During the First World War air operations were on a much smaller scale on the Italian front than in France and Flanders. Italian fighter pilots claimed to have shot down fewer than a tenth of the number of enemy aircraft officially credited to German fighter pilots operating over the Western front.1 Nevertheless the air war over the Isonzo and the Adriatic had several features which suggest the desirability of revising standard accounts of the evolution of air warfare that are based on the experiences of the British Royal Flying Corps and the German Luftstreitkräfte further north, particularly with regard to the use of bombing aircraft.