Quote 452 of 497

Airmen like Harris argued in the 1920s that armies could fight only
other armies, whereas aircraft could strike right to the heart of the
enemy's territory, crippling its ability and, more important, its will
to wage war. Success, it was claimed, would come mostly through
influencing the psychology of the enemy. The first chief of Britain's
Royal Air Force, Hugh Trenchard, repeatedly asserted that the "moral
effect" of bombing "stands in a proportion of 20 to one" to any
physical destruction it might cause. Trenchard once even said that not
bombing a town could be as effective as bombing it: "The anxiety as to
whether an attack is likely to take place is probably just as
demoralizing as the attack itself."

Although it was the potential of air power in large wars that
galvanized such thinking, airmen were also quick to argue that
aircraft could be equally potent in small wars against irregular or
guerrilla forces. An early opportunity to put this to the test
presented itself in 1919 when the Emir of Afghanistan declared jihad
against Britain's forces in the North-West Frontier Province. The RAF
shipped a single Handley Page biplane bomber to Karachi. It flew over
Kabul and dropped four 112lb bombs and 16 20-pounders. The emir sued
for peace shortly thereafter.

The political capital and prestige which the RAF reaped from the
incident were enormous. Basil Liddell Hart, a military writer,
declared that "Napoleon's presence was said to be worth an army corps,
but this aeroplane seems to have achieved more than 60,000 men did."

The RAF repeated its triumph to much eclat the next year. This time
the target was Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, the "Mad Mullah" of
Somaliland. The mullah, a precocious Muslim fanatic, had been a thorn
in the side of the British for decades. He had adopted a particularly
puritanical form of Islam after a pilgrimage to Mecca, which inspired
him on his return home in 1895 to emulate the Mahdi who had defied the
British in Sudan. The British army then sent four expeditions to
Somaliland to try to deal with the mullah, the last one involving
15,000 troops. Each time the mullah regrouped. In 1909 his men, waging
a jihad against local tribesmen who had accepted British rule,
slaughtered a third of the territory's inhabitants.

When the War Office balked at repeating the effort yet again, the war
minister, Winston Churchill, proposed to have the RAF do it. Six small
aircraft were ferried to East Africa on warships, the mullah's fort
was bombed for two days, and a month later it was all over. Churchill
crowed in Parliament that the previous land expedition had cost the
Treasury GBP6m--about GBP120m ($220m) in today's money; the RAF had
done the job for GBP77,000.

But there were hints even amid the glee that the truth was murkier.
The mullah was never captured. He and 700 riflemen slipped out of the
country only after being pursued by ground forces, whose commander
dismissed the airmen's claims of victory as "something of a hoax". The
bombing, he said, had actually made his work harder by dispersing the
enemy.
		-- "An enduring illusion", The Economist, 2006-08-26

Tags: raf aeroplane eclat wagewar mahdi armycorps trenchard physicaldestruction britisharmy target guerrillaforces handleypage militarywriter expeditio frontierprovince madmullah pilgrimagetomecca biplanebomber northwestfrontier basilliddellhart