To a greater degree than ever before, World War II was an air war. World War I had been the first to be fought with airplanes, largely in the famous dogfights between competing air units, while World War II included this element as well as bombing raids conducted far from home base by German planes over Great Britain and other distant regions, and later by the V-2 rockets that were also directed at that island nation. The German Luftwaffe was a key element in the Nazi intention of conquering much of Europe beginning in the 1930s and continuing through the war in the 1940s. The Luftwaffe was a formidable air power. It had its origins in World War I, but after that war, the Treaty of Versailles had forced the Luftwaffe into a clandestine existence until 1935, when the Nazi propaganda machine extolled the virtues of this unit. By 1939, Herman Goering had created an officer corps capable of terrorizing the other nations of Europe. The Luftwaffe was key in the early victories of the Third Reich and would continue to be important throughout the war, but it would be gutted by defeat and left even more ineffective by this war than it had been by the last.
The airplane became a weapon first in World War I during the early months of the war. In spite of the literature to the contrary, the airplane contributed little to the outcome of that war, though the use of the airplane gave rise to the myth of the flying "ace." At the time, the Germans did introduce terror bombings, but these were from Zeppelins. The Germans developed the giant bombers toward the end of the war, the Gothas, Staaken, and other planes, but they did not pursue systematic bombing at this time. Between the two wars, the development of air power was minimal (Jablonski xiii).
In 1933, Herman Goering was appointed to the position of National Commissioner of Aviation. He had been a successful fighter pilot during World War I, and he now had as his goal the establ...