Air Superiority
in Tactical Air Warfare
General Bruce K. Holloway
Twenty-six million living Americans are veterans of military service, and most of them have served in wartime. How many of these 26 million ever had to face an enemy who held air superiority?
Not many: the 20,000 Army, Air Corps, and Marine troops who were cut off and overrun in the Philippines immediately after Pearl Harbor; scattered units in the Pacific during the early days of World War II; the soldiers and airmen in the Southwest Pacific prior to our defeat of Japanese air power at Wewak in August 1943: U.S. forces in North Africa up to the battle of Kasserine Pass in February 1943. In all, probably no more than one out of 50, for after February 1943 the U.S. and our allies had undisputed air superiority in the Mediterranean and Western Europe; after August of 1943 we had it in the Pacific. From that time on, there were isolated and relatively rare instances in which our opponents gained temporary, local air superiority, especially in the Pacific, but these were the exceptions.
In Korea we won air superiority twice—from the North Korean Air Force in the first two months of that war, and again from the Chinese Air Force after November 1950. The latter was a novel kind of air superiority, prophetic of things to come; I will discuss it later. In South Vietnam, our air superiority has come by default. In North Vietnam it has yet to be seriously challenged.
A generation of American fighting men has almost forgotten what it is like not to have air superiority—what it is like to lose mobility except by night; to be cut off from supplies and reinforcements; to be constantly under the watchful eye of enemy reconnaissance aircraft; to be always vulnerable to strafing and bombing attacks; to see one’s fighters and bombers burn on their hardstands; to be outnumbered, outgunned, and outmaneuvered in the air.
We sometimes forget, too, the cost of gaining air superiority from a well-equipped, well-trained, and determined enemy. In the European and Mediterranean Theaters alone, U.S. air forces lost 4325 fighters and bombers prior to June 1944. Nearly 17,000 of our aircrew people were killed in action, and more than 21,000 were missing or prisoners of war. The fighter losses were largely a result of the battle for air superiority. A major part of our bomber effort in preparation for the Allied invasion was devoted directly or indirectly to the air superiority mission.
From D-Day until the German surrender on 8 May 1945, a period of eleven months, the U.S. Eighth and Ninth Air Forces and the First Tactical Air Force flew 320,000 sorties to maintain the air superiority that we had won at so great a cost. This was about 25 percent of the total number of sorties flown during that eleven-month period. In addition to these sorties, fighters of the Fifteenth Air Force based in Italy gained air superiority there and carried fighter sweeps and escort missions deep into Germany.
Air superiority came hard and high. Although the Allied air forces had won air supremacy over Normandy and the Channel coast by the time of the invasion, Luftwaffe attacks on our bomber formations continued at a high level throughout the fall and winter of 1944-45. Not until the closing days of the war was theater-wide air supremacy finally achieved.
We entered World War II underestimating the importance of air superiority and the difficulty of winning it. We were unprepared both qualitatively and quantitatively. But we emerged from that war with an unrivaled mastery of the employment of air power. We learned the hard way that air superiority is the key to effective use of air power, which is in turn the key to successful surface operations.
In the years since then, that lesson seemed to be forgotten or ignored, or set aside, twice and relearned twice: first, in the period between World War II and the Korean War, when hopes for a stable, peaceful world were high. Korea at least temporarily changed that hope. Again between 1954 and the early 1960s there was a widely held belief that strategic nuclear superiority was virtually a universal deterrent and that any war which happened by accident or miscalculation was likely to be measured in terms of hours or days. In that context, tactical air superiority was again neglected.
The United States was not the only nation that learned in World War II the value of air superiority and the exorbitant cost of not having it. Hitler launched his attack on the Soviet Union with 164 divisions supported by 2000 German combat aircraft and 700 combat aircraft of his allies. The Russians opposed that force with about 119 divisions and some 5000 aircraft, most of them designed for support of ground forces. Within a week the Luftwaffe, with superior fighter aircraft and pilots, had achieved air superiority on the Eastern Front. Probably more than 4000 Soviet aircraft were destroyed on the ground and in the air during that week. Luftwaffe fighter pilots scored phenomenal numbers of kills against inferior Soviet aircraft. They continued to shoot down Soviet aircraft wholesale until the Allied offensive had turned full-tide against Germany; her fighters were deprived of bases, fuel, and supplies; and the U.S.S.R. had achieved air superiority on the Eastern Front. This expensive lesson in air superiority was not lost on Soviet airmen.
Five years after V-E Day the Soviets were putting into the field jet fighters that were technically the equal of any air superiority fighter in the world. Before the close of 1950 we were to find out in MIG Alley just how good their fighters were.
it goes on
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1968/mar-apr/holloway.html
