Guest Post by Lori Martello
William Mitchell was more than the
man our Milwaukee airport is named after, for Mitchell was a prominent figure
beyond the notorious court martial that made him seemingly more famous than his
revolutionary ideas during the First World War and during the interwar period. George
Hardie, Jr., a Milwaukee aviation historian, Army veteran, and author of
General William Mitchell: Air Power Pioneer, wrote the following
regarding how Mitchell should be received:
“General
Mitchell can be well regarded as the American herald of a world revolution.
With that revolution war and transport moved into a new dimension. Mitchell,
with many others, saw it coming. However, unlike the many, he did something
about it, advancing aviation in ways that are recognized here and abroad.”[1]
Like Hardie’s
commentary on Mitchell, Major Alfred F. Hurley, a former Air Force Brigadier
General and former chancellor of the University of Northern Texas, wrote that
Mitchell was the pivotal character in the history of the World Wars as his
ideas and actions made him unique and indispensable to the future of warfare:
“When
Mitchell is considered in terms of his ideas, he emerges as one of the
significant figures of the years between World War One and Two…Many of his
ideas span an era which will not end until the missile replaces the airplane as
the primary carrier of nuclear weapon.”[2]
What has
been intensely studied surround the topic of Mitchell was his 1925 court
martial, wherein he attacked the United States Navy for their supposed responsibility
in the disaster that was the USS Shenandoah. Yet what other historians have
sought to prove is that Mitchell was a man of great action and ideas that was
constantly stalled by the War Department and the Army in the interwar years.
There are various biographies on Mitchell that portray his boisterous character
and parallel it with the court-martial, yet what the following historians
advocate for is the revolutionary aspect of his ideas that made his boisterous,
passionate, and outspoken manners and attitudes make sense.
To being to understand how Mitchell
became known as the Father of the United States Air Force, one must be aware of
his exceptional actions prewar, during the First World War, and in the interwar
period. Plainly stating, Mitchell was a man who enjoyed acquiring knowledge,
and his learning and application of said learning made him a fierce leader and
expert. His experience in the Spanish-American War made him a soldier, but the time
he spent learning would foster his ideas on the future of combat and supported
his insistence on a unified Air Force. Mitchell even paid for his own flying
lessons in Kansas, which then cost him $1,470. Under General MacArthur,
Mitchell laid 75 miles of telegraph lines in the Philippines and later 1,700
miles in Alaska; and it was during this time that he later recounted his first
thoughts of “blitz” warfare. Emile Gauvreau, an American journalist and author,
in his 1942 book, Billy Mitchell: Founder of Our Air Force and Prophet without
Honor, credited Mitchell as the creator of the blitz due to his time spent
in Alaska and the Philippines; Gauvreau recounts conversations Mitchell had
regarding the “flaming coffins” that himself and others would attempt to fly.
Mitchell spent his time touring Russian, Japanese, French, and Germany
warcrafts in his youth prior to the outbreak of the First World War. He wrote
in the Cavalry Journal in 1906 about how his tour of the far north
culminated in his ideas about aviation: “Conflicts no doubt will be carried on
in the future in the air, on the surface of the earth and water, and under the
water.”[3]
What historians have made clear is that Mitchell spent his time forecasting
military future in terms of how aviation would be the factor that determined
success.
During
the early years of the First World War before American entry, Mitchell, through
his own financial and social means while still working for the War Department,
advocated for and created a loose aviation department for the U.S. Army. It was
his time in Paris that really originated Mitchell as a war hero and annoyance: “Though
Washington placed little value on Mitchell’s views on aviation, the French
regarded him as an authority. He once lectured the French Senate committee on
aviation.”[4]
The United States appropriated $1,650,000,000 for aircraft and all Mitchell got
was 196 planes, so he used his own finances to relocate to a bigger
headquarters in Paris. Socially, Mitchell acquired prospective aviators as the
War Department would leave his messages unanswered. Mitchell absorbed and generated
ideas and asked endlessly shrewd questions that fed into the character which
was popularized during his court martial in 1925.
His
actions during the First World War cemented him as a hero not only because of
his actions at Saint Mihiel, wherein he led an air armada of French, British,
and Italian flyers to successfully halt Germans, but because he was an
organized and dedicated soldier that was in those “flaming coffins” similarly
to his soldiers. Mitchell was the first American officer to fly over battlelines.
According to Burke Davis, “Mitchell used his organization plans of St. Mihiel
for the new offensive, improving his communication system between airfields and
other points by radio, telephone, and motorcycle couriers.”[5]
And while he was not regarded as heroically to the War Department, the soldiers
perceived him differently: “The fliers around him would have done anything for
him…and so would the boys out in the squadrons…Billy was clearly the Prince of
the Air now.”[6]
Mitchell spent the war years flying over enemy lines to report back to commands
on the how aviation and his fleet could alleviate the pressures on the ground
forces. His success during the First World War impacted his behavior,
attitudes, and perspectives in the future that have been used to sensationalize
the events leading up to his court martial.
Major
Alfred F. Hurley and Emile Gauvreau seem to be the biggest proponents that seek
to establish Mitchell as a man of ideas and knowledge that speak the great
depths and impact of Mitchell. Hurley claims that the sensationalism of the
certain events of Mitchell do not do justice to the revolutionary ideas that
Mitchell contributed: “All of Mitchell’s biographies have tended to
overemphasize one or two sensational elements in his history, particularly his
court martial…When Mitchell is considered in terms of his ideas, he emerges as
one of the most significant figures in the years between World War One and
World War Two.”[7] Mitchell
spent the interwar years studying and even predicting the events of the Second
World War in particular the events of Pearl Harbor, and Emile Gauvreau spends
copious amounts of time setting up his book Billy Mitchell: Founder of Our
Air Force and Prophet without Honor in a way that presents the then current
events of war (1942 specifically) in retrospect, in retrospect to what Mitchell
predicted: “Everything he [Mitchell] told us right here has come true – the
battleships sunk by air bombs, big cities like Cologne destroyed from the air,
France gone, the Philippines gone, just as he said seven years ago, sitting
right at this table.”[8]
What
is greatly interesting is that Mitchell advocated that aviation would be a
valuable adjunct to the Army – “a second line of defense,” if the Navy, “the
first line of defense” should fail to stop an invasion, and he advocated for
this with ideas that were well researched, thoroughly detailed, and had an
overall theme of the strengthening the American military. And what historians
have romanticized in some ways was his passion and outspoken character that got
him court martialed as he spoke out against the Navy regarding the crash of the
USS Shenandoah. What the above mentioned historians and authors have
offered is a way of viewing Mitchell for his passionate ideas surrounding
aviation and not solely his 6,000-word press statement that blamed the Navy for
the deaths of the 14 crewmen on the USS Shenandoah. For Mitchell spent
his career and life vehemently finding ways to foster American success in war,
and Mitchell’s ideas paired with his success in the air give credence to him
being referred to as the Stormy Petrel of the Sky and the Father of the United
States Air Force.
[1] George
Hardie, General William Mitchell, Air Power Pioneer (Milwaukee, WI: Ken
Cook Transnational, n.d.), 19.
[2] Hardie,
General William Mitchell, 18.
[3] Burke
Davis, “I Am Naturally a Sort of Soldier,” in The Billy Mitchell Affair
(Delanco, NJ: Notable Trials Library, 2003), 19.
[4]
Burke Davis, “Good Men…Running Around in Circles,” in The Billy Mitchell
Affair (Delanco, NJ: Notable Trials Library, 2003), 31.
[5] Burke
Davis, “Good Men…Running around in Circles,” in The Billy Mitchell Affair
(Delanco, NJ: Notable Trials Library, 2003), 39.
[6] Cohen
Lester & Emile Gauvreau, “The Creator of the Blitz,” in Billy Mitchell:
Founder of Our Air Force and Prophet without Honor (LULU COM, 2019), 29.
[7] Alfred
F. Hurley, “Introduction,” in Billy Mitchell, Crusader for Air Power
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), p. viii.
[8] Lester
& Gauvreau, “The Creator of the Blitz,” 13.
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