When the observation ship was in place, Billy dispatched a fleet of his rudimentary Martin bombers from shore. Each carried no more than two thousand pounds of explosives. Mitchell’s planes puttered toward their target, in no need to push to their limits of acceleration, a mere ninety-eight miles per hour. At 12:19 P.M. they dropped their first bomb. To conclusively prove the strength of airpower, Billy had ordered his men not to bomb the ship directly but to score near misses on either side of the great battleship, creating a “water hammer” to collapse the “unsinkable vessel.” At exactly 12:40 P.M., just twenty-one minutes into the trial, the Ostfriesland vanished beneath the surface. “The chins of navy officers watching, dropped,” wrote an observer. “Their eyes seemed to be coming out of the ends of their marine glasses. . . . Many seasoned admirals and captains were sobbing audibly at the sight, while others hid their faces behind handkerchiefs.” It was the end of an era.
Billy’s victory in the Atlantic over the navy made him a national hero, his conclusive demonstration of airpower garnering front-page headlines. The New York Times reported, “No fleet afloat is safe if it loses control of the air. Control of the sea is now insufficient. Control of the air is vitally necessary. The impression one got in watching the bombing was that it hardly seemed possible that such a small amount of offensive equipment could damage this powerful monarch of the sea. It is evident to everyone who attended the demonstration that history is being made.”
Eight days after sinking the Ostfriesland, Billy staged mock air attacks on New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore to further demonstrate the dominance of airpower. Bold headlines informed readers that their army and navy could not defend them against the airplane. To rub it in, Billy had his flyers hover over the Naval Academy at Annapolis to symbolize the navy’s new secondary role in the nation’s defense.
Just two weeks after Billy sank the Ostfriesland, Senator William Borah of Idaho rose on the floor of the Senate to challenge “the wisdom of completing at a cost of $240,000,000 six great battleships under construction, in view of ‘the experiment off the Virginia coast’ which demonstrated ‘that with sufficient airplane and submarine protection this country was perfectly safe from attack.” Senator William King of Utah “declared that ‘those tests demonstrated the vulnerability of the battleship,’ and introduced a bill providing that three proposed battle cruisers, the Saratoga, Lexington and Constellation be converted into aircraft carriers.” Disarmament was the call of the day, and many thoughtful observers had now concluded that investing limited peacetime dollars in Billy’s airpower seemed a prudent idea.
Backed into a corner, the battleship school, with hundreds of millions of dollars in battleship contracts at stake, struck back. The army and navy leadership issued a report under the name of the country’s great WWI hero General John Pershing concluding that “the battleship is still the backbone of the fleet and the bulwark of the nation’s sea defense.” Mitchell blithely responded with a report in which he said that if he mobilized all his airplanes, he could obliterate the entire Atlantic fleet. But while the public was with him, behind the scenes his position was being deliberately eroded.
When Billy was married on October 11, 1923, his superiors used the occasion to ship him off on a “honeymoon” inspection tour of Hawaii, the Philippines, China, India, and Japan, hoping the fever for airpower would die out in his absence. But when Billy returned nine months later, he had even more ammunition for his call for an air force and unified command. He told Congress, “When I was in the Hawaiian Islands relations between the army and the navy were such that the commanding general of the army and the commanding admiral of the navy would not even go to the same social functions together. I have never seen anything like it.” A divided command in Hawaii was the equivalent of no defense at all, and he warned that Hawaii was in grave danger of air attack by Japan and that “in making estimates of Japanese air power, care must be taken that it is not underestimated.” “They can fly, are going to fly, and may end up by developing the greatest air power in the world,” Mitchell declared. He also told Congress, “I think if we plunged into war tomorrow, it would take us at least two years to get on a par with . . . Japan.”
Billy Mitchell saw clearly that a war with Japan for control of Asia was inevitable. He warned of “aerial attacks by the enemy against Hawaii and the Philippines. The object of these operations would be for Japan to possess herself of all the southern approaches to Asia and the initial successes, as things stand now, would probably be with the Japanese.” When asked to give his opinion as to why airpower was stillborn in the U.S., with little funding or interest coming from the navy or army, he replied: “Conservatism. . . . You see, the army and the navy are the oldest institutions we have. They place everything on precedent. You can’t do that in the air business. You have got to look ahead.”
Billy’s testimony outraged the War Department. Headlines blared, “Foes May Force General Mitchell Out.” One congressman denounced the “determined effort” to subject Mitchell, “America’s only fighting flying general of the world war and one of the outstanding figures in world aeronautics, to humiliation, demotion and discipline.”
To silence the rising chorus of support for what was now called “Mitchellism,” Secretary of War John Weeks scheduled public tests to prove that antiaircraft fire would protect the country from air attack. Billy had long derided the effectiveness of antiaircraft fire, comparing the difficulty of hitting airplanes with guns with “knocking a butterfly out of the air with water from a garden hose.”
Once again army, navy, congressional, and media observers assembled for the tests.
Under the supervision of General Mitchell, three planes, each towing at a comparatively low speed a target about 10 feet in length and 4 in diameter, flew at fixed altitudes while three-inch guns on the ground tried to hit them, and kept missing again and again. . . . During the tests, the coast artillery fired 39 shots at the aerial targets. Not a single hit was scored. Two planes then descended with their targets to within 1,000 feet and less. Machine guns opened fire from the ground, expending thousands of rounds. When the two targets were later examined, it was found that one was in perfect condition. The other one, which the ordnance experts thought would be riddled to shreds, bore the mark of a single bullet hole.
The next day, a New York Times headline blared, “Air Targets Defy Secretary Weeks’ Gunners,” and the article proclaimed, “These maneuvers, planned . . . to prove that anti-aircraft defenses are adequate against enemy airplanes, proved the exact opposite.” The Brooklyn Eagle, in an editorial entitled “The Proof That Fizzled,” remarked, “Everything came out as General Mitchell predicted and the exact opposite of what [Secretary of War Weeks] tried to prove. The nation wants no report from the War College that fortresses and anti-aircraft devices remain the ‘backbone’ of coast defense.”
Rather than face facts, the War Department demoted Mitchell and exiled him to “a mosquito post in Texas,” as Will Rogers put it. The military expected him to resign, but Billy proclaimed, “I have not even begun to fight” and that he would “jar the bureaucrats out of their swivel chairs.” He published incendiary articles with titles like “Why Have Treaties about Battleships When Airplanes Can Destroy Them?” He further hammered away at the inevitability of conflict with Japan and declared that a Pacific war would not be won on the surface of the sea but above it with airplanes and below it with submarines.
Then, after a series of bungles by the military that resulted in the deaths of some of his airmen, Billy released a statement charging:
These accidents are the direct results of incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonable administration of the national defense by the war and navy departments.
All aviation policies, schemes and systems are dictated by the non-flying officers of the army and navy who know practically nothing about it. The lives of the airmen are being used merely as pawns in their hands.
The great Congress of the United St
ates, that makes laws for the organization and use of our air, land and water forces, is treated by these two departments as if it were an organization created for their benefit. . . . Officers and agents sent by the war and navy departments to Congress have almost always given incomplete, misleading or false information about aeronautics, which either they knew to be false when given or was the result of such gross ignorance of the question that they should not be allowed to appear before a legislative body.
The airmen themselves are bluffed and bulldozed so that they dare not tell the truth in the majority of cases, knowing full well that if they do, they will be deprived of their future career, sent to the most out of the way places to prevent their telling the truth, and deprived of any chance for advancement unless they subscribe to the dictates of their non-flying bureaucratic superiors. These either distort facts, or openly tell falsehoods about aviation to the people and to the Congress.
The broadside stunned Washington; no officer in the history of the United States had ever criticized his command to this extent. As Mitchell later told the Cleveland Press: “I considered it my duty to tell what I knew, although it meant sure disciplinary action and probably court-martial. All these things were well understood by me. In fact, I showed the paper I had prepared on the subject to our military judge advocate before I issued it, and he told me that I would certainly be tried for it.”
Billy was right. President Calvin Coolidge himself ordered Billy’s court-martial, declaring, “Any organization of men in the military service bent on inflaming the public mind for the purpose of forcing government action through the pressure of public opinion is an exceedingly dangerous undertaking and precedent.” Billy responded by complaining that the indictment avoided the main issue of what the country should do about airpower: “The truth or untruth of my accusations against the bureaucrats is not permitted to become a part of the court-martial proceedings. I am just going to be tried for daring to remind the conservatives that there is something new under the sun, that there is a great new modern branch of the service, aircraft, which is being ignored in the administration of national defense.”
Billy’s trial was a media circus. It stands today as the longest court-martial in the history of the United States. Witness after witness supported Billy’s views, but it didn’t matter—he was being tried for challenging the president and his military-contractor friends. To lessen the public relations blow, Coolidge released a report compiled by a blue-ribbon committee chosen to support the battleship school of the navy. The report was a whitewash that concluded that the battleship was supreme and “there was no ground for anticipating the development of aviation ‘to a point which would constitute a direct menace to the United States,’” that “the next war may well start in the air, but in all probability, it will wind up, as the last one did, in the mud,” and that “wars against high-spirited people never will be ended by sudden attacks upon important nerve centers such as manufacturing plants, depots, lighting and power plants and railway centers. The last war taught us that man cannot make a machine stronger than the spirit of man.”
Predictably, Mitchell was found guilty of insubordination and sentenced “to be suspended from rank, command, and duty, with forfeiture of all pay and allowances for five years.” Yet even after his court-martial, Billy would not give up the fight. A compelling orator, he spoke at Carnegie Hall and across the nation, and he wrote many magazine and newspaper articles warning that the United States was unprepared for war. He warned of Japanese plans “to seize Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines.” In April of 1926, fifteen years prior to Pearl Harbor, Billy predicted that Japan would initiate war in the Pacific “with an aerial attack against the United States involving the dispatch of two huge disguised aircraft carriers to American shores in a surprise move while negotiations would be going on behind diplomats’ doors.” A keen student of history, Billy warned of surprise, saying in 1932, “Japan never declares war before attacking.”
Years later, Flyboys beating back Japan in the Pacific must have reflected upon how America could have prevented the shock of December 7 if their prophet’s warnings had been heeded. The military experts who compiled the 1946 “United States Strategic Bombing Survey” agreed with Billy. In the chapter headed “Hindsight,” they wrote:
[America] underestimated the predominant role that air power was to play [in the Pacific war] and allocated to it too small a share of even the inadequate resources then available to the Army and Navy. At the outbreak of the Pacific war our deficiency was particularly great in modern land-based fighters and in carriers. One thousand planes . . . dispersed on some 50 airfields, would have seriously impeded the original Japanese advance if knowledge of their existence had not entirely dissuaded the Japanese from making the attempt.
Divided command at Pearl Harbor, reliance on outdated battleships, and lack of American airpower tempted the Japanese warlords and gave them what Billy had predicted, “the greatest military surprise in history.” The Washington Post’s Raymond Clapper later summarized the findings of the president’s Pearl Harbor commission: “The Army thought the Navy was patrolling. The Navy thought the Army had its detection service operating. Neither bothered to check with the other—or maybe they were not on speaking terms. . . . The two services were totally uncoordinated, and neither knew what the other was doing—or in this case, not doing. And the air force, so supremely important in the new warfare, apparently was regarded by both as a minor auxiliary.”
To his dying day, Billy prophesied, “Our most dangerous enemy is Japan and our planes should be designed to attack Japan,” and that “history and destiny unmistakably point to the next contest being for the possession of the Pacific. Whenever the Japanese see a decadent military power near them, they pounce on it if they have anything to gain. The Japanese consider us a decadent military power. They consider that on account of the riches we possess, the easy existence we have led and the false theories that have grown up among us as to national defense, in a little while we will be as easy to attack as a large jellyfish.”
In the 1930s, bills were introduced in Congress to reverse Billy’s court-martial and clear his name. But on January 28, 1936, the House Military Affairs Committee voted against reinstating Billy. His court-martial would stand. That same day, Billy entered Doctors’ Hospital in New York, never to come out alive. The Flyboy prophet died there at the age of fifty-seven on February 19, 1936, a broken man. One of his last utterances was to fellow airman Homer Berry: “The American people will regret the day I was crucified by politics and bureaucracy.”
CHAPTER FIVE
The Rape of China
Japan is expanding, and what country in its expansion has ever failed to be trying to its neighbors? Ask the American Indian or the Mexican how excruciatingly trying the young United States used to be once upon a time.
— Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka, quoted in Tojo and the Coming of the War
IN 1933, a motion picture featuring an army general was a hit across Japan. He delivered an emotional Hakko Ichiu / manifest destiny speech. Superimposed upon the screen was a map of Japan and Manchuria with the words “New World Order” glowing. China, Siberia, India, and the South Pacific formed the outer edges. The sound track boomed, “Can we expect the waves of the Pacific of tomorrow to be as calm as they are today? It is the holy mission of Japan to establish peace in the Orient. . . . The day will come when we will make the whole world look up to our national virtues.”
The Spirit Warriors constantly bombarded the Japanese public with the message that Japan was gradually being encircled by gaizin who might pounce at any moment. Countless speeches, articles, and movies depicted tiny Japan overshadowed by the westerners in China; the Americans hovering in Alaska, Hawaii, Wake, Guam, and the Philippines; the British in Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Australia, and throughout the Indian subcontinent; the French and the Dutch to the south and the menacing Russians to the north. The army’s message was that it was the duty of each and e
very child of the gods to rise up and break the ring before it closed. “Japan’s holy mission beckoned: defend the imperial way and build a paradise in Asia!”
And of course Japan needed more “living space.” One military writer proclaimed: “It is well known that Japan’s overpopulation grows more serious every year. Where should we find an outlet for these millions?”
Most Japanese were never aware that the Japanese army had provoked China until after Japan’s surrender in 1945. The army controlled the media and constantly put forth the case that Japan was “implementing Japan’s historic mission to expand on the continent, to secure the peace of East Asia, and to save its 600,000,000 from ‘imperialistic oppression’” by the rapacious western conquerors.
Ignorance combined with arrogance was common in the Spirit Warriors’ government. In 1937, when major hostilities with China broke out, General Hajime Sugiyama advised the emperor that his sacred army would vanquish China “in about three months.” He predicted, “We’ll send large forces, smash them in a hurry and get the whole thing over with quickly.” Another general boasted, “China may squirm and struggle but it will not slow down the Japanese army. Three or four divisions and a few river gunboats will be quite enough to handle the Chinese bandits.”
This “three-month war” continued for eight years. This time China was no longer the prostrate power it had been in the 1800s. In 1911, Dr. Sun Yat-sen—modern China’s George Washington—had overthrown the corrupt Ching dynasty and founded the Republic of China. After his death, one of his generals, the ruthless Chiang Kai-shek, seized control, defeated local warlords, and ruled some of the country from Nanking. Chiang commanded immense armies and had Anglo-American financial and technical support in his fight against the Japanese invaders. England and America did not want to lose their trading rights in China.
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