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planes against German forces in the Saint-Mihiel salient. He later met Douhet. In a July 1921 demonstration, Mitchell and his fliers famously sank off the coast of Virginia several captured German ships in an effort to show the superiority of air over sea power. (‘He’s a man after my own heart,’ Trenchard said of Mitchell. ‘If only he can break his habit of trying to convert opponents by killing them, he’ll go far.’) The British military theorists J. F. C. Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart concurred with the air-power advocates that bombing cities made sense. Fuller did the math, concluding that killing a few thousand civilians would save the lives of millions of soldiers and ‘incident[al]ly several thousands of women and children’.26

Trenchard’s commitment to air power was partly utilitarian: during the relative peace of the 1920s and 1930s, he sought to justify the maintenance of an independent and reasonably well-funded British air force. In this effort he found an ally in Winston Churchill, who was Secretary of War in 1919 when he reminded the Commons that ‘we have all those dependencies and possessions in our hands which existed before the war... The first duty of the Royal Air Force is to garrison the British Empire.’ Trenchard and others would refer to this function as ‘air control’ or ‘air policing’ of those the RAF War Manual of 1928 called ‘semi-civilised enemies’. An opportunity to marry Trenchard’s faith in air policy to Churchill’s concern for the Empire arrived in 1919. At intervals since the beginning of the century, the British in their colony of Somaliland had attempted to subdue Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, a radical Muslim who had organized an army in the jagged hills of the Somali interior. The British regarded Abdullah Hassan as a fanatic and dubbed him the ‘Mad Mullah’, a sobriquet so pithy that few in Britain ever remembered his real name. Put on lean rations by the tight colonial budget, the perceived remoteness of East Africa, and military demands of world war, the British constabulary in Somaliland could not control the Mullah and his followers, who at leisure sortied out of their hilltop fortresses to plunder lowland villages.

In May 1919, the Colonial Secretary, Lord Milner, summoned Trenchard to ask his advice about the Somali situation. ‘Why not leave the whole thing to us?’ Trenchard asked. ‘This is exactly the type of operation which the RAF can tackle on its own.’ Milner was not so sure, and others remonstrated too, but, after six months of lobbying and no more success by British land forces in capturing Abdullah Hassan, the government gave its consent.

A bomber squadron of a dozen planes arrived in Somaliland from Cairo in January 1920 and immediately went into battle. The planes bombed and strafed Abdullah Hassan’s headquarters and his fort at Jidali. His army broke up under fire; a locally recruited Camel Corps occupied the enemy’s strongholds. Abdullah Hassan was tracked to Abyssinia and killed soon after.27

Air control had proved itself effective, and the brief Somaliland campaign was, as the new Colonial Secretary Leopold Amery boasted, ‘the cheapest war in history’. There were other ‘semi-civilised enemies’ evidently deserving similar treatment. The RAF flew six squadrons of planes to northwest India, where they could be used to pacify obstreperous villages. The planes would dump leaflets on an offending village, warning its inhabitants to leave, for their homes were about to be bombed. The home of a suspected law breaker would be particularly targeted. After the attack would come an ‘air blockade’, in which the village and its outskirts would be selectively bombed to keep its residents away, until they agreed to abide by the law. The Emir of Afghanistan was reportedly deterred from attacking India when a 20-pound bomb was dropped on his palace grounds. Similar attacks were administered to rebellious Iraqis in 1921 and 1922. ‘The tribesmen and their families were put to confusion, many of whom ran into the lake, making good targets for the machine-guns,’ noted the operational report