The Italian Royal Air Force and Strategic Bombing in the International Disarmament Years

Military aviation saw rapid development in terms of technology and strategic thinking since the outbreak of the First World War. The appearance of the “new” weapon was destined to significantly impact the defences and perceptions of security not only of all those great powers involved in the conflict but also of the entire international community. Diplomacy could only act accordingly, trying to establish a multilateral dialogue to regulate the military and civil use of aviation. It also took into consideration the abolition of aerial bombardment as a military tool. One of the major concerns that emerged in the diplomatic talks concerned the threat that air warfare posed to populations. Considering what happened during the First World War, it was clear that aerial bombardment did not represent a “simple” act of war but implied several humanitarian consequences in relation to the vulnerability of civilians. In the meantime, in Italy, strategic thinkers such as Giulio Douhet stressed the efficiency of strategic bombing for military, political and economic purposes. Italo Balbo, who was Undersecretary and Minister of Air between 1926 and 1933, was against any form of limitation of aviation since it would have represented a serious obstacle in his attempt to put the newly-formed Italian Royal Air Force on the same level as the national Army and the Navy. In his opinion, banning aerial bombardment would have implied not only the marginalization of Douhet’s war theory, on which the raison d’être of the Italian Air Force as an independent armed force was largely based, but also prevented a “poor” nation like Italy from having a “cheap” but effective instrument of deterrence and coercion. The paper intends to put the development of air power and the Italian Royal Air Force in the diplomatic context of the interwar years, particularly between 1919 and 1933. It aims at examining the problem of strategic bombing when disarmament was at the top of the agenda of the international community, even in relation to the danger to civilian populations and urban space.