Volume 35, Number 4 · March 17, 1988
Aerie Visions
By Garry Wills
The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon
by Michael S. Sherry
Yale University Press, 435 pp., $29.95
'Thou marshal'st me the way that I was going,' says Macbeth of the 'dagger of the mind' that hovers before him, insubstantial, unable to inflict real wounds itself, but inspiring him to the murder. Michael Sherry, a professor at North-western, boldly argues that modern air power has been a 'dagger of the mind,' a thing of the imagination out ahead of the technology, determining how that technology would develop, at least as much as technical developments established their own priorities. It is common to say, of our destruction of cities in World War II, that we did it because we could do it. According to technological determinism, means establish goals. Sherry agrees with that rule, and describes in great detail the way it has operated. But he sees that something else was at work, too, what he calls technological fanaticism—the belief that air power must be qualitatively different from all other kinds of war, apocalyptic in its promise of blessings (quick victory) or curses (the obliteration of whole civilizations, not merely of opposing armies).
Review, 1636 words
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