Julien Vincent for technophilia; and Caterina Zanfi for the philosophy of war. My warmest gratitude here to them all.
Tripoli, 1 November 1911. ‘I decided that today I would try to drop bombs from the aeroplane. No one had ever tried such a thing, and if I succeed I shall be happy to have been the first,’ Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti wrote in a letter to his father. The engineer from Genoa had obtained his pilot’s wings just at the time that the Italian government decided to embark on the conquest of a colonial empire in Libya. Gavotti’s record to date was limited to an unauthorized flight above the Vatican, which led to his detention for a few days, and to second place in a race between Bologna and Venice. But in late September 1911 things began to hot up in Libya: the Sublime Porte had refused to cede Tripoli and Italy declared war on the Ottoman Empire. Less than a week later, the city fell into the hands of the Italians. As a member of a small ‘airmen’s flotilla’, Gavotti was posted to Africa a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday.
At dawn on 1 November, Gavotti took off in his plane and headed for the Mediterranean. He had no specific mission order, but he did have a definite idea. He made a wide turn above the sea before heading for the small oasis of Aïn Zara, some fifteen kilometres south-east of Tripoli, where he had noticed a troop of Arab fighters on an earlier reconnaissance flight:
I held the joystick with one hand, and with the other I untied the cord that held the cover of the box. I took a bomb from the box, which I placed on my knees. Transferring the joystick to my other hand, with the free one I removed a detonator from the small box. I put it in my mouth. I closed the box, placed the detonator in the bomb and looked down. I was ready. I was about one kilometre from the oasis.
The Ottoman army, caught unawares by the Italian aggression, met with considerable difficulties. So much so that Fethi Bey, the Ottoman military commander of the Tripoli region, decided to withdraw his troops and call on indigenous units to use guerrilla tactics. Gavotti’s task in Libya was to undertake strategic reconnaissance missions and keep the general staff informed of the manoeuvres of the enemy forces. But guerrilla fighters do not act like a regular army: they do not concentrate their forces in the same fashion, and can move among the civilian population like ‘fish in water’. In such conditions, strategic reconnaissance was completely useless and the Italian airmen had to invent new missions for themselves. Hence the initiative of Giulio Gavotti. It would have a long posterity.
Tripoli, 1 November 2011. NATO planes had stopped their bombing a day ago. The air strikes on Libya, which had begun on 19 March, ended on 31 October, one day short of a century since the very first bombing by plane. By a strange historical and geographical coincidence, the bombs launched by the NATO planes fell in the same places as those of Gavotti a hundred years earlier. History repeated itself, seeming to invite us to revisit a century of air bombardments. The historiography of air warfare, which has focused above all on the question of the legitimacy and utility of strategic bombing in the Second World War, finds it hard to take into account the importance of the colonial precedent, most often viewed as simply a ‘dress rehearsal’ before the ‘real war’ between the great powers.1 Yet the history of air bombing is full of this kind of ‘geographical coincidence’: the regions subjected to such bombing in the inter-war years particularly included Iraq, Syria, and the Indian ‘north-west frontier’: Afghanistan and the tribal regions of Pakistan.
What, then, happened on 1 November 1911?
I saw two encampments close to a white building, the first with about two hundred men, the second with some fifty. Just before reaching them I took the bomb in my right hand; I removed the safety pin with my teeth and let the bomb fall from the aircraft. I managed to follow it for a few seconds with my eyes before it disappeared. Soon after, I saw a dark cloud rise from the centre of the smaller camp. I had aimed at the larger one but I was lucky. I was spot on.
When he activated the detonator with his teeth, Gavotti did more than experiment with a new way of launching bombs: he revolutionized warfare. It is only today that we are beginning to measure the scope of the revolution commenced in the Libyan sky. Having left on a reconnaissance mission, Gavotti struck an encampment of fighters. This historical first of dropping a bomb from the air resembled in some respects an artillery action, but with the difference that the forces Gavotti targeted were not officially engaged in battle. Besides, Aïn Zara was not simply a gathering point for potential insurgents: the oasis was also a social and economic system. This was precisely the novelty: by dropping a bomb on Aïn Zara, Gavotti did not just hit a target, he actually constituted a new type of target. A hybrid target, which indifferently mingled civilian and military objectives and, among the latter, regular and irregular forces. In this way Gavotti inaugurated a new way of thinking about and making war, the hybrid and ‘asymmetrical’ wars that have been an obsession ever since.
It is the spectacularly innovative aspect of this event that strategic thinking has focused on: with aircraft it became possible to strike not only armed forces but an entire socioeconomic system. It was in no way surprising, therefore, that air power should have been viewed as a solution to the war of position of 1914–18. The unprecedented development of weaponry in the early years of the century seemed to have ruled out completely any kind of offensive. Faced with the impossibility of breaking the front, aviation made it possible to get round it and strike no longer the military forces deployed but the very sources of their power: industrial production, means of transport, political cohesion, and popular morale. Faced with tactical stalemate on the front, aviation offered the possibility of waging a strategic offensive.
Aerial bombing thus became an essential element of ‘total war’ in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. From Guernica to Dresden, by way of Coventry, Rotterdam, and Brest, European memories of the Second World War are marked by the experience of bombed cities. The ravages of this war are still well anchored in European ‘communicative memory’,2 and recent historiography has conducted important work, particularly on the strategic bombing of Germany and Japan. This chapter in the history of air warfare had long been avoided, seeming as it did to mark a dilemma in terms of historiographical ethics: was it permissible to place at the centre of analysis the deliberate attack on German civilians during the Second World War? The history of air warfare was thus caught in a normative cul-de-sac.
To escape from this means remembering Bourdieu’s postulate that the fundamental theoretical operation in social sciences lies in the definition of the object.3 We can note therefore that the normative question surreptitiously introduces a theoretical decision that is anything but anodyne: to situate strategic bombing solely in the context of total war in Europe. Yet bombing from the air did not start in Europe but in the Libyan desert, before striking the Middle East, Waziristan, Africa, the Philippines, and Nicaragua. Before reaching the centre, bombing was experimented with and perfected on the periphery of the world system; before European cities were transformed into fields of ruins, there was the colonial matrix of total war.
Although it was only in the 1920s that the systematic destruction of socio-economic resources was integrated into the corpus of military doctrine, it was already virtually present in the bombing of Aïn Zara. Air war thus corroborates Hannah Arendt’s thesis that colonialism provided the model for totalitarianism, and particularly for the totalization of war. In other words, air bombing does not relate just to the memory of European peoples, it forms an essential chapter of what is nowadays called ‘global history’. This approach was born from an idea that is simple in appearance: that the world is one, and that everything that happens in one part of the globe inevitably has effects on the ‘world system’ as a whole. To adopt a ‘global’ perspective also implies contextualizing differently the value judgements that underlie any theoretical analysis.4
Accordingly, far from beginning with the Second World War, air strikes were already part of the arsenal deployed by all
