Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [5]
As Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek feared, China paid the heaviest price for the raid’s success. In May the Japanese swept through Chekiang and Kiangsu Provinces, seizing Chinese airfields to prevent further missions against the homeland and scourging villages suspected of assisting the Raiders. The toll will never be known, but the Chinese estimated perhaps a quarter-million people were killed in retaliation for America’s own retaliatory strike.
Metropolitan Japan would remain immune to American bombs for the next twenty-two months, until June 1944. But a terrible warning had been delivered, and a foretaste of impending cataclysm.
CHAPTER ONE
Before the Beginning
IN 1921 ITALIAN aviation visionary Giulio Douhet proclaimed, “Aeronautics opened up to men a new field of action, the field of the air. In so doing it of necessity created a new battlefield; for wherever two men meet, conflict is inevitable.”
In that opening passage of Command of the Air, Douhet established the twin towers of his professional philosophy: evangelical aviation mated with bone-deep cynicism about human nature.
Douhet was—and remains—an intriguing character. Born in 1869, he became an artillery officer but early on grasped the violent promise of military aviation. As a technocrat—he studied science and engineering—he perceived the potential for aerial warfare almost as soon as there were Zeppelins, let alone airplanes. In 1912, a year after Italy committed aircraft against the Turks in Libya, he wrote Rules for the Use of Airplanes in War. It was among the first efforts to establish a doctrine for military aviation.
When the Great War in Europe erupted in August 1914, Douhet was a vigorous forty-five-year-old infantry colonel. Eagerly following aviation developments, he was primed and ready when Italy entered the fray against Austria-Hungary and Germany eight months later. Though not a pilot, he advocated building an aerial armada of 500 bombers capable of carpeting the enemy with explosives, presumably forcing capitulation without prolonged ground combat.
But Douhet was bitterly disappointed as a succession of Italian defeats and command incompetence spurred his sharpened pen and acerbic tongue. Certain that aviation technology could offset his nation’s embarrassing unpreparedness, he vented his spleen in all directions, haranguing anyone who would listen, and many who would not. Inevitably such sentiments breached the tolerance of officialdom, and in 1916 Douhet was imprisoned for, among other things, “issuing false news . . . and disturbing the public tranquility.”
Undeterred in his evangelism, Douhet wrote from his cell, while army commanders and government ministers remained targets for his acid ink as the war news deteriorated. Finally, in late 1917, Italy’s fortunes bottomed out with the disastrous Battle of Caporetto, which produced 300,000 Italian casualties. At that dismal point Douhet was released from prison and named director of the General Air Commissariat, responsible for coordinating Italy’s aviation plans and policies. However, it was too little too late. He found an ingrained bureaucracy unwilling to enact his plans, and he left in disgust in June 1918.
Following the war, the verdict of Douhet’s court-martial was reversed and, remarkably, he was promoted to general. However, by then he had lost faith in Italy’s government and military, and declined to return to duty.
After 1918, Douhet believed the material means of achieving his vision of airpower finally existed. His colleague Gianni Caproni had produced hundreds of large, capable bombers, some flown by Americans