William Mitchell

American military leader

• Born: December 29, 1879
• Birthplace: Nice, France
• Died: February 19, 1936
• Place of death: New York, New York

An advocate of air power in the armed forces, Mitchell worked to create a separate air force and to develop strategic doctrines that would utilize its potential in the conduct of modern warfare.

Early Life

William Mitchell was born during his parents’ visit to France in 1879. His paternal grandfather, Alexander Mitchell, was born in Scotland, migrated to Wisconsin, and became a successful businessman and investor. His grandfather served in the U.S. Congress, a path followed by his father, John Lendrum Mitchell, who served in both houses of Congress as a representative of Wisconsin. Mitchell, one of nine children, attended private schools in Wisconsin and received his college degree from George Washington University after his military enlistment.

Mitchell’s military career began with the declaration of war against Spain in 1898. He enlisted as a private with the Wisconsin volunteers and was quickly commissioned a lieutenant in the Signal Corps. He served on the staff of General Fitzhugh Lee, and when Cuba fell to American troops, he transferred to the Philippines, where the war continued in 1899 against Philippine nationalists led by Emilio Aguinaldo. There, he served on the staff of General Arthur MacArthur, whose son, Douglas, later served on the court-martial board that convicted Mitchell of insubordination and ordered his five-year suspension from active military duty.

After the war in the Philippines ended in 1902, Mitchell returned to the United States with the Army Signal Corps. He was assigned to duty in Alaska, where he commanded units charged with laying three thousand miles of telegraphic lines connecting the territory with the United States. In 1912, he was sent to the Army’s General Staff School as a young and promising officer. His first real encounter with the untried but intriguing flying machine was in 1908, when he served as an Army representative to a demonstration flight of a Wright brothers airplane at Fort Myer. He later learned the fundamentals of piloting from Orville Wright and soloed in 1914. Always sensitive to technological changes that modified traditional doctrines of warfare, Mitchell quickly appreciated the tactical uses of piloted flight.

As a young officer serving outside the United States, Mitchell gained new insights into the geopolitical implications of modern warfare. His experiences in Cuba, the Philippines, and Alaska focused Mitchell’s attention on the strategic significance of the Pacific area. Before the United States entered World War I, he was sent to Spain as an observer and then to France in 1917. After the war, he traveled in Europe, and he toured the Pacific and Far East in 1923 and 1924. He understood the significance of the growing power of Japan better than many of his military contemporaries, leading him to argue forcefully for air power as America’s first line of defense, especially in the Pacific. He formed close relationships with the important early air-power spokespersons abroad, and after World War I, he was awarded not only the Distinguished Service Cross but also France’s Croix de Guerre, as well as special commendations by the British and Italian governments.

Life’s Work

After 1900, the potential development of motorized air power for military purposes struggled for recognition and adequate financial support. The War Department, through the Board of Ordnance and Fortification, believed that dirigibles were of greater value than fixed-wing aircraft for military use, especially for reconnaissance. It was not until 1909 that Orville and Wilbur Wright produced a test aircraft for the Army’s Signal Corps. Mitchell agreed with other military strategists that air power should be used not for tactical support for ground troops or strategic bombing, but for observation, in part because technological problems prevented the production of fast, large, and reliable aircraft capable of sustained air operations. The First Aero Squadron, composed of Curtiss biplanes, was activated for service in Mexico in 1916 to support “Black Jack” Pershing’s expedition into northern Mexico to pursue Pancho Villa’s revolutionary force. Mechanical and maintenance problems, however, soon grounded all aircraft. Between 1916 and 1918, American intervention in World War I provided the new advocates of air power with ample opportunities to perfect superior aircraft and to develop new strategies for the deployment and use of winged aircraft.

The Air Service of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), under the direction of the Signal Corps, initially asked for five thousand pilots and planes to accompany the ground forces to France. The Army Air Service grew rapidly under the supervision of three ambitious young officers, operating very much on their own: Brigadier General Mitchell, Brigadier General Benjamin D. Foulois, and Colonel Reynal C. Bolling, soon joined by a senior officer, Major General Mason M. Patrick. Mitchell assumed the position of air combat commander and chief advocate of the AEF’s air-power contribution to the war in France. Mitchell argued for a separate role for American pilots at the front: to observe and to protect the separate operational front assigned to the American land forces under the command of General John J. Pershing by the joint Allied command. A combined attack of air and land forces was planned for the Saint-Mihiel salient in September, 1918. Mitchell was given the command of six hundred aircraft a combined force of American, French, Italian, and Portuguese air forces and coordinated assault operations with a joint attack by American and French ground forces, successfully reducing the salient and capturing more than fifteen thousand prisoners. The victory not only established the integrity of American infantry forces but also proved the success of combined air-land operations.

With the return of peace in 1919, American advocates of air power returned to the United States prepared to lobby for public and governmental support for the establishment of a permanent and well-financed commitment to military aviation. Mitchell was the most enthusiastic advocate for a new role for air operations in modern warfare. The debate on air power after 1919 involved both the Army and the Navy, often focusing on the activities of Mitchell and creating a sharp split between the two services on the future of air power in the United States military. While both services acknowledged the essential usefulness of air operations, the Navy rejected the proposition that air power alone could win future wars. Mitchell’s advocacy of aerial warfare both antagonized and threatened the Navy’s efforts to build adequate public support in the postwar era. Mitchell defined four basic functions for the new air service: to destroy the enemy’s air effectiveness, to destroy enemy ground targets, to demoralize enemy ground forces, and to gather information. The suggestion by Mitchell that adequate air power was the key to coastal defense irritated naval strategists. Focusing on the Pacific as an area of future military operations, Mitchell suggested that air power was the most efficient substitute for naval power; aircraft development thus warranted adequate congressional support and a separate institutional identity. In 1920, the reorganization of the Army elevated the Air Service to an equal rank with other military services.

Never adept at mediating interservice arguments over the role of air power in the armed forces, Mitchell planned a dramatic demonstration. He secured a role for the Air Service in bombing tests planned by the Navy in 1921 to test the vulnerability of battleships to air attack. The captured German battleship Ostfriesland was anchored near Chesapeake Bay, and Mitchell’s pilots sent it to the bottom with heavy bombs, in disregard of the rules set by the Navy for the demonstration. Mitchell’s success strengthened his congressional supporters, but alienated his colleagues in the military. This incident led the Army to remove Mitchell from the center of political debate over appropriations and reorganization by sending him to Europe, where he consulted with other primary architects of modern aerial warfare: General Sir Hugh Trenchard of Great Britain’s Royal Air Force and General Giulio Douhet of the Italian air force, author of Command of the Air (1921). Mitchell agreed with Douhet that strategic bombing, when directed against enemy urban centers and their civilian populations, could effectively diminish morale and support for a war; nevertheless, Mitchell still viewed strategic air power as a substitute for naval power and the key to the coastal defense of the United States. American strategic bombing in World War II later proved Douhet’s vision to have been more accurate.

Mitchell’s return to the United States did nothing to further the creation of a separate air force. Tired of his constant lobbying efforts, Major General Mason M. Patrick transferred Mitchell to a field position and reduced his rank to colonel. Mitchell’s outspoken accusations of negligence on the part of American military leaders prompted President Calvin Coolidge to appoint a special review board to investigate charges that the neglect of air power bordered on “treason,” and Dwight W. Morrow was selected to head the special panel of inquiry. While the review board endorsed increased attention to aviation development, the Army moved to silence Mitchell’s criticisms of incompetence, negligence, and “almost treasonable administration” of national defense, accusations Mitchell had directed not only against the Navy but also against the Army itself. President Coolidge personally ordered a court-martial hearing, which to no one’s surprise found Mitchell guilty and ordered his suspension from military service for five years. He resigned his commission in January, 1926, but continued to speak and write extensively in favor of separate and coequal status for the air service. His ideas of strategic air operations were later tested extensively by American operations in the European theater under U.S. air general Henry H. Arnold, although with mixed results.

Mitchell’s unrelenting and impolitic advocacy of a separate and independent air arm may have dissuaded more effective and influential supporters from aiding his cause. His critics referred to him as the “General of the Hot Air Force.” He called his Army critics the “longbowmen.” While the Morrow board recommended changing the Army Air Service to the Army Air Corps (AAC) and increasing its strength to eighteen hundred planes, the air force remained under the command of the General Staff of the Army. In the 1920’s, Congress, concerned with tax and budget reductions, generally ignored pleas to increase allocations for AAC personnel and equipment. The most pressing need of the air force was the development of a heavy bomber to accomplish the type of strategic bombing Mitchell continued to advocate.

By 1930, Mitchell was the most persuasive spokesperson for Douhet’s “morale” warfare. The proper targets in future wars were the “vital centers,” areas of civilian population where transport, food supplies, and material support were located. He defended the destruction of such civilian centers as the key to short and decisive wars, avoiding the horrible trench warfare of World War I. While many Americans could not accept the strategic destruction of civilian populations as humane warfare, Mitchell intellectually “prepared them to accept it.” The intensive bombing of centers of civilian populations such as Hamburg, Dresden, and Hiroshima in World War II was the outcome of his writings, although he never advocated “throwing the strategic bomber at the man in the street.” His emotional and partisan defense of an independent air arm coequal with surface forces made him the martyr of the modern Air Force.

Significance

What Alfred Thayer Mahan did for naval strategy at the turn of the century, Mitchell did for strategic air-power development in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Based on his firsthand observation of the futility of land warfare in World War I, he believed that the proper development and deployment of specialized aircraft and the targeting of civilian centers could shorten future wars by destroying an enemy’s industrial capabilities. He envisioned military aircraft capable of many tasks pursuit, attack, bombardment, reconnaissance, and the delivery of airborne troops behind enemy lines, an idea he first proposed in 1919. His vision of a separate role for military aircraft was not unique; his writings and lectures were refined by exchanges with his counterparts in the emergence of the new air age, Trenchard and Douhet being only two of his well-known colleagues.

Mitchell believed that modern warfare required the destruction of the weak and the old, women and children, and that air power “put a completely new complexion on the old system of making war.” He set forth his ideas by lecture and by book. He published Winged Defense in 1925 and Skyways in 1930. His refusal to work through a bureaucratic system of conservative procurement and governmental reluctance to finance innovative weapon systems in the 1920’s led directly to his court-martial in 1925. As a civilian, he continued to espouse the strategic use of air power until his death in 1936. He lectured, he wrote, he testified before Congress, and he used the press to push his particular views. Indifference he found impossible to tolerate. The irony of Mitchell’s career was that the real systemization of his thoughts on strategic warfare and “vital centers” came after 1926, when he joined the ranks of civilians.

Bibliography

Cooke, James J. Billy Mitchell. Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Reinner, 2002. Biography, in which Cooke depicts Mitchell as a man whose character was fatally flawed by consuming ambition.

Craven, Wesley Frank, and James Lea Cate, eds. The Army Air Forces in World War II. 7 vols. 1949-1958. Reprint. Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1984. The standard history of the use of air power, deployment of forces, theater of operation, and air power development during World War II.

Dupuy, R. Ernest, and Trevor N. Dupuy. The Encyclopedia of Military History. 4th ed. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. The standard reference source for students of military history, containing sections on strategy, tactics, weaponry, and war and battle chronologies.

Earle, Edward Mead, ed. Makers of Modern Strategy: Military Thought from Machiavelli to Hitler. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1943. This anthology contains a well-written, if dated, essay on three great architects of aerial warfare: Douhet, Mitchell, and Alexander de Seversky. Douhet’s doctrine influenced American air-power theory through Mitchell’s interpretation and popularization of his arguments.

Hurley, Alfred F. Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power. 1964. Reprint. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975. A biographical portrait of Mitchell that is considered the most factual and objective. It should be used to balance Mitchell’s often exaggerated claims for his own ideas and the superiority of air-power.

Jeffers, H. Paul. Billy Mitchell: The Life, Times, and Battles of America’s Prophet of Air Power. St. Paul, Minn.: Zenith Press, 2005. A comprehensive chronicle of Mitchell’s controversial life and career.

Millet, Allan R., and Peter Maslowski. For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America. New York: Free Press, 1984. An excellent history of America at war. The authors integrate naval and air force developments with the conduct of war by conventional surface forces. Mitchell’s contributions are balanced by adequate attention to the Navy’s assessment of the role of military aircraft in the post-World War I era.

Mitchell, William. Memoirs of World War I: “From Start to Finish of Our Greatest War.” New York: Random House, 1960. Mitchell’s memoirs, published twenty-four years after his death.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power Economic and Military. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925. To understand the development of Mitchell’s thought and the development of strategic air-power doctrines, there is no better place to start than this work.

Weigley, Russell F. The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977. Weigley’s excellent study of the evolution of U.S. military strategy devotes a chapter to Mitchell’s thought, writings, and advocacy of directing air-power to the destruction of the “vital centers.” He also traces the interpretation of Mitchell’s doctrines as they were applied to strategic bombing in World War II, where its results often fell short of those promised by its advocates, including Alexander de Seversky.