Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [7]
Billy Mitchell may have been an irritating gadfly, but he meant business. He readily agreed to conduct the tests under “wartime conditions,” though the target vessels were immobile. Having accepted the rules, he cheated like hell. Mitchell obtained one-ton bombs that could not easily be carried aloft, and restricted the range of any aircraft that bore them. Nevertheless, in their most spectacular test his airmen scored a major triumph by using their unconventional weapons against the “unsinkable” battleship Ostfriesland. The 24,000-ton veteran of the Battle of Jutland survived the first day’s tests with minor damage, but the next day Mitchell launched his heavyweights, British Handley Page 0/400s. They scored two hits and four near misses that ripped Ostfriesland’s hull, sending her down in twenty-one minutes. The Navy was astonished—and the Army leadership embarrassed. But Mitchell’s giant bombs sank other aged battleships in additional tests, even using huge 4,300-pound weapons.
The next year Mitchell met Douhet in Europe and was captured by the Italian’s fervor and the depth of Command of the Air. Mitchell had excerpts sent to colleagues, and got banished for his trouble. Dispatched to Hawaii and then to Asia, he literally took a page from Douhet’s book and spent his exile producing a tome of his own. The result was a 324-page treatise predicting war with Japan. Published in 1925, Winged Defense insisted that the mere threat of sustained aerial bombardment would cause a collapse of enemy willpower, and that battleships were becoming obsolete as aviation technology advanced. The fact that Mitchell reverted to colonel that year probably was no coincidence.
That was bad enough. But in September, one of Mitchell’s naval counterparts died unnecessarily, following orders from nonaviators. Sent into treacherous weather over Ohio, Commander Zachary Lansdowne perished with thirteen other crew members of the dirigible Shenandoah. Fliers were outraged that “paddlefeet” controlled airmen’s destinies. Many grumbled; Mitchell exploded. Calling a press conference, he publicly accused the leaders of the U.S. Army and Navy of professional incompetence and indicted the “almost treasonable administration of the national defense.” The gauntlet had been dropped, and no one doubted that it would be retrieved and flung in the accuser’s face.
In a sensational six-week trial, Mitchell exploited his court-martial to gain a public forum for his views. He received sympathetic coverage in many newspapers but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. Undeniably guilty of insubordination, in December 1925 he was suspended from active duty for five years. Rather than live with the penalty, he resigned from the Army to continue his crusade as a civilian. He died in 1936, still insisting that America’s military future would be found in the sky.
Eventually Mitchell was proven wrong on many details but the concept of strategic bombardment outlived him. Almost before he was buried, the Army gave significant contracts to two leading aircraft manufacturers: Boeing in Seattle, Washington, and Douglas in El Segundo, California. Their commission was to build single examples of large, ocean-spanning bombers that could be flown and evaluated as prototypes of follow-on designs. In the words of a later generation, they were technology demonstrators.
First up was Boeing’s experimental XB-15. Successfully flown by test pilot Edmund T. Allen in 1937, it featured a 149-foot wingspan and 32.5-ton empty weight. Its four 850-horsepower radial engines were reliable but