Document created: 4 September 03
Air & Space Power Journal - Fall 2003

Billy Mitchell by James J. Cooke. Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. (http://www.rienner.com), 1800 30th Street, Suite 314, Boulder, Colorado 80301, 2002, 305 pages, $49.95.

Billy Mitchell has always been a controversial figure in American military history. On the one hand, soldiers and sailors usually see him as an arrogant, disloyal, and self-promoting blowhard who played loose with the facts in order to push his own agenda. Airmen, on the other hand, generally tend to see him as a courageous, farsighted, and dedicated patriot persistently thwarted by conservative soldiers and sailors who protected their turf. These conflicting images, common in the 1920s, remain popular today. James J. Cooke, a professor emeritus at the University of Mississippi who has written extensively on US participation in World War I, both from a ground and air point of view, attempts to present a more balanced portrait of Mitchell. He is only partially successful.

We have a number of Mitchell biographies, but Cooke found material that the others had missed- specifically, family papers and diaries located in Milwaukee, Mitchell’s birthplace. These documents illuminate a dark side of the airman usually not seen. Mitchell’s father, a powerful Democratic senator, had gone through a particularly messy divorce in his mid 30s. He subsequently remarried but had almost nothing to do with his son from that first marriage. The senator also had little time for the children of his second marriage, including Billy, who, says Cooke, was permanently scarred because of his father’s neglect. Ominously, Mitchell went through a similar midlife crisis, divorced his wife, and essentially abandoned his three children from that marriage- they didn’t even bother to show up for his funeral in 1936.

Cooke reveals that Mitchell had a drinking problem upon returning from France in 1919. For the next two years, when his marriage was falling apart, his behavior became increasingly erratic, and his military performance suffered noticeably. In 1921 the Army apparently ordered Mitchell to Walter Reed Hospital for a psychological examination. (However, Cooke’s endnote states that this order was written in January 1928, long after Mitchell had retired; obviously, something is wrong with this account.) Instead, the Air Service shuffled him off to Europe on an inspection trip, giving him an opportunity to rest and get his life back in order.

Apparently, Mitchell frequently found himself in debt and periodically wrote his mother, asking for money to buy uniforms, guns, and horses. Fortunately for him, his second wife was extremely wealthy; she bought their large country home outside Washington, D.C., and her father paid Billy’s considerable legal bills during his court-martial.

Cooke looks closely at the court-martial, portraying Mitchell’s performance as dismal. He deliberately provoked the trial, apparently seeing it as a forum from which to lambaste his old foes in the Army and Navy hierarchy. According to Cooke, he was lackadaisical throughout the trial, either assuming he would not be convicted or unconcerned if he were. The prosecutor uncovered Mitchell’s surprising lack of detailed knowledge regarding naval operations- and even the Air Service. As a consequence, Mitchell not only was found guilty, but also- and far worse- the news media found him boring. A “show trial” gains one little support or sympathy if journalists don’t bother to cover it.

Cooke’s account, however, fails to achieve the balance he promises. Although acknowledging that Mitchell did good work in World War I (although even that effort was stained by his petulance and bravado), the author suggests that he did little else of value during the rest of his career. This interpretation is too stark. Mitchell thought long and deeply about the employment of aircraft in war, but one finds no discussion of those ideas in the book. Instead, Cooke lumps Mitchell’s views into two groups- the obsolescence of battleships and the need for a separate air force. Mitchell’s views were more nuanced than that, but Cooke either ignores or gives short shrift to the vast majority of his writings. For example, one finds no reference to Mitchell’s important and lengthy “Notes on the Multi-Motored Bombardment Group,” written in 1922.

Nonetheless, Cooke admits that much of what Mitchell advocated and predicted was accurate and valid: the obsolescence of the battleship, the vulnerability of the Hawaiian Islands to air attack, the growing importance of strategic bombing, and the need for a separate air force. However, the author argues that Mitchell’s methods hindered the achievement of his goals, which were unobtainable in the mid-1920s, when Mitchell pushed them. Few people would argue with the former portion of that statement- as even his supporter Hugh Trenchard put it, “Mitchell tried to convert his opponents by killing them first.” The second point, however, raises the question of what could have been attained had the air arm enjoyed proper funding. From 1921 to 1926, when Mitchell attacked his superiors for ignoring airpower, the Air Service received barely 5 percent of the Army’s budget- small wonder the Air Service had so little capability at the time of Mitchell’s court-martial (precisely his point).

Overall, Billy Mitchell is a very well written book with some sobering insights into this controversial man’s personality and character. Readers who want an insightful view of his ideas on airpower employment, however, should turn to Alfred Hurley’s Billy Mitchell: Crusader for Air Power, the standard work on that subject.

Col Phillip S. Meilinger, USAF, Retired
McLean, Virginia

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.