WI: Billy Mitchell, Air Marshal?

In the year 1921, Newton D. Baker (US Secretary of War during WWI) laughed at the pilot Billy Mitchell when he proposed a demonstration of how planes could sink battleships. The Navy was very reluctant, and did their own trials, but after being demonstrated that their trials had been fixed so that the bombs planes used were actually sand-bombs, Congress finally approved the trial under the codename "Project B". The trials made by Billy Mitchell's group (named 1st Provisional Air Brigade) were a success, even sinking the battleship Ostfriesland, considered unsinkable. However, when the War Department tried to endorse the establishment of an independent Air Force named "General Headquarters Air Force", the Navy objected and the plan was retired. Billy Mitchell ended up at a base in Texas and, after criticising the Navy for the loss of the dirigible Shenandoah, he was court-martialed and left the Navy. He would posthumously be given the Congressional Gold Medal for his foresight.

WI GHAF went forward and made the Air Force an independent group apart from the Navy, with Mitchell as the Air Marshal in a position akin to that of a Field Marshal?
 
In the year 1921, Newton D. Baker (US Secretary of War during WWI) laughed at the pilot Billy Mitchell when he proposed a demonstration of how planes could sink battleships. The Navy was very reluctant, and did their own trials, but after being demonstrated that their trials had been fixed so that the bombs planes used were actually sand-bombs, Congress finally approved the trial under the codename "Project B". The trials made by Billy Mitchell's group (named 1st Provisional Air Brigade) were a success, even sinking the battleship Ostfriesland, considered unsinkable. However, when the War Department tried to endorse the establishment of an independent Air Force named "General Headquarters Air Force", the Navy objected and the plan was retired. Billy Mitchell ended up at a base in Texas and, after criticising the Navy for the loss of the dirigible Shenandoah, he was court-martialed and left the Navy. He would posthumously be given the Congressional Gold Medal for his foresight.

WI GHAF went forward and made the Air Force an independent group apart from the Navy, with Mitchell as the Air Marshal in a position akin to that of a Field Marshal?

Was the Ostfriesland really considered unsinkable ? I suppose you mean from the air, but even then it was a bit of an old heap, crewless and with no damage control, hardly realistic conditions.

The thing is about promoting him, how old was he ? And who would do the promotion ? I'd think perhaps if TR had lived, had taken the nomination in 1920 and won re-election therre might have been SOME chance

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 

MrP

Banned
I think Grey's right - he's a bit young for such a high rank. His personality is also extremely combative, judging from what I've read of the chap. Constantly telling people they are fools - whether they are or not - will do bad things for one's relations with them. Mitchell doesn't seem to have grasped this simple truth.
 
There are a few problems with the initial WI the biggest being Mitchell was associated with the US Navy. He was not. He was US Army and later US Army Air Service. I think it would be fairly easy to subsitute him for General Menoher, who became Director of the Air Service IOTL. Of course a lot does come down to Mitchell's personality and then there is really very little you can do with that.
 
Well, first of all, we need to get some facts straight. Mitchell was a US Army officer, not a Naval officer. True, he was courtmartialled for criticizing navy brass (and brass in general) after the USS Shenandoah crash, but did not leave the navy since he was never in it. Finally, if he had suceeded in establishing an independent airforce in the 1920's, he would not be an "Air Marshall". US paralance does not use the term. He would have been a General of the Air Force, and his force would have been formed (as it was in OTL) primarily from US Army Air Corps personnel and equipment.

Mitchell was an aggressive advocate of airpower, but it was very selective. He would probably have favored heavy investment in land-based strategic air power at the expense of aircraft carrier aviation, or adopted the equally silly idea of putting carrier aviation under Air Force command - probably mainly for scoutiong or defensive purposes. It could be argued his version of airpower might have hurt the US when WW2 broke out.

Mitchell, like other airpower advocates of the 1920s and 1930s, believed that strategic level bombing was the ultimate expression of air power. His land based level bombers were able to sink the stationary, unmanned, and unprotected Ostfriesland but later experience in WW2 proved that level bombing was very ineffective against warships at sea. Most warship losses were the result of low level torpedo bombing and/or dive bombing - most often carrier borne. Early use of B-17s against Japanese ships were very ineffective. If the USA had invested in an independent air arm based on Mitchell's concepts (at the expense of separate naval and army air forces), I think there is the that risk US Naval aviation would have been much weaker than in OTL - and ill suited to fight the Japanese Navy in 1941-43.
 
Mitchell was an aggressive advocate of airpower, but it was very selective. He would probably have favored heavy investment in land-based strategic air power at the expense of aircraft carrier aviation, or adopted the equally silly idea of putting carrier aviation under Air Force command - probably mainly for scoutiong or defensive purposes. It could be argued his version of airpower might have hurt the US when WW2 broke out.

Mitchell appears to have been of the same mindset of those that formed the RAF, Luftwaffe and the Italian Air Force, in that the new arm was to control all aircraft and pilots including those that formed their respect fleet air arms. Similar mindsets that grew out of similar situations and ideas. They were products of their time.
 
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