The Yanks Are Coming! (20 page)

In that same speech, MacArthur reminded his listeners of a line from an old barrack room ballad, “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.” That did, indeed, seem to be his choice, as his first love in retirement was watching sports—boxing, baseball, and football. He kept himself busy, though: he served as chairman of the board of Sperry Rand and impressed President Kennedy, among others, with his still-sharp intellect and grasp of world affairs.
³⁵

In 1962, two years before he died, MacArthur spoke at West Point, where he told the cadets, “The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. . . . But in the evening of my memory, always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and reechoes: duty, honor, country. Today marks my final roll call with you, but I want you to know that when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of the corps, and the corps, and the corps.”
³⁶
MacArthur's loyalty, like his brilliance, was never in
doubt. What is sometimes forgotten is how one of the greatest generals in American history was formed in the Great War, a war that is itself fading from America's memory.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

BILLY MITCHELL (1879–1936)

L
ike many rebels, Billy Mitchell came from a prominent, wealthy family—in his case, one shot through with Scotch belligerency as well. His grandfather, direct from Scotland, had made the family fortune; his father largely spent it; and Mitchell tried to maintain a precarious aristocratic lifestyle on an Army salary that needed to be supplemented by other means (chiefly his wife's fortune and his mother's remaining savings). His parents had a taste for the cosmopolitan life, which accounts for his birth in France. The family returned to Wisconsin three years later, where young Billy (or Willie, as his mother called him) swiftly developed a love for mischief and, eventually, fast horses and loud guns. He attended an Episcopal
school and after his father was elected to the United States Senate transferred to a private school in Washington, DC, and enrolled at Columbian College.
¹

The Spanish-American War displaced all thoughts of study, and he enlisted, but his father intervened and won the eighteen-year-old a second lieutenant's commission, making him the youngest officer in the Army. Mitchell was a natural soldier. He arrived in Cuba too late to see action but volunteered for the Philippines, where there was still fighting to be had in 1899. In the Senate his father, a liberal Democrat, railed against American imperialism.
²
Billy, meanwhile, gloried in it. For Christmas, he asked his parents to send him a “Mauser automatic or any other
good
automatic pistol with 500 rounds of ammunition for same.”
³

LOOKING FOR ADVENTURE

After convalescing from malaria, predicting (in a letter to his mother) a future war with Germany, and returning home on a roundabout path (through the Middle East and Europe) Mitchell accepted an extended assignment with the Signal Corps
⁴
in Alaska, where he worked as a surveyor and helped construct an Alaskan telegraph system. He did good work and at twenty-three was promoted captain—the youngest in the Army. He also got married, to Caroline Stoddard, a graduate of Vassar, and in due course was assigned to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where he taught at the Signal School, commanded a company, got to dabble in the latest signal technology, and even gave an early aeronautics lecture (on the potential use of balloons or dirigibles in military operations). His military education proceeded apace; he attended the School of the Line in 1907 and the Staff College in 1909. Having earned his sheepskin as a Signals
officer, Mitchell tried to transfer into the cavalry (where he had always wanted to be), but his request was denied.

If he was looking for adventure, he found it anyway. The Army sent him to the Philippines—where he investigated Japanese ambitions—and on a tour of Asia that allowed him to observe the Chinese, Japanese, and Russian armies. His conclusion: Japan was America's enemy in the Pacific; there would be a war; and likely it would be in the Philippines.
⁵

In 1913, he joined the general staff in Washington, where, ironically given later developments, he downplayed the prospects for air power, advocated keeping airmen under the authority of the Signal Corps (on the theory that aircraft were machines best used for reconnaissance), and actually helped draft the rules governing the Aviation Section of the Signal Corps (which included the requirement that pilots be under thirty and single; Mitchell, of course, was neither).

The war in Europe led to a radical reconsideration of and an enormous congressional funding boost for air power. The age restriction on pilots was dropped, and Mitchell's superiors recognized in the frustrated cavalry officer a potential airman. Mitchell, a top-flight athlete in tennis and polo, was a man far better fitted for field duty than the confines of staff work, which was taking a toll on his health (he suffered from rheumatism). He was an outdoorsman wilting behind a desk, weighed down by piles of paper, his vitality leeched by artificial light. In 1916, he was assigned to the Aviation Section (which promised plenty of outdoor work), was promoted to major, took off-duty flying lessons (which he paid for himself), and was sent to the Western Front in March 1917 as a military observer.

By the time Mitchell arrived in Paris in April, the United States had declared war on Germany. If the Yanks were coming, Mitchell was already there, and he took advantage of the interval to train with
experienced pilots. If there was going to be action in the air, he was going to be a part of it—and what he saw of French air power amazed him: fast bombers and even speedier fighters, far more technologically advanced than the planes in America's sparse inventory. “I had been able to flounder around with the animated kites that we call airplanes in the United States, but when I laid my hand to the greyhounds of the air they had in Europe, which went twice as fast as ours, it was an entirely different matter.”
⁶

Flying over the Western Front, Mitchell noted, “One flight gave me a much clearer impression of how the armies were laid out than any amount of traveling around on the ground. A very significant thing to me was that we could cross the lines of these contending armies in a few minutes in our airplane, whereas the armies had been locked in the struggle, immovable, powerless to advance, for three years. . . . This whole area over which the Germans and the French battled was no more than sixty miles across. . . . 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.”
⁷

Fluent in French since his childhood, Mitchell was the perfect liaison officer and perfectly suited to gain a quick appreciation of what the United States could learn from the French and British experience—especially the British, for despite his father's Continental tastes, Billy Mitchell was an Anglophile. He was particularly impressed by his interview with the gruff but visionary Major General Hugh Trenchard, commander of the Royal Flying Corps in France and advocate of relentless aerial offensives.

Though he was promoted to lieutenant colonel in May 1917 and the first American officer to see action on the Western Front (winning a Croix de Guerre from the French), Mitchell's reports gained little
attention in Washington. That didn't matter after General John J. Pershing arrived in June. He made Mitchell his aviation officer, separated the Air Service from the Signal Corps, and in September 1917 promoted Mitchell to colonel.

Pershing pegged Mitchell as his aerial combat commander—he was certainly combative enough with his superiors—and it was in that role that Mitchell directed air operations at Saint-Mihiel (after which he was promoted to brigadier general) and during the Meuse-Argonne Campaign. At Saint-Mihiel, Mitchell scouted the German lines from the air and insisted, when others argued for delay because of rain, that the attack go ahead as planned. Mitchell's pilots flew and fought regardless of conditions.

APOSTLE FOR AIR POWER

He returned from the war not as a well-known hero—except among his fellow airmen—but as an aspiring prophet of the future of air power.
⁸
He was named chief of Air Service training and operations, serving in Washington under Major General Charles C. Menoher, an infantry officer now commanding the Air Service, who gave Mitchell free rein. Budget-slashing congressmen ensured that Mitchell could not roam far. Indeed, his and Menoher's greatest task was to keep the Air Service from extinction.

Mitchell made the case that air power was essential to the defense of the United States. U-boats and long-range bombers (flying from ships or offshore bases) meant America's coasts were no longer immune from enemy attack. The United States needed command of the air; and it would certainly need a vastly improved Air Service for any future war—because the next war, Mitchell had no doubt, would be decided in the air.

Mitchell was a whirling dervish of activity: inundating Menoher with proposals for guns, shells, dirigibles, air transports (he had already envisioned paratroopers), and even aircraft carriers (which might have been thought the Navy's concern). He spoke incessantly about the wars of the future, giving speeches and testimony. He fueled his imagination by flying, meeting with aircraft designers, studying, and nightly parties with his staff—Mitchell was waging a private war against Prohibition—where ideas were bounced around freely. Mitchell's vision was not popular. The Army concluded that air power had not been decisive in the Great War and would be no more decisive in the next; aircraft were essentially tools of reconnaissance. While these objections were annoying, Mitchell thought his greatest enemies were in the Navy, which seemed to take an even dimmer view of air power, though Mitchell believed that controlling land or sea was dependent on controlling the air. Mitchell knew that there were political difficulties as well: bomber aircraft that could fly beyond the battlefield and hit industrial targets in civilian areas could be regarded as immoral; he regarded such “total war” as inevitable but couched his arguments carefully. He was keen to illustrate the practical—and dramatic and inspiring—applications of air power, with cross-country flights that were expensive in pilots (because of fatal crashes), but which laid the routes for air mail and challenged aircraft companies to improve their designs and technology. Mitchell thought the stakes could not be higher: “There can no longer be any doubt that complete control of the air by any nation means military control of the world.”
⁹

Actually, there was some doubt about that—and the question burst into the public imagination in a terrific spectacle, a challenge: Mitchell said an aerial bomber could sink any vessel afloat. His view won enough support in Congress that the Navy was obliged to test his claims. Mitchell, at the time, had no trained bomber pilots.

Undaunted, he set up a pilot training program, had ordnance men design and build new bombs big enough to sink a battleship, slapped together a team of aerial cameramen to record the big event, and fought a relentless campaign for funds to keep his preparations going. The terms of the challenge were set by the Navy. The targets, captured German war ships, were put at the end of the bombers' range, the amount and type of ordnance they could drop was limited, and there would be pauses between bombing runs so that the vessels could be inspected. Navy pilots, who had a stake in the challenge, and Army pilots would fly on alternate runs. The first target was a U-boat, scheduled to be attacked by Navy planes on 21 June 1921. The naval airmen made short work of it. On 13 July, Mitchell's boys tore apart a German destroyer; and on 18 July the Navy, Marines, and Army took turns on a German light cruiser, which held up under the lighter bombing of the Navy but was sent below by Mitchell's big bombs.

The prize target was the presumed unsinkable German battleship
Ostfriesland
, which was attacked on 20 and 21 July. Her survival of the first day's attacks seemed to justify the Navy's confidence; Mitchell's unexpected sinking of her the next day stunned the Navy and convinced the admirals (and their supporting congressmen), as nothing else could, of the priority of building aircraft carriers. Mitchell was right. To control the seas, you had to control the air.

Still, many purported to be unconvinced. The Navy argued that if the
Ostfriesland
had had a crew, it could have patched the damage. A joint Army-Navy board, led by General Pershing, tried to take a balanced position, arguing on the one hand that battleships still ruled the waves and on the other hand that it was only prudent to invest in aircraft carriers and the rapid development of Army and Navy air power.

Mitchell had won a major victory for air power in the eyes of the public, but his enemies—the Navy, which he had antagonized, and the Army establishment, which distrusted opinionated, headline-seeking officers, especially for a service so unproven (in their opinion)—regarded him with eyes more gimlet than admiring. Mitchell politicked to be named Charles T. Menoher's successor as chief of the Air Service. It was a sign of his lack of clout in the Army that while he had the overwhelming support of his fellow airmen, he was nevertheless passed over for General Pershing's favorite, Major General Mason Patrick, who was promoted and given command on 5 October 1921. Patrick was regarded as a troubleshooter; Mitchell was regarded as the source of much of the trouble. Mitchell knew what to expect, as Pershing had appointed Patrick to ride herd on Mitchell during the war. Mitchell tried to reorganize the Air Service so that more power would be concentrated in his hands. Patrick rejected the proposal. Mitchell threatened to resign. Patrick called him on it and marched him over to General James Harbord, deputy chief of staff. Mitchell retracted his proposed resignation.