No single human invention has transformed war more than the airplane—not even the atomic bomb. Even before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, predictions abounded of the devastating and terrible consequences this new invention would have as an engine of war. Soaring over the battlefield, the airplane became an unstoppable force that left no spot on earth safe from attack. Drawing on combat memoirs, letters, diaries, archival records, museum collections, and eyewitness accounts by the men who fought—and the men who developed the breakthrough inventions and concepts—acclaimed author Stephen Budiansky weaves a vivid and dramatic account of the airplane’s revolutionary transformation of modern warfare. On the web: http://www.budiansky.com/ "A truly fascinating and insightful perspective on the history of air power."  —Norman R. Augustine, former chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin Corporation "A splendid job." — The Wall Street Journal Stephen Budiansky, journalist and military historian, is the author of nine books about history, science, and nature, including Air Power: The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Gulf War II . He publishes frequently in The New York Times and The Washington Post and currently serves as a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly . Air Power The Men, Machines, and Ideas That Revolutionized War, from Kitty Hawk to Iraq By Stephen Budiansky Penguin Books Copyright © 2005 Stephen Budiansky All right reserved. ISBN: 014303474X Chapter One Visions It was an age of miracles. The year 1900 began with an excited rush of newspaper articles, sermons, and speeches marveling over the transformations that had taken place in the century just past. "The nineteenth century," editorialized the New York Times, "has been marked by greater progress in all that pertains to the material well-being and enlightenment of mankind than all the previous history of the race." In "every department of science and intellectual activity," agreed the Washington Post, "we have gone beyond the wildest dreams of 1800." People were not merely living in a miraculous age; they were keenly aware of living in a miraculous age, one in which there seemed no limit to what human ingenuity might do. Inventions were not merely providing new material comforts and easing burdens; they were breaking down the very certainties of centuries. Change had come at a mind-spinning pace. The historian Mark Sullivan, born in 1874, wrote that as a boy he had carried a lantern "of a model as old, at least, as Shakespeare, a cylinder of tin with little jagged holes punched through it." Candles and candle molds were common household articles. Half of Americans still were farmers, and they still used tools that a farmer from a thousand years before would have had no trouble recognizing. Grain was mowed with handheld scythes and threshed on a barn floor using a flail made of two sticks joined together with a leather thong. As late as the 1880s, Sullivan recalled, a farmer who wanted a barn went out to the woods with an axe, chopped down oaks, trimmed them, and got his neighbors together for a barn raising. The blacksmith's shop and the gristmill were still fixtures of every rural hamlet, plying trades unaltered in their essentials since the Middle Ages. The typical American or European of the mid-nineteenth century lived in a world that was not just medieval in its material and tangible dimensions; it was medieval in its cadences and habits of mind. The rhythms of life were set by the sun's rise and fall and the procession of the seasons. Men, and news, and knowledge, traveled at the speed a man or a horse could walk in a day-perhaps twenty-five miles, on a good day, on a good road, in good weather. Henry Adams, the historian and educator who struggled in his autobiography to fathom the world turned upside down that he now lived in, did not exaggerate when he observed that the "American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1, than the year 1900" in the education he was given. In 1900 Henry Adams would stand in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition in Paris and feel "his historical neck broken" as he contemplated the almost silently whirring dynamos that lit the fair's buildings and grounds. "He began to feel the forty-foot dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross," Adams wryly observed, his distant third-person voice perfectly echoing the disconnectedness from all things certain and familiar that the new century had ushered in. "The planet itself," he wrote, "seemed less impressive, in its old-fashioned, deliberate, annual or daily revolution, than this huge wheel, revolving within arm's length at some vertiginous speed." Even history, the laying out of an orderly sequence of events linked by cause and effect, history as Adams had practiced it as a professor at Harvard, had been stood on its head by this "sudden irruption of forces totally new." Th