If Billy Mitchell's greatest flaw was a defiance of authority when he believed he was right, he came by that naturally.  His Scottish grandfather, Alexander Mitchell, had combined hard work and determination to leave a bank teller's job in 1839 to build one of the largest fortunes in the State of Wisconsin.  By the time civil war broke out, Alexander Mitchell owned the world's largest rail system and was worth millions of dollars.  He was also a man of intense principle. 

Later, when the Wisconsin legislature tried to fix rail road rates that Mitchell though were too low he petitioned no one.  Rather, he NOTIFIED the governor that the existing rates would remain in effect until the courts settled the case...a case that he ultimately won.  Senator Bob La Follette characterized the incident by saying:  "A more brazen defiance of law could scarcely be conceived."

But Alexander Mitchell DID have great respect for the law, and numbered among his closest friends the esteemed Judge MacArthur of Milwaukee.  Judge MacArthur's son was an acquaintance of Mitchell's son John Lendrum Mitchell, and both young men had served with Wisconsin Volunteers in the Civil War.  John Mitchell's war experience was of little note, serving for a time as chief of ordnance on the staff of a Union general before an eye ailment ended his military career.  MacArthur's son Arthur, on the other hand, went on to earn the Medal of Honor and become the Boy Colonel of the Civil War.  Both families remained close over the years so it was natural that their grandchildren too, would become friends.  They did, despite the fact that the nature of the careers of John Mitchell and Arthur MacArthur would often place them in opposite sides of the globe.

William Billy Mitchell was born in Nice, France on December 29, 1879, the first son of John Lendrum Mitchell and his second wife Harriet.  (Some authors still list Billy as William Lendrum Mitchell, though in fact, William Mitchell had no middle name.)  The following month Arthur MacArthur's wife Mary gave birth to her second son in Little Rock, Arkansas on January 26th.  The couple named this child Douglas. 

The Mitchell's remained in France for three years before returning to Milwaukee with a toddler who spoke French better than English.  Young Billy took a lot of teasing for his preference to his native French when he entered school, causing him to abandon the language (as well as the German, Spanish, and Italian he also spoke) for nearly forty years.  He revived it when he needed it, and could use it, to his best advantage.  

At home in Milwaukee, Billy Mitchell and Douglas MacArthur not only had occasion to meet, but to become childhood friends.  It was a friendship that would follow them all their lives, and years later present Douglas MacArthur with one of his most painful duties.

Mitchell was privy to a lifestyle without want: education at an Episcopal prep school, learning to ride carefully bred horses on the 400-acre family estate at Meadowmere, polo, and marksmanship.  In 1891 John Mitchell was elected to the United States Congress, then entered the Senate two years later.  The elder Mitchell's duties provided Willy, as the family called him at that time,  opportunity to live in the Nation's capitol where he enrolled in Washington's Columbian School (later George Washington University.)  It also gave him opportunity to study the workings and machinations of American politics.

Mitchell money and political clout (Grandpa Mitchell had also served in the United States Congress and turned down a bid to run for governor of Wisconsin), meant that neither Billy or his nine siblings would ever have to settle for common labor.  The greatest problem for the growing young Mitchells seemed to be simply deciding on what private vocational endeavors to embark.  When the USS Maine exploded in Havana, Cuba in 1898 and the United States declared war on Spain, Billy Mitchell decided perhaps the military would provide an answer to his own active personality.

"You're not going to let this little boy go to war, John?" asked General Fighting Joe Wheeler while he was in Washington before departing for Cuba as part of General Shafter's invasion force.  "Especially as he's your oldest child."

"He's eighteen," replied the Senator, one of the leading opponents to the war in the early days leading up to the loss of the Maine.  Then with a wit that was typical he noted, "I'd rather have them (soldiers) under twenty than over forty, if I were running a war."

Lieutenant Billy Mitchell

Despite the rumblings and calls for war against Spain that had been growing in the United States for years, when at last that war was declared, our nation was totally unprepared to field an army, or supply it.  The manpower problem was solved by raising an army of volunteers in the various states, usually a gathering of hometown boys who knew each other and were enamored with a potential adventure.  Officers were elected within the group, usually based on popularity rather than military training, experience, or ability...qualities almost none of the volunteers possessed.  It was in such a group, the First Wisconsin Volunteers, that Billy Mitchell gained his first military experience commission.

One week after joining the Army Billy Mitchell was a second lieutenant.  It was now just a few months after his 18th birthday which made him the youngest officer in the American military.  It was a position for which Mitchell was well suited.  Among a motley group of citizen-soldiers with almost no military bearing, Lieutenant Mitchell seemed almost naturally, a sort of soldier.  As an officer he was adept at bringing some order to the chaos.

In May 1898 the First Wisconsin Volunteers were sent to Florida where 30,000 troops were being staged for the invasion of Cuba.  Here the confusion and lack of preparedness for war was so bad that the assistant commander of the First United States Cavalry, arriving from Arizona, later wrote:  "We disembarked in a perfect welter of confusion.  Everything connected with both military and railroad matters was in an almost inextricable tangle."  Throughout the brief Spanish-American War, and for years afterwards, that same officer, Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, continued his castigation of military and political leaders for their lack of foresight and preparation for the war.

Mitchell, as were most of the other young volunteers waiting in Florida, was excitedly anticipating action in Cuba.  His hopes were dashed when he was called to Washington, DC for assignment to the Army's Signal Corps under Genera Adolphus Greely, a friend of Senator Mitchell.  Perhaps the elder Mitchell was not as enthused about his young son's military service as he had echoed to General Wheeler.  Whatever effected the transfer, a protesting Second Lieutenant Mitchell found himself deprived of his chance for combat action.  In one of those unusual twists of fate, the transfer gave the young officer a chance to demonstrate his natural leadership abilities.

Mitchell's handling of this incident gained the attention of General Greely and marked him for future service under the Signal Corps' commander.  Before summer ended, Mitchell returned to Florida in hopes of seeing action in Cuba.  By the time he did reach the Carribbean Island in the fall however, the war had ended.  When he did reach Cuba he proved his abilities during a brief foray to the interior of the island where he and his 40-man contingent strung 140 miles of telegraph wire.  His mission completed, he wrote and submitted a detailed report, a custom that marked his entire military career.  One of his commanders noted, "I have seen few reports giving so much information in clear-cut form on a technical subject of such range."

The two personal traits that marked the life and service of Billy Mitchell seem to have been:

• keen observation and 

• detailed reporting on what he had observed.  

Not always were his observations, however, as discretionary as his superiors might have wished.  In the Spanish-American war Mitchell was aware of the rivalry between the Army and Navy commanders at Santiago that had prevented a unified American response to the Spanish presence in the harbor.  In Florida he had seen a confusion that bordered on criminal ineptness in the use and deployment of U.S. military resources.  In a manner that reflected yet a third personal trait that marked the life of Billy Mitchell, he voiced his opinion based upon his observations.  Of the war in Cuba he wrote, "I really do believe that if we had been up against a first-rate power, they would have whaled the mischief right out of us."

Mitchell's status as the son of a United States Senator certainly enhanced the success of his early military career, but as young Lieutenant Mitchell pursued his duties well, he made his own mark through diligent and detailed effort.  At the turn of the century as Douglas MacArthur was entering the military academy at West Point, First Lieutenant Mitchell debarked for the Philippines for seven months of duty under his boyhood friend's father.  It was ironic as Senator Mitchell was one of the leading opponents of American expansionism.  Billy on the other hand, seemed to support the concept of the United States' Manifest Destiny with a patriotic fervor.

Mitchell arrived in the Philippines in November 1899 and saw action during the Philippine Insurrection where he proved both his courage and his initiative.  He strung miles of communication wire through the jungles despite the ever present threat of danger from the native insurgents.  The job was made nearly impossible because there were no supplies.  Mitchell accomplished his job by using wire unwound from captured cannon, fashioning insulators from bamboo or broken glass, and even creating his own batteries using common salt.  In a daring night raid he also led a small patrol of Black soldiers to capture Captain Mendoza, adjutant to the insurgent leader Aguinaldo.  His departure was hastened when he contracted Malaria, and Lieutenant Mitchell returned home after a six month tour of both the Orient and Europe, expecting to resign his commission, leave the Army, and pursue other as yet undefined interests.  But for the intervention of General Adolphus Greely,  Billy Mitchell's military career might have ended at the turn of the century.

The grizzled commander of the Army's Signal Corps was by now legendary, not only for his ill-fated adventure at the polar ice cap in 1882 and the unsubstantiated but sensational rumors of cannibalism, but also as one of the Army's forward thinking commander.  Since 1887 he had held the role as the Army's chief Signal Officer, responsible for communications, photography, and observation balloons.  He had also developed a sincere interest in the immense northwest territory of Alaska, purchased from Russia by the United States in 1867.  Alaska had remained secluded from American interest until 1997 when gold was discovered in the Klondike, sparking a furor reminiscent of the California Gold Rush of 1849.  Life in Alaska was full of the potential for riches...and also for death.  So many visitors were lost in the vastness of the region that the US Government was forced to send soldiers.  

These soldiers needed a means of maintaining communications back to the contiguous United States, and a concerted effort had been directed by private contractors to accomplish this.  The efforts had failed and the possibility of completing WAMCATS (Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph Systems) was deemed impossible.

With American expansion into the Pacific at the turn of the century, Greely had the foresight to see that one day Alaska would hold a great strategic position in world affairs.  In 1900 at the age of fifty-six, he personally went to Alaska to prove the job could be done.  Returning home convinced that WAMCATS could be built by the right person, he knew just the man to accomplish it.  When Billy Mitchell returned to Fort Meyer in 1901, General Greely asked him to take the Alaskan assignment.  Always open to adventure and a chance to take on the odds, Mitchell elected to remain in the Army and go north, departing Seattle for Alaska in July.

From July to October, summer in Alaska, Mitchell observed both the terrain and the poor progress on the communications system.  His orders were to observe, then report back to Greely why all efforts on the project to date had failed. 

"I submitted a report of my observations in Alaska to General Greely...to the effect that the people trying to build telegraph lines stayed in the house too much in the winter, and that if they got out and worked when it was cold, the lines could be built.  Whereupon Gen. Greely ordered me to return to Alaska and build them and I was delighted with the prospect."

Over the next two winters the young Lieutenant strung wire to connect the farthest outposts of territorial Alaska to Washington State.  By the time he finished, WAMCATS linked military posts from Sitka to Seattle with more than 1,000 miles of undersea cable, and 210-foot antenna provided wireless communications across Norton Sound to Nome.   For the most part the mission had been hampered, as had his earlier mission, by lack of proper supply and equipment.  As he had in the jungles of the Philippines, in Alaska Mitchell improvised where he could, skirted the boundaries of procedure where he couldn't improvise.  He had been authorized $5,000 for completion of the task that ultimately cost $50,000, but in his typically pragmatic fashion, he bypassed the system and spent the necessary funds even without contracting an officer's warrant.  Under ordinary circumstances such a budget over-run might have ruined a career, but Mitchell had accomplished a task that the military had struggled for years without success to do.  The end not only justified the means, it exonerated the pragmatist.

When Mitchell returned home in 1903 it was to yet another promotion.  At age 23 he was the youngest Captain in the Army and a rising star in the Signal Corps.  That same year he married a young socialite from Rochester and honeymooned in Mexico.  New ideas played at Mitchell's ever inquiring mind, and military innovation was never far removed from his thought-process, taking precedence over home and family.

During the cold winter of 1902-03 Mitchell had developed interest in a new innovation while spending long weeks snowed in by 40-foot Alaskan drifts.  In his lonely cabin he had spent hours reading up on engineering and aeronautics with special interests in the experiments of Professor Samuel P. Langley.  Before 1903 came to an end, two brothers named Orville and Wilbur Wright gave the world the first successful airplane flight, and from that moment on, life would never be the same for Billy Mitchell.

The following year Senator Mitchell died.  Meanwhile Captain Mitchell continued to build his own resume while experimenting with new ideas for military communication and photography at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.  His naturally inquisitive mind was constantly seeking to push the envelope, including one experiment in which he sent a kite nearly two miles into the air attached to a wire, which enabled him to receive a radio transmission from Puerto Rico nearly two thousand miles away.  With the birth of heavier than air flight, Mitchell was in the right place (Army Signal Corps) at the right time.  The Signal Corps was responsible for radio transmissions through the air, the use of lighter-than-air observation balloons, and similar projects all linked to the skies.

In 1906 when the airplane was less than three years old and the first military aircraft was still three years from delivery to the Army, Mitchell wrote an article for the Cavalry Journal.   In it he stated:

"Conflicts no doubt will be carried on in the future in the air, on the surface of the earth and water, and under the water."

It was the kind of essay one would have expected from someone like Jules Verne, certainly not a bright young Army officer.  The airplane was exciting but too infantile to even be considered as a weapon of war.  As he would be throughout his brief life, Mitchell's foresight was well ahead of his time.

 Billy Mitchell, American Spy

In the following three years the Mitchell family grew with the birth of two daughters, and Billy saw his career continue its impressive course when he was selected as the first Signal Corps officer to attend the Army's School of the Line, graduating with distinction.  By 1909 the Army had received its first airplane and trained its pilots...TWO of them.  Mitchell's own growing interest in aviation had to be placed on hold with assignment back to the Philippines however.  During the slightly more than three years that followed Mitchell became interested, or some would say "obsessed", with what was seemingly his only other interest in later life...a potential enemy to be faced in a future war.

The movements and activities of American troops in the Philippines were carefully monitored and reported on by the Japanese, certainly suspicious of the American presence in the Pacific.  During his first year in The Islands, Mitchell made it a practice to watch the watchers, noting with detail what THEY were doing and diligently transferring these notes to volumous reports back to Washington.  For a time he moved casually around the islands posing as a naturalist, observing birds and wildlife, while photographing or sketching Japanese activities.  By his own admission, he often purchased his way into the confidence of these Oriental spies, for the most part alone and isolated far from home, with conversation, beer and cigarettes.  Mitchell was an engaging guy who made friends easily, and was difficult to dislike.  It allowed him to get his way in most situations.

In the fall of 1911 Captain Mitchell toured Japan, Manchuria and China.  It was NOT a pleasure tour but a hard look at what was happening in these countries.  Mitchell was especially interested in Japan, its military training and weaponry, and particularly the Japanese interest in the budding field of aviation.  Again he took copious notes, photographed when he could and sketched when he could not photograph, and then compiled his observations in reports to Washington.  

As early as 1913 he wrote:

"Increasing friction between Japan and the United States will take place in the future there can be little doubt, and that this will lead to war sooner or later seems quite certain."

The original of the report containing this prophetic observation is a part of the War College papers in the National Archives.  Exactly how much attention was paid to Mitchell's reports on the Japanese in the period before World War I is quickly evident.  Penciled in the column next to the above paragraph is the word: "Arse."

While Mitchell's predictions raised little attention, in a military establishment that might sometimes be characterized as prioritizing paperwork over bullets, Mitchell's diligence and hard word was not unnoticed.  His first fifteen years of military service had been filled with glowing reports by superiors, successes in Alaska and Fort Leavenworth, and a drive to duty that was uncommon even among the most dedicated of Americans.  Mitchell returned home  with a selection to the General Staff.  At the age of thirty-two he was the youngest man every selected to this most prestigious of military assignments.   

In 1912 he was assigned to Intelligence, a suitable position for a man who had just spied out the Orient like few Americans had ever been privileged to do, and an opportunistic place to be with the brewing troubles in Europe.  His new role also returned him to Washington, D.C.; a city where the Mitchell name was well-known and remembered, and where the budding young officer had many friends.  The location also placed him close to Newport News, Virginia where Glenn Curtiss operated a flying school.

Billy Mitchell, The Pilot

Three things dominated the following three years of Mitchell's life and career:  

• continued interest in aviation, 

• Intelligence reports of the growing crisis in Europe,  and 

• giving voice to his strong personal opinions about the first two of these interests.

In Washington Captain Mitchell became friends with a budding young pilot who had been one of the first military aviators trained at the Wright Brothers' flying school in 1911, an officer named Lieutenant Henry Arnold.  A 1907 West Point Graduate, Arnold was known as "Hap" at the point.  He had hoped to become a Cavalry officer but his poor performance as a cadet stymied that dream and sent him to serve as an Infantry officer in the Philippines.  After that tour of duty, he again applied for service with the Cavalry.  When he was again turned down he opted for the Signal Corps as at least a better place to serve than in the Infantry.  It was a fortunate assignment, both for Hap Arnold and for the future of American air power.

Mitchell and Arnold spent many hours discussing the developing airplane, Mitchell saturating his mind with knowledge during these sessions.  Arnold later recalled:  "His questions about the air were intelligent and to the point; in fact, it was he who did most of the talking, asking questions only to get concrete facts."  So immersed in the subject was Captain Mitchell that, three years before he ever sat in a cockpit, he was recognized in Washington as an authority on the airplane.  In 1913 Mitchell, Arnold, and Ben Foulois (who had taught himself to fly in 1909 through correspondence with the Wright Brothers) were called to testify on the future of the airplane before a Congressional committee.  At that time military use of aircraft was assigned to the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps, and the question had arisen about a separate air arm.  Though it was this very concept that twelve years later would make Mitchell a thorn in the flesh of the Army, Navy and War Department, in 1913 Mitchell argued against removing aeronautics from the Signal Corps.  Perhaps remembering well how Army/Navy rivalries had led to tactical problems during the Spanish-American War, Mitchell admonished:

"If we are going to try to build up aviation in this country, what's the use of trying to create a separate branch...causing all sorts of complications?  I believe it would set aviation back to create a separate organization." 

It was a proclamation that would one day come back to haunt air power's greatest advocate.  When the hearings concluded the committee agreed with the policy advocated by Mitchell, Arnold and Foulois.  Army aviation would remain within the Signal Corps.  That the congressmen were impressed with Mitchell's understanding of the Army's air arm was further illustrated when the young Captain was asked to author the legislation himself.

It is of note that, in 1913, the airplane was still thought of as a tool to be used by ground commanders.  The airplane could be used to observe, to photograph, and to transmit communications--hence it was suitably placed within the Signal Corps.  Mitchell did have the foresight, even then however, to recognize the potential beyond the traditional role, stating:  "Some people think of the aeroplane (as) being an adjunct of the lines of information, (but) the lines of information may grow to be an adjunct to the aeroplane, and very probably will."

Mitchell's second passion developed almost unexpectedly, though quite naturally.  Throughout his military career, Mitchell had been recognized as an officer who was thorough in reporting, drafting pages of detailed reports of his various observations for submission through the channels.  When the budding young officer was bed-ridden due to a severe case of rheumatism (which had been developed as a result of his service in Alaska a decade earlier), he used his time to write.  Now, however, his words were penned for distribution beyond military channels.  Under a pseudonym he authored articles for the Chicago Tribune and even penned an anonymous piece on the brewing war in Europe for World's Work.  In July 1915 he wrote a controversial paper in which he advocated reorganizing the War Department with the creation of a Council of National Defense that would have authority over BOTH the Army and Navy stating:  "We would then have the whole national defense brains, so to speak, under one roof."

The diatribe was titled "Our Faulty Military Policy", and spoke to the threat of war looming on America's horizon, with an eye to preparedness.  Mitchell urged compulsory military service to raise an Army, an unpopular concept, two years before passage of the Selective Service Act that did become necessary to raise an army AFTER the United States did enter the war.  Mitchell's premise, for the most part more historically observant than prophetic, stated:

"The military policy of the United States is and has been to prepare for war after such war has actually broken out."

This doctrine may well explain Mitchell's actions at the end of World War I.  In 1898 and again just nineteen years later he had seen his nation enter two different wars, totally unprepared to field an effective army.  From history he developed a sincere and compelling drive to convince the United States to prepare for the NEXT war which, no one wanted to believe would ever come.  Indeed, the fact that history repeats itself coupled with Billy Mitchell's interest in American history and past wars, may reveal the man to have been less of a prophet and more of an astute historian.

By the time Mitchell's duty on the General Staff neared its completion late in 1915, the radically thinking young officer was already raising eyebrows and wearing out his welcome.  His assignment to the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps was welcomed by most of his superiors who saw him as more suited to field duty than staff duty.  Again Mitchell received promotion, attaining the rank of Major.

For three months Mitchell was totally confined by his rheumatism to bed rest, and the illness weakened his heart and nearly claimed his life.  Fighting back, he regained gradual movement and slowly recovered.  By mid-1916 he was able to travel and began to fulfill his dream of flying.  Every weekend for nearly six months he drove to Newport News, Virginia for flight lessons until he soloed.  Mitchell himself paid for two thirds of the $1,470 bill for flight lessons, as Army regulations allowed payment of no more than $500 to a civilian agency for services to one of its officers. 

 Billy Mitchell, The Firsts

Billy Mitchell's fifteen years of military service were marked by his youth--youngest officer in the Spanish-American Army, youngest officer selected the the General Staff.   In 1917, two years past the middle-age milestone, his career became marked by a series of firsts.  The catalyst for the new phase of his life was provided by the war in Europe, a war that had engulfed the old world and one that the United States was doing its best to ignore and stay out of. 

Mitchell was convinced that eventually the United States would be dragged reluctantly into the conflict, and in 1917 began requesting duty in Europe.  On March 3, 1917 he joined a group of five observers heading to France.  His orders called for him to report to the American ambassador in Paris "for the specific purpose of observing the manufacture and development of aircraft."    Major Mitchell arrived in Spain in March and was making his way to France when, on April 6th, the United States indeed entered the war.  The three-year old war in Europe had at last, as Mitchell expected, become a WORLD war.

Returning to his native French tongue for the first time since his youth, Mitchell was quickly welcomed in France.  The three years of bitter warfare had left the French with dour pessimism and a hopeless outlook. That had now been brightened by the anticipated arrival of millions of American soldiers, and Billy Mitchell became the symbol of the relief that was to come.

Months before the first soldiers of General Pershing's American Expeditionary Force (A.E.F.) arrived, Billy Mitchell became representative of a new phase in the war.  His character, his courage, and his sincere interest in the prosecution of the war was more than welcomed.

• Even before the A.E.F. arrived, Major Mitchell toured the front lines with French soldiers, taking up a position in a trench beneath the guns in the distance and participating in an infantry attack.  He was the first American soldier under enemy fire in World War I.  (Several US citizens had prior combat experience flying with the British or in the Lafayette Escadrille or fighting in the French Foreign Legion, but Mitchell was the first under fire in the uniform of the United States.)
• Mitchell's orders had been for him to observe and report on the manufacture and development of aircraft for the war in Europe.  He did more.  With a French pilot he winged his way over the battlefields, becoming the first American officer to fly over the enemy lines.
• For his foray into the front lines, Mitchell was recognized by the French government.  He became the first American to be awarded the French Croix de Guerre.

All the while the Major continued his job of observation and reporting.  During the day he traveled the countryside, at night in his hotel room he typed pages of reports back to Washington.  In those early months Major Mitchell learned much of what would a year later contribute to his success.  French pilots echoed complaints of their own government's lack of understanding tactical aerial warfare.  At the time the French were flying regularly but in a scatter-gun approach to warfare...an occasional dog fight here or there, but no tactical organization.  These early pilots dreamed of massive air strikes, hundreds of airplanes, in a concerted attack on the German forces.

Mitchell quickly grasped the concept.  His flights over the lines had showed him the smallness of the area in which two armies had slugged it out to a bloody, stalemated trench war for three years.  The strip of land was no larger than sixty miles long, a mere bump in the terrain from the air, but real estate that that swallowed up ground soldiers of both sides without compromise.  He observed, "It looked as though the war would keep up indefinitely until either the airplanes brought an end to the war or the contending nations dropped from sheer exhaustion."

Major Mitchell didn't limit his observations to the French alone, however.  While awaiting the arrival of reinforcements from the United States, he took time to visit the Royal Flying Corps (R.F.C.) at the British compound.  Arriving unannounced, he wasted no time seeking the attention of Sir Hugh Boom Trenchard,  already legendary for building the R.F.C. into an effective flying arm of 2,000 airplanes.  A no-nonsense general officer, Trenchard was initially brusque at the young American officer's request to see his organization.

"How many weeks have you got?" he asked with no small display of impatience.
"We could take in the equipment and supply today," Mitchell responded.  "Tomorrow we could start..."
"Just a moment here, young man.  Do you think I've nothing more to do than chaperon you and answer questions?"
Not intimidated, Mitchell's response reflects a tactful nature that many of his later detractors claimed he never possessed:  "Sir, I know you've got such an excellent organization that it shouldn't need your leadership for a day or so."
To the surprise of those who knew the explosive nature of the flying legend, Trenchard did not toss the upstart young Major out of his office.  Instead, with a laugh, he responded:  "Come along young man.  I can see you're the sort who usually gets what he wants in the end."

The three days that Mitchell spent with Trenchard may have been some of the most important days of his life.  Mitchell bombarded the British commander, who had himself been a pilot, in the same manner he had queried his friend Hap Arnold for information on flying.  In Trenchard Mitchell found not only a mentor, but a kindred spirit.  In later years detractors would claim Mitchell's concepts of aerial combat, strategic bombing, and military aviation had been stolen from Trenchard.  For his own part, Mitchell never denied his close association with the British pioneer and their impact on his thinking.  The two remained friends and collaborated on aerial theory even after the war.

Mitchell returned to Paris with dreams beyond the current use of aircraft for observation and an occasional dogfight.  Trenchard had boasted 2,000 aircraft, the French  nearly as many, and with American forces on their way to France it was easy to dream that the skies over the front lines might soon be darkened by the wings of massive aerial formations.  In Mitchell's developing dream of tactical aircraft deployment he envisioned two separate but coordinated approaches to the air war:

1. The organization of fighter squadrons for offensive use against enemy aircraft and ground troops, and

2. Systematic, strategic bombing of the enemy behind his own lines.

"This," he stated, "is the proper way to use air power and I am sure the future will see operations conducted this way by thousands of airplanes."

In May Mitchell received promotion to Lieutenant Colonel.  He spent his nights continuing to report back to Washington on his ideas for the use of air power once the American forces arrived.  Sir Trenchard followed his progress with a mix of feelings:  

• the uneasy hope that somehow the upstart American officer would succeed in convincing his own government of aerial concepts the airmen of other countries had failed to convince their own, and

• the belief that "Mitchell is a man after my own heart...if only he can break his habit of trying to convert opponents by killing them."

When General Pershing arrived in Paris on June 13, 1917 with the first elements of the A.E.F., Lieutenant Colonel Billy Mitchell was there to greet him.  In just a few short months Mitchell had observed the progress, or rather the lack of progress, of the war from both the ground and the air.  He had built important liaisons with French and the British airmen and commanders, established himself well in the Paris social circles that could be all important to a Staff officer, and had developed his own ideas about how the newly arrived American forces could best be used.  Of course, his primary interest was in the deployment of American air power.

Pershing had brought with him Major Townsend F. Dodd, a veteran pilot, to head the Aviation Section of the Army's Signal Corps.  Upon meeting Mitchell however, Pershing recognized the Lieutenant Colonel's superior rank and assigned Major Dodd to other duty.  The first American airmen of World War I would work under Lieutenant Colonel Billy Mitchell, new Chief of Aviation for the Signal Corps, American Expeditionary Forces.

For Mitchell it was time to "Put up or shut up!"   

Part I