MONDAY, AUGUST 31, 1925
It was evening when Billy Mitchell finally sat down in the parlor of his quarters at Fort Sam Houston to write to Betty (as his wife, Elizabeth, was known) about the plane accident. Shade from leafy trees, some ripe with figs and pecans in the front yard, surrounded the home and cooled the dry air in the evening. But summer at the army post, just outside San Antonio, Texas, was still unbearably hot and dusty. Mitchell was glad Betty had remained with her parents in Detroit to give birth to their first child, while he managed the moving in of their furniture and the laying of new carpets.
Quarters Number 14 was not the best on the post, certainly not as fine as the accommodations usually given to generals. But it was comfortable. The house was built according to a two-story Italianate design, with limestone from the cityâs rock quarries. It had three bedrooms, a parlor, dining room, and servantsâ quarters in the back. Stables nearby housed three horses Mitchell had brought with him from Virginia: Eclipse, Boxwood, and Flood Tide. From the parlorâs bay window, Mitchell had a beautiful view of a vast parade ground. He had to walk just several blocks to reach his office in the postâs quadrangle. His old boss in Washington, Maj. Gen. Mason Patrick, had ordered that Mitchellâs personal plane, the Sea Gull 3rd, be flown down to him.
Still, Fort Sam Houston, as Will Rogers saw it, was âSiberia.â (The two had become fast friends after Mitchell took the famous humorist up for his first plane ride four months earlier.) Mitchell had been busted from brigadier general to colonel and banished to this âmosquito post in Texas,â Rogers had written in one of his columns, because he had angered the brass in Washington.
But Texas was far from a backwater. Fort Sam Houston was the armyâs largest post in the United States. For decades it had guarded the countryâs strategically important southern flank against threats percolating up from Mexico. As the new air officer of the Eighth Army Corps, Mitchell had an area of responsibility that stretched from Texas to the West Coast. Elizabeth was thankful the army hadnât sent him farther away, to Panama. And though Mitchell had been reduced in rank, the army did not consider it a demotion. Colonel was his permanent rank, the highest he ever held during his career. Brigadier general had been his temporary rank during World War I, when officers were promoted rapidly as the army expanded for combat. After the war most reverted to their permanent peacetime ranks. Colonels went back to being captains, generals sank as low as major. The only reason Mitchell had been lucky enough to keep his star after the war was that his job as assistant director of the air service allowed for that rank while he held that position. When the job ended he stopped being a general.
But Mitchell felt humiliated by the reduction in rank. Elizabeth knew his feelings had been hurt âmuch more than he ever will say,â she wrote to one of his sisters. John Weeks, Calvin Coolidgeâs secretary of war, had refused to reappoint him as air service assistant director the previous March, which meant that he returned to the rank of colonel. Mitchell had been so publicly critical of the War Departmentâs management of air powerâand so reckless with the facts, as far as Weeks was concernedâthat he had practically been insubordinate. As far as Mitchell was concerned, he should have been named director of the army air service and promoted to major general a long time ago. He refused to accept the rank of colonel now. Soldiers on post still called him âgeneral,â and he never corrected them.
True, the Eighth Corps territory was vast, but its air arsenal was puny. In Washington, Mitchell had lorded over the entire air service, and his instant access to the national press and the cityâs powerful allowed him to push his cause for an air force independent of the army. Now he was relegated to a do-nothing job far away, the War Department hoped, from politicians and the media. In Washington, he had a platoon of air officers as loyal to him as disciples to a prophet. His staff now consisted of two clerks and a stenographer, Maydell Blackmon, whom heâd brought from Washington and who spent most of her days answering the hundreds of letters that poured in each weekâmost from admirers who thought heâd gotten a raw deal. It amused âBlackieâ (the nickname Mitchell had given her) that he always dictated letters while walking in wide circles in his office. âThe general,â as Blackie always called him, had a good command of the language and always seemed to know what he wanted to say. He rarely went back and edited what he had dictated.
Mitchell had wrenched his right shoulder in the plane accident that morning. He had scratches on his hands and face, and a plaster cast was packed on his nose, which was probably broken when his head slammed into the cockpitâs forward crash pad. He had sent Betty a quick telegram earlier that morning hoping it would reach her in Detroit before she read about the mishap in the afternoon newspapers. In fact, reporters had already phoned her shortly after his Western Union message arrived, asking her for a comment. âThank heaven you are safe,â she had wired back. Betty had given birth to their first child, Lucy, less than a month earlier. She did not need the extra worry, not with everything else going on in this turbulent year. âI wanted you to know ahead of any news items appearing that nothing had happened to your old man,â Mitchell now wrote in the peace and calm of his parlor.
Flying was still dangerous in the 1920s. Planes were mostly contraptions made of wood, wire, and cloth. Equipment in open-air cockpits was crude: a stick to control ailerons, a wooden or metal bar on a pivot for rudders, a magnetic compass, drift meter, airspeed meter, fuel indicator, little else. Almost half the armyâs peacetime deaths were due to plane accidents. Air service pilots routinely made emergency landings on deserted roads or farm fields, shooing away cattle that liked to lick the varnishlike airplane dope applied to the fabric covering the wings and fuselage to make it airtight.
Shortly after 7:30 A.M., Mitchell had climbed into a Consolidated PT-1 biplane trainer at a nearby makeshift airfield that had once been a racetrack. Harry Short, his longtime mechanic, sat in the backseat. (Shortâs wife had accompanied him to San Antonio to keep house for Mitchell.) Before takeoff the two men had both thoroughly tested the aircraftâs engine, landing gear, and shock absorbers. Though a couple of valves were leaking, the engine revved up to 1,650 rpm, which made it fit for flight. When all the cockpit controls seemed to work fine, Mitchell signaled the ground crewmen to turn the aircraft around so it faced the wind. They made eleven takeoffs and landings with no trouble, dazzling officers from the postâs Second Division, who had come out to watch. On the twelfth takeoff, however, the engine suddenly went dead at an altitude of almost one hundred feet. The planeâs right tank, they later discovered, had been empty; a faulty fuel indicator registered that it was half full.
Mitchell nosed the aircraft down to keep it from stalling, then leveled it out at fifteen feet so it wouldnât hit a clutch of laborers and mule teams just ahead. Once past them, he crash-landed at the corner of a fenced-in field. The landing gear collapsed, and the PT-1 flipped over on its nose. Upside down, Mitchell and Short quickly unbuckled their cockpit belts and crawled out. Mitchell stood up, grinning and waving to the officers running toward him. âItâs all in a dayâs work,â he told reporters later. The nonchalance wasnât false bravado. Mitchell had flown just about every model of aircraft in the army inventory and had walked away from several serious crack-ups. He rode Eclipse that afternoon. He may have had his faults as an officer, but as a pilot, forty-five-year-old William Mitchell was fearless.
He was a man of his times and a man far beyond his times. Born to a millionaire Midwestern family at the end of the 1870s, he was part of Americaâs wealthy elite who built large mansions reflecting their enormous egos, who sailed to Europe for their educations and vacations, who took the train to Florida for their winters and to upstate New York for their summers, who ruled the country with their money, their influence, and a powerful sense of noblesse oblige. He joined the militaryâregarded by some in the upper class as a public service outletâat the age of eighteen during the Spanish-American War, at the dawn of his countryâs emergence as a world power. Thus he became part of a small but growing group of energetic, ambitious, and innovative officers stuck in an army that was still trying to determine what style of saber its cavalry should carry. In World War I he led the largest armada of airplanes ever to attack an enemy force, returning as a dashing young general with a chest full of medals and the radical belief that airpower would be the only decisive instrument for future wars.
The United States turned inward after the Armistice and shrank its military as it had after previous conflicts, but Mitchell remained an apostle of empire, a committed internationalist both fascinated by and fearful of the turbulent geopolitics of Europe and the growing power of Asia. His greatest achievement came in 1921, when he led a brigade of airplanes that sank the surplus German battleship Ostfriesland off the Virginia coast, demonstrating for the first time the vulnerability of the worldâs mighty dreadnoughts to upstart airpower.
Mitchell was a trumpeter of ideas when the War Department had few new ones. By the time of his transfer to Texas, he had published numerous books and magazine articles with hundreds of predictions. Historians would later sniff that if you make enough of them, as Mitchell had, some are bound to come true. But Mitchell had an uncanny knack for forecasting the future. In the 1920s, when the average speed limit on roads was still thirty-five miles per hour and ocean liners were still the only means of transportation across the seas, he predicted that high-speed commercial airliners would one day carry passengers from New York to Europe in as little as six hours. Eighteen years before it actually happened, he detailed how Japan would launch a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. He predicted that planes and space rockets would easily be hurtled over the oceans, making countries such as the United States vulnerable to strategic attack. He predicted that air forces would be able to strike targets from afar with munitions such as cruise missiles (fired seventy years later against Iraq) and unmanned aerial vehicles (used against Al Qaeda terrorists in Afghanistan eighty years later).
Some of his forecasts never materialized. He predicted that fleets of gas-filled dirigibles would transport commercial passengers and military hardware over vast distances. Today airships do little more than hover over football games. Other notions proved fanciful. Aircraft never scattered âminute grass seedsâ over clouds to produce rain and âluxurious meadowsâ when the seeds âfall to earth.â But he foresaw a day when gliding would be a popular sport, when aircraft would routinely be used for crop dusting, fire-fighting, medevacing the sick and wounded, photographing terrain, and spying on enemies. âA single explosionâ well placed by aircraft into the heart of New York City, he once wrote, could wreck tall buildings, close the New York Stock Exchange, put communication and transportation systems âcompletely out of order,â and paralyze briefly âthe financial center of the Western Hemisphere.â
Mitchell was also a showman. The 1920s ushered in the era of mass communications: radio, movies, large-circulation newspapers and magazines. He understood their power and used them skillfully to press not only for a separate air force but also for a Department of Defense that would oversee it along with the army and navy. His enemies in the War and Navy Departments, who just as adamantly opposed such reorganization, grumbled that he manipulated the media too well. Mitchell became more of a propagandist than a reasoned advocate. The cause he championedâa radical reorganization of the defense establishment of his dayâwas a worthy one, but he lost whatever potential allies by behaving arrogantly and by playing fast and loose with the facts. As the years wore on he had become more strident in promoting his separate air force, more impatient with the slow pace of change, more disdainful of those who disagreed with him. Navy admirals sputtered with rage at the mere mention of his name because he so publicly denigrated the value of their fleet.
In his private life Mitchell ran out of money often, drank heavily, and in 1922 went through a bitter divorce from his first wife, Caroline. His second wife, Betty, had been swept off her feet by this fiery air general who landed his plane on a beach near York Harbor, Maine, to court her at her familyâs vacation home. She had calmed down his personal life after they married in 1923, but his zeal for airpower still burned hot. By the time Mitchell reported to Fort Sam Houston on June 27, 1925, he had alienated practically everyone above him in the chain of command, including his commander in chief, President Calvin Coolidge.
Coolidge, who didnât think much of an officer using a government plane to visit his girlfriend, was still miffed that Mitchell had hoodwinked him the previous fall. The general, who had been under a War Department gag order not to publish any articles on aeronautics unless the army approved them, walked into the presidentâs office with the editor of the Saturday Evening Post and asked the president for permission to write a series of bland pieces for the magazine. Coolidge saw no problem as long as he cleared it with his bosses in the War Department. Mitchell then went back to General Patrick, who as director of the air service was his immediate superior, and said the president had okayed the articles. âVery well, if you have the Presidentâs authority,â Patrick recalled telling him. Mitchell conveniently didnât mention that Coolidge had conditioned it on the War Departmentâs approval. Secretary of War Weeks was enraged when he opened the magazine and, to his surprise, found Mitchellâs pieces warning about airplanes laying waste to nations in future wars and calling for an independent air force.
For Weeks the last straw came in January 1925, when Mitchell began appearing before a House investigative committee chaired by Florian Lampert, a portly, cigar-chomping Republican congressman from Wisconsin. Ignoring pleas from aides to tone down his testimony, Mitchell blasted the entire military establishment. Americaâs air service, he charged, was woefully unprepared for a future war. Top admirals and generals, he claimed, had lied to Congress about the decrepit conditions in their services, and officers under them were muzzled or forced to give false statements when called before congressional committees. The army and navy hotly disputed his charges and the credibility of his evidence, but Mitchell remained defiant. To add insult to injury, at the end of August bookstores received Mitchellâs latest unauthorized tome on airpower, Winged Defense, which contained political cartoons ridiculing Weeks, a popular secretary who happened to be ill and near resignation. Mitchell insisted that the publisher inserted the cartoons without his knowledge. But Betty knew that no one would believe it, and she feared that incident alone might be enough to get her husband court-martialed.
The press called Mitchell the âstormy petrel,â for the seabird whose presence is supposed to warn of turbulent weather. Senior army officers, in private, had dubbed him the âKookaburra,â for a bird Australians called the âLaughing Jackass.â He wasâand continues to beâthe object of extreme adulation or extreme vilification. Even today officers at the nationâs military schools argue fiercely about him. Sen. John McCain, the maverick Republican who ran for president in 2000, lists Mitchell as one of his heroes. (McCainâs grandfather, Adm. John Sidney McCain, opposed Mitchellâs campaign for a separate air force, though the admiral told relatives privately that he liked the army man.) Mitchellâs admirers compare him to Socrates, Alexander, Napoleon, Robert E. Leeâthe greatest military prophet in centuries, a man who sacrificed a promising career for a higher cause. His enemies accuse him of being a scheming, mentally unbalanced, political opportunistâeven a Bolshevik and the catalyst for the feuding we still see among the army, navy, and air force. Both sides stretch the truth, particularly with the charge that he was a Bolshevik or the father of interservice rivalry. An intense patriot, Mitchell loathed communism. Service squabbling remains alive and well among generals and admirals today who werenât born when he was in uniform.
What cannot be denied is the tremendous impact Mitchell had on the modern U.S. Air Force. His ideas on how planes should be used in combat became the fighting doctrine for World War II. Air force officers are still immersed in his theories during their training. It was Mitchell who planted the intellectual seeds for what is now Americaâs global airpower.
But he was a far more complex man than black-and-white portraits suggest. He was only five feet nine inches, but seemed taller because he stood so erect and kept his chin up. He was aggressive, brash, and often contemptuous of superiors. He had a somewhat high and twangy voice, almost dictatorial in tone, which could be heard at a distance. Around children he could be bossy and intimidating, treating them like privates, but some, like his niece Harriet, stood up to him and he found it amusing. He quit smoking in his twenties and never ate red meat. In Europe during World War I, he designed his own flashy uniform. In civilian clothes he was a dandy, sporting the latest expensive fashions from British tailors. (His head was small, so he wore a small hat, always jauntily cocked to the left.) He was handsome, and women were attracted to him. He loved to hunt and play polo but hated card games and gambling. He kept three pairs of reading glasses in the house for the several books he was always reading.
Mitchell had many loyal followers or opponents or rivals, but he had few equals or close friends his age. An Episcopalian, he was deeply religious and fond of studying stars in the universe; he felt he was closer to God when flying. He spoke Spanish fluently, French fairly well, German poorly, and Tagalog, the language of the Philippines, slightly. A workaholic, he slept no more than five hours a night. Aides found him a difficult taskmaster. He often reduced Blackie to tears with his demands. After a grueling day of inspecting planes at an air base, heâd keep the exhausted pilots up half the night partying at the officersâ club. Jimmy Doolittle, who later led the first U.S. bombing raid over Tokyo during World War II, was once assigned as Mitchellâs temporary aide for a day. âThe busiest day I ever had,â he recalled.
On Tuesday morning Mitchell dropped the letter for Betty into a mailbox on his way to a nearby airfield. Though he ached all over from the accident the day before, he climbed into a De Havilland DH-4 biplane the mechanics had fixed up with a larger 110-gallon fuel tank and took it for a spin over the post. He spent the rest of the morning and afternoon in his office dictating to Blackie; then he set out for a nearby game preserve with a half dozen locals to hunt doves. They ended up shooting three armadillos, six skunks, and two buzzards.
Mitchell was intent on making the best of his exile. Two weeks after he arrived at Fort Sam Houston, driving onto the post in a new Packard the auto company had sold him at a discount, Mitchell had hopped into a plane and began touring his new domain with Harry Short in the backseat. The mechanic filmed the terrain below with a movie camera. Mitchell flew to Tucson, Arizona, where the Pueblo Club and Chamber of Commerce feted him at a banquet; then to Los Angeles, where he toured movie sets in Hollywood with Douglas Fairbanks Sr. and stayed overnight at Cecil B. DeMilleâs mansion. Flying in the open cockpit, with the hot wind beating against his face, invigorated him. He even slept late at times, and in a note to Betty said he was consuming âpractically no drinks....
