The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon

How did the United States become committed to the warplane as an instrument of national policy? What forces influenced America's decision to rely on indiscriminate destruction to implement its will? This book is the first in-depth history of the rise of American strategic bombing. With impressive sweep and vigor, Michael S. Sherry explores the aspirations and illusions that led Americans to embrace air power before World War II, the ideas, techniques, and organizations that guided air attacks during the war, and the devastating effects of American and British "conventional" bombing. His book is a major contribution to American military, intellectual, and political history.

Sherry investigates the growing appeal of air power in America from the turn of the century to the end of World War II. he demonstrates that the airplane became at the same time the embodiment of the fantasy of flight, a celebration of American technical genius and might, and a promise of escape from the protracted destruction suffered by land armies. Then, because what America thought about air power is only half the story, Sherry reconstructs in compelling detail what bombing actually did, focusing on the campaign of firebombing against Japanese cities during World War II that preceded the atomic bomb and rivaled it in destructive fury. Sherry explores why Americans employed against Japan the techniques of city bombing they had usually resisted in Europe and, in the process, examines the insidious role of racism in American policy. He shows how the bureaucratization of this war, by which the bombing campaign against Japan was directed from offices in Washington D.C., affected the decision process, And he assesses the roles and personalities of such controversial policymakers as Roosevelt, LeMay, Arnold, and Truman.

Sherry's book traces the origins of a dangerous illusion in American thought about bombing and mass destruction: that the bombing of cities would be so horrific that nations would not dare let it occur, or long tolerate it if restraint broke down. This illusion, says Sherry, persists today and it has sanctioned the growth of nuclear arsenal, crippled efforts to contain the nuclear buildup, and immensely deepened the modern nuclear peril.