Army Air Cooperation and Support
This lengthy message is prompted by Danny42C’s account (some time ago) of the way in which a small group of Vultee dive-bombers could accurately deliver munitions to a small, hardened target under circumstances where conventional artillery could not be brought to bear. Why did the RAF not make more use of dive bombers and why were those they did have in India/Burmah retired sooner than (perhaps) necessary or sensible?
Some sort of answer to the basic question appears in a book that happened to come my way:
The Development of British Tactical Air Power 1940-1943. Powell, M., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 261 pp. ISBN 978-1-137-54417-9,
and I will try to summarise some of the relevant issues it describes. This is an academic history, with many references, and I found it slightly heavy going. But it gives a lot of the background history, of which I can give only an inadequate and partial summary. The book’s focus is on Air Army Cooperation and Support (AACS), its history, principles, and doctrine, with little detail about implementation. Note that 14th Army is not indexed, and the Vultee Vengeance gets only a passing mention.
As I understand it, the major practical problems that bedevilled AACS included: Who would issue orders to the airmen and through what channels of communication? How could the air element respond in good time to a call for action? How could ground targets be identified and nearby friendly forces be kept safe? An important factor in solving these problems seems to have been the co-location of Air and Army headquarters at the relevant levels, together with development of the necessary wireless communication systems.
The major political factor that led to weak development of AACS despite its good start in the WW1 period of static trench warfare, seems to have been the fragile state of the RAF’s political and financial existence post-WW1, coupled with the infamous “ten-year rule”. Trenchard and the Air Staff saw the RAF as having a potentially vital, strategic role and thought that this would never develop if the Air was parcelled out to the Army and Navy. Because of this danger AACS was never an RAF priority, although some basic studies and exercises were carried out during the inter-war period. After the Battle of France in 1940, during which AACS had clearly failed, an Air Cooperation Command was reluctantly established, its main remit being to develop ideas and procedures. This Command may not have been what the Army expected or wanted, but was also more than the Air Ministry had hoped to provide. At the same time the war in the North African desert forced the evolution of more successful AACS doctrine and practice so that, by 1943, planning for the invasion of Europe could proceed, what had been learned being incorporated into the foundations of 2nd Tactical Air Force.
Little of the resulting operational doctrine appears to have had a “flying artillery” flavour at first, the emphasis being on Air Observation, which was developed successfully (though limited by available planes) until ground attack by fighter aircraft became practical as the Luftwaffe lost control of the air. As we know, dive bombers did not enter into these developments because the aircraft did not exist; the RAF never wanted them. Intriguingly, it transpires that the Luftwaffe use of the Stuka JU87 dive-bomber has been largely misunderstood. Its main use was not for impromptu AACS but was generally pre-planned to supplement the ground assault immediately before the latter was launched.
It would be interesting to see an historical analysis of AACS in the 14th Army’s area. Were there independent and divergent developments or did the higher direction simply mirror what was happening in Europe and Africa? In any scenario I can envisage the exchange of dive bombers for Mosquitos, even if the latter were rocket-firing, is hard to understand.
If I have misunderstood or mis-reported anything please be kind; I am a biologist, not an historian.
No doubt other readers will expand on the issues raised here and I look forward to reading those posts.
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