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Department of Agriculture should be unified in a Department of Aeronautics. He attributed the Army's failure to fly the mail satisfactorily to the War Department's "boneheadedness," to bad equipment, to the flyers' lack of proper experience. Billy Mitchell has been singing the same song ever since the War. With it he sang himself into the Washington spotlight and out of the Army eight years ago. His tune had grown so familiar that the country had wearied of it. But now, though the song was the same, the audience was different. Senate Majority Leader Robinson was echoing the call for unification. President Roosevelt himself was thinking about unification. And President Roosevelt was having Billy Mitchell to luncheon at the White House. U. S. expatriates in Nice, France, who read this news in their Paris Heralds last week could have stepped around to the Place Grimaldi and inspected on the door of an old house a bronze plaque which read: "Here was born William Mitchell, Brigadier General, United States Army Air Service. Dec. 29, 1879." Born during a belated honeymoon, first of the seven children of U. S. Senator John Lendrum Mitchell of Wisconsin, Billy Mitchell did not see the U. S. until he was two years old. A growing boy, he could pop a tomato can at 100 ft. with his airgun, climb the tallest tree, ride the most fractious horse. At seven he made a successful parachute jump—out of a hayloft, clutching an umbrella. When the Spanish-American War came he enlisted as a private. A year later, at 19, he was a first lieutenant, youngest officer in the Army, chasing guerrillas at the head of 70 cavalrymen. At 24 he was the youngest Army captain by seven years. Meanwhile the Wright Brothers had got their flying contraption off the ground at Kitty Hawk. Billy Mitchell followed their doings and those of a onetime bicyclist named Glenn Curtiss with intense interest. In 1912 he got friends to take him up while he practiced bombing by throwing oranges at ground targets. Not until three years later did a transfer to the War College in Washington enable him to become an aviator by the fly-or-be-killed method. He was sent to Spain to learn if that country intended to fight on Germany's side. U. S. entry into the War found him in Toledo. He hastened to Paris, was the first U. S. officer to fly over the lines. He dipped into his pocket for $2,000 to form what was the nucleus of the A. E. F. Air Force. No one was surprised when he was appointed its chief. Chief of Air Force Mitchell did not stay on the ground. He led his men on many a reconaissance and combat flight, piled up 2,500-odd hours of flying time. He was a potent factor in wresting control of the air, bit by bit, dog fight by dog fight, from the Germans. When Brigadier General Mitchell got home, his breast ablaze with medals, he was disgruntled because, although 3,000 of the touted new De Havilands had been manufactured, only 100 reached the front before Armistice. But that was behind; ahead was the next war, which he, as Assistant Chief of the Army's Air Service in Washington, was sure would be settled in the air. He felt the Army and Navy air forces should be combined in one autonomous defense arm. The General Staff controlling military aviation he viewed as a hidebound, opinionated gang of groundlings who knew nothing about flying and he said so. The Navy and Navy-loving statesmen hated him