By the end of World War II, the United States possessed the world’s largest and best-equipped air force, which made a critical contribution to the Allied victory. American air-power was based on the support of an unrivalled industrial base and on remarkable technological progress, culminating in the production of atomic bombs, delivered by state-of-the-art B-29 Superfortresses in August 1945. The words popularly attributed to Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto, that his country’s attack on Pearl Harbor had awakened a ‘sleeping giant’, seemed to have come true.
In the early stages of the Cold War, the air force took centre stage as the body that would, in the last resort, have been called on to spearhead a nuclear assault on Soviet Russia. A network of forward bases was estab-lished around the world to make this possible. By the 1950s, jet bombers, spy planes, and long-range missiles were set to transform the environment in which military plan-ners operated. Proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam tested American airpower on the battle-field, while successive US administrations engaged in a prolonged arms race with the USSR (see MHM 152, June/July 2026).
The path to aerial dominance had, however, been an uneven one. Although the world’s first powered flight in December 1903 was an Amer-ican engineering achievement, the US was slower than its European rivals to apply the new technology to military purposes. During World War I, the US relied heavily on aircraft manufactured by its allies. In the immediate aftermath of both world wars, cost-cutting led to rapid demobilisation of aircraft and personnel. Advocates of airpower struggled to make their case to politicians and the wider public, whose peacetime priorities lay elsewhere.
It took the emergence of alarming external threats – first Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, then the Soviet Union – to secure domestic support for the expansion of air-fighting capacity. The US air-arm did not gain complete institutional independence from the army until 1947 – almost 30 years after the UK had formed a separate RAF. Even then, there was never an unchallenged consensus within the US defence establishment about the use that should be made of this new power.
In our special for this issue, we examine in depth America’s emergence as a global airborne superpower. In the first of our two articles, Graham Goodlad analyses the factors that at different times promoted and delayed the development of the US air force between World War I and the Cold War; while in our second article he focuses on the hardware deployed by American forces across a period which saw fragile wooden biplanes superseded first by larger piston-engined monoplane fighters and bombers, and then by jet-powered aircraft.
This is an extract from a special feature on the rise of US airpower from the August/September 2026 issue of Military History Matters magazine.
Read the full article online on The Past, or in the print magazine: find out more about subscriptions to Military History Matters here.
