In 1921, Army Brig. Gen. Billy Mitchell proved airplanes may sink battleships. Three years later, he predicted Japan would launch a shock air assault on Pearl Harbor at daybreak. Navy and Army brass dismissed him. They court-martialed him, pressured him out, then spent the following 20 years constructing extra battleships.
On Dec. 7, 1941, Mitchell’s predictions have been confirmed proper, but it surely was too late.
The Navy’s Rigged Take a look at
Mitchell was a veteran of the Spanish-American Battle and World Battle I. He spent the late 1910s vocalizing how airpower may dominate the seas. The Navy was not amused by his assertions, and as an alternative hoped to proceed massing its battleship fleet.
Chief of Naval Operations Adm. William S. Benson summed up the Navy’s view throughout this time: “I can not conceive of any use that the fleet will ever have for plane. Aviation is simply a whole lot of noise.”
In late 1920, the Navy hoped to silence the WWI hero as he continued to argue battleships have been out of date. So, they performed their very own anti-naval take a look at utilizing airplanes on the USS Indiana, an previous battleship from the Spanish-American Battle.
Navy plane dropped dummy bombs stuffed with sand to mark the place they hit on the ship, then crews detonated huge explosives at these spots to simulate an aerial assault. The harm was devastating and the ship sank in shallow water.
When the take a look at ended, the Navy drew a distinct conclusion. Capt. William D. Leahy launched a report asserting that “all the experiment pointed to the improbability of a contemporary battleship being both destroyed or utterly put out of motion by aerial bombs.”
The Navy hoped this could silence Mitchell, who’d been telling Congress the Air Service may sink any battleship and that funding ought to shift to modernizing Army plane.
Nothing was introduced from the assessments. Nothing concerning the outcomes appeared in U.S. newspapers. The Navy stored it quiet.
Nonetheless, in December 1920, two dramatic photographs displaying huge bomb harm from the assessments appeared in London Illustrated News. Seven extra surfaced in The New York Tribune. Congress and the press erupted because the take a look at was proven to be rigged.
Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels scrambled to launch Leahy’s report publicly, hoping it could calm the storm. It did not. Particulars emerged that challenged the Navy’s conclusions: no dwell bombs had been dropped in any respect.
The Indiana take a look at had confirmed nothing.
Mitchell Will get His Shot
After the Indiana scandal, Secretary of Battle Newton Baker and Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels agreed in February 1921 to joint Army-Navy workout routines. Daniels could not afford one other embarrassment. The workout routines, nicknamed Undertaking B, would take a look at to see if Air Service bombers may assault and sink a number of out of date ships.
Mitchell, who had commanded almost 1,500 Allied plane on the Battle of St. Mihiel in WWI, fashioned the First Provisional Air Brigade at Langley Area, Virginia — 150 plane and 1,000 Air Service personnel from throughout the nation. He introduced in Alexander de Seversky, a Russian Imperial Naval Service veteran who had attacked German destroyers throughout WWI. Seversky taught American pilots the “close to miss” approach: dropping a bomb shut sufficient to a warship to generate an underwater stress wave that rips hull plates aside.
In the meantime, Army ordnance engineers developed a 2,000-pound bomb particularly designed to kill battleships.
The assessments started in June 1921 off the Virginia coast. As Mitchell flew overhead to watch, Navy plane went first, attacking a German submarine and the previous battleship USS Iowa with extra dummy bombs. The Navy refused to make use of live-ordnance because the Army had demanded. As a substitute, the ship was crewed and allowed to maneuver. Solely two of 80 bombs hit the Iowa. The battleship advocates that witnessed the take a look at have been reaffirmed of their beliefs.
Then got here Mitchell’s flip.
His targets included captured German warships from WWI, together with the battleship Ostfriesland — thought of unsinkable resulting from its compartmentalized design that would simply comprise flooding.
The Navy set strict guidelines designed to guard the ships. Mitchell’s planes could not use aerial torpedoes. They’d be restricted to simply two hits on battleships with their heaviest bombs. Ships needed to sink in no less than 100 fathoms of water — so the Navy picked a spot 50 miles offshore, chopping the time Mitchell’s bombers may spend over the goal.
However Mitchell had realized his lesson from the Indiana debacle. On July 21, 1921, he violated the Navy’s guidelines and ordered his Martin bombers to drop six 2,000-pound bombs as an alternative of the permitted quantity. He advised his pilots to intention for near-misses within the water beside Ostfriesland moderately than direct hits on the deck which might have probably absorbed the explosions however stored the ship afloat.
The bombs detonated shut sufficient to crack the battleship’s hull. Twenty-two minutes later, Ostfriesland rolled over and sank beneath the Chesapeake Bay.
Naval officers watching from the USS Henderson stood in surprised silence. Some reportedly wept.
The Warning No one Wished to Hear
The Navy remained unimpressed with the take a look at outcomes. Mitchell stored preventing for change. After a 1924 inspection tour of Japan and the Pacific, he returned with a 324-page report warning that Japan would finally assault the USA.
The report outlined Japanese expansionist ambitions and described intimately how a hypothetical assault on Pearl Harbor may unfold — together with plane placing at 7:30 a.m. with devastating outcomes resulting in a protracted naval battle within the area.
The Army Battle Plans Division dismissed the forecast as “exaggerated” and “unsound.”
In 1925, the Normal Board of the Navy insisted: “the battleship is the factor of final pressure within the fleet, and all different parts are contributory to the success of its perform as the ultimate arbiter in sea warfare.”
Mitchell’s relentless criticism of Army and Navy management earned him a court-martial in 1925 for insubordination after he accused them of “virtually treasonable administration of the nationwide protection.” He was discovered responsible and suspended from obligation for 5 years. Reasonably than serve the sentence, he resigned.
Mitchell continued to advocate for airplanes and airpower, in addition to an impartial Air Power. He died in 1936, 5 years earlier than Pearl Harbor proved him proper.
World Battle II and Naval Aviation
In November of 1940, British biplanes attacked and sank quite a few Italian ships, together with their trendy battleships, throughout the Battle of Taranto. In the meantime, because the U.S. Navy started shifting its Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor, Navy officers nonetheless refused to acknowledge the significance of airpower in naval warfare.
On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor at 7:55 a.m. in addition to Clark Area within the Philippines — inside an hour of Mitchell’s 1924 predictions. Three days later, Japanese plane sank HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse off Malaya, making it brutally clear that the age of the battleship was over.
If Navy management had listened to Mitchell as an alternative of rigging assessments to guard their battleships, numerous American sailors might need survived Pearl Harbor. As a substitute, the Navy realized the lesson Mitchell tried to show them 20 years earlier — at the price of eight sunken or broken battleships and a couple of,403 American lives.
It wasn’t till June 1942 that the U.S. Navy leveraged its airpower to maul the Japanese fleet on the Battle of Halfway.
Congress posthumously awarded Mitchell a particular Congressional Medal of Honor in 1946 for his contributions to navy aviation. The B-25 Mitchell bomber, which carried out the well-known Doolittle Raid on Tokyo in 1942, was named after him — the one American navy plane ever named after a selected particular person. At the moment, Mitchell is taken into account the daddy of the U.S. Air Power.
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