Winged Victory

Giulio Douhet (1869–1930) was an Italian general and military theorist best known for his 1921 book, The Command of the Air. This influential volume argued that the invention of the airplane forever altered military strategy, rendering air power the most effective and concise method for overcoming enemy power and ending a war swiftly. While The Command of the Air has been translated into several languages and used in history and military classrooms for years, Douhet’s earlier book, an alternate-history novella titled Winged Victory: How the Great War Ended (1918) has been long unavailable even in the original Italian—until now. Douhet’s story imagines how an independent, massed air army could decisively end the war by securing permanent command of the air. Largely ignored for over a century, Winged Victory is both an unusual attempt to bring strategic debate to the public at large and a critical stage in the evolution of Douhet’s theory of strategic bombing.

This edition of Winged Victory, edited and translated by Gregory Alegi, Nicoletta Barbarito, and Phil Haun, presents Douhet’s novella for the first time to English-speaking audiences. In addition to the inclusion of an annotated bibliography, two critical essays provide important context and discuss the novella’s cultural impact, noting that Douhet correctly predicted some key aspects of air power that would be borne out during WWII, over two decades after its publication.