\
=3h—
available at Pearl Harbor,
\
That, to be sure, was a surprise attack preceding
declaration of hostilities, but such possibilities must be taken into account
for the future,
At any rate, the Japanese air attacks upon our ships off
Okinawa occurred more than 3 years after the opening of hostilities, and there
the Japanese, who were not superior in numbers on any one day and who did indeed
lose over 4,000 planes in 2 months of battle, nevertheless succeeded in sinking
or damaging no fewer than 253 American warships,
For that matter, the British
were effectively raiding targets deep in Germany, and doing so without suffering
great casualties, long before they had overtaken the German lead in menbers
of aircraft,
The war has demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt that the sky
is much too big to permit one side, however superior;rto shut out enemy aircraft
fs
See
SS
’{S
ra
fa
completely from the air over its territories.
The concept of "command of the air," which nok
used altogether too
loosely, has never been strictly analogous to that of "command of the sea,"
The latter connotes something approaching absolute exclusion of enemy surface |
craft from the area in question.
The former suggests only that the enemy is
suffering losses greater than he can afford, whereas one's own side is not.
But the appraisal of tolerable losses is in part subjective, and is also affected
by several variables which may have little to do with the number of planes dowmed,
Certainly the most important of those variables is the amount of. damage being
inflicted on the bombing raids,
An air force which can destroy the cities ina
given territory has for all practical purposes the fruits of command of the air,
regardless of its losses,
Suppose, then, one put to the Army Air Forces the following question:
If