The infantry and Navy had centuries of accumulated experience to draw from in plotting battle strategy. Although primitive bomber aircraft had been employed by both sides in World War I, and although Japan, Germany, and Italy had used dive-bombers to terrorize cities and villages in China, Spain, and North Africa in the 1930s, no nation had ever fought a full-scale bomber war prior to World War II. As the novelist John Steinbeck wrote in 1942, “Of all branches of the Service, the Air Force must act with the least precedent, the least tradition.”
