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War in the air

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• War in the air
• Ideas and images of aerial warfare existed long before the invention of the aeroplane. Leonardo da Vinci worked out plans for flying war machines, but kept them secret because he thought knowledge of them would be dangerous. Frenchmen who witnessed the first balloon flights of the Montgolfier bothers in the 1780s immediately foresaw that soldiers would one day descend from the sky. And a mere five years after the Wright brothers' first flight, H.G Wells presented the world with a novel (War in the Air, 1908) in which New York City is devastated by an intercontinental air raid.

The history of air power has been shaped to an unusual degree by such expectations. Broadly speaking, theorists and practitioners of war in the air have fallen into two schools. Some have seen air war as a lubricant for combined arms operations, a means of averting the kind of tactical stalemate that prevailed throughout most of World War One, by attacking enemy communications, logistics, reserves, and so on. Others have preferred to employ aerial weapons as an independent strategic force, striking directly at an adversary's civil society and economic infrastructure.

Most air forces have been unwilling to choose categorically between these two approaches. The aircraft shown here, an American B-25B Mitchell bomber, was a characteristic compromise from World War Two: ideal for nothing, but good enough for anything.

The Mitchell was designed for level bombing of cities and other strategic targets, a role in which it quickly proved inferior to larger, four-engine aircraft. But its modest size also allowed it to operate at tree-top level in support of ground forces, and to attack enemy ships. These were missions for which its five 50-calibre machine guns, intended to fend off fighters, were also useful.

On one occasion - Jimmy Doolittle's famous raid on Tokyo in April, 1942 - B-25s flew from aircraft carriers. The one shown here has just bombed a rail yard in support of Allied ground operations in Italy in 1944.