Billy Mitchell

For other people with the same name, see Billy Mitchell (disambiguation).

William (Billy) Mitchell (December 28, 1879 – February 19, 1936) was an American general who is regarded as one of the most famous and most controversial figures in American airpower history.

Early life

Born in Nice, France to John L. Mitchell, a wealthy Wisconsin senator and his wife, Mitchell grew up on an estate in what is now the Milwaukee suburb of West Allis, Wisconsin. Alexander Mitchell, his grandfather, was the wealthiest person in Wisconsin for his generation and established what became the Milwaukee Road along with the Marine Bank of Wisconsin. Mitchell Park and the street Mitchell Boulevard were named in honor of Alexander.

Billy Mitchell attended Columbian College (now George Washington University), where he was a member of Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. He then enlisted as a Private at age 18 during the Spanish-American War. Quickly gaining a commission due to his father's intervention, he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps. He predicted as early as 1906, while an instructor at the Army's Signal School in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, that future conflicts would take place in the air, not on the ground.

After tours in the Philippines and Alaska Territory, Mitchell was assigned to the General Staff—at the time, its youngest member at age 32. He became interested in aviation and was assigned to the Signal Corps (the Aeronautical Division, U.S. Signal Corps was responsible for US military aviation until the establishment of the Army Air Service in 1918). In 1916 at age 38 he took private flying lessons because the Army considered him too old and too high-ranking for flight training.

World War I

On April 6, 1917, the United States declared war on Germany, and Mitchell, by then a lieutenant colonel, was immediately deployed to France. He collaborated extensively with British and French air leaders, studying their strategies as well as their aircraft. Before long, Mitchell had gained enough experience to begin preparations for American air operations. Mitchell rapidly earned a reputation as a daring, flamboyant, and tireless leader. He eventually was elevated to the rank of Brigadier General and commanded all American air combat units in France. In September 1918 he planned and led nearly 1,500 British, French, and Italian aircraft in the air phase of the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, one of the first coordinated air-ground offensives in history.

Recognized as one of the top American combat airmen of the war alongside aces such as Eddie Rickenbacker he was probably the best-known American in Europe—he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, and several foreign decorations, but nevertheless, alienated most of his superiors—both flying and non-flying—during his 18 months in France.

Post-war demotion

Returning to the United States in early 1919, Mitchell was appointed the deputy director of the Air Service, retaining his one star rank. It had been widely expected throughout the Air Service that Mitchell would receive the post-war assignment of Director of Air Service, but the Army chose an infantryman and commander of the Rainbow Division in France, Maj. Gen. Charles T. Menoher, to maintain operational control of aviation by the ground forces.

Mitchell did not share in the common belief that World War I would be the war to end all wars. "If a nation ambitious for universal conquest gets off to a flying start in a war of the future," he said, "it may be able to control the whole world more easily than a nation has controlled a continent in the past."

His relations with superiors continued to sour as he began to attack both the War and Navy Departments for being insufficiently farsighted regarding airpower. He advocated the development of bombsights, ski-equipped aircraft, engine superchargers and aerial torpedoes. He ordered the use of aircraft in fighting forest fires and border patrols and encouraged a transcontinental air race, a flight around the perimeter of the United States, and encouraged Army pilots to challenge speed, endurance and altitude records—in short, anything it took to keep aviation in the news.

Mitchell infuriated the Navy by claiming he could sink ships "under war conditions," and boasted he could prove it if he were permitted to bomb captured German battleships. In 1921, he successfully sank numerous ships, including the stationary German WW1 battleship, the Ostfriesland and the U.S. pre-dreadnought battleship Alabama.

Although Mitchell had stressed "war-time conditions", the tests were under static conditions and the sinking of the Ostfriesland was accomplished by violating agreed-upon rules that would have allowed Navy engineers to examine the effects of various munitions; Mitchell's airmen disregarded the rule and quickly sank the ship in a coordinated attack. This proved—at least to Mitchell—that surface fleets were obsolete. In 1922 he met the like-minded Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet on a trip to Europe and soon after an excerpted translation of Douhet's The Command of the Air began to circulate in the Air Service.

In 1924, Mitchell's superiors sent him to Hawaii, then Asia, to get him off the front pages. Mitchell came back with a 324-page report that predicted future war with Japan, including the attack on Pearl Harbor. His report was mostly ignored.

He also experienced difficulties within the Army, notably with his superiors Charles Menoher and later Mason Patrick, when he appeared before the Lampert Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives and sharply castigated Army and Navy leadership. The War Department had endorsed a proposal to establish a "General Headquarters Air Force" as a vehicle for modernization and expansion of the Air Service, but then backed down before objections by the Navy, incensing Mitchell.

In March 1925 he reverted to his permanent rank of Colonel and was transferred to San Antonio, Texas, as air officer to a ground forces corps. Although such demotions were not unusual at the time—Patrick himself had gone from Major General to Colonel upon returning to the Army Corps of Engineers in 1919—the move was nonetheless widely seen as punishment and exile, since Mitchell had petitioned to remain as Assistant Director of the Air Service when his term expired, and his transfer had been directed by Secretary of War John Weeks.

Court-martial & Later Life

When the Navy dirigible Shenandoah crashed in a storm, killing 14 of the crew, Mitchell issued a statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and "almost treasonable administration of the national defense." In 1925 he was court-martialed at the direct order of President Calvin Coolidge, found guilty of insubordination, and suspended from active duty for five years without pay. Mitchell resigned instead, as of February 1, 1926, and spent the next decade writing and preaching air power to all who would listen. However his departure from the service sharply reduced his ability to influence either policy or public opinion.

Mitchell viewed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Navy man, as advantageous for airpower. He believed the new president might even appoint him as assistant secretary of war for air or perhaps even secretary of defense in a new and unified military organization. Neither ever materialized. Mitchell died of a variety of ailments including a bad heart and influenza in a hospital in New York City on February 19, 1936 and was buried at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Posthumous recognition

The North American B-25 bomber, utilized by Jimmy Doolittle to bomb Tokyo in 1942 in retaliation for Pearl Harbor, was nicknamed the "Mitchell," after Billy Mitchell. The B-25 "Mitchell" is the only American military aircraft that has been named after a specific person.
In 1946, Mitchell was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, "in recognition of his outstanding pioneer service and foresight in the field of American military aviation."
In 1955, the Air Force Association passed a resolution calling for the voiding of Mitchell's court-martial. His son petitioned in 1957 to have the court-martial verdict set aside, which the Air Force denied while expressing regret about the circumstances under which Mitchell's military career ended.
The 1955 motion picture The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, directed by Otto Preminger, portrays Mitchell's plight in a dramatic yet vindicating light.
General Mitchell International Airport in Milwaukee, Wisconsin is named after him.
The cadet dining hall at the United States Air Force Academy is named after him.
General William Mitchell High School in Colorado Springs, Colorado is also named after him, as is Mitchell Hall at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
The Civil Air Patrol cadet program includes an award called the Billy Mitchell Award.
In 2004, Congress voted to authorize the President to commission Mitchell as a Major General in the Army, posthumously, which the President did in 2005.
In 1999, General Mitchell's portrait was put on an US airmail postage stamp.
On May 18, 2006, the US Air Force unveiled two prototypes for new service dress uniforms, referencing the service's heritage. One, modeled on the United States Army Air Service uniform, was designated the "Billy Mitchell heritage coat" (the other was named for Hap Arnold). [1]

References

American Airpower Biography: Billy Mitchell
Cooke, James J. Billy Mitchell (2002)
Cooke, James J. The U. S. Air Service in the Great War: 1917-1919. Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1996. ISBN 0-275-94862-5.
Davis, Burke. The Billy Mitchell Affair. New York: Random House, 1967.
Henrotin, Joseph. L'Airpower au 21e siècle: Enjeux et perspectives de la stratégie aérienne. Bruxelles: Emile Bruylant (RMES), 2005. ISBN 2-8027-2091-0.
Hurley, Alfred H. Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power (revised edition). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. ISBN 0-253-31203-5, ISBN 0-253-20180-2.
Kennett, Lee. The First Air War, 1914–1918. New York: Free Press, 1991. ISBN 0-684-87120-3.
Mitchell, William. Memoirs of World War I: From Start to Finish of Our Greatest War. New York: Random House, 1960.