Air Power and Colonial Control

632 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919—1939. By David E. Omissi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990; distributed by St. Martin’s Press, New York. Pp. xvi + 260; illustra­ tions, notes, bibliography, index. $79.95. Of all the weapons introduced during World War I, the airplane seems to have had the most enduring impact on Western society. While the submarine and the tank faded from the public view in the post-Armistice years, the flying machine remained highly visible and endlessly captivating. One reason for this was that the airplane had a relevance to the peacetime world that the tank and the submarine could not enjoy. But there was another reason. The early advocates of air power argued that the new weapon was especially useful in resolving the military problems of the interwar period and they had considerable success in selling their views. This was especially the case in France and Great Britain, which emerged from the conflict with colonial empires that were at once larger and more turbulent than before. This use of aerial means to protect colonial peoples—and more often to subjugate them—came to be known as “air control.” David E. Omissi has produced an extremely enlightening study of this practice; while he concentrates on the British experience, there is also succinct treatment of air control by the French and the Italians. The airplane was valuable because it had a unique quality that, for want of a better word, was sometimes called “penetrativeness”; it could take coercive power into remote areas far more easily than a sweating, toiling column of infantry and maintain the king’s peace as easily as hundreds or even thousands of foot soldiers. This was demonstrated dramatically when a single Royal Air Force plane named Old Carthusian bombed Kabul in May 1919, leading Afghan rebels to sign a truce. While the techniques of air control are of concern chiefly to the military historian, it should be noted that the policy rested heavily on the assumption that primitive peoples would be overawed by the airplane itself; indeed Omissi calls it “the culmination of technological imperialism” (p. 4). The usefulness of air power in this connection was seen very quickly: balloons accom­ panied colonial expeditions as early as the 1880s; by 1914 airplanes had been deployed in Africa. The practice of air control had some interesting effects on the development of both aircraft and techniques for their use. It was sometimes necessary to move aircraft of fairly short range over considerable expanses of territory, especially in Africa and Asia, and thus the Royal Air Force pioneered air routes from Cairo to the Cape and from Basra to Singapore. The aircraft most useful in air control tended to be of the multiple-purpose variety, and this consideration affected design. Nor did air-control work require planes of evernewer and more sophisticated type; on the contrary, rough field conditions put a premium on the simplest, most rugged designs. TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 633 Interestingly, Omissi finds that the experience in air control did foster two innovations of some importance: low-pressure balloon tires and auxiliary fuel tanks. These are but some of the revelations to be found in this well-turned monograph. Lee Kennett Dr. Kennett is research professor of history at the University of Georgia, where he specializes in military history. Among his publications are A History ofStrategic Bombing (1982) and The First Air War, 1914-1918 (1991). This People’s Navy: The Making of American Sea Power. By Kenneth J. Hagan. New York: Free Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 434; illustrations, bibliography, index. $27.95. Kenneth Hagan’s This People’s Navy is a thoughtful and enjoyably written history of the U.S. Navy that tells us much about the relationship between naval strategy and naval technology. Hagan stresses the conventional distinction between the guerre d’escadre and guerre de course (attempts to win the naval war either by destroying the enemy’s battle squadrons or by driving opposing commerce from the seas). According to Hagan, “The competition between these two strategies . . . constitutes the real essence of American naval history from the Revolution to the

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