Billy Mitchell, Air Force Apostle
Billy Mitchell, Air Force Apostle
Mitchell’s insubordination constantly limited his career. Eventually, it ended it.
This series is dedicated to the heroes and heretics of history who fought the bureaucracy to bring needed change to the military, often at great personal cost. Few paid more dearly than Billy Mitchell.
Today, Mitchell is remembered as the “father of the United States Air Force.” But his military career ended in disillusionment and court martial. Only later, after his death and the Second World War, would his advocacy for airpower be recognized as prescient.
It’s time to give Billy his due.
William Lendrum Mitchell was born in Nice, France in 1879 while his parents were on holiday. He returned to France in 1917 to fight the world’s first war in the air.
Mitchell already had a distinguished career as a soldier. He joined during the Spanish-American War and fought Filipino insurgents under the command of a young general, Douglas MacArthur. He eventually rose through the ranks of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which exposed him to a paradigm-shifting technology: the airplane.
Few fathomed the significance of airpower in the first decade of the twentieth century. The primitive biplanes of Orville and Wilbur Wright were viewed as a curiosity, potentially useful to observe enemy activity and pass messages along the front (thus the Signal Corps’ interest).
Billy Mitchell was an early convert, sensing that flying machines could revolutionize how wars were fought and won. As early as 1906, he wrote that “conflicts, no doubt, will be carried on in the future in the air.” He was referring then to dirigibles and balloons, but the rapid development of airplanes only underscored the point.
By 1916, Mitchell was convinced of the airplane’s worth and decided he should fly them. The Army wouldn’t pay for lessons—he was too old and valuable, in an age when flying was a death-defying feat under the best conditions. So he paid out of his own pocket. Pilots would remember him, according to one biographer, as “more enthusiastic than skillful in the cockpit.” But enthusiasm took him far.
During the First World War, Mitchell led the air wing of the American Expeditionary Force, which by then had been detached from the Signal Corps but remained firmly in the Army camp. At the war’s peak, he commanded thousands of airplanes in offensive operations. He came home heavy with decorations, buoyant with fame, and bursting with ideas.
The First World War convinced Mitchell beyond doubt that airpower was the future of warfare. The pressure cooker of war had already developed flying machines beyond recognition from Kitty Hawk: World War I featured bombing raids on England by Zeppelin airships, the development of high-altitude fighters to intercept said Zeppelins, and many other ingenious innovations.
Mitchell came to believe fervently that airpower deserved its own service, led by flyers and freed from subordination to the Army and Navy. More radical still, he came to view airpower as a potentially decisive force in war, capable of reaching behind enemy lines to bomb the enemy into submission—a prefiguring of the Second World War’s massive strategic bombing campaigns. Mitchell even believed that airpower would render large, slow platforms like battleships obsolete. This was heresy, in an age when battleships were the pride of the world’s navies and the benchmark for comparing nations’ military strength (A flavor of this belief is still heresy today, as unmanned, attritable assets threaten multi-decade, multi-billion dollar weapons platforms).
Mitchell’s message would’ve been radical no matter how it was phrased—and he pulled no punches. As Hugh Trenchard, father of the Royal Air Force, put it, Billy “tried to convert his enemies by killing them first.” Recognizing his brilliance and also his volatility, the Army elevated him within the postwar Air Service but did not put him in charge. He would become airpower’s most dogged and well-known advocate nevertheless, ginning up publicity and savaging the hidebound officers who viewed airplanes only as appendages to ground forces and surface fleets.
Mitchell’s greatest coup came in 1921, when the Navy agreed to a demonstration—what is today referred to as a SINKEX—to test Mitchell’s contention that bombers could sink a battleship. The captured German dreadnought Ostfriesland was selected as a target for a series of interservice weapons tests. Billy Mitchell seized his chance.
The tests were supposed to be carefully monitored and executed, with bombs of escalating payload tested by the Navy and Army in turn. Observers would go aboard after each wave to record damage.
Mitchell overturned these plans, ordering an all-out onslaught by his Army bombers on the second day of the trial. He instructed his flyers to aim for the water near the ship to target her hull. After a punishing salvo, the Ostfriesland rolled and sank, groaning like a whale as she went.
The Navy was furious at Mitchell for disregarding the plan. Critics observed, fairly, that the test wasn’t a true-to-life simulation of battlefield conditions. The battleship wasn’t buttoned up, had no crew to perform emergency repairs, and couldn’t defend itself as it would in a real battle. But Mitchell, the press, and the public couldn’t be bothered with these details. The mighty battleship suffered a major blow that day at Billy Mitchell’s hand.
Mitchell’s intemperate remarks and insubordination constantly limited his career. Eventually, they ended it.
In 1925, the military suffered a series of high-profile air disasters, including the dramatic loss of the airship USS Shenandoah in a storm. Mitchell was a friend of the Shenandoah’s commander, who perished in the disaster along with a dozen others. He vented his anger to the press, blaming the tragedy on “the incompetency, the criminal negligence, and the most treasonable negligence of our national defense by the Navy and War Departments.” The Army and Navy, he charged, were led by non-flyers who misunderstood and mishandled aircraft. Flyers, like his friend, paid with their lives.
Mitchell’s court martial for these remarks was a media circus. Again, the press and the public were on his side. But the officers judging him could not overlook the obvious breach of military discipline. They ordered him stripped of rank, command, and pay for five years—and stated they were being lenient on account of his wartime heroism. (The one officer who voted to acquit, interestingly enough, was Douglas MacArthur, Mitchell’s old commander—and a ‘hero and heretic’ in his own right.)
Mitchell couldn’t accept this blow to his honor. He resigned from the military, determined to continue his crusade for airpower in a private capacity—just like he had learned to fly. But his limelight faded outside of the service.
He died in 1936, age 56, three years shy of the war that would vindicate his views and 11 years shy of an independent Air Force.
As always, Billy Mitchell was ahead of his time.
Further Reading
From Air Service to Air Corps: The Era of Billy Mitchell by John F. Shiner
Billy Mitchell: Stormy Petrel of the Air by Roger G. Miller