100 years ago, Milwaukee’s Billy Mitchell changed military thinking forever
If it wasn’t for the sinking of a battleship 100 years ago, Milwaukee’s airport might have a different name.
On July 21, 1921, Gen. Billy Mitchell, the hardheaded son of a powerful Milwaukee family, led a group of U.S. Army planes on a bombing test to sink a mothballed battleship from the air, something that had never been done before.
Mitchell’s dramatically successful mission signaled a new era in warfare, made him a celebrity and sparked a struggle within the U.S. military. It also led to his court-martial. “He was a smart guy. He did a lot, made a difference, but he made as many enemies as friends along the way,” said Chris Kolakowski, director of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison. “Sometimes I think his mouth got him in a lot of trouble — the court-martial being a perfect example.”
Kolakowski, who wrote about Mitchell’s historic 1921 bombing tests in the most recent edition of the museum’s quarterly publication The Bugle, noted that Mitchell’s bold demonstration of air power reflected the confidence of a person who was used to getting his way.
A storied Milwaukee family
Billy Mitchell grew up in one of Milwaukee’s wealthiest families. His grandfather, Alexander Mitchell, was an influential politician in Wisconsin and Milwaukee’s early days. A railroad and banking magnate, he built the palatial mansion that’s now the downtown home of the Wisconsin Club, 900 W. Wisconsin Ave. Billy’s father, John Mitchell, served in the Union Army in the Civil War and went into politics, serving in the U.S. House and Senate.
“Billy Mitchell grew up as a player, and the family were players in Milwaukee for generations,” Kolakowski said.
With his path greased by family connections, Mitchell joined the Army in 1898 during the Spanish-American War, serving in the Philippines. In the Army, he fell in love with flying. By the time the U.S. entered World War I, Mitchell was one of the leaders of the Army’s aviation arm, eventually commanding all air combat operations in France.
After the war, Mitchell was a persistent, and persistently vocal, proponent of an independent air force. Facing serious opposition — especially from the Navy, which believed that sea-based defenses were mightier than any air assaults — Mitchell set out to prove his case.
Billy Mitchell’s big test
In the summer of 1921, Mitchell collected 125 planes and crews to man them to show what bombers could do against ships. Their targets: a submarine, a destroyer, a cruiser and the battleship Ostfriesland, all surrendered by Germany after the war and parked in the Atlantic off the coast of Virginia.
Top officials of the Army and Navy, along with senators, congressmen, diplomats and reporters, were on hand to witness the tests.
The crews made quick work of the first three ships. But none of those vessels was a heavily armored battleship like the Ostfriesland. While Mitchell was confident of the outcome, his was a minority position.
“If you look at the airplane in 1921, it’s slow. It’s biplanes from World War I,” Kolakowski said. “… They can’t carry a lot of bombs, so the idea of carrying a thousand-pound bomb is a big deal. … And the idea in 1921 that you can drop a 1,000-pound bomb on a battleship and sink it, when a battleship has been designed to withstand 12-, 13-, 14-inch shells, and those are several thousand pounds each that are being thrown across several miles of ocean, that’s ludicrous to a lot of people.
“We look back with hindsight and it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, we know Billy Mitchell sank those ships.’ But at the time, it was very much an open question as to whether it could be done.”
It actually took two days and several bombing runs to break the Ostfriesland. But when the ship finally rolled onto its port side and capsized on July 21, Mitchell biographer Douglas Waller wrote, “mouths of the VIPs gaped open. No one spoke. Politicians, many of whom had staked their careers on funding the battleships, looked as if they had just witnessed a murder. Some admirals sobbed like babies.”
The tests brought cheers and Mitchell was heralded as a hero. But the victory party was short-lived. Top military officials tried to keep the results quiet, for fear that it would make the Navy look weak. But Mitchell refused to be silenced, and took every opportunity to make his case for a stronger air force.
Court-martialed but proven right
After years of lambasting his superiors — the capper was when blamed a pair of air disasters on “the incompetency, criminal negligence and almost treasonous administration of the national defense by the Navy and War departments” — Mitchell was called before a court-martial in October 1925.
The panel of judges found Mitchell guilty and suspended him from active duty. Mitchell resigned from the Army, and spent the rest of his life pushing for a strong, independent air force.
Mitchell died in 1936 at age 56, from heart trouble and a bout with influenza. But his impact lived on. The lessons he’d tried to teach the Army were quickly borne out: in the Spanish Civil War, where German forces destroyed cities like Guernica from the air; and especially during World War II.
While the Army and Navy took awhile to be convinced, much of the public saw Mitchell as a hero from the first.
In early 1941, Milwaukee decided it was time to honor Mitchell in his hometown. The County Board renamed Milwaukee County Airport General Mitchell Field. Then-County Board Chairman Lawrence Timmerman called Mitchell “one of Wisconsin’s greatest sons.” (In 1959, the County Board returned the favor by renaming the county’s second airport Timmerman Field.)
Like everything else having to do with Mitchell, the renaming didn’t come easy. The County Board’s highway committee, the first stop for the proposal, split on the decision; some supervisors thought the airport didn’t need a new name, while others worried that the airport would lose its Milwaukee identity. When renaming was narrowly approved by the full board, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported that others “contended that the Mitchell family had been sufficiently honored by the naming of a park and street after it.”
Milwaukee’s other tributes to Billy Mitchell are General Mitchell Boulevard, the street that includes the Milwaukee Soldiers’ Home near American Family Field; and the Mitchell Gallery of Flight, the museum at what is now Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport. The Wisconsin Veterans Museum, which reopened to the public July 1, houses a salute to Mitchell, too.
“I don’t know if he and I would have gotten along personally, but he’s a man who made a difference and he’s somebody who still has an influence and a legacy today,” Kolakowski said.