Mitchell and the Foundations of Progressive Air Power

The Ostfriesland episode demonstrated much more than simply Mitchell’s commitment to Air Service autonomy. It also revealed that the vestiges of progressivism remaining in postwar America had enveloped many airmen, and none more so than Billy Mitch­ell.2 Far more ambitious than their muckraker predecessors, Mitch­ell and the air progressives aimed to reform the most violent of man’s activities—war. Rifled artillery, the machine gun, and poi­son gas had made war an endless nightmare that killed millions, as typified by the unremitting fury of the Western Front. Technol­ogy was the demon responsible for the slaughter, but, Mitchell and his cohorts believed, technology was also the key to salvation. The bomber would be their instrument of change. Not only would it prevent a naval force from attacking the United States, it would obviate trench warfare, single-handedly achieving a victory that was quicker, cheaper, and hence more humane than one gained by ground combat. The wartime application of air power would, Mitchell contended, “result in a diminished loss of life and trea­sure and will thus be a distinct benefit to civilization.”1

Mitchell’s unabashed faith that air power had altered the charac­ter of war caused him to demand an air force separate from Army or Navy control to guarantee its proper use. Ffe continually voiced progressive notions in his appeals for service independence, and used the term directly in the foreword to his book Winged De­fense: “The time has come when aviation must be developed for aviation’s sake and not as an auxiliary to other exiting branches [of the service]. Unless the progressive elements in our makeup are availed of, we will fall behind in the world’s development.”4 Much like the muckrakers, Mitchell took his case for autonomy straight to the American public. In the aftermath of the “War to End All Wars,” however, he found that his message could not per­suade a populace beset by isolationism, pacifist tendencies, and, ultimately, the Great Depression.5 Still, his progressive ideals en­dured among airmen, and provided the foundations for the bomb­ing doctrine they developed during the interwar years.

Mitchell was an apt choice to serve as the messiah of Amer­ican air power. With a United States senator for a father and a railroad tycoon grandfather, he possessed ties to leaders in both government and industry. World War I provided him with con­siderable experience as a combat air commander, and he had ex­celled at it—most of the pilots who flew in his units adored him. Brimming with confidence in any situation, he could charm most audiences, often by relying on his fluent French or his expert polo. Yet his overwhelming self-assurance did not stem entirely from expertise. Mitchell was a driven man, a man on a mission, a man with little time to waste. He wrote his mother in December 1919 that he “was practically the only one that can bring about a bet­terment of our national defense at this time” and noted with pride in his diary on Christmas Eve five years later: “Supposed to be a half-holiday, but I worked hard all day in the office neverthe­less.”6 Those who interfered with his promotion of air power—or his boundless ego—incurred his wrath. “Mitchell tried to convert his opponents by killing them first,” observed British Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, who served as Mitchell’s air power mentor during World War I.7 During the war, Mitchell’s vanity produced bitter clashes with fellow airmen Benjamin Foulois and “Nap” Gorrell, both of whom, he believed, snubbed him after obtaining high Air Service positions.8

After the Armistice Mitchell turned his temper toward those who opposed his ideas and his methods of espousing them. His quick tongue and steadfast beliefs prevented him from command­ing the Air Service; he had to settle for Assistant Chief, which car­ried with it a brigadier general’s rank. As such, he refused to de­fer to Major General Charles T. Menoher, a non-flying Air Service chief who had led the Forty-second “Rainbow” Division in World War I. Mitchell published his report of the Ostfriesland sinking despite Menoher’s warning not to do so. Instead of confronting Mitchell afterward, Menoher resigned his post. His successor, Ma­jor General Mason Patrick, was an engineer, the West Point class­mate of General John J. Pershing, and the Air Service commander during the last six months of the world war. He learned to fly at age sixty to enhance his image with his subordinates.

Upon replacing Menoher, Patrick stated that he would be chief in deed as well as name in a remark aimed at Mitchell. When Mitch­ell responded with an offer of resignation, Patrick told him that the offer would be accepted, and Mitchell reconsidered.9 Patrick realized his deputy’s brilliance and even came to share his views on an independent air force, but he did not appreciate Mitch­ell’s unorthodox methods of pursuing his goal. Patrick sent him to inspect European air forces to prevent Mitchell from disrupt­ing the 1922 Washington Naval Conference, and also dispatched him to the Pacific in early 1924. In the end, though, the Air Ser­vice chief proved incapable of curbing his deputy’s penchant for seeking public support.

Because his ideas conflicted with traditional Army views on the “proper” role of air power in war, Mitchell believed that the Army leadership would never endorse air force autonomy. He un­derstood full well the Army’s desire to guarantee that it received adequate air support for its ground forces—he had provided that backing in France during the war, and he did not dismiss the need for it afterward. Yet the auxiliary application of air power of­fered meager prospects for overcoming the murderous technol­ogy of modern land warfare—or for justifying an autonomous air force. As long as ground advance remained the primary means to achieve victory (and Army leaders had little incentive to change that emphasis), the bomber’s ability to revamp war remained lim­ited. “Should a War take place on the ground between two indus­trial nations in the future,” Mitchell wrote in 1919, “it can only end in absolute ruin, if the same methods that the ground armies have followed before should be resorted to.”10 In contrast, inde­pendently applied air power presented an opportunity to win a war by avoiding stalemate and slaughter.

Mitchell maintained that air power alone could defeat a na­tion by paralyzing its “vital centers,” which included great cit­ies, factories, raw materials, foodstuffs, supplies, and modes of transportation.11 All were essential to wage modern war, and all were vulnerable to air attack. Moreover, many of the targets were fragile, and wrecking them promised a rapid victory. Mitchell as­serted: “Air forces will attack centers of production of all kinds, means of transportation, agricultural areas, ports and shipping; not so much the people themselves. They will destroy the means of making war, because now we cannot cut a limb out of a tree, pick a stone from a hill and make it our principal weapon. Today to make war we must have great metal and chemical factories that have to stay in one place, take months to build, and, if destroyed, cannot be replaced in the usual length of a modern war.”12 Only an air force possessed the means to attack vital centers without first confronting enemy surface forces, and destroying those cen­ters would eliminate the need to advance through enemy territory on the ground. “The influence of air power on the ability of one nation to impress its will on another in an armed conflict will be decisive,” he insisted.13

Like many Army officers of his time, Mitchell could recite Clause – witz’s dictum on the objective of war, and he did so with a paro­chial twist. Air power would wreck an enemy’s will to fight by de­stroying its capability to resist, and the essence of that capability was not the army or navy, but the nation’s industrial and agricul­tural underpinnings. Eliminating industrial production “would deprive armies, air forces and navies .. . of their means of main­tenance.”14 Air power also offered the chance to attack the will to fight directly. Mitchell equated the will of a nation to the will of its populace, but he vacillated about the propriety of bombing civil­ians. On the one hand, he called for attacks on “the places where people live and carry on their daily lives” to discourage their “de­sire to renew the combat at a later date,” advocated burning Jap­anese metropolitan areas in the event of a war with Japan, and noted that poison gas could be used to contaminate water sup­plies and spur evacuations from cities. On the other hand, in a 1922 bombing manual written for Air Service officers, he argued that attacking a factory was ethical only if its workers received “sufficient warning that the center will be destroyed” and that “in rare instances Bombardment aviation will be required to act as an arm of reprisal.”15

The dominant theme emerging from these discussions was not the desire to attack civilians directly, but rather the desire to sever the populace from the sources of production. “It may be neces­sary to intimidate the civilian population in a certain area to force them to discontinue something which is having a direct bearing on the outcome of the conflict,” Mitchell observed in his bomb­ing manual. Achieving that goal might cause some civilian deaths, but the number would pale compared to the deaths produced by a ground war between industrialized powers. Moreover, once bombed, civilians were unlikely to continue supporting the war effort. “In the future, the mere threat of bombing a town by an air force will cause it to be evacuated and all work in munitions and supply factories to be stopped,” he asserted.16 In Mitchell’s eyes, civilian will was exceedingly fragile, and its collapse would cause a corresponding loss in war-making capability. In addition, civilians did not have to be attacked directly to produce a direct impact on an enemy’s will to fight.

Although adamant about the fragile nature of civilian will, Mitchell was less than explicit about how breaking it would trans­late into a rapid peace. He thought that air raids would trigger evacuations of hundreds of thousands of people from urban ar­eas. Those refugees would not be able to obtain adequate food or shelter, and their plight would cause a war to end. “There is only one alternative and that is surrender,” he wrote in 1930. “It is a quick way of deciding a war and really much more humane than the present methods of blowing people to bits by cannon projec­tiles or butchering them with bayonets.”17 Yet Mitchell neglected to say whether “surrender” would occur because the government of the battered nation was sympathetic to the plight of its people, feared overthrow by an irate populace, or had in fact been dis­placed by a new regime demanding peace.

In many of his futuristic examples, he depicted the United States as the country undergoing air attack, so the presumption was that surrender would stem from a sympathetic government. Mitchell claimed that America’s “strategical heart” consisted of the man­ufacturing complexes within a triangle formed by Chicago, Bos­ton, and the Chesapeake Bay, and that destroying those centers and their transportation links would not only wreck industrial productivity but also lead to widespread starvation if the nation chose not to capitulate.18 In such projections, war-making capa­bility ceased once bombs destroyed vital industries and agricul­tural areas, or once civilians left the factories and fields. Mitchell dismissed stockpiles of materiel, especially food, and he also re­jected reserves of morale.19 He bestowed on the governments un­der attack a degree of rationality that ignored the enemy’s war aims and the possibility that the population would willingly suf­fer to avoid capitulation. His examples intimated that all indus­trial powers were alike—and that all resembled his view of the United States. He thus overlooked crucial distinctions between nations—and the types of wars they fought—that would directly affect bombing’s ability to achieve an independent victory, much less a rapid one.

For Mitchell, the key prerequisite for achieving victory through air power mirrored the requirement stipulated by the Italian air theorist Giulio Douhet: gaining control of the sky. Mitchell later stated that he had “frequent conversations” with Douhet during his 1922 visit to Italy; whether those conversations actually occurred, he was well acquainted with Douhet’s confidant, Gianni Caproni, and received a synopsis of Douhet’s classic book, The Command of the Air, in late 1922.20 Much of Mitchell’s and Douhet’s writ­ing was remarkably similar.21 Both agreed that “nothing can stop the attack of aircraft except other aircraft,” and that after achiev­ing air supremacy, an enemy’s vital centers—a term used by both men—could be wrecked at will.22 They differed, however, about how best to achieve air control. For Douhet, the best method was to destroy the enemy air force on the ground, either at its bases or before it left factory assembly lines.21 Mitchell countered that air combat was also a suitable means, and that attacking a crit­ical vital center would compel the hostile air force to rise in de­fense, whereupon it could be overcome.24 Both initially thought that escort fighters for bombers were essential to ward off the en­emy’s fighters, although Douhet would later advocate an air force based on a single type of aircraft, a bomber bristling with ma­chine guns that he dubbed the “battleplane” in his 1926 revision to Command of the Air.

Like Mitchell, Douhet argued that an independent air force em­phasizing the bomber was the cheapest and most efficient means to defend his nation. Yet unlike his American counterpart, Douhet had to consider that his country was susceptible to air attack.25 The Italian asserted that a defending air force could not protect all of a nation’s vital centers, because the defender could never be certain what centers the attacker would choose to strike.26 His answer was to attack first, with as much air power as possible, and destroy the enemy’s ability to retaliate in kind. Once enemy bombers took to the air against an unknown target, attempting to stop them was probably futile.27 Mitchell realized that advanc­ing technology would ultimately overcome the limitation on range that protected the United States from air attack by a European or Asiatic power. Under his guidance, Air Service Colonel Townsend F. Dodd prepared an April Г9Г9 study evaluating the need for a separate air force that concluded: “The moment that [an] aircraft reaches that stage of development which will permit one ton of bombs to be carried from the nearest point of a possible enemy’s territory to our commercial and industrial centers, and to return to the starting point, then national safety requires the maintenance of an efficient air force adapted for acting against the possible en­emy’s interior.”28 By the time that trans-oceanic flight had been perfected, Mitchell aimed to make Americans an “air-going peo­ple,” ready to conduct “war at a distance” through a Department of the Aeronautics equal in status to the Army and Navy Depart­ments in a single Department of National Defense.29

Mitchell tried to transform the American populace into air power advocates by emphasizing the progressive notions of order and effi­ciency. Not only could an autonomous air force protect the United States and achieve an independent victory in war, he insisted that it could do so more cheaply—and more effectively—than either the Army or the Navy. Yet the Air Service could not perform an independent mission, Mitchell argued, as long as the Army con­trolled it. Because the Army divided air units among its various corps and divisions to assure that they received adequate air sup­port, air units had a meager chance of being massed together for a long-range independent mission in which Army commanders had little interest. “To leave aviation essentially under the domi­nance and direction of another department is to absolutely stran­gle its development, because it will be looked on by them merely as an auxiliary and not as a principal thing,” he protested in De­cember 1919.30 Mitchell provoked the Navy’s ire with his persis­tent claims that the sea service provided minimum defense for a maximum price tag. In 1922 he contended that an average bat­tleship cost roughly forty-five million dollars to build and equip, while bombers cost twenty thousand dollars each. Thus, the na­tion could either build one battleship or two thousand bombers— each of which could sink a battleship!31 Mitchell’s argument omit­ted a great deal, such as the rapid rate of obsolescence of aircraft compared to capital ships, and the high costs of training aircrews and building air bases, but its simplistic logic touched a receptive chord in many Americans.

In December 1924 Representative Julian Lampert, chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, began hearings in re­sponse to Representative John F. Curry’s bill for a unified avia­tion service. Mitchell testified extensively at the hearings, making some of his most inflammatory accusations. “All the organiza­tion that we have in this country really now is for the protection of vested interests against aviation,” he told the committee. He added that some individuals testifying for the government had showed “a woeful ignorance. . . and in some cases possibly a falsification of evidence, with the evident intent to confuse Con­gress.” When asked by Secretary of War John W. Weeks to elab­orate on his testimony in writing, Mitchell declined to provide specifics and added additional charges. He berated the Navy for the conduct of its bombing tests, remarking that it “actually tried to prevent our sinking the Ostfriesland.”32 Mitchell had recently angered Secretary Weeks by publishing an explosive series of avi­ation articles, unreviewed by the War Department, in the Satur­day Evening Post. The confrontational testimony following on the heels of those articles caused Weeks to deny Mitchell’s reap­pointment as Assistant Chief of the Air Service when it came up for renewal in March 1925.33 At the end of the month Mitchell reverted to his permanent grade of colonel and was transferred to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas, as aviation officer for the Army’s Eighth Corps Area.

Mitchell, however, had no intention of remaining dormant in the Texas hinterland. In August 1925 he published Winged De­fense, which expanded many of the arguments that he had made in the Saturday Evening Post. Although stressing the importance of an independent air force built around the bomber, the book continued the attack on Army and Navy leaders opposed to such an organization.54 It also contained cartoons lampooning Sec­retary Weeks, who at the time of publication had become seri­ously ill. Mitchell had been unaware that the cartoons would be published in the book, and on 4 September received a letter from his wife, Elizabeth, who was in Detroit with their infant daugh­ter. Elizabeth was greatly distressed about the appearance of the cartoons and contended that no one would believe that Mitch­ell had not approved them. “I don’t very well see how they can avoid court-martialing you now, my sweet—but I’m sorry it will have to be over something sort of cheap like those cartoons,” she lamented.35 Mitchell’s receipt of his wife’s letter coincided with the crash of the Navy dirigible Shenandoah in an Ohio thunder­storm and perhaps influenced his decision to make the Navy di­saster his personal Rubicon. On 5 September he told San Antonio newspapers that the crash resulted from “the incompetency, crim­inal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the Na­tional Defense by the Navy and War Departments.”56 Two weeks later he was court-martialed.

For Mitchell, the trial and the “Morrow Board” that preceded it were anticlimaxes. An enraged President Calvin Coolidge, who called Mitchell a “God-damned disturbing liar,” proffered the court-martial charges himself.57 Coolidge summoned friend and J. P. Morgan banker Dwight Morrow to conduct a formal investi-

gation of American aviation that would undercut the publicity of Mitchell’s trial.58 The president directed Morrow to produce a re­port by the end of November, and Morrow’s hearing concluded on r 5 October, thirteen days before the court-martial started. Mitch­ell testified for the Morrow Board but chose to read long passages of Winged Defense rather than to engage in the verbal sparring at which he excelled. Although he returned to form at his trial, the verdict was a given. Found guilty on 17 December—ironically, the twenty-second anniversary of the Wright brothers’ first pow­ered flight at Kitty Hawk—he retired from the service on 1 Feb­ruary 1926 to continue his crusade sans uniform.59

While newspapers gave the court-martial proceedings extensive coverage, no outcry for an independent air force erupted follow­ing the verdict. The Morrow Board, which had received testimony from an array of civilian and military aviation specialists, had in­deed diminished interest in the court-martial. Winged Defense sold only 4,500 copies between August 1925 and January 1926 dur­ing the peak of sensationalism.90 Mitchell received many support­ive letters in that span, but few individuals were willing to back his cause with a demand for legislation.41 Future general Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, then an Air Service major and a close personal friend of Mitchell’s, later speculated on why the American people failed to act on Mitchell’s recommendations: “the public enthusi­asm. . . was not for air power—it was for Billy.”42 Flamboyant, intrepid, and cocksure, Mitchell appealed to New Era America. His message, though, struck an uncertain chord. His argument that bombers could now defend the nation more efficiently than battleships seemed to make sense, as did his assertion that bomb­ers could defeat an enemy without the need for a ground invasion. Yet questions remained—defend against whom? Whom would air power defeat? The Morrow Board’s conclusion, “that air power… has yet demonstrated its value—certainly not in a country situ­ated as ours—for independent operations of such a character as to justify the organization of a separate department,” reflected con­cerns held by the bulk of Americans regarding Mitchell’s ideas.43 In Г925, the public realized that no enemy threatened the United States, and airplanes could not cross the Atlantic or Pacific. The mood endured for more than a decade.