Billy Mitchell

William Mitchell, army officer and aviator, commonly known as "Billy" Mitchell, was born Dec. 29, 1879, in Nice, France, where his parents were residing temporarily. His boyhood home was Milwaukee, Wis., where his Scottish-born grandfather, Alexander Mitchell [q.v.], was a prominent financier, railroad magnate, and Congressman. His father, John Lendrum Mitchell, represented Wisconsin in both houses of Congress; by his second wife, Harriet Danforth Becker, he had nine children, of whom William was the oldest; an older half-brother died at an early age. Young Mitchell attended private schools in Milwaukee and Racine, Wis., and Columbian (later George Washington) University, Washington, D. C. When war with Spain began, in April 1898, he left college to enlist as a private and was soon commissioned in the signal corps. (In 1919 he was retroactively awarded the A.B. degree.) He was in Cuba with the Army of Occupation and in the autumn of 1899 was transferred to the Philippines, where he served with distinction in the campaign against Aguinaldo. Liking the excitement and activity of military life, Mitchell on his return to the United States in 1901 accepted a commission in the regular army. His next duty was in Alaska, where he helped to establish telegraphic communications with the United States. Other assignments took him to various posts at home and abroad, to army schools, and in 1912 to the General Staff as its youngest officer.

Mitchell's duties in the signal corps and his natural bent turned him to the study of new technical and mechanized methods of warfare. Reading intelligence reports from Europe early in the first World War, he became convinced of the military potentialities of aviation. He learned to fly in 1916, becoming eventually a superb pilot. Control of the army's planes was then vested in the signal corps, and for a while Mitchell commanded its tiny aviation section. Early in the spring of 1917 he went to Spain as observer, and when Congress declared war on Germany he moved to Paris. There, with great energy but little authority, he began planning for an American expeditionary air force. He visited Allied units at the front, studying their tactics, organization, and supply problems. He met Major General Hugh M. Trenchard of the Royal Flying Corps, whose advanced views on the independent air mission were to be the most important outside influence on his thought. Mitchell also conferred with civilian authorities and was apparently responsible for the ambitious aviation program suggested to President Wilson by Premier Alexandre Ribot of France. When General Pershing arrived in Paris, Mitchell joined his staff, helping to frame the American Expeditionary Forces Aviation Program (July 1917).

More interested in air combat than in administration, Mitchell continued to fly his own plane in battle as he commanded successively the Air Service of the Zone of the Advance, of the I Corps, of the First Army, and of the First Army Group, advancing in grade from major to brigadier general. By April 1918 United States squadrons began reaching the front, where their excellent record owed much to Mitchell's leadership. Twice he was able to test the ideas he had developed with large forces; his success gave evidence of imaginative planning and careful staff work. In September, in the battle for the Saint-Mihiel salient, he used 1,481 planes, less than half of them American, in the war's greatest air effort. On Oct. 9 he massed a large force and struck behind the enemy's lines to disrupt a counterattack near Damvillers. Before the Armistice Mitchell was planning strategic bombardment of Germany and a large-scale use of paratroopers; there is evidence that he was slated to command all Allied air forces in the projected unified command structure. His colorful personality had made "Billy" Mitchell a celebrity.

With his brilliant record he might have hoped to become Chief of Air Service, but on his return home, in 1919, he was appointed assistant chief instead. Nevertheless, in the ensuing struggle for recognition of air power Mitchell assumed an unofficial leadership, often to the embarrassment of his immediate superiors. The failure of the costly aviation procurement program, general disillusionment following the war, and stringent economies in defense budgets aided those conservative members of the army's General Staff and the navy's General Board who resisted further development of the air arm. Mitchell's chief concern was to secure greater autonomy for aviation through some form of "united" or "separate" or "independent" air force, or through a single department of defense with coordinate air, ground, and sea forces. Balked in his endeavors to work through normal channels, he turned to the American public, advertising the cause of aviation in speeches, articles, testimony in congressional and executive hearings, and by the flying stunts of his airmen and himself.

His most controversial claims were those challenging the traditional role of the navy in national defense: though an ardent champion of the submarine, he insisted that the airplane had made the battleship obsolete. In widely publicized tests off the Virginia coast (July 13-21, 1921) his bombers sank three captured German warships, including the battleship Ostfriesland. Later they repeated the performance against obsolete American battleships--the Alabama (Sept. 23-26, 1921) and the New Jersey and Virginia (Sept. 5, 1923). The significance of the tests became a national issue, immediately related to current problems of naval appropriations and disarmament. Mitchell's views gained wide acceptance, but were challenged within the Navy and War departments. Disappointed by his failure to secure the desired legislation, Mitchell became increasingly outspoken in his criticism of opponents. His immediate superior, Major General M. M. Patrick, found it equally difficult to curb Mitchell's impatience and to protect him from discipline from above. It was partly to remove the troublemaker from Washington during crucial periods that he was sent on tours of inspection to Europe (December 1921-March 1922) and to the Pacific and Far East (October 1923-July 1924). His findings confirmed his opinions of the inadequacies of our defense structure, particularly as against Japan. Controversial statements made in testimony before Congressman Floran Lampert's select committee and in a series of popular magazine articles led to his being relieved as Assistant Chief of Air Service and transferred, with the grade of colonel, to a minor assignment at San Antonio, Texas, in the spring of 1925.

Early in September of that year the nation was shocked by the supposed loss of a navy seaplane en route to Hawaii and the tragic wreck of the navy dirigible Shenandoah. On Sept. 5, "after mature deliberation," Mitchell gave the press a prepared statement placing the blame for the accidents on "the incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the War and Navy Departments." As he had expected, he was relieved of duty and ordered to Washington to appear before a court-martial on a charge involving the omnibus 96th Article of War. The trial, lasting from Oct. 25 to Dec. 17, was sensational. Mitchell attempted, not unsuccessfully, to use it as a sounding board for his ideas, but the court found him guilty as charged. He was sentenced to suspension from duty and pay for five years; on Feb. 1, 1926, he resigned from the army.

At Boxwood, his estate in northern Virginia, Mitchell took up the life of a gentleman farmer without quitting his fight for an air force and against those whom he considered military bureaucrats and industrial profiteers. He continued to write articles and books and to use every available medium to propagate his ideas. A newspaper assignment in 1927 that took him abroad impressed him anew with the superiority of European aviation, while he continued his Cassandra-like warnings against Japan. Minor concessions to demands for a separate air force were made in the establishment of the Army Air Corps (1926) and GHQ Air Force (1935), but Mitchell was disappointed when the Roosevelt administration failed to effect the more sweeping changes he advocated. He died in New York City from a coronary occlusion and was buried in the family plot in Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee. Mitchell was married twice: to Caroline Stoddard in 1903 and, following a divorce, to Elizabeth Trumbull Miller in 1923. His children were: by the first marriage, Elizabeth, Harriet, and John Lendrum; by the second, Lucy Trumbull and William.

Though his writings often seem hortatory and intemperate in tone, Mitchell showed imagination and, usually, soundness in his ideas on strategy and tactics, and on civil aeronautics as well. His technological knowledge was considerable, and though as advocate he tended to exaggerate the performance of existing planes, rapid technological advances have justified most of his major claims. His analysis of the Japanese threat was shrewdly prescient, and his constant emphasis on the strategic importance of Alaska and the high latitudes in general is reflected in present-day defense plans. His insistence on the offensive nature of the airplane, on the necessity of air superiority, and on the importance of strategic bombardment influenced profoundly Air Corps doctrine. His most serious error, a gross underestimation of the ability of civilian populations to resist air bombardment, was based in part on an unfulfilled expectation of the use of gas bombs. In 1946 Congress belatedly authorized a special Medal of Honor for Mitchell; more significant memorials may be seen in the Army Air Forces of World War II and the Department of Defense established in 1947.

text by James Lea Cate, Dictionary of American Biography, Supplements 1-2: To 1940. American Council of Learned Societies, 1944-1958.

Sources:

Mitchell's writings include "Leaves from My War Diary," Liberty, Mar. 31 through May 19, 1928; Our Air Force (1921); Winged Defense (1925); Skyways (1930); and numerous articles in such magazines as Nat. Geographic, World's Work, Rev. of Revs., Saturday Evening Post, Liberty, Annals Am. Acad. of Pol. and Soc. Sci., and Aero Digest. Typical examples of his expert testimony may be found in President's Aircraft Board [Morrow Board], "Aircraft," Hearings (4 vols., 1925), and House Select Committee of Inquiry into Operations of the U. S. Air Services [Lampert Committee], 68 Cong., Hearings (6 vols., 1925). The best biog., Isaac Don Levine, Mitchell: Pioneer of Air Power (1943), contains a bibliog. of Mitchell's writings. See also Ruth Mitchell, My Brother Bill (1953); Roger Burlingame, Gen. Billy Mitchell (1952); and N. Y. Times, Feb. 20, 1936. The Mitchell Papers are in the Lib. of Cong. and are described in its Quart. Jour., VI (1948-49), 39-43, and VII (1949-50), 27. There is also Mitchell correspondence in the Carl Spaatz Papers and in the William F. Fullam Papers (in the Naval Hist. Foundation Deposit) in the Lib. of Cong.; other material is in the Nat. Archives.