Program Information

Billy Mitchell’s experience as Army air combat commander during World War I showed him that future success in warfare depended on air power. His problem was that he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

A Moment in Time is a brief, exciting and compelling journey into the past. Created to excite and enlighten the public about the past, its relevance to the present and its impact on the future, A Moment In Time is a captivating historical narrative that is currently broadcast worldwide.

Transcript

Lead: For 400 years service men and women have fought to carve out and defend freedom and the civilization we know as America. This series on A Moment in Time is devoted to the memory of those warriors, whose devotion gave, in the words of Lincoln at Gettysburg, the last full measure.

Intro: A Moment in Time with Dan Roberts

Content: Billy Mitchell’s experience as Army air combat commander during World War I showed him that future success in warfare depended on air power. His problem was that he just couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Before the war, Mitchell had a limited view of the airplane’s potential. He was in the Signal Corps and believed flying machines were primarily useful only for reconnaissance, flying behind and over the battlefield, spotting artillery, tracking enemy maneuvers, and aiding in fast communication and travel. As the months in Europe passed, his perspective began to change. He started to fly battle missions beside his pilots and eventually rose to be leader of the Army’s air arm. Under actual combat conditions additional powerful possibilities for the airplane began to emerge. Tactically, warplanes could support troops fighting on the ground and, strategically, planes could help destroy enemy installations behind the lines.

Billy Mitchell’s father and grandfather were congressmen. He thus grew up in the circles of power and expected people to listen when he spoke, but his habit of going public with his ideas and tendency to browbeat his opponents diminished his influence with the Army. Mitchell’s experience as head of Army air combat forces in Europe during World War I led him to conclude that the warplane was the key to victory in future conflicts and he went on a crusade to prove it. He was particularly adept at using the press to further his ideas. He arranged a series of highly publicized tests in which his bombers spectacularly sank several surplus battleships thus proving the ships’ vulnerability and increasing obsolescence.

In the years following the war, under pressure from Congress, the military was forced to endure severe budget cutbacks. From his position as Assistant Chief of the then Air Service, Mitchell began speak out vigorously on a variety of controversial strategic decisions facing defense planners. His confrontational, even hectoring style, his unwillingness to abide by ancient customs of deference to those in higher authority, and his increasing tendency to go public with mocking accusations of military incompetence, made him many enemies.

More importantly, his approach and attitude diminished the impact of his ideas which, in themselves, were right on the money. He also believed that the nation needed a separate independent air force, that Japan posed a serious military threat in the Pacific and that strategic bombing had a terrible potential for destruction in future wars.

Mitchell’s public campaign had many supporters in and out of the military, but his style of advocacy garnered him many powerful enemies who considered him insubordinate and a source of embarrassment to the government; among those was President Calvin Coolidge. When demotion and banishment to an obscure post in San Antonio failed to quiet him, in 1925 he was brought up on charges of “bringing discredit on the military service.” He was found guilty, suspended from duty and pay. He resigned, and until his death in 1936 promoted his ideas which proved to be accurate and, in his warnings of the growing Japanese threat in the Pacific, fatally accurate.

At the University of Richmond, this is Dan Roberts.

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