IGCSE History

• Home
• Introduction to IGCSE
• The Road to Affluence: USA 1917 - 1941 (A9)
  • 1917 - 1929
    • The impact of the First World War
    • Immigration
    • Henry Ford and mass production
    • Farming in the 1920s
    • The Stock Market Boom
  • 1929 - 1941
    • The Wall Street Crash
    • The Depression
    • The policies of Hoover
    • Roosevelt and the New Deal
    • Reactions to the New Deal
• International Relations 1919-1939 (A8)
  • Collective Security
    • The Versailles Settlement
    • The Foundation of the League of Nations
    • Strengths and weaknesses of the League of Nations
    • Successes and failures of the League of Nations
    • Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact
  • Appeasement
    • Manchuria
    • The Disarmament Conference
    • Abyssinia
    • Hitler and the League
    • Appeasement in action
• Revolution in China 1949 - 1996 (A14)
  • 1949 - 1976
    • China under Mao
    • Reform under Liu and Deng
    • The reasons for the Cultural Revolution
    • The impact of the Cultural Revolution
    • China 1971 - 1976
  • 1976 - 1996
    • The defeat of the Gang of Four
    • China under Deng Xiaoping
    • Reforms of the economy
    • The Democracy Movement
    • China in the 1990s
• South-East Asia 1945 - 1900 (A15)
  • Indo-China
    • The end of the French Empire
    • Vietnam 1954 - 1965
    • US involvement in Vietnam
    • The unification of Vietnam
    • Laos and Cambodia
  • South-East Asia
    • The struggle for control of Malaya
    • The creation of Malaysia
    • Singapore
    • Suharto and Indonesia
    • Sukarno and Pancasila
• Conflict and Crisis is the Middle East 1946 - 1996 (A16)
  • Unit overview
  • 1946 - 1967
    • The creation of Israel
    • The impact of the war of 1948 - 1949
    • The Suez Crisis
    • Superpower involvement in the Middle East
    • The Six Day War
  • 1967 - 1996
    • International terrorism
    • The war of Yom Kippur
    • The Palestinian Liberation Organisation
    • Lebanon and the occupied territories
    • Successes and failures from Camp David to Oslo
• The First World War (B4)
  • The Schlieffen Plan
  • Deadlock on the Western Front
  • Gallipoli
  • The Somme and Passchendaele
  • The War at Sea
  • The defeat of Germany
• The USA 1917-1929 (B7)
  • The Roaring Twenties
  • Advertising and consumerism
  • New forms of entertainment
  • Prohibition
  • Gangsterism
  • Hollywood
• China under Mao Zedong 1949 - 1959 (B10)
  • The creation of the Communist State
  • Land Reform
  • Communist society
  • The First Five Year Pan
  • The 100 Flowers
  • The Great Leap Forward
• The Changing Nature of Warfare (C3)
  • Unit overview
  • Warfare at the beginning of the 20th Century
  • Land warfare
  • Sea and aerial warfare
  • Atomic and nuclear weapons
  • Warfare at the end of the 20th Century
• Links

Sea and aerial warfare

The First World War saw few developments in surface warfare. Little fighting took place between warships. They key objective was to control the seas to stop supplies getting to the enemy. The British blockade of German ports, which stopped supplies reaching Germany, was a crucial factor in the Allied victory over Germany.

The only major sea battle at Jutland in 1916 confirmed the superior design of the German battleships which inflicted heavier losses on the British. Nevertheless it was a strategic defeat for the Germans who returned to port having failed to break the British blockade.

The key development was the German use of submarines known as U-boats and the measures adopted by the British to defeat this menace. In the early stages of the war, German U-boats concentrated their attacks on Allied warships. When the Allies learned to protect their warships the U-boats attacked Allied merchant ships instead.

To start with, the attackers would warn a merchant ship that it was about to sink and allow the crew to abandon ship. This was abandoned in February 1915 when the Germans began a campaign of unrestricted warfare. All Allied ships were targeted. They could be torpedoed without warning. This proved very effective and by June 1917 Britain had lost 500,000 tons to the U-boats and London only had six week’s supply of food left.

However, from 1916 the Allies improved their tactics for dealing with the U-boats. They developed depth charges, set to go off underwater at certain depths. From mid-1917 almost all merchant ships travelled in convoys. British and US ships escorted merchant ships in close formation. Allied shipping losses fell by 20% when the convoy system was introduced. Depth charges became even more effective when used together with the convoy system.

U-boats also played an important role in the Second World War. During the early years of the Battle of the Atlantic, the battle for control of the North Atlantic, U-Boats had the upper hand due to new tactics and technology. By attacking from the surface and at night, the U-Boats were able to avoid detection by the British anti-submarine device, ASDIC, which relied on sound waves travelling through water. German intelligence had cracked some of the codes used by the British ships. Wolf packs of U-boats were difficult to detect as they deliberately limited the use of their radios to avoid detection. In 1941 the Allies lost 1300 ships rising to 1661 in the following year.

However, improved technology and intelligence defeated the U-boat threat in the battle of the Atlantic. From late 1941 onwards, the British code beakers at Bletchley Park got better at decoding German codes. If they broke the German code, they knew where the U-boats were and so could guide the convoys away from the wolf packs. Between may 1942 and May 1943, they managed to steer 105 out of 174 convoys across the Atlantic without any interference from U-boats.

A specially powerful explosive called Torpex was used in anti-submarine weapons. Another development was the hedgehog depth charge, which fired clusters of bombs over a wide area. Convoy tactics improved from the First World War. Training for commanders improved and special support groups of destroyers were created fitted with powerful radar and listening equipment that could pick up radio signals from U-boats. In July 1943 over 1600 ships crossed the Atlantic without being attacked. Between June and December 1943 the Allies sank 141 U-boats, losing only 57 ships themselves.

The most significant long-term change was the aircraft carrier and its use in the war in the Pacific. Aircraft carriers had been under development since the First World War. It was the British who highlighted their effectiveness when, in November 1940, Swordfish torpedo bombers launched from the British carrier, HMS Illustrious, sank three Italian battleships within Taranto Harbour. The Japanese navy quickly obtained a full report and used aircraft armed with quick-fusing, shallow run torpedoes, from aircraft carriers to attack the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, 7 December 1941.

Control of the Pacific was now dependant on a combination of air and sea power. In other words, the size of the carrier fleet. The decisive battle came at Midway in May 1942 when the Americans destroyed four Japanese carriers, the very thing the Japanese had failed to do at Pearl Harbor. Without air protection, the Japanese fleet was hopelessly vulnerable.

The fastest development was in aerial warfare in the first half of the twentieth century, with the development of fighter and bomber planes. Civilians and their homes were now threatened by enemy attacks.

In the early stages of the First World War, the most important aircraft were airships. These were essentially huge bags of lighter-than-air hydrogen gas, powered by engines carried in ‘cars’ in a keel-like structure underneath. The British used airships mainly for escorting ships and for hunting for U-boats. German airships were much more advanced and more widely used. Known as Zeppelins (after the designer Count Zeppelin) they were used to bomb British towns. The first raids were in 1915. they did not carry enough bombs for real damage, but what they did achieve was psychological damage – civilians in Britain were no longer safe. Searchlights picked them up as they flew across the city and fighter planes, firing explosive bullets or dropping bombs on them, brought many down in flames.

In 1914 aeroplanes were very unreliable and highly dangerous and were mainly used for observation. Soon their speed and mobility meant that commanders used them for detailed reconnaissance work over enemy trenches. Enemy aircraft began to shoot down reconnaissance flights and soon the ‘dogfight’ had developed, at first using pistols and rifles but, in April 1915, the planes were successfully fitted with machine guns.

The Fokker D.VII

The Germans developed the Fokker fighter plane with a synchronised machine-gun mounted in front of the pilot firing between the rotating propeller blades. Fighter planes like this could be used to attack targets as well as enemy aircraft. German fighter aces, such as Hermann Goering and Baron von Richtofen did battle with Allied pilots over France. By 1918 the primitive planes had given way to sleep fighters such as the Sopwith Camel and Fokker Triplane.

By the end of the First World War, aeroplanes had been designed that could drop bombs. The standard German bomber was the Gotha. Between December 1914 and June 1917 there were 57 German aeroplane raids on Britain, mostly on London but also on industrial towns such as Newcastle, Leeds, Liverpool and Manchester. About 5000 people were killed or wounded by German bombs. Because of improved defences from anti-aircraft fire, the Germans switched to night attacks, especially on London.

The First World War had speeded up the development of air technology. Nevertheless, aircraft remained a side-show the land war. This was to change again during the Second World War. Air power now became essential to army and naval operations. Hitler appreciated the role of air power in his Blitzkrieg tactics. The Polish air force was destroyed on the ground and Stuka dive-bombers were used to soften up the enemy.

The Battle of Britain, August-September 1940, confirmed the importance of air power. Hitler could not invade Britain until the German air force, the Luftwaffe, had defeated the Royal Air Force. The German attempt failed and the invasion was called off. This was due to the RAF Fighters, Spitfires and Hurricanes, which were more than a match for the German fighter planes but also due to a further development, radar. This worked by transmitting radio waves that bounced off approaching enemy aircraft. Experienced radar operators could accurately estimate the size and speed of approaching aircraft. In previous campaigns the Germans had been able to destroy most of their enemies’ aircraft on the ground. Britain’s investment in radar in the 1930s meant that RAF planes were not caught on the ground as the Luftwaffe approached.

The Second World War also confirmed the role of the bomber as a method of attacking the enemy civilian population. In fact, before the war it was widely believed that civilian populations would not be able to withstand aerial attack and would demand peace. This did not prove to be the case. If anything, bombing increased the will to resist.

From 1940 to 1941 the Luftwaffe attempted to blitz Britain into submission by bombing major British cities, especially London. Britain suffered more civilian than military casualties. By the end of 1940, 22,000 had been killed and there was considerable damage to housing and industry. Britain was not defeated.

The Allied retaliated with their own raids on Germany with Air Chief Marshal Harris, head of RAF Bomber Command, convinced that such raids would destroy German morale, industry and housing. Berlin and other major German cities were bombed regularly from 1943 to 1945 using high explosive and incendiary bombs which caused fires to rage uncontrollably.

German war production was disrupted but Germany did not surrender. This highlighted the limitations of air power. It was the Allied armies advancing into Germany which forced the final surrender

Meanwhile German scientists had developed Hitler’s secret V-weapons. The V1 ‘flying bomb’ had stubby wings, was jet-powered, filled with a tonne of high explosives, and flew a set distance before the engine cut out and it dived towards the ground. The first V1s landed on London on 13 June, 1944. Fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons prevented most V1s reaching London.

However, the British had no answer to Hitler’s second V-weapon, the V2 rocket. It carried a tonne of explosives and was a genuine guided missile. It flew at supersonic speeds and was impossible to shoot down. Several of these hit London but their launching sites were captured by the advancing Allied armies before they could create serious damage.

The most important technological development in conventional air warfare came in 1944 with the world’s first jet aircraft, the British Gloster Meteor with a speed of 660-800 kph. Military aircraft became bigger and faster in the years following the Second World War.

The limitations of air power were highlighted again during the conflict in Vietnam in the 1960s. In 1965 the USA launched Operation Rolling Thunder, extensive bombing raids on military and industrial targets in North Vietnam, later extended to Laos and Cambodia. Although damaging North Vietnam’s war effort and disrupting supply routes, US air power could not defeat the Communists – it could only slow them down. The USA also used a powerful chemical weapon, Agent Orange, a highly toxic ‘weed killer’ and Napalm, which was sprayed on thousands of kilometres of jungle in order to destroy the place where the enemy, the Viet Cong, hid. Napalm burned through skin and bone. Many civilians and soldiers were killed by these chemical weapons.

Nuclear Warfare

The Red Barron