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Aerial Combat The World’s Great Air Battles by Robert Jackson Hard Cover
Aerial Combat The Worlds Great Air Battles by Robert Jackson
Hard Cover
160 pages
Copyright 1976
CONTENTS
Foreword by Alan Clark7
1 The First Air Battles9
2 Trial of Strength21
3 1917 : The Killing Ground33
4 1918 : A Fall of Eagles44
5 Blitzkrieg - The Air War over Europe, 1939-4054
6 The Battle of Britain65
7 Mediterranean Air War95
8 Air War on the Eastern Front, 1941-45108
9 The Battle of Germany 119
10 Pacific Air War133
11 Jet Combat148
Further Reading156
Acknowledgments157
Index158
FOREWORD
What is it about aerial combat that endows it with a particular romance and fascination? Surely, and above all else, it is the personal identity, the direct pitting of individual qualities - courage, judgement, keenness of vision and reflex, and the ability to control machinery of immense complication and power.
For over three centuries, or even longer, from the time of the discovery of gunpowder until the invention of the aeroplane the practice of warfare, and combat itself, sank ever lower into anonymity. The Big Battalions decided the issue. And as the use of explosives widened so did the range at which these encounters took place lengthen, and the private bravery and accomplishment at arms of the participants diminish in importance. Of course, there were savage struggles, hand-to-hand, at Blenheim, at Waterloo, at Gettysburg, but the essential determinants were the deployment of firepower and mass. At Verdun tens of thousands of soldiers lost their lives crawling backwards and forwards through storms of high explosive remotely directed upon them by artillery-men whom they never saw, nor could ever hope to reach with their weapons.
But aerial combat was from the very outset - and remains even to this day exclusively individualist, and the proliferation of high technology accentuates the importance of the human brain in interpreting its messages, as it does the virtues of bravery and calculating risk. There is a direct qualitative link between the observer hammering desperately with gloved hand against the jamming magazine of his Lewis gun as the pursuing Fokker closes the range, and the pilot of an Israeli F4 diving to ground level as he attempts to shake off the pursuing SAM.
In aerial combat there is also a certain clinical detachment. The presence of your opponent is always felt. The intrusion of his willpower and cunning warp the contest, as they do over a chessboard. But his appearance, the many clues and inferences to a man's character, that can be drawn from a scrutiny of his face and eyes, remain a mystery. Nor can the victor ever see the actual affect of his prowess; those tenths of a second when a whiplash of bullets tear across his enemy's cockpit, smashing bone, leather and instruments; the sudden loss of pressurization as the canopy shatters at altitude, the deluge of Glycol, the orange blast of ignited fuel - even this last is observed only remotely, a minute gyrating speck signifying a transient personal triumph and a brief lightening of danger.
Airmen, then, are different from other soldiers. They have to be navigators, mathematicians, experts in meteorology and geography. They have to be marksmen and athletes. But without the killer instinct, the animal tenacity that holds the jaws clenched for those critical seconds longer than seems physically possible, their survival is at risk. In the gallery of warfare they are above all others, an elite, and their tales are the tales of heroes.
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