The nations’ airy navies

When in 1890 Captain A. T. Mahan, United States Navy, produced his book on The Influence of Sea Power on History, 1660-1783, it made a world-wide sensation and had important historical consequences; both Germany and Japan took note, and set out to build great navies. There is now room for a book on the influence of air power on history. It needs to be said early that Mr Budiansky has not written it; he has written instead, as an American journalist should, a collection of gripping anecdotes about the results, largely military, of the Wright brothers’ proof in 1903 that a heavier-than-air machine could fly.

He presents a mass of material, unusually well illustrated — both by photographs and by numerous drawings of aircraft profiles — and clearly set down. He touches on service politics, particularly in the United States, and has plenty of service anecdotes, sometimes in the full brutality of fighting men’s slang. He goes back to the origins of air warfare, in the Italo-Turkish campaign of 1911, and forward to the troubles in the Persian Gulf in the 1990s. On his way, he takes in both of last century’s world wars, in which air power was critical, and the war in Vietnam, in which it was ineffective. He describes well the seesaw that rocks between bomber attacks and anti-aircraft defences, tilting first one way, then the other; and the seesaw, inside air forces, between strength devoted to tactical effort and to strategic attack. A few telling pages cover the Israeli air force’s difficulties and successes against Egypt and Syria.

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Sometimes he has valuable points to make: the Taranto raid, for example, on 11 November 1940, in which the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm put three Italian battleships out of action for the loss of two elderly biplanes and four men, and — all unintending — gave the Japanese the data on which they prepared their attack on Pearl Harbor.