Young Mitchell attended Columbian (later George Washington) University, Washington, D. C.
Career
Gallery of William Mitchell
1920
Billy Mitchell posing with his Vought VE-7 Bluebird aircraft at the Bolling Field Air Tournament (in Washington, D.C.). General Billy Mitchel's personal insignia - a silver eagle on a red field - was painted on the fuselage of his plane during World War I.
Gallery of William Mitchell
1925
Billy Mitchell
Gallery of William Mitchell
1925
Billy Mitchell at his court-martial.
Gallery of William Mitchell
Billy Mitchell
Gallery of William Mitchell
Billy Mitchell
Gallery of William Mitchell
Billy Mitchell
Gallery of William Mitchell
Billy Mitchell as Assistant Chief of Air Service
Gallery of William Mitchell
Billy Mitchell demonstrating its use with wreckage from a battleship sunk by aircraft. (Photo by General Photographic Agency)
Gallery of William Mitchell
Billy Mitchell (right), and A. S. Maitland. (Photo by Hulton Archive)
Billy Mitchell posing with his Vought VE-7 Bluebird aircraft at the Bolling Field Air Tournament (in Washington, D.C.). General Billy Mitchel's personal insignia - a silver eagle on a red field - was painted on the fuselage of his plane during World War I.
Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power - Economic and Military
(This book is the basis for airpower doctrine in the US an...)
This book is the basis for airpower doctrine in the US and demonstrates how forward-looking Gen Mitchell was even though the technology for conducting air operations was in its infancy when it was written.
William Lendrum Mitchell was an American army officer and aviator, commonly known as "Billy" Mitchell. Considered an aviation pioneer by many, Mitchell recognized the potential of air power as an integral part of national defense. His strong beliefs led to a court-martial for insubordination in the 1920s. The key role played by air defense during the Second World War II vindicated him.
Background
William Lendrum Mitchell was born on December 29, 1879, in Nice, France, where his parents, John Lendrum Mitchell and Harriet Mitchell, were residing temporarily. His boyhood home was Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where his Scottish-born grandfather, Alexander Mitchell, was a prominent financier, railroad magnate, and Congressman. William’s father represented Wisconsin in both houses of Congress. The family had nine children, of whom William was the oldest; an older half-brother died at an early age.
Growing up in Milwaukee, Mitchell spoke French just as fluently as English. He and his siblings also learned German, Spanish, and Italian.
Education
Young Mitchell attended private schools in Milwaukee and Racine, Wisconsin, 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.
Mitchell 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 an 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 October 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.
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, his bombers sank three captured German warships, including the battleship Ostfriesland. Later they repeated the performance against obsolete American battleships Alabama and the New Jersey and Virginia. 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 and to the Pacific and the Far East. His findings confirmed his opinions of the inadequacies of the American 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 September 5, "after mature deliberation," Mitchell gave the press a prepared statement placing the blame for the accidents on "the incompetence, 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 October 25 to December 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 February 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.
(This book is the basis for airpower doctrine in the US an...)
1925
Views
William 'Billy' Mitchell was a crusader who had the vision to understand the potential of air power long before his contemporaries. Long before anyone else, he vigorously advanced the theory that the airplane would replace the fleet as America’s first line of defense. He also saw the flying machine as a strategic weapon that could take a war to an enemy’s industrial resources. Mitchell became determined that the nation’s money should be spent on aircraft and not expensive battleships.
Mitchell believed that Japan was the dominant nation in Asia and was preparing to do battle with the United States. He predicted that air attacks would be made by the Japanese on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines and described how they would be conducted. Mitchell wrote many articles expounding his theories and demanding national awareness of the new dimension of warfare that he perceived.
Quotations:
"Nothing can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft."
"With us air people, the future of our nation is indissolubly bound up in the development of air power."
Membership
Billy Mitchell was a member of several military societies and veteran organizations. Among them Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the United States, Military Order of Foreign Wars, Military Order of the Carabao, National Society of the Army of the Philippines and American Legion.
Personality
The name Billy Mitchell brings different images to mind. To most, he was a hero, without whose dire warning the United States might never have been able to field the world’s largest air force in time to fight World War II. To others, he was an ambitious egotist and zealot who ran roughshod over anyone who opposed his views on air power, especially his military and civilian superiors.
Quotes from others about the person
C.V. Glines: "The name Billy Mitchell brings different images to mind. To most, he was a hero, without whose dire warning the United States might never have been able to field the world's largest air force in time to fight World War II. To others, he was an ambitious egoist and zealot, who ran roughshod over anyone who opposed his views on air power." Glines concluded, "It was his voice that first loudly proclaimed the need for strong air defenses."
Connections
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.
Predicting Pearl Harbor: Billy Mitchell and the Path to War
From Commodore Matthew Perry's 1853 voyage into Japanese waters to the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States and Japan were on a collision course. Gen. Billy Mitchell recognized the signs and foresaw the eventual showdown between the two nations - eighteen years before the tragedy of Pearl Harbor. Yet his predictions were dismissed out of hand. Mitchell's attempts to have his theories taken seriously led to scorn and a subsequent court martialing. Primary-source documents, memoirs, and firsthand testimonies deliver an exhaustive background to Mitchell's prescient reports. Now, historian Ronald J. Drez finally gives credence to the man called the "Cassandra General."