Bandits Ten, Vector One-Six--Oh
OLIVER STEWART'S survey of air warfare ranges from the balloons used in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War to the ICBM. The best part of the book is the history of the evolution of the RFC into the RAF during the First World War. His account of the air fighting on the Western Front, Fokkers and Bristols, and the build-up of the great aces such as Mannock, Bishop and Richtofen, makes this air war, at any rate, seem a romantic exercise compared with the trench fighting beneath the combatants. The fantastic Zeppelin operations are also described, as well as the daring Gotha sorties, mentioned even by Proust. Between the wars Trenchard, Baldwin and Douhet, the would-be Mahan of air power, all thought that the bomber would 'always get through.' They were wrong; RAF Fighter Command air exercises held in 1938 had shown that large bomber forces could be held by the use of secret radar stations and the radio-telephonic control of fighter squadrons. Radar almost obviated standing fighter patrols and Dowding's vision was a tremendous contribution to the vic- tory of 1940. Mr. Stewart still gives the number of German aircraft shot down on September 15, 1940, the climax of the Battle of Britain, as 178 when Sir Winston himself is content to give the post-war corrected figure of 56. Discussing the Anglo-American bombing campaign against Germany, the author accepts the whole mystique of Bomber Command's annihilating effectiveness against the Nazi war economy. But the US Strategic Bombing Survey showed that pre- cision attacks by the USAAF on selected targets such as the Leuna synthetic oil plants were just as effective as Harris's erasure of whole cities. The most important weakness of the book is the dismissal of the Korean War in a few lines. There is no treatment, therefore, of the vital question of limited air warfare in the nuclear age. DAVID REES
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