Imperial policing

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When Imperial Policing (Reich monitoring) is a 1920s during the years in the UK by Major General Sir Charles Gwynn developed method of counterinsurgency using air forces , which in 1934 through his work Imperial Policing was officially recognized as doctrine.

Historical background

The idea of ​​using air forces in war is almost as old as established aviation itself. This is why HG Wells' work The War in the Air caused such a sensation that it was reviewed as a fictional work in 1909 by the German military literature newspaper , although this magazine otherwise exclusively dealt with specialist literature. As early as 1910, the Deutsche Kolonialzeitung stated:

Without a doubt it is possible, with the help of the technical advances in flight technology, to tighten surveillance in distant and large colonial areas and to show the violence of the motherland visibly and surprisingly even in remote areas.

The first detectable combat aircraft took 1911/1912 in the Italian-Turkish war place when Italian pilots in the ground fighting in what was then the Ottoman Empire belonging to Libya intervened. In the Mexican Civil War , too, in 1913 air forces were deployed on both sides of the civil war parties, and civilians were also hit, as the German sea captain Karl von Schönberg observed on May 6, 1914 in the northwestern Mexican city ​​of Mazatlán :

This morning at 9 o'clock the biplane flew over the city and dropped 3 bombs, one of which hit a school: many harmless people, especially children, are dead or terribly wounded; all doors and windows in the area are depressed.

As early as 1913, the then commander of the German protection forces , Major General Franz Georg von Glasenapp, won Lieutenant Alexander von Scheele as an aviator for the protection force of the German South West Africa colony . Scheele was then transferred to the Schutztruppe and flew in 1914/15 during the First World War against South African troops who had marched into the colony.

Imperial policing in the interwar period. Somalia and Iraq

During the First World War , the so-called attack aircraft was developed by all warring parties, which, equipped with machine guns and light bombs, could intervene directly in the ground fighting. This new technique was also used by the Royal Air Force (RAF) in Somalia immediately after the end of the First World War . Since the turn of the century, Mohammed Abdullah Hassan (approx. 1867-23 November 1920), called The Mad Mullah by the British and "The Tolle Mullah" in the German press, fended off numerous British expeditions to conquer the area with guerrilla tactics . Since the costs for a large expeditionary force were too high for the Colonial Office , the dispatch of eight aircraft was approved, which were transported on the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal . The so-called Z-Staffel arrived in Somalia in December 1919. It took them five days to demoralize Abdullah's forces, which were entrenched in strong forts, and to make them flee. Abdullah also fled to Abyssinia , where he died of natural causes on November 23, 1920. Paradoxically, his abandonment of guerrilla tactics and the use of conventional fortifications made him vulnerable to the new weapon.

Above all in Iraq, which after the First World War as a former Ottoman province was now a British protectorate and where there had been a massive uprising as early as 1920 , the Empire used massive air forces to suppress rebellions. In issue no. 12 of the 1931/32 volume of the leading German military journal of the interwar period, the military weekly , the article Air Force in Colonial Areas appeared , which dealt in detail with the use of air forces. In some British colonial or mandate areas, the army, navy and police were even subordinate to the RAF. In Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan, however, it turned out that the use of air forces alone was not enough to put down insurrections permanently, only the massive deployment of ground troops.

In the so-called Banana Wars in Haiti , the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua, the USA also used air forces to suppress insurgents, but these only served to support the ground forces of the United States Marine Corps . Both France and Spain deployed air forces in the Rif War in Morocco from 1921 to 1926 , with Spanish aviators also using poison gas and bombing villages, cattle herds and cropland.

The Imperial Policing is very similar to the aerial war theory of the Italian General Giulio Douhet . However, the British doctrine referred exclusively to asymmetrical opponents , i.e. insurgents in colonial areas who had no means of defense by airmen .

Since the end of the so-called Cold War in 1990, the Imperial Policing method has been increasingly used in the so-called “New Wars” up to the use of so-called drones , which are practically flying combat robots . The backgrounds for its use are the same as in the 1920s. Should own losses be avoided at that time in order not to worry the war-weary population after the First World War, the governments of the intervening states fear. B. in Afghanistan or Iraq, feedback with public opinion in the sending state, which could lead to a demand for withdrawal from the intervention area.

See also

literature

  • Bernd Lemke : mandate - "independence" - occupation. Conflicts, revolts and war in Iraq 1920–1945. In: Sebastian Buciak (ed.): Asymmetrical conflicts in the mirror of time. Berlin 2008, pp. 299–331.
  • Bernd Lemke: Colonial history as a forerunner for modern nation-building? British attempts at pacification in Kurdistan and the North-West Frontier Province 1918–1947. In: Tanja Bührer , Christian Stachelbeck and Dierk Walter (eds.): Imperial Wars from 1500 to today. Structures, actors, learning processes. Paderborn u. a. 2011, ISBN 978-3-506-77337-1 , pp. 383-400
  • Tim Moreman: “Watch and ward”: the Army in India and the North-West Frontier, 1920-1939. In: David Killingray and David Omissi (eds.): Guardians of empire: the armed forces of the colonial powers, c. 1700-1964. Manchester 2000, pp. 137-156.
  • David Killingray and David Anderson (eds.): Policing and Decolonization: Nationalism, Politics, and the Police, 1917-1965. Manchester 1992.
  • David E. Omissi: Air power and colonial control. The Royal Air Force 1919-1939. Manchester 1990.
  • Olaf Groehler : History of the Air War 1910 to 1980. East Berlin 1981.
  • Keyword: Italo-Turkish was. In: Richard Holmes: The Oxford Companion of Military History. New York 2001, p. 457.
  • Keyword: Imperial Policing. In: ibid., P. 433f.
  • Military Literature Newspaper. Literary supplement to the military weekly. Born in 1909.
  • Gerhard Wiechmann (ed.): From foreign service in Mexico to the sea battle of Coronel. Sea captain Karl von Schönberg. Travel diary 1913–1914. (Small series of publications on military and naval history, Vol. 9), Bochum 2004.
  • Air forces in colonial areas. In: Military weekly paper. Year 1931/32, No. 12, Col. 458.
  • Chapter colonial war. In: Dierk Walter: Between jungle war and atomic bomb. British visions of the war of the future 1945–1971. Hamburg 2009, pp. 436-477.
  • Without author: flight technology and colonial politics. In: Deutsche Kolonialzeitung. Organ of the German Colonial Society (Berlin), Volume 27, No. 39 of September 24, 1910, p. 650.
  • Alexander v. Scheele: Aviators in South West Africa. In: Werner von Langsdorff : German flag over sand and palm trees. 53 colonial warriors tell. Gütersloh (Verlag C. Bertelsmann) 1936, pp. 149-175.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Gerhard Wiechmann (ed.): From foreign service in Mexico to the sea battle of Coronel. Sea captain Karl von Schönberg. Travel diary 1913-1914, Bochum 2004, p. 108.