The admirals were convinced it was impossible. You simply could not sink a battleship from the air. Battleships were armoured fortresses, built to absorb punishment from naval guns. Bombs dropped from altitude, they argued, would never hit anything. General Billy Mitchell decided to prove them wrong. On 21 July 1921, he sent his bombers against the German battleship Ostfriesland, captured after World War I and anchored in the Atlantic Ocean as a target. The ship sank in 21 minutes.

Mitchell had commanded the largest air armada in history during World War I — 1,481 aircraft attacking German positions during the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918. He returned from the war convinced of something that no one in the established military wanted to hear: the aircraft had made the battleship obsolete, and the next war would be decided in the air, not at sea. He said so loudly, repeatedly, and with little diplomatic finesse.

In 1924, he wrote a classified report predicting that Japan would one day attack the US Navy at Pearl Harbor — in a surprise Sunday morning strike using carrier-based aircraft. He was ignored. In 1925, after the crash of the Navy dirigible USS Shenandoah killed 14 crew members, Mitchell issued a public statement calling the Army and Navy leadership “incompetent, criminally negligent, and treasonable.” The Army convened a court-martial. He was found guilty and suspended from duty for five years without pay. He resigned.

Vindication from the Sky

On 7 December 1941, Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor on a Sunday morning, exactly as Mitchell had predicted seventeen years earlier. Congress later awarded Mitchell the Congressional Gold Medal and promoted him posthumously to Major General. The US Air Force — the independent service he had argued for his entire career — was established in 1947. Everything he had been court-martialed for believing had come to pass.

“The airplane has made the surface fleet as obsolete as the sailing ship. Those who refuse to see this truth will be destroyed by it.”

Giulio Douhet — Italian General and Air Power Theorist, author of The Command of the Air (1921)

Mitchell died in 1936, five years before Pearl Harbor proved him right. He never saw the vindication. But every pilot who has flown from an aircraft carrier since 1941, and every general who has understood that wars are won or lost in the air before a single soldier lands on a beach, owes something to the general who was court-martialed for saying so first.