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It may still be that Billy Mitchell was wrong in his final estimate of the power of the military airplane. But he has been devastatingly right so far. In the greatest upset in warfare since Frenchmen first routed Britons with artillery (at the battle of Formigny in 1450) he had picked in advance the winner of every round.
In Poland and the Lowlands, Germany proved that the side with command of the air can operate successfully on the surface. Britain proved it again in the retreat from Dunkirk. In the Battle of Britain, Germany came close to proving Mitchell down to the last paragraph, but failed because she went at the job with too little vision (and too few airplanes) and because Britain took command of the air.
Proof. The proof switched to the Navy: to Taranto, where British pilots in antique planes proved that the aircraft could sink men-of-war; to the battle against the Bismarck, where they proved that the aerial torpedo could cripple the finest best-protected battleship afloat.
The proof went on. The Jap took it up sank battleships at Pearl Harbor. Navy men pleaded that they had been surprised. He smeared the Prince of Wales and Repulse when every gun in their anti-aircraft batteries was blazing. By then there were few to argue with Al Williams when he wrote: "What has any battleship done to date, in this war, but sink?"
The proof went on. A great naval battle was fought in the Coral Sea, and not a shot was fired by one surface ship against another. Carriers were sunk, and no desperate defense their airmen could make could save them.
The proof went on. Luckily for her enemies, Japan had her battleship admirals too. At Midway the Jap Fleet poked into the range of land-based aircraft, and for the first time in history, on such a scale, naval power with imposing air support met naked air power. It was the carriers again that took the beating. When the Jap turned back, minus two, and perhaps four, of his floating airdromes, airmen could ask some pertinent questions: What price carriers when aircraft get up (as they will next year) to ranges of 10,000 miles, with bomb loads of 25 tons? What price carriers to a group of nations which controls the islands of the seas and can use them (as the Jap uses the Mandates) for stationary carriers that cannot be sunk by aircraft?"
Mitchell's Pupil. When Billy Mitchell died, the air-power revolution lost its one great leader. There were plenty of airmen who agreed with him, and most of them were in the Army Air Corps. But there was none so gifted with the combination of impressive rank, burning partisan zeal and disregard of military convention as the man who had written: "The day has passed when armies on the ground or navies on the sea can be the arbiters of a nation's destiny in war."
Billy Mitchell's fate had shown airmen what they could expect if they sounded off out of turn. As soldiers they agreed with the justice of Billy Mitchell's punishment, since he had grievously broken military protocol. They kept their mouths shut, except among themselves, worked mightily with what they had to turn out their limited crop of good airplanes, good pilots, good battle doctrine.