Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe
Gustavo Urueña A independent.academia.edu
During the First World War, air power came of age. Although it was not yet a weapon that was capable of achieving decision on the battlefield, between 1914 and 1918 it became, at the very least, an important weapon used in a variety of ways by all
THIRTY-FIVE years ago the English Channel had not yet been crossed by air. Now the crossing of the Atlantic by airplanes is a commonplace. One of this war's sensations was the cross-Channel bombardment of England by flying bombs and rockets. If there is another world war, will the transatlantic flight of bomb and rockets become a commonplace also? There is every reason to believe so. The technical problems involved are not so great as those which had to be overcome by the men who invented and perfected the airplane. A few years from now it probably will have become technically possible to bombard the United States from European bases, and vice versa. And the nature of the bombs so carried may be, as we now have had confirmed to us, terrible beyond any previous imagining.

The Hussars of the 12th Cavalry Brigade were attached to the 5th Cavalry Division, which was subordinated to the First Cavalry Corps. It formed part of the German Third Army that enacted the attack on France and Belgium in August 1914 as part of the pre-war Schlieffen Plan. He crossed the Meuse river at Dinant. It was involved in heavy action against the French VIII Cavalry Corps and fought in Belgium at Namur on 23–24 August and again at St. Quentin. The 5th Cavalry continued its drive into France after the Battle of the Frontiers, but was stopped at the First Battle of the Marne in September. In recognition for bravery in combat, Wolfram was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class (1914) on 21 September 1914. The modern combat environment damaged the effectiveness of cavalry, and thus Richthofen’s division was transferred to the Eastern Front, in Poland that November On the Eastern Front, the Cavalry Division was mostly deployed in the south. Little combat took place, as the German army did not use cavalry as frequently. The division was kept mainly in reserve. Richthofen’s brigade served near Pinsk in 1916, and the division would spend late 1915 to January 1917 of defensive operations in the Pripet Marshes. Richthofen was made commander of the horse depot of the Brigade in the autumn, 1916 and was promoted to Squadron Commander, with 160 men under his command. This was never going to garner him the level of fame his cousins, Lothar and Manfred, were now achieving in the Luftstreitkräfte (Imperial Air Service). They personally encouraged him to join as an airman. He finally did so in June 1917.

Stealth technology takes a lot of forms. The word can refer to all kinds of things, from spray-coatings on bombers to the active camouflage of various science fiction properties. For the purposes of this article, we’ll treat the word stealth with the following definition: the passive avoidance of detection. That is to say, the Predator wouldn’t count — that would be cloaking. We’ll get to that in a later piece. But stealth, particularly, has been making real-world impacts for hundreds of years. It has served as a major play in several concurrent arms races, often turning the tide of wars before countermeasures are developed. The most basic form of stealth? Hiding, the time-honored tradition of holding a bush in front of you as you advance on the castle, or painting splotches on your fatigues so you can blend in with the ground. This may seem silly, but in the lead-up to the World War I, a U-Boat’s stealth capabilities came almost entirely from the fact that it was simply not visible. In the time before advanced sonar and meticulous new methods of triangulation, that really was all it took. Similarly, the altitude of a spy plane counts as stealth, especially given modern research outfitting planes with non-standard cameras to spy the ground through the protection of cloud cover.

Seventy-five years after the Battle of Britain, the conventional wisdom remains that the Battle was won by the innovation of the ‘Dowding system’, which integrated radar and eight-gun fighters, and the skill and courage of the RAF's fighter pilots. This article examines the design of the London Air Defence Area in 1917-18, the formation of the Home Defence Air Force in 1922-23 and the reorientation of Britain’s air defences to face Germany in 1934 to demonstrate that Britain continuously developed strategic air defence from 1922 to 1940 because of the alignment of both political imperative, defence strategy and the RAF's institutional air defence expertise. While successive Chiefs of the Air Staff favoured strategic bombing, the RAF, formed in 1918 to prevent German raids on London, had many air defence experts and advocates. Therefore, while strategic bombing was largely unproven and its impact exaggerated, air defence was based on lessons from the First World War, and increasingly on science, operational research and operational evaluation. Furthermore successive British governments, not just Chamberlain's, pursued a deliberate defensive strategy, recognising Britain’s strategic vulnerability to the bomber and public anxiety, while seeking to use Britain’s technical, industrial and air strength in a long war and avoiding a bloody continental commitment. This combination ensured victory in the Battle of Britain but also contributed to the Fall of France, without which the Battle of Britain would not have been fought.