Libya: A century of study in air bombing

— -- Soaring above the Libyan desert, Italy's Lt. Giulio Gavotti turned his attention to the handful of steel shells packed inside his monoplane's cockpit.

The shells were grenades, each about the size of an orange, and filled with explosive picric acid.

Banking over the Taguira oasis on Nov. 1, 1911, miles from the trenches outside the recently-taken city of Tripoli, Gavotti steered with one hand while clasping the grenades between his knees. Some 2,000 feet high, Gavotti dropped two grenades on the oasis, and then released four more on the nearby Turkish camp of Ain Zara, a stretch of white tents parked in a sandy hollow.

Though they likely missed their mark, exploding harmlessly in the sand, the era of aerial bombing had begun, a century ago this month, in Libya. One irony of the recent overthrow and death of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, following NATO warplanes bombing his convoy in October, is that Libya illustrates the advances in aerial bombing technology that transformed warfare over the last century.

"Accuracy has been the great problem and great challenge in aerial bombing," says air historian Tom Crouch, a senior curator with the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. "Today the problem isn't hitting the target, but making sure it is the right target. It wasn't always that way."

Bombs, blimps and airplanes made their first wartime appearance in Lt. Gavotti's war, the Italian-Turkish conflict of 1911-12, a clash remembered almost solely by devotees of air power. "Amazingly, aircraft were used not only for reconnaissance but also for artillery spotting, transportation of supplies and personnel, and even bombing of enemy troops, supplies, and facilities — both day and night," wrote the air power historian Col. Philip Meilinger.

In 1911, the airplanes these men flew were mostly framed with wood, although some used steel tubing, covered in torn canvas and held together with steel wires. Designers had not determined whether the planes should land on wheels or skids, whether the propeller should push or pull the plane forward or determined the pilot's best location — back as far as possible from the engine and nose it turns out — to survive a crash. Recent experiments had demonstrated that long narrow wings generated more lift than short stubby ones, but an explanation for this puzzling fact awaited publication by the German aerodynamicist Ludwig Prandtl, in 1918.

The airplanes were slow. The state-of-the-art 100-horsepower rotary Gnome engine (the Wright Flyer's 1903 model only had a 16 h.p. one) could propel a Blériot "sport" monoplane to 75 mile-per-hour speeds, which made landing tricky as engines had only one speed, full-throttle, and smooth runways were a novelty. A Taube monoplane, the kind Gavotti seems to have flown, cost $6,335 with a 100 h.p. Mercedes engine.

In 1911, perhaps 1,000 serious pilots were alive in the world, according to a survey published that year. Learning to fly was "a perplexing business," said the British pilot Cecil Grace, quoted in The Aeroplane, Past, Present and Future, which published the survey. The din of the engines prevented the novice from hearing instruction, while "his breath is almost taken away by the rush of wind from the propeller" before undertaking a first take-off. The attempt usually ended a few seconds later in a short bouncing landing that damaged the plane. "Proficiency, as regards flying under ordinary conditions, comes very readily, however," Grace concluded, in a comment recorded a day before he disappeared with his airplane over the English Channel.

An early grave wasn't unusual for aviation's pioneers, as airplanes readily crashed. At least 37 had died by 1911 in accidents since the first fatal crash of Sept. 17, 1908. On that date, Orville Wright broke his leg and ribs and killed his passenger, a U.S. Army lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge, on a demonstration flight before 2,000 spectators. Four of the dead aviators since then were Italians, military pilots or military engineers, who otherwise likely would have flown over Libya in the 1911-12 war and dropped grenades with Lt. Gavotti.

"Later on, they had racks of bombs, shells with fins on them outside a second cockpit, and a guy would literally drop them by hand," Crouch says. "It was not very accurate."

Observers agreed in 1911. "Bomb-dropping, whether from airship or aeroplane, does not appear to have been attended by any great measure of success, and it is not unlikely that that the possibilities of early development in this direction have been overrated," revealed W. K. McClure, then a Times of London reporter embedded with the Italian Army.

"Bombing very quickly became more sophisticated, however," Crouch says, in World War I. Aside from the Zeppelin raids, Germany began sending large twin-engined Gotha bombers over England before the war ended. "They had bombsights which were becoming more complex by then"

A bomber arms race ensued afterward, resulting in planes such as the four-engined B-17 and during World War II, the Norden bombsight, which supposedly accounted for wind speed and direction. "It was supposed to be very accurate, but they still had trouble dropping a bomb 'in the pickle barrel' as they said then," Crouch says. The area bombing of World War II, which obliterated cities such as Dresden and Tokyo, was partly a result of this inaccuracy, he adds.

The second atomic bomb, dropped on Nagasaki, which killed at least 39,000 men, women and children, was several miles off target, Crouch says. "The atomic bomb was the ultimate expression of area bombing. You didn't need to be accurate."

Real accuracy in aerial bombing came towards the end of the Vietnam War, in cases such as the 1972 destruction of North Vietnam's Thanh Hoa Bridge with laser-guided bombs, after conventional bombs had failed for years. The maturation and miniaturization of electronics, computers, lasers and other communications technologies springing from that time, all add up to today's "precision" munitions, Crouch says. The result is the current era of drone plane bombing, and the precise targeting that saw fighter planes, launched in Italy, target Gadhafi's motorcade. "Hitting a target is not so much the problem now, as making sure it is a real target," says Crouch, noting controversy over civilian bombings in the ongoing war in Afghanistan. "How could Gadhafi stand up to that kind of air power, really, in the end?" he says.

A century ago, air power advocates such as Italy's Giulio Douhet and H.G. Wells saw airplane bombing deciding wars, through mass terror of populations facing bombs. "It happened. But it didn't happen the way they thought it would happen," Crouch concludes. That's one of history's lessons, both when it comes to technology and to war.