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Congressional Medal of Honor Recipient Billy Mitchell
Born in Nice, France, in 1879, on his parent's extended tour of Europe, Mitchell was brought back to Milwaukee at age 3. This photo was taken in 1898, when Mitchell first entered the military service. Mitchell held the rank of junior lieutenant.
 Following WW I, many Air Service flyers supported the idea of a separate air arm, independent of the Army and Navy, which could carry out strategic operations against enemy industrial targets as opposed to supporting front-line troops on the battlefield. The most prominent advocate of this philosophy was Billy Mitchell.
When Mitchell suggested that U.S. airpower could defend the nation's coasts from attacks by enemy warships better than U.S. seapower, the controversy developed as to whether an airplane could sink a battleship. It was decided to conduct tests off the Virginia capes and in Jun.-Jul. 1921, Mitchell's bombers sank three captured German naval vessels and in Sep. 1921, the obsolete U.S.S. Alabama. Two years later, additional tests were conducted off Cape Hatteras and two more obsolete U.S. battleships were sent to the bottom.
The success of the bombing trials encouraged the supporters of a separate air arm to press even harder for their objectives but the Army General Staff remained firm in its belief that airpower, acting independently, could not win a war. Mitchell became increasingly critical of his superiors until his public statements could no longer be condoned. In Dec. 1925 he was found guilty before a court-martial of violating the all-inclusive 96th Article of War and was suspended from duty for five years. In 1926, Mitchell resigned from the service.
Mitchell was gone but his ideas remained, to be resurrected in ten years with the advent of the Boeing B-17, the world's first true long-range, high-altitude strategic bomber. Mitchell died in 1936 and never saw his ideas vindicated in WW II, but in 1946 Congress posthumously awarded to him a special Congressional Medal of Honor in recognition of his outstanding pioneer service and foresight in American military aviation.
MITCHELL THE PROPHET
Billy Mitchell was a visionary far ahead of his time. His predictions on the role of airpower in a future war were uncanny, though they made little impression upon his superiors in the mid-1920's. Following a trip to Japan early in 1924, Mitchell submitted a report which has been labeled "the masterpiece of his career." In it, he foretold of Japanese expansionist ambitions in the Pacific and presented what he considered would be the start of a Pacific war. Basically, he stated such a war would start with a Japanese air and sea attack upon Pearl Harbor in Hawaii with an accompanying aerial attack on the Philippines:
Attack will be launched as follows:
Bombardment, attack to be made on Ford Island (Hawaii) at 7:30 A.M..... Attack to be made on Clark Field at 10:40 A.M.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 7:55 A.M. and, later, Clark Field in the Philippines at 12:35 P.M. Mitchell had erred by only 25 minutes for Hawaii and less than 2 hours for the Philippines. In the same year, the Dayton Journal published a full-page editorial on the need for America to support an enlarged air force in face of Japanese advancements in aviation. Accompanying the article was a drawing of a modernistic Japanese warplane, flying across the Pacific from Tokyo toward San Francisco, guns firing as it approached the U.S.
Billy Mitchell's Special Congressional Medal of Honor
This is the Special Congressional Medal of Honor
awarded posthumously to Mitchell in 1946.
This medallion, the only one of its kind in existence,
was sculptured by Erwin F. Springweiler, and was
struck by the Philadelphia Mint.
The inscription on the front of the medallion reads:
BRIGADIER GENERAL WILLIAM MITCHELL
The inscription on the reverse side reads:
AWARD OF THE
CONGRESS
AUGUST 8, 1946
FOR OUTSTANDING
PIONEER SERVICE AND
FORESIGHT IN FIELD
OF AMERICAN MILITARY
AVIATION
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell (1955)
The true story of General Billy Mitchell, a pioneering crusader for the Army's fledgling air corp. In spite of an impressive performance during the First World War, the commanders of America's armed forces still think of the airplane as little more then a carnival attraction. Even after sinking an "unsinkable" captured German battleship from the air, Mitchell sees funds dry up and friends die due to poor equipment. He is court-martialed after questioning the loyalty of his superiors for allowing the air corp to deteriorate. The film, made in the mid-1950s, reveals how the founding spirit of America is being smothered by the new conformity - linking the military intransigence here to ex-General Eisenhower's America. The presence of Rod Steiger, fresh from 'On The Waterfront', also reminds us of another recent, prominent showtrial, the McCarthy purges. But, although the film is impeccably anti-military, -bureaucracy and -conformist, it questions that founding spirit, suggesting that such individualism always had something a little mad and sick in it.
General Billy Mitchell at his Court Martial
General Billy Mitchell at Selfridge Field.
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