Guest Post by Lori Martello
Throughout
the course of this semester, finding and analyzing primary sources surrounding
the popular figure Billy Mitchell in the army and during the First World War
was difficult as the sources found were mainly published secondary sources
rather than published primary sources. Key published primary sources
surrounding Billy Mitchell, like his 6,000-word press statement after the crash
of the USS Shenandoah and his War Department memos that revealed his
attitudes to superiors and the Navy, have been selectively published to further
notions of his behaviors and reputation as a tenacious and provocative leader
and war hero. Specifically, there are many secondary sources published by the
Air Force Historic Foundation that focus on his character and temperament that
made him a successful leader.
Hoping
to discover archived primary sources to yield more key sources that had not
been published or widely cited to fit into the narrative of Billy Mitchell, the
Stormy Petrel of the Air, the UW-Milwaukee Archives Special Collections was
very helpful. In the collection of the Mitchell Family Papers, 1864 – 1968,
Billy was already a war figure, hero, and fervently fighting for organized
aviation, and so there were unfortunately no primary sources in this collection
that focused on his time in the War Department or his correspondence with his
family that had not been cited frequently; the collection did have reference to
the movie that was based on Billy Mitchell’s court martial in 1925, titled The
Court Martial of Billy Mitchell. The second useful source at the UWM Special
Collections Department was Billy Mitchell’s book, Winged Defense: The
Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power – Economic and Military,
published in 1925. The difficulty in using this book, and with many archives, is
that none of the sources focusing on Billy Mitchell were either digitized and
made available online and that scheduled appointments were needed to view these
sources. The accessibility and inaccessibility of sources will seemingly
forever be a problem for students and archives, but a great methodological
approach to finding unpublished or less popular primary sources was to look at
the footnotes and reference pages of secondary works.
Additionally in this process, analysis
of the sources found regarding Billy Mitchell during the First World War encouraged
different interpretations of Mitchell. As the character and brief history of
Mitchell was focused on in class prior to this primary source process, analysis
of primary sources enabled for attentiveness, a deeper study to contrast the
time in which the writings took place with the time span of the narrative. And
as many of the sources found were life narratives of Mitchell, his experiences,
and interpretations of the past, then present, and future, this process enabled
for evaluation of Mitchell’s objectives during his time during the war, in the
interwar period, and after his court martial.
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