'Billy' Mitchell's Visions

Way, way back sometime? Did a column here about “Billy” Mitchell (1879-1936). Recall discussing the young army officer’s bitter fights with military big shots. Rapid airplane improvements occurred after the Wright brothers’ famous 1903 flight, but Mitchell was almost busted out of the service for suggesting advancing designs could make aircraft useful for dropping bombs in case of war. A little later, the high brass went completely bananas when he suggested the USA should build big ships with a flat deck on top where planes could take off and land at sea. History records that

Billy Mitchell, under great political pressure and personal vilification, would not back off an inch.

He eventually proved the value of his ideas, but it took a long time and it was unbelievably difficult.

STARTLING! Was discovery for me this week of excerpts from an article by General William Mitchell for Liberty Magazine in 1932. Mitchell was 53 years old and still fighting Federal Bureaucracy. Title of the article was “Will Japan Try to Conquer the United States?”:

“The United States is faced not only with the possibility of war with Japan in the comparatively near future but with extreme likelihood of it sooner or later. For several years Japan has been working to isolate the United States from Europe so, in the event of war, assistance will be difficult to get from that quarter. She has also been attempting to make arrangements with the European countries so that in the event of partition of China they may benefit commercially, again with the idea of keeping us out. So while we have been chasing the butterflies of international debts and the will-o’-the-wisp of disarmament, not paying particular attention to the Pacific or ourselves, Japan has been strengthening her position all the time.

“While the Japanese have not had the experience in war that Western nations have, and are probably not yet endowed with physical and material resources that will enable them to compete with the greater white nations, still they are working almost with desperation to make themselves the strongest military power in the world. Their principal aim in doing this is the order to fight the one great white nation on the Pacific Ocean, that is, the United States.”

Under a photo in the article was his statement, “We have an obsolete navy based on battleships.”

That is part of what Billy Mitchell wrote just four years before his death in 1936. Hitler’s invasion of Poland three years later added a twist he had not foreseen, but his analysis of the Pacific situation was right on.

Being only 4 years old in 1932, I somehow missed that magazine article, but in its discovery 76 years later, have to wonder about some things?

If he had lived beyond the age of 57, would General “Billy” Mitchell possibly has made a difference in the way we got into World War II?

Have to speculate if rising Japanese military planners during and after WW I took the Mitchell ideas about bombing and aircraft carriers to heart before USA brass did? On a public tour of

America’s Pacific fleet in the late 1930s. I saw a conventional warship, which had been converted to aircraft use. Has a “flat deck on top.” Anchored in Puget Sound was the USS Saratoga, “our aircraft carrier.” Unlike the battleships Arizona, West Virginia and others, it was not sunk at Pearl

Harbor, being on a cruise away from the rest of our fleet there.

The Japanese planes that bombed Pearl Harbor, Dec. 7, 1941, came from big ships with a flat deck on top, carefully designed aircraft carriers. That was only nine years after Billy Mitchell predicted a Japanese war.

We can find samples of irony in all historic events, but Billy Mitchell’s unusual life story … is crammed with it.

G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national-award winning Hungry Horse News columnist.