Abstract
The Air Force, like the Army, was unprepared to fight a limited war on the Asian mainland. Air Force planning focused on global war with the Soviet Union in which atomic bombs delivered by the Strategic Air Command were the decisive weapons. The USAF justified its independence from the Army in terms of its leading strategic role and fought the Navy to maintain its position as custodian of the atomic deterrent. According to W. Stuart Symington, the Secretary of the Air Force, the strategic bomber carrying atomic weapons was the surest deterrent to war and ‘the one means of unloosing prompt, crippling destruction on the enemy if war broke out’.1 The joint strategic war plan in force when the Korean conflict broke out, OFFTACKLE, gave a central role to atomic bombing. Any Soviet invasion of western Europe was to be answered by prompt air retaliation on Russian industrial cities, destroying the Soviet capacity to wage war.2
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Notes and References
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Eugene M. Emme (ed.), The Impact of Air Power (New York, 1959) pp. 673–6.
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© 1986 Callum A. MacDonald
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MacDonald, C.A. (1986). The War in the Air. In: Korea: The War before Vietnam. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-06332-1_12
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