mere fact of assault from the air; moral collapse would provoke industrial disintegration, and thus defeat. The destruction of Guernica by the Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War, along with the bombing of Nanjing, Warsaw and Rotterdam, promoted delusions about the vulnerability of civilian populations. More protracted experience disproved these, however. ‘[A] vital lesson – one that has taken even air specialists by surprise,’ wrote Major Alexander Seversky, a leading American air strategist, in 1942,

relates to the behaviour of civilian populations under air punishment. It had been generally assumed that aerial bombardment would quite quickly shatter popular morale … The progress of this war has tended to indicate that this expectation was unfounded. On the contrary, it now seems clear that despite large casualties and impressive physical destruction, civilians can ‘take it’. On the whole, indeed, armed forces have been more quickly demoralised by air power than unarmed city dwellers. These facts are significant beyond their psychological interest. They mean that haphazard destruction of cities … is costly and wasteful in relation to the tactical results obtained. Attacks will increasingly be concentrated on military rather than on random human targets. Unplanned vandalism from the air must give way, more and more, to planned, predetermined destruction.

Bombers achieved results only in proportion to the weight of explosives they could drop accurately on designated targets; mass was critical. The Luftwaffe and the Japanese air forces had formidable capabilities for supporting their respective ground forces and navies, as well as for killing refugees and promoting terror, but their aircraft carried small bombloads. The Luftwaffe inflicted pain and destruction during the 1940–41 blitz on Britain, but nowhere near sufficient to make a decisive impact on the ability of Churchill’s nation to continue the war. Thereafter, Germany’s air force suffered a steady decline: when the first generation of Axis airmen was killed off, training of their successors languished. Both the Germans and the Japanese made a critical strategic mistake, to which fuel famine contributed, by failing to allocate resources to sustain a flow of proficient pilots. By 1944–45, Axis flying skills had become markedly inferior to those of their American and British counterparts. The Russians displayed the same ruthlessness in training and expending aircrew as in everything else. By 1943 they had some good aircraft and able pilots, but their technology was less advanced, and they suffered savage losses.

In the second half of the war, the Western Allies produced superb planes in vast numbers, but the Germans introduced only two good new types – the Focke-Wulf 190 and the revolutionary Me 262 jet fighter. Numbers of the latter were too small and pilot skills inadequate to avert the Luftwaffe’s eclipse in the sky. The Japanese Zero, which so daunted the Allies in 1941– 42, became wholly outclassed. It has been described as ‘an origami aircraft’ – light, graceful, superbly manoeuvrable, but frail and offering negligible concessions to pilot safety, for instance lacking cockpit armour. Commander David McCampbell, the US Navy’s top-scoring air ace of the war, said: ‘We learned very early that if you hit them near the wing roots, where the fuel was, they would explode right in your face.