Air University Review, May-June 1980

Two Different Worlds?

the military historian and the U.S. Air Force

Dr. Dennis E. Showalter

THE relationship between military men and military history has traditionally been conditioned by the episodic nature of the warrior's work. Intense, relatively brief periods of action give way to long periods of time that can be used to prepare for the future. This process in turn frequently involves contemplation of the past. The common criticism of armies and navies as always being prepared for the last war, or the last war but one, overlooks the impossibility of creating a military equivalent of accurate laboratory conditions. Maneuvers can never be a complete substitute for combat, if for no other reason than the process is in-house, pitting parts of a system against each other. Justifiably high reputations as peacetime commanders often do not survive the entirely different demands of battle. Nor are successful combat leaders always the best choice for the peacetime tasks of training and evaluation. Even the most detached professional would hardly consider a "forever war" an ideal situation. From the days of Athens and Sparta it has therefore seemed natural for soldiers to seek counsel with the captains of antiquity--to use, in other words, history as part of the military laboratory.¹

These generalizations, however, are at best of limited applicability to the attitude of air forces toward military history and military historians. Three factors have combined to make air forces in general and the U. S. Air Force in particular institutionally less in­terested than the senior services in studying the past. First, air forces have from their beginnings attracted mavericks. If they were graduates of existing military academies, they tended to be men willing to break with established structures, men suspicious of orthodox wisdoms. During two world wars the massive expansion of air arms brought in large numbers of civilians whose value systems tended to resemble those of the professionals, at least in their interest in the new. Nor did the circumstances of aerial warfare encourage profound reflection on the campaigns of Caesar or Napoleon. Whether in the wire-and-strut era or the age of thousand-plane raids, even relatively senior officers were likely to lead from the front--a fact substantiated by casualty rates and prisoner of war (POW) statistics. Popular culture and interservice rivalries alike combined to reinforce the image of the air force officer as a hard charger, a Flip Corkin or Terry Lee who led men by a combination of force of character and technical skills. Particularly in those air forces like the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF), which regarded commissioned rank as a prerequisite for many flying assignments, wartime promotions were rapid. And if the boy colonels of World War II dropped sharply in rank after 1945, their mind-sets did not necessarily change in ways more congenial to the study of history.²

This does not imply that air forces are blindly anti-intellectual, wedded in spirit to leather flying helmets and fifty-mission crush caps. Their mental energy, however, has necessarily been diverted into other channels. The sky, even more than the sea, is terribly unforgiving of slight mistakes. And this fact has led inevitably to a second reason for disinterest in history. It begins with an emphasis on engineering skills, broadly defined, as vitally important to a properly trained air force officer. The rivalries between line officers and technicians, characteristic of so many nineteenth-century navies, had little chance to survive in air forces under the conditions of World War I. The pilot who understood the workings of his aircraft and its armament and who checked his own ammunition before a flight might increase his chances of survival only marginally; but given the already high odds he faced, every little bit helped. Through subsequent decades, material changes succeeded each other so rapidly that just keeping pace has required a constant focus on the nuts and bolts of aerial war. For all the encouragement given to broadening curriculums at service academies, cadets at the U.S. Air Force Academy tend to be urged by a wide variety of unofficial means, ranging from career counseling, to rumor, to their own perceptions of the civilian world, and move beyond the core curriculum required of all cadets to majors in engineering, aeronautics, or physics rather than history or literature.³

Once commissioned, the junior air force officer is likely to develop an increasing involvement with the social and behavioral sciences. Modern armed forces, at least in the Western world, tend to be presented as occupations rather than callings. Limited work weeks, useful craft skills, twenty years, and a pension--these are the stocks in trade of most recruiting literature, whether written in English, French, or German. Officer corps are subject to similar influences. In the U.S. Air Force, the concept of the garrison state has arguably become inverted. Perceived patterns of convergence with civilian structures are strong, particularly in supporting and service organizations. Formations embodying traditional or heroic models are relatively small and tend to incorporate high personnel turnover.⁴ This pattern reflects something other than a simple decline in martial spirit. To function at all, the modern air wing requires a complex matrix of equipment that cannot be optimally maintained on modern equivalents of Henderson Field-the remote airstrip with very limited facilities. And this in turn tends to produce bases that offer relatively comfortable living environments.

The word "relatively," of course, must be emphasized. The air crewman of the 1970s nevertheless usually approaches death decently, with a clean shave, a full stomach, and fresh underwear. Only a small proportion of men in air force uniforms, moreover, can reasonably be expected to engage the enemy directly. More than in any other service, the typical airman of any rank plays a supporting role. This situation gives rise to an interesting paradox, perhaps best illustrated by the self-image of transport pilots and navigators relative to their colleagues who fly fighters and bombers. An excellent case can be made that in a world where U. S. military presence is increasingly unwelcome, airlift capacity and in-flight refueling will be of vital importance in America's twenty-first­-century defense profile. One would hardly be aware of this, however, while listening to the "trash haulers'" wry self-deprecation of their role and probable career patterns relative to their more "successful" colleagues who fly "real" combat aircraft. As for the nonrated officer, the man without wings, he tends very early to accept as a fact that his career options are going to be limited. These beliefs are the stuff of officers' club happy hours and cocktail party conversations. As such, they have the kind of mythic stature not to be demolished by analyses of promotion lists or pep talks from three-star generals, all of whom seem to be command pilots.

These circumstances contribute heavily within the U.S. Air Force to the downgrading of what Morris Janowitz calls the "heroic" style of leadership. They correspondingly encourage bureaucratic approaches to career planning.⁵ An officer who takes an advanced degree may be influenced more by the availability of courses than their subject matter; an M.A. of any kind can look good on one's record. Given opportunity for choice and reflection, however, such an officer may seek an M.B.A. in order to administer his section of the machine more effectively. He may opt for an M.A. in psychology, hoping better to understand and motivate the civilianized technicians who will form the bulk of any squadron or wing he might command. His choices also may be influenced by thoughts of a second career after retirement as an 0-5 or 0-6. But to study history in general or military history in particular, as opposed to mining the past for examples of courage or leadership, is to walk the outsider's path--to pursue a kind of hobby at best peripheral to one's professional life.

The relationships between historians and air forces have been rendered distant by still a third element: the obvious difficulties of applying lessons drawn from land- and sea­bound history to the fast-changing field of aerial warfare. Until very recently, its tactical and operational principles have tended to be developed on an ad hoc basis. The issue of the immutability of strategic laws, an argument still raging among ground force theorists, has never had similar importance among air generals. Generalizations about the necessity of maintaining the offensive or achieving comprehensive air superiority still begin textbooks and lectures at the Air Force Academy. They lack, however, quite the sense of holy writ applied to their equivalents at West Point or Annapolis. Air power has never found its Mahan. The closest it has come to such theorists, men like Douhet or de Seversky, Mitchell or Trenchard, have been proved false prophets by too many standards. Once outside the realm of the most abstract generalizations, air force operational principles depend heavily, though not exclusively, on material factors. The wing-­strength combat box might have been effective against the Luftwaffe's day fighters but is suicidal against a modern, electronically coordinated gun, missile, and aircraft defense. While modern discussions of air-to-­air combat constantly search history for precedents, the best they are likely to produce are such universal constants as the importance of aggressiveness and airman ship, flying skill and sensible caution.⁶ No one seriously suggests that the combat techniques of a Max Immelmann or an Oswald Boelcke can be applied directly by the crew of an F-4 or the pilot of an F-15. Examples can be multiplied; the principle remains the same. And the modern military historian is generally too unconcerned with operational history and operational analysis to provide the Air Force with any kind of independently conceived scholarly framework for analysis.⁷ In such a context it is hardly remarkable that much aerospace history remains thinly disguised antiquarianism: unit histories and material descriptions interlaced with war stories of the "there I was at 40,000 feet" variety.

IN LIGHT of these factors, can any mutual relationship between the U.S. Air Force officer and the academic military historian be said to exist? Should not each go his own way, focusing on his own goals and aims? Our answer is an emphatic no. To substantiate the negative, it is worthwhile to begin by asking, for example, whether the relative indifference to history, as described earlier, has not contributed to the strong influence of moral questions and inter- and intraservice rivalries on discussions of strategic bombardment in the United States--a debate sometimes seeming to regard historical evidence as no more than a source of support for preconceptions.⁸ In the sphere of tactical aviation, lessons in air­-ground cooperation demonstrated by the Germans in 1939 and 1940 were first learned by the Army Air Forces through the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1943, relearned by the U.S. Air Force in Korea, and once again rediscovered in Vietnam. This pattern has some institutional rationale: advocacy of an independent air force has traditionally been justified by asserting the decisiveness of strategic bombardment, as opposed to the mere support of ground troops. It has also resulted in the kind of periodic rediscovery of the obvious more commonly associated with the seminar room or the faculty meeting.⁹ The tendency for students of the thermonuclear arms race to assume or assert that history began with Hiroshima has similarly distorted approaches and perspectives in a wide variety of ways. The cynical historian has no difficulty calling to mind other alleged ultimate weapons--crossbows, hot-air balloons, and dynamite are only three examples--and wondering whether a slightly broader-gauged approach to the problems of nuclear warfare might be preferable to Dr. Strangelove and his MAD bombers.¹⁰  

Were it to end here, this article could legitimately be described as a series of cheap shots, a slightly more sophisticated version of a men's room graffito, observed by the author, which read: "History repeats itself, itself, itself, itself." It is true that the school of experience charges murderously high tuition. But it is also true that confidence remains one of the primary attributes of the warrior. The essence of command involves the knowledge that one is going to make errors costing lives, while retaining the intelligence to minimize these errors and the will to act despite them. This will in turn tends to generate an optimistic cast of mind loosely described as the "can-do" mentality-an attitude making it relatively easy to draw favorable or optimistic conclusions from military history. Sometimes the conclusions are right and sometimes wrong; sometimes they are neither. When the Italian proto-blitzkrieg collapsed at Guadalajara in 1937, Europe's general staffs sagely described the impending decline of the tank and the limited value of large mechanized formations. The Germans, on the other hand, began with the premise that Mussolini's army could not be expected to do anything very well. In the short run, they were true prophets. By 1942, on the other hand, the blitzkrieg's foes had learned enough to demonstrate the validity of earlier warnings on the vulnerability of unsupported tanks and the need for cooperation among all arms.¹¹ The Armed Forces of the United States went into Vietnam well aware of the problems and pitfalls the French had encountered a decade earlier. The Americans were simply and firmly convinced of their ability to avoid making the same mistakes.¹²

Since history can so easily be used to justify opposing arguments, any real intellectual relationship between air forces and historians must go beyond mere utilitarianism. To demonstrate this, it is necessary to examine exactly what the student of history does when he works at his craft. Two essential ingredients are involved. The first  is evidence. While history is not simply one damn thing after another, neither is it a purely intellectual construction. The historian requires data with which to work. The second vital element in the craft of history is interpretation. Without an analytical dimension, history degenerates into chronicle, becoming a meaningless jumble of unrelated information. And the way in which the historian deals with evidence and interpretation is what makes him a worthwhile mentor to the air force officer.

Evidence is important because most students, military or otherwise, approach history as a field of study that supplies answers to questions. Historians may deplore this attitude as fostering unscholarly present-mindedness. In practice, however, they also recognize the importance of being able to answer questions by reconstructing at least an approximation of what actually happened. This, in turn, requires the historian to do four things with his available data. He begins by collecting, by assembling a wide variety of material that seems pertinent to his chosen theme. To the best of his humanity, he avoids tunnel vision, the structuring of his material to fit conclusions predrawn by either men or machines. This attitude is a useful, not to say a necessary, counterweight to two tendencies within the military. One is traditional. It is a kind of heroic vitalism, a reluctance of commanders at all levels to consider information contradicting their views on a subject or a course of action. The other, more contemporary, is an assumption that ultimate truth is expressed by statistics. The influence of the mania for quantification on military planning and operations scarcely requires elaboration. From the flow charts and cost­effectiveness readings of the McNamara era to the carefully compiled body counts and pacification tables of Vietnam, experience suggests that numbers are good servants, bad masters, and often only marginally relevant to the course of events.

The historian's second responsibility to his evidence is its ordering in a way that is at least coherent enough to help others to suggest new questions or see the answers to old ones more quickly. If the historian has a single distinguishing professional characteristic, it is the ability to establish structure in a confusing jumble of events. History resembles a tapestry: the closer one approaches it, the more one risks losing his view of the whole. Here, too, the staff officer or commander, faced constantly with the responsibility for establishing priorities and for making sense of inputs of every kind from a wide variety of sources, has an easily discernible common bond with the scholar.

The third element of the historian's relationship to his evidence involves developing new lines of argument by carefully drawing inferences from available material through logic and imagination. It is this process, however uncongenial it may be to the cliometrician or the social scientist, that establishes history as an element of the humanities and separates the historian from the medieval chronicler and the modern reader of computer printouts. History is the most tentative of academic disciplines. Its favorite phrases are "Yes, but" and "Are you sure?" Historians collectively tend to be cautious, lacking the rectitude of certitude common in other academic disciplines. As recent discussions of cold war revisionism suggests, the historian who violates the principle of caution in presenting his evidence risks becoming something else--a propagandist, perhaps even a liar, but not a historian.¹³ The uses of this set of abilities to the air force officer, who never knows what is on the other side of the hill and is seldom perfectly sure what is on his own side, are obvious. These are skills acquired only with practice. They are neither intuitive nor quantitative. And in a service that has consistently stressed the role of the boy wonder, the water walker, the man who makes his mark by doing things differently--the role of the reflective thinker needs more emphasis than it often receives in practice.

Finally and perhaps most important, the historian questions his evidence. He is Cartesian in his doubts of the reliability of the material he studies, of the motives generating its existence, and of the relationship of a given interview or document to the rest of the events they describe. Here once more his skill is a function of knowledge and experience-­learning by practice what to question and how to question it. And in a military environment where the pressure to get with the program can be overwhelming, the ability to question without permanently alienating his intellectual adversaries can be vital for the officer and the air force alike. Perhaps he will not find any more favorable response than did Socrates when he informed the Athenians that his habit of asking awkward questions deserved no less than permanent support at public expense. But it is this kind of moral courage whose development can well be fostered by closer association with the historian.

The second broad area where air force officers can profit from association with historians involves the task of interpretation. Here the historian faces six responsibilities. First, he recognizes the interpretations of other scholars. This obvious but important process of ground-clearing is basic to any coherent analytical work, whether in a university library or on a Pentagon planning team. If properly done, it can avert many a reinvention of the wheel--a peril to which, as suggested earlier, air forces can be particularly prone.

A second closely related task involves questioning the defensibility of the interpretations thus collected. The working historian asks two questions. First, does a given interpretation fit the data known or available? To what extent might it be simply the product of a scholar trying to be too clever by half? Second, is the interpretation internally coherent? Do the premises and the conclusions have a recognizable relationship to each other? This task is becoming increasingly important in an era when technical jargon and bad grammar combine in the pages of the best professional journals to confuse the most conscientious readers. To the professionally conscientious air force officer, whose time for reflection is inevitably more limited than is the academician's, separating shadow from substance as quickly as possible can be vital. He needs all the help he can get.

A defensible interpretation is not necessarily valid. It has merely passed tests of evidence and logic. The historian moves into the heart of his relationship to interpretation only when he begins analysis. This process essentially involves combining one's own evidence with the work of other scholars, then fitting the two together to generate new substances and meanings. Here again the air force officer can profit from involvement with an intellectual process involving judgment, intuition, and common sense--three of the most significant elements in making command or planning decisions. None of them can be taught. If they are acquired at all, it is through apprenticeship and practice. And because his work is focused on people rather than data, the historian can provide opportunities for cultivating these qualities in areas often denied the scientist or the technician.

The fourth responsibility of the historian to interpretation is revision--above all, revision of his own work. He must begin immediately to examine his conclusions in new frames of reference, to ask new questions, to incorporate evidence he inevitably overlooks--evidence some reviewer is sure to point out. This demand for flexibility has been the rock on which many an academic career has foundered. One can simply be too proud of one's ideas to change them--or, indeed, to submit them to the pitiless scrutiny of anonymous critics. Most history departments have at least one professor who spends his career working on a project that somehow never quite reaches the stage of final typing. Again, the relevance of this process to the air force officer involves attitudes as opposed to direct connections. Maintenance of the objective may be an accepted principle of war, but how many military memoirs, published or unpublished, are written to justify inflexibility, to prove the author was right all along even if he did finish his career commanding a supply depot in Provo, Utah? And, on the other hand, how many ideas never reach even the memorandum stage because someone of relatively junior rank fears putting a foot wrong, particularly in areas where he cannot produce statistics to back his argument?

The fifth task of the historian is to admit the limits of his interpretation. He must have an idea of what questions his research can legitimately answer and what questions it omits. Just as important is the ability to recognize where one interpretation ends and how to begin developing another one. Johnny One-Note is another familiar figure in history departments. He is an adherent of monocausal explanations of history, not because he is a convinced Marxist, Darwinian, or Christian, but because he once had a thought. Perhaps he even published a monograph. Since then he has remained convinced that his particular insight is the sole key to anything that happened within a century in either direction. Professional parochialism has also been a distinguishing, if not distinctive, characteristic of air forces. The multiengined bomber became a virtual fetish object in certain circles between 1934 and 1945. And how many fighter pilots during the early days of World War II recoiled at the thought of defacing the clean lines of their aircraft with bomb racks or even drop tanks? Here, too, it is scarcely an exaggeration to suggest that a systematic connection with an academic discipline encouraging the transcending or discarding of one's own ideas can only benefit the air force officer, particularly at the beginning of his career.

The sixth duty of the analytical historian is the application of his interpretations. Only with this process does history become something more than an abstract exercise. The historian who uses his insights to sharpen his perceptions of himself and his world is beginning to comprehend the ultimate value of an academic discipline with few correct answers. And understanding the nature of the relationships among oneself, the past, and the present is particularly crucial for the military man who seeks to be more than a mercenary technician. An honest, careful attempt to comprehend the past on its own terms can help furnish perspective on the present. Far more important, the methods of developing such comprehension through the use of the historian's tools and techniques can help the officer override the limits of science, whether social, physical, or behavioral.

THE study of history can help the air force officer, in particular, remember a fact that is in danger of being lost among slide rules and computer programs, performance data and flow charts. Warfare, like history itself, is ultimately an affair of human beings, which in turn makes it the province of chance, ambiguity, and intuition. Neither Clio nor Bellona yields herself to crude or casual suitors. Their seduction requires talents and sensitivities foreign to simple technicians' macho. But the goal in both cases is worth the effort. And just as the young buck can learn polish and technique from the elderly boulevardier, so the air force officer can profit, as a human being and as an officer, from a connection with the academic discipline of history.

The Colorado College
Colorado Springs, Colorado

Notes

2. Autobiographies and biographies of air force generals are fruitful sources of support for the thesis of unconventionality. H. H. Arnold's Global Mission (New York, 1949) and Colonel Alfred F. Hurley's Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power (New York, 1964) are only two of many examples. Martin Caidin and Edward Jablonski stand out among the popular writers whose works, fiction and nonfiction alike, reinforce the image. Actual personnel and training procedures during World War II are surveyed in Wesley Craven and J. L. Cate, The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. VI, Men and Planes (Chicago, 1955), pp. 427 passim.

3. The contrast between this conclusion and such articles as Lieutenant Colonel W. L Anderson, "The Whole Man," Air University Review, September-October 1972, pp. 60-65, and L. I. Radway, "Recent Trends at American Service Academies," in Contributions to Military Sociology, Vol. I, The Perceived Role of the Military, M. R. Van Gils (Rotterdam, 1971), pp. 19-38, is based on nine years of personal observations and conversations with cadets and faculty from a wide variety of departments at the Air Force Academy.

4. Cf. Harold Lasswell, "The Garrison State," American Journal of  Sociology, XLVI (1941), 455-68; with Morris Janowitz, The Professional Soldier: A Social and Political Portrait (Glencoe, Illinois, 1960); and Charles C. Moskos, "The Emergent Military: Civil, Traditional, or Plural," Pacific Sociological Review, XVI (1973), 258-80.

5. Cf. John Downey, Management in the Armed Forces (New York, 1977); K. Lang, "Military Technology and Expertise: Some Chinks in the Armor," in Van Gils, pp. 119-37; M. N. Zald and W. A Simon, "Career Opportunities and Commitments among Officers," in Morris Janowitz, The New Military (New York, 1964), pp. 257-85; Charles C. Moskos, "From Institution to Occupation: Trends in Military Organization," Armed Forces and Society, IV (1977),41-50; and the commentary by Colonel Franklin D. Margiotta in the Inter-University Seminar on Armed Forces and Society Newsletter, April 1978, pp. 7-9; and Moskos, "Compensation and the Military Institution," Air Force Magazine, April 1978, pp. 31-35.

6. An excellent example of this intellectual process involves comparing Captain Dave Smith, "One vs. One or More," USAF Fighter Weapons Review, Spring 1975, pp. 23-25. with Major Barry Watts, A Comparison of "Team" and "Single-Ship" Approaches to Aerial Combat (USAF Academy, Colorado, 1976).

7. See the general bibliographic survey by Martin Gordon, "American Military Studies," American Studies International, XV (1976), 3-16; and Dennis E. Showalter, "A Modest Plea for Drums and Trumpets," Military Affairs, XXXIX (1975), 71-73.

8. George H. Quester, Deterrence before Hiroshima (New York, 1966); and "The Impact of Strategic Air Warfare," Armed Forces and Society, IV (1978), 179-206; and Melden E. Smith, Jr., "The Strategic Bombing Debate: The Second World War and Vietnam," Journal of Contemporary History, XII (1977), 175-92, are particularly useful surveys of this issue. See also David Macisaac, Strategic Bombing in World War II: The Story of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (New York, 1976).

9. For general discussions of this theme, see Robert Frank Futrell, Ideas, Concepts, Doctrine: A History of Basic Thinking in the United States Air Force, Aerospace Studies Institute, Air University (1971), esp. pp. 74 ff. and 160 ff.; Perry M. Smith, The Air Force Plans for Peace (Baltimore, 1970), pp. 27 ff.; Thomas H. Greer, The Development of Air Doctrine in the Army Air Arm 1917-1941, USAF Historical Studies, No. 89 (1955); William D. White, U.S. Tactical Air Power: Missions, Forces, and Costs (Washington, D.G, 1974); and Colonel John P. Russell, "The Future For Tactical Airpower," Professional Study No. 4707, Air War College, Air University (1972). Major H. G. Nophsker, "Perceptions of Fighter Strikes: An Investigation into Army and Air Force Officers' Concepts of Close Air Support, Air Interdiction, and Tactical Air Control," M.A. thesis, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (1976), is a useful discussion of the semantics of the issue.

10. For some indications that defense analysts are beginning to rediscover history, see the cross section of recent articles in Robert J. Pranger and Roger P. Labrie, editors, Nuclear Strategy and National Security Points of View (Washington, D.C., 1977). Colin S. Gray, The Soviet-American Arms Race (West mead, England, 1976), is another work with a refreshing, commonsense approach to its subject.

11. See, for example, Heinz Guderian, Achtung Panzer (Stuttgart, 1937) and the brief discussion in Kenneth Macksey, Tank Warfare (New York, 1972), pp. 95 fl.

12. Zeb B. Bradford, "U.S. Tactics in Vietnam," Military Review, February 1972, pp. 63-76, is a particularly incisive analysis of this question.

13. The most scathing indictment of this approach to contemporary history remains Robert Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton, New Jersey, 1973).

Dennis E. Showalter (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of History, Colorado College, and Editorial Consultant to Archon Books; he has been a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Military Affairs. He has written numerous articles for publication. Dr. Showalter is author of Railroads and Rifles: Soldier, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (1975) and is now writing a book entitled The German Army in the Age of Moltke and Schlieffen; his German Military History Since 1648: A Critical Bibliography is being published by Garland Press.

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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