100 Years in Libya

Recent Nato operations in Libya are just the latest in a long line of international policing operations with unpredictable and potentially unwelcome outcomes; think of Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia. Yet this campaign differs—so far, anyway—from many other recent police actions in that it has largely been a demonstration of air power. There has been little, if any, air-to-air conflict, and the Nato forces have been operating ground attack missions, with aircraft striking targets on the ground.

A poignant and thought-provoking aspect of the present action, and one that has been largely overlooked, is that it is taking place exactly 100 years after the first use of powered aircraft in war; 100 years after the first aerial bombing; 100 years after the first ground attacks by warplanes. And, astonishingly, these very first examples of air war also occurred in Libya.

In 1911, Libya was a province of the ailing Ottoman (or Turkish) Empire. In those pre-first world war days, Turkey’s grip on its more distant colonies was loosening. Italy had long disputed a claim to Libya and in September 1911 it sent military forces into the country. A fleet of nine primitive aircraft formed part of the Italian expeditionary force, with Captain Carlo Piazza in command. On 22 October, he made a one-hour flight in his French Bleriot aircraft over enemy lines, observing Turkish troop movements. With this intelligence-gathering operation, Captain Piazza inaugurated the era of powered air warfare.

Airships and, of course, balloons had been used before 1911 as aerial observation platforms and for artillery spotting. However, just over a week after Piazza’s pioneering flight, the Italian air corps mounted a mission that took air war to a new level. Sub-Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti flew over Turkish forces occupying Ain Zara and Taguira. He had taken with him several 2kg hand grenades and he dropped these on the enemy troops.  The era of aerial bombing and ground attack had begun.

The unfortunate Turks, the first ever victims of air raids, were unable to offer much resistance, but their response has a familiar and modern ring to it. They lodged a protest, and claimed that a hospital had been hit by the grenades and that innocent civilian patients had been among the victims. It was no easier then than in the Libya of 2011 to penetrate the fog of war and establish the truth of claims about civilian victims of aerial bombing.

The Italians would go on to carry out more raids of the same type later in the war, and would also use dirigible airships for bombing. Italy emerged from the war in nominal control of much of Libya but the main outcome of the conflict was the impression made on observers by the aerial aspect. Many military figures had, prior to the conflict, been dismissive about the value of aeroplanes in war. The Royal Navy’s supposedly game-changing Dreadnought battleships were not equipped with any anti-aircraft defences at all. But in this tentative Italian grenade-hurling was the germ of all aerial bombing, while the dirigible raids prefigured the Zeppelin menace that haunted Britain in the early years of the first world war.

By the end of the first world war, the RAF had made, if the phrase can be used, a fine art of ground attack in the latter stages of the campaigns on the Western Front and in Palestine. The practice continued to develop, along with aircraft and firepower technology, throughout the second world war and beyond. Libya, of course, saw a great deal of aerial action during the Second World War and was also the focus of anti-Gaddafi air strikes by the USA in 1986. And now, again, aerial warfare is back where it started, in Libya.

Attempts at regime change, questions of colonial conquest and air strikes from Italian bases. Nothing much has changed, then.