A Summer Bright and Terrible Read Online Free PDF Page B

best possible speed, range, and carrying capacities,
which meant that civilian airplanes could be modified overnight to carry bombs
instead of passengers, which in turn meant that the only way to ban military
airplanes would be to ban all airplanes. The Secretary of the Air Ministry
pointed out that even small biplanes intended for pleasure flying could be
modified overnight to carry 350 pounds of bombs over distances of hundreds of
miles (and we have recently seen how terrible a weapon even unarmed jet
airliners can be).
    The arguments were irrefutable. It was
impossible to ban airplane design, airplane production, and even the use of
airplanes to bomb civilians. The only possible recourse was to pursue the exact
opposite: for each nation to build for itself an air force capable of deterring
attack by imposing always the threat of instant and massive retaliation by
fleets of bombers.
    The idea of bombing civilian populations from
the air goes back an incredible three hundred years, to the year 1650, when an
Italian priest, Francisco Tana, published a book describing an aerial ship. Lift
was to be provided by four evacuated copper globes, each twenty-five feet in
diameter. Because we live at the bottom of an ocean of air, he reasoned,
propulsion was to be by oars and sails. But he never tried to build it, because
“God would surely never allow such a machine to be successful since it would
create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind.
Where is the man that can fail to see that no city would be proof against
surprise when the ship could at any time be steered over its squares or even over courtyards of houses and brought
to earth for the landing of its crews? Iron weights could be hurled to wreck
ships at sea, or they could be set on fire by fireballs and bombs, nor ships
alone but houses, fortresses and cities could thus be destroyed with the
certainty that the airship could come to no harm, as the missiles could be
hurled from a great height.”
    Needless to say, the idea languished for a
while. The first military use of the air was for observation rather than
bombing. The strategy sounds rather passive, but if the concept had been
followed faithfully, Napoleon would have ruled the world.
    It was balloons rather than airplanes, but the
concept was the same. Balloon flight had been pioneered in France in the
mid-1700s, and so the Committee of Public Safety, set up in Paris after the
French Revolution, decided to use observation balloons to help France’s armies.
In 1793 they built the world s first military observation balloon. Filled with
hydrogen and tethered to the ground, the balloon carried a hanging basket for
two people, one to handle the balloon and the other to act as observer and to
communicate with the ground by dropping messages in sandbags. At its extreme
height, the observer equipped with a telescope could see nearly twenty miles;
in other words, he could see the whole of that era’s battlefields. It was so
brilliant an idea that it led to the establishment of the world’s first air
force, the Compagnie d’Aeronautiers, in 1794.
    That year, during his conflict with Austria,
Napoleon became the first military commander to use the advantages of the air
for reconnaissance. The balloon successfully spied on Dutch and Austrian troops
from high above its own armies, providing detailed reports of the location and
composition of enemy troops and directing artillery fire against them. The
Austrians protested that this was a violation of the rules of war, but Napoleon
laughed off the charge. They then attempted to shoot it down, but the balloon
floated too high for their bullets.
    Its success led to the building of three more
balloons, which were used
during all of Napoleon s battles for the next two years. Then, in 1797, he
brought the aeronautiers with him to Egypt, and when the British successfully
shot them down, he lost faith, disbanded the group, and abandoned the concept.
He did so