in American military history is an iconic figure whose contributions to U.S. military aviation have been overshadowed by his political antics and flamboyant personality. The legend surrounding the beginnings of the U.S. Air Force and the politics of strategic bombing. Lionized by the Air Force, demonized by the Navy, he has been described as, quote, a heroic lone patriot fighting against bureaucracy for the good of the country on the one hand and an egotistical charlatan more interested in grandstanding on the future of air power on the other. He has been called the Messiah of America air power and a trailblazer for preparing the American people to accept the role of aeronautics in the nation's military. Mitchell has often been portrayed as the founder of the U.S. Air Force and the creator of strategic bombing. He was neither. Ironically, Mitchell's leadership in World War I has been often overlooked or underplayed, yet it is difficult to see how the success and acclaim achieved by the air service in World War I could have been earned without Mitchell's presence. While he posthumously received a special medal voted by Congress for the outstanding pioneer services and foresight in the field of American military aviation, his court martial stands as one of the most extraordinary in the annals of American military justice. How did I come to write about Mitchell? I'm a Navy guy and I've written five books on naval history and probably close to 30 articles. It's very interesting. In 1999, I was mucking around the warehouse's storage room of the Naval Historical Foundation in Washington, D.C., and I came across the papers of who eventually became Vice Admiral Alfred W. Johnson. Now, who is Alfred Johnson and why is it important? Well, it turns out Johnson was the commander, U.S. Naval commander, of the ships during the Virginia bombing trials in which the Osfrelander was sunk. Now, you all know the Osfrelander was sunk by Mitchell and that created a lot of the fame and the controversy about the Navy. So, it turns out that in this collection of papers by Alfred Johnson were all of the archival correspondence relating to Mitchell and the Navy, correspondence between the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of War, Moffat and the Secretary of the Navy, all in one place, all relating to the trials and tribulations of Billy Mitchell. Included was an entire copy of Mitchell's 19th, the three series of articles in 1925 that Mitchell wrote for the Saturday Evening Post. And on one side of this paper are the article that Mitchell wrote and the other is the criticisms and errors and mistakes that Mitchell made that Johnson pointed out. It turned out that Johnson became the Navy's point man against Mitchell. This was 1999. About three or four years later I was asked to write a book review on a question of loyalty which was a book that described basically the court martial of Billy Mitchell. Then about four years ago I met in the Smithsonian a gentleman who was on a fellowship going to write the doctrinal history of the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, the Navy and the Army, Air Corps Doctrine from 1903 to 1923. And myself who was a former Smithsonian Fellow and some of the other curators said you can't do it. It's too big. And what I suggested he write about Mitchell and the Navy. Well his advisor said no, no, you must do this whole thing. At that point I said well I'm going to do it myself. And one of the reasons as I began to, previously as I began to do research, what I found is so much of Mitchell has been written from an Air Force viewpoint, virtually nothing from the Navy. And none of the books, previous biographies that have been written by Mitchell have anything to say about the Navy's role in the Virginia Capes and what actually took place. And this is why I started to write this book. Okay, one of the things that I found and I have hoped to correct in this book are many of the myths surrounding Billy Mitchell. Two of the greatest are the fact that he was really created an independent Air Force and he was the father of strategic bombing. As I said earlier he was neither. Let me talk first about strategic bombing. The myth of Mitchell's involvement with strategic bombing stems from a memorandum that he wrote in June of 1917 outlining the force structure of what was to be the Air Service of the American Expeditionary Force. Let me back up a little bit. Mitchell in 1917 was a major. He was in the Signal Corps and the aviation resources of the Army were then part of the Signal Corps. And Mitchell was sent to France as an observer and I'll go back and tell you why he was sent to France. He was sent to France because George Squire wanted to get rid of him and I can tell you why that later. But anyway Mitchell sent to France as an observer. In the U.S. to class war in Germany and he arrives and he becomes a senior airman, senior American airman in France. Not yet a pilot and I'll go into that later. And he writes, the first thing he does is he goes and he tours the battlefield. He meets a trencher, he spends time, a lot of time with the British and a lot of time with the French leaders, French command structure, learning about what they're doing with their aviation resources. And Pershing comes to France and he establishes an aviation board to come up with recommendations for what the air service in the AEF is going to look like. And Mitchell as a senior aviator prepares his memorandum and basically his memorandums divides the mission of the air force into two phases. The first is tactical. Tactical basically is to provide air superiority over the troops for observation. So that the artillery can be used effectively. And of course to get air superiority you need to have fighters. So tactical air is fighters in observation primarily. The second division he comes up with is something called strategical aviation. Not strategic, but strategical. And what he goes on to describe this is something that we would call today interdiction. It's really attacking the enemy resources behind the lines. But not so far that it's at the home base. And this is the basis for all of the confusion and all the subsequent writings that have occurred about Mitchell's involvement with strategic bombing. Okay. I'll give you an example of how this myth has been perpetuated. In his book, Beneficial Bombing, which Mark Colfelter published, which was published in 2010, he writes on page 16 that Mitchell's request that the AEF, the American Expeditionary Force, intelligence branch provide information on strategic bombing. Where does this come from? Well, he cites Alfred Hurley's Billy Mitchell, which was produced in 1964. Now, Hurley's book is the first scholarly biography of Billy Mitchell. And it was based on a dissertation that he wrote. The only problem with Hurley's work is that he frequently quotes things out of context. Totally unreliable. But Colfelter still fully uses this one piece of information to suggest that Mitchell was doubling his efforts to secure the strategic bombing operations that Pershing ignored. Pershing comes in and he's interested in the tactical aspects. He's not interested in what we would call strategic, but what we call now, strategic bombing, or night bombing, it was then called. He then goes on, this is called Leather, then goes on to state that Mitchell also created a staff to explore the possibilities of bombing Germany in more detail. But he doesn't cite a source again. He follows with a statement about picking Garell to determine the air service requirements. Now, are we to assume it was because he knew, this is Colfelter knew, that Garell would later write the defining AEF, American Expedition Report, on strategic bombing. In other words, he uses all of these arguments to try to convince us that Mitchell, unsupported arguments, to try to convince us that Mitchell was really the father of strategic bombing. So he cleverly paints a picture that suggests that Mitchell was strongly involved in the early preparations that as Colfelter writes, quote, ultimately produced America's first plan for a strategic air campaign. And this is done without citing original raw resources.  This is not scholarship. Hurley takes a quote from Mitchell, from Mitchell's books, Winged Defense, which he wrote in 1925, about strategic bombing. We'll go pick up a copy of Mitchell's Winged Defense. It's 147 pages. There's one paragraph on strategic bombing. So in my view, the Air Force and the Air Force historians have for a long time used Mitchell as the iconic father of strategic air power. And a lot of this comes from the posthumous award that Mitchell was given in 1941 by Congress when the Japanese bombed Broad Harbor. It was propaganda. What was the award, sir? The Congressional Gold Medal. It's frequently confused with the Congressional Medal of Honor, which it is not. Howard Hughes received the Congressional Gold Medal. So, lots and lots of myths. Any questions about strategic bombing? I'll go back later in a lot of the things that Mitchell did very well and why he became where he was. But before I do that, one of the things that surprised me very much is there's been a number of reviews of the book, and they've all been very positive. But none of them have picked up the real theme and the real message of this book.  Actually, I should give you the whole story. As you recall, I said that Mitchell is sent to France in the early, just as the war is starting. I think he's sent in April, and by June, he's writing this report. Now, I lost my change that I've thought for a second. Yes, he's a major. He's not a pilot, but he's fluent in French because he grew up as a child. His family was wealthy, took him to Europe, and he learned French as a child growing up. So he had the advantage of, and he was a very personable guy, a guy from a well-to-do background. So he fit in very, very well with French society and was able to relate very easily to the French command. And the French teach him to fly in two months. And at the end of that time, and I don't know how much he knew, I don't know how much of the politics was involved. But Congress, in July of 1917, passes a law that now says that if someone has experienced flying in the front and their officer approves it, they can become a pilot. And this is how Mitchell does earn his pilot's wing. And he goes on, and he becomes the senior aviator, American aviator in Europe. He's largely responsible for, not largely, he is responsible for amassing 1500 planes, American, British, and French that help the allies succeed in the Saint-Mahal campaign. He rises to Brigadier General, temporary rank. So at the end of the war, he's highly decorated. He's participated in combat, as I mentioned, in my piece of the American Legion. It's hard to see how the air service in World War I would have achieved as much as it did without Mitchell's presence. Because it was very disorganized, they had lots of problems procuring airplanes or logistics problems. They were problems that I won't go into with the command structure. Arguments between Folloy, who was his commander, and Mitchell. Folloy was replaced by General Patrick. So at the end of World War I, Mitchell is now a Brigadier General. And he sent home, and he expects to be a appointed commander of the air service. Well, he's not. Instead, an artillery officer by the name of Meneheur is placed in command, a non-flyer. And of course, Mitchell feels part of my French's pissed. Because he thinks only airmen should be in command of the aviation forces. And when the war is over, the air service leaves all of its planes back in Europe because they're all obsolete. None of them come back. Most of the flying officers are discharged. There's a great contraction as they wind down the service as it happens in most wars. And Mitchell now starts writing the Air Force Doctrine. And one of the things he has to find out is a mission. What's the purpose? He wants to build air power. He wants to build an air force. He wants to do this because he wants to rise in command. Well, how do you do this? Well, very early on, they come up with the idea of they're going to be the first line of defense. You don't need battleships anymore. A battleship, you can get 100 airplanes for the cost of one battleship. And he goes on this crusade to prove that the battleship is obsolete and you can sink a battleship by air power. This is the mission that he foresees for aviation. Without a mission, they can't crawl. This leads to the bombing of the Austrian land. Now what happened was the Navy was well aware of the threat of bombardment. And it set up a series of what was called the Trials on the Virginia Capes where it assembled a large group of obsolete ships that had been captured from the Germans. As some of you may know, the German fleet capitulated and surrendered to the British. Well, we took a whole bunch of ships across the Atlantic and they were used as test beds to experiment with bombing. So during the Trials of the Virginia Capes, they sank submarines, they sank destroyer, they sank a light cruiser and the last vessel was the battleship, the Austrian land. Before these trials were conducted, Mitchell gets invited to participate. He lobbies hard for this. This just didn't come about. And I was fortunate enough to find the minutes of those meetings. And they laid out very specifically what was to take place because what the Navy wanted to do was they wanted to drop bombs, see the effects of these bombs, stop bombing, send observers in to record what would take place, what the damage was, and then resume bombing. Well, the first exercise is an exercise in finding a ship at sea. It turns out it's not using a German ship, it's using the X-battleship Iowich, which is fitted with radio control. And Mitchell is invited to take port. Oh, but no, no, no, we can't do that because it's unsafe for our planes to fly that far. So he doesn't take port in this, the Army doesn't, the Navy. Well, the trials come and the bombings of the light vessels go fairly straightforward. There's no rig problem. Now they come to the bombing of the Austrian land. And there was a specific schedule that was to take place. On the day before she was sunk, they attacked with light bombs. And it's interesting to note that after the first day, the Austrian land was already going down by the bow she was taking on water. When she was, after she was sailed to the United States, she was stripped of a lot of her equipment. And one of the things they took, besides taking watertight doors, they also took some of the valving on the equalizing water system. So even the day before she was attacked with heavy bombs, she was sinking. And I know this because I have the report of Van Curren, who was the engineering officer in charge of the ship. So now it comes to the day when she's supposed to be scheduled to be sunk. Well, the first thing that happens is that the Navy was supposed to drop their heavy bombs first. Two thousand pounders. Well, Mitchell's plane shows up before the Navy and starts bombing. Okay? The second thing that happens, they're only supposed to drop two bombs, after which they're supposed to back off and the observer is supposed to go aboard to watch the damage. It doesn't happen. They continue dropping bombs. They've dropped, I think it was, seven bombs until the Austrian sinks. Now the other thing they did, the day before the bombing, Mitchell called up Sikorsky, who was a Russian immigrant. And Sikorsky had actually participated in naval bombings in the Black Sea in World War I. And Sikorsky says, don't try to hit the ship. Have the bombs drop alongside so you get the mining effect. And that's what sank the Austrian land. In front of a whole shipload of observers from the press, the Army and the Navy. And of course, Mitchell makes hay with this and says, see, I can sink a battleship. Now, he doesn't tell you that the battleship is stationary and that it's undefended. And this starts a huge political fight between the Navy and the Mitchell or the Air Service over whether the Air Service should be the first line of defense. And this goes on for several years. It's argued in the press. I'd like to tell the story, another example of Mitchell's insubordination. The Texas was sunk in gunfire trials and wound up on a sandbar. And the Navy subsequently used it for gunfire target practice. And one day, Moffat, who is the newly installed chief of the Bureau of Air Exonics, finds out that the Army is bombing the ship without permission. Calls up Mitchell. His boss answers, no, he's not here.  Mitchell calls. Oh yes, we'll stop. Do you think they stopped bombing? No. So the whole story of what happens here, and in my book, I stop with the court martial. I'll talk about the court martial later. But after Mitchell was court martial, this controversy over the Army Navy continued. Partly it continued because in 1921, the Army has an appropriations bill. And they try to write in this bill that the Navy can have no land-based aircraft. And at the last minute, the politicians get involved and they take it out. If the Army had been able to put this clause in, the Navy would not have had any land-based aircraft. So after Mitchell's court martial, this controversy still grows on. And an example of this that I write about that nobody else talks about. In the late 1920s, the Navy puts torpedo planes. And they want to buy a bunch of torpedo planes to put in Panama and in Hawaii. And the planes are, I think they're, I forget the designation there. I think they're BDs. Anyway, they have a bomber designation. And the Army says, no, no, no, you can't do this. Because it's a land-based airplane. And that's our job. And this all goes back to Mitchell's defending the fleet. Well, the Navy is pretty smart about it. All they do is change the designation to torpedo planes. In 1931, there's still this controversy. I got to remember his name. Until the Chief of Naval Operations decides that we're going to focus on taking aircraft at sea. That's the important thing. Our aircraft are going on aircraft carriers and we're going to take them to sea. And they reach an agreement with the Army that, well, we're only going to take, well, you know, only our aircraft are going to go to sea. And that agreement lasts for just about a year. It brings us to the mid-1930s. During the mid-1930s now, the Air Force has solved missions still coastal defense.  They can't find it. The Navy has to tell them where it is. Years and years go by and the Army is always asking the Navy, we need a ship. We need a ship to attack at sea. Well, in all these years, and remember all of what the Army bombing is, usually their bombing records were based on stationary targets, dropping one bomb at a time in ideal conditions. And based on the dispersion, they came up with statistical measures for how many aircraft it should take to hit a ship. In all those years, they conducted one exercise against a moving ship. This was the Iowa, and I think it was 1938. And they conducted it at low altitude. And unfortunately, because it was an inter-service exercise, there's no records of it. I haven't been able to find the records of it. And Curtis Rume, who writes about this, and of course he's very biased about what took place. And I urge you to read it because it's very interesting. He even says, and he can't find the records. So there's no records what actually took place. But the bottom line of this story is, let's move up to Midway. And some of you may know that B-17s flew out of Midway and attacked the Japanese, various elements of the Japanese fleet. Well, they flew 204 sorties and they dropped 55 bombs. One near miss. So part of this whole story on this book, which I don't have the cover in front of me, about Billy Mitchell, it's really about the controversy between the Army and the Navy in the interwar years over defining a mission. And the Air Corps needed the mission in order to get funding to build their airplanes. And in my opinion, that's the real value of this book. Because that's the kind of thing that continues to go on today. Any questions so far? In World War I, Mitchell, did he have any kills? Was he under attack? He had come back. No, Mitchell flew. It's difficult to find what Mitchell did. Here's another example of where you've got to be very careful of scholarship. A number of his biographers quote Mitchell's diary. And Mitchell goes at great lengths to show his good side, his most favorable activities. You see this in the writings against the Navy where, as I mentioned, when he writes these articles for the Saturday evening post and he makes all of these claims, and you can go down line by line by line and see where these are out and out lies or overstatements of facts. It turns out that the diary that these people are quoting is a transcription, is a typewritten transcription that was done after the war, probably by Mitchell to enhance his standing. So it's very difficult to, you can't use this as an unbiased source. There are not really, really good records. There is a so-called, the answer of his history of World War I that Gorell put together. But if you go to it, it's really, every command or organization just dump their records into a file. And there are no records of Mitchell's combat action. If he flew, he claims to have flown observations. But if you look at his diary or what was deported to be his diary, you'll see where he writes about spying the German advance ahead of time and he alerts the allies and it slows the advance. Well, if you go to the record, you see that it was raining and there were other reasons for the advance to have been slowed. So it's very, very questionable what he did. Nevertheless, there's no question that he was able to organize the tactical air service logistically, get it going. By that I mean all of the, if you look at all the fighter commands and all the aces and at the St. Michael of getting a group of 1500 airplanes together under his command. So there's no question in my mind that he was a great leader. Now, where does this leadership come from? It's very, very interesting. Mitchell enters the service in 1898. He volunteers for the first Wisconsin infantry in 1898 to go to Cuba. And within two weeks, he's given a commission, probably through his father's efforts. And he's commissioned in the signal corps. And by the time they reach Cuba, the war is over, but he's given an independent command to string telegraph wire. And he's very successful in this. He accomplishes his task with minimal resources in the jungle with mules and a company under his command. And from Cuba he's sent to the Philippines where he may have engaged in some firefights with insurrectionists. But again, he's very, very successful. And this is where the senior leadership of the signal corps notices him. And he actually, I think, is the youngest captain to go to command school. Also very interesting, he's sent to Alaska to set up what's called WMPATS, which was the telegraph system that they established in Alaska to communicate. And he's got some wonderful stories of laying this telegraph line in these horrible conditions. At one point, he falls into an icy river and talks about having to quickly get out and build a fire and throw himself out. As a child, he grew up in a state where he hunted and he did a lot of shooting and horseback riding. He was a great horseman. So here you have this very assertive, no question he had great leadership abilities, very wanting to succeed. His mother doesn't want him to make a career out of the army and he decides to do that. You can see the basis of where this man is coming from. Anyway, he's assigned to the aviation section. And one of the things that he's tasked to do is to write a piece of legislation that's going to establish air bases. This is 1916, really 1916. And Benjamin Falloy is another officer who's very involved with the air service at this point. And Falloy literally goes ballistic because Mitchell puts all of these air bases in the northeast where the weather is terrible. And he brings this to Squire's attention. Falloy did not like Mitchell from day one and it starts from this controversy. And I believe from the record because Falloy writes a whole bunch of letters criticizing Mitchell's writing of this legislation. Falloy is very active in changing what Mitchell wrote. And I think this is why Mitchell was sent to Europe. That's something again that not many of his biographers point out. They wanted to get rid of him. He didn't know aviation and he was a troublemaker. Yes? Was there any influence that his program on the development of naval aircraft carriers and the authorization to build them? Yes, absolutely. What about when the Austrian land was bombed, which was 1922? The Navy had gotten funding to convert the Langley. But as we know, the Langley was a very, very poor experimental ship. She was slow, she was small. The aviation advocates were lobbying very, very hard unsuccessfully for an aircraft carrier. I mean, one of the things that was going on at this time was the British had demonstrated that you could open fire at extreme range. And their battleships were all engineered to have high elevations in guns. And most of the US Navy battleships did not. And there was a lot of controversy over spending money just to increase the elevation of US battleships. There wasn't a lot of money around because nobody wanted to spend money on the military anymore. Congress was very budget conscious. And Mitchell's bombing started this firestone form of writing pro and con. And what it didn't do is bring to light the importance of air power and did help to get the Lexington and the Saratoga bill. Of course, you know they were to be scrapped. They had been battle cruisers. So I view Mitchell as a great visionary, but he was a zealot. He would do anything in the world to push this idea of air power. So he was right about air power, but he was too far ahead of his times and he was wrong with the details. And this is the myth that I think has been carried all along. Now why did he want to do this? I don't know if I mentioned this, but forgive me if I was talking to somebody earlier. But as I said, he came from a very well-to-do family. He liked the high life. He liked his horses. He belonged to a number of clubs. It appears that he imported riding gear from England. He had a lot of horses. And he couldn't afford it. I think he saw an opportunity to create an independent air force as a way for him to advance. And if he could advance, he would make more money. Well, in order to do this, this didn't happen. Congress, the first step was to try to legislate what would be a department of the air. And that fell through. It didn't happen. Congress, bills were passed and bills were presented and they were not passed. The next effort was to try to get an independent air force. This didn't happen. And I think Mitchell got very frustrated. And his writings became more and more adamant. He was specifically told by the Secretary of War not to write, and he did. He's very disgruntled. His antics, now, when Mitchell was sent back to the United States, he was Assistant Chief of the Air Service. He retained the temporary rank of Brigadier General because that's what the Deputy of the Air Service had. But his official rank was Colonel. Well, Patrick succeeds man and her as Head of the Air Service. Mitchell wants to be Head of the Air Service and he's passed over. They don't want him because of all of his political shenanigans and his writings. And they don't want him Head of the Air Service. The Secretary of War doesn't want him. Patrick doesn't want him. So his term is up. He reverts to a Colonel C and is sent to Houston to take over the district there. Incidentally, one of the myths from Mitchell's court-martial is he was demoted. He was not demoted as part of the court-martial. He simply returned to his normal rank of Colonel after he was passed over and reassigned. Yes? Could you talk about the court-martial? Yeah. About ready to do that. So you have to put Mitchell in perspective. He's now not going to be Head of the Air Service. It's very clear that there's not going to be an independent Air Service. And he goes to Houston. I think it's Fort St. Houston. I'll get to the court-martial. He has a contract to write wing defense. He thinks he's going to make a lot of money out of it. Very interesting that when he goes to Texas, he has remarried second wife who has a lot of money. Let's go back into his first wife, who's a whole other story. Who Mitchell shot once. But that's a whole other story. I'll ask you a question. So he goes to Texas and he does not take any of the memorabilia in his office. He sends it to the home that he's just purchased in Virginia. What does that tell you? Very interesting. The first thing that happens is John Rogers gets lost going to Hawaii. And then, forgive me, I get old and my memory loses the Shenandoah crashes. And Mitchell was very friendly with Lansdown, the commander of the Shenandoah. And when these two events occur, Mitchell calls in a reporter into his office the day after. And writes a seething critique of the Army and the Navy and the Secretary of War. And basically calling them inept and responsible for the crash. And this is what leads to the, he calls them negligent. And this is what leads to the court martial. And he's court martial for insubordination. Rightly so, if you look at the record. No question in my mind that he was insubordinate. And the interesting thing is, one of the historians, his letters are in Milwaukee. The University of Milwaukee. One of the letters to his wife says that Mitchell looks forward to the court martial because it's going to promote the sale of his book. Very interesting, very, very interesting. So he's court-martialed. The trial gets immense publicity. It's a huge trial for its time. It's as big as the Scopes trial. And he's found guilty. But he's not demoted. And he's not sent out of the Army. The penalty is five years of inactive service at half pay. And in February, which is about two months after the verdict, he retires and becomes obscure. At this time, is the signal core still in charge of the air? No. He's not even, in the signal core, in World War I, the signal core was removed. The air service was established. Well, the air service was established. And then under Patrick's command, later in 1925, as a result of all of this controversy, there's the air bill of 1925 that establishes the air core as a core, which begins the process of disestablishing the Army air services from the Army. But the first step is to create an air core. But Mitchell is gone by now. But the Mitchell court-martial was part of all of the controversy, part of all of the discussions that led to these changes. Do you have a question? It's the date of the court-martial. 1925, the end. I think it was October, November. Was Mitchell involved in the design of World War II aircraft? And secondly, was he involved in the Northern bomb site? No. Had nothing to do with either of those. And I, by the way, I always, if you ever go to a museum, if you get close to a Northern bomb site, take a look at the nameplate. You know who made him? U.S. Navy, every single one. Army hated this. In 1933, Filoi, who now finally becomes head of the air service, is trying to get Northern bomb sites, and the Navy won't give it to him. They'll lend him, but they won't give it to him. Interesting point of fact, the bombing trials, the official names of the trials were the bombings of the Virginia capes. It's where the Austrian was sunk. Guess who had us apply the bomb sites for the Army? The Navy. At war with the Navy is the title. Why? And you can see none of this. The Air Force people have written none of this, because they have put, he's an iconic figure. And then, of course, the movie that John mentioned is very, very biased. Because they established him as a martyr. And the real story is that he was an advocate of air power. There were a lot of advocates of air power then, but he was overzealous. The real gut man, who really is responsible for the Independent Air Force, was Mason Patrick. And he's the one that got the legislation through for the Air Corps. And that also established extra payments for airmen. It laid out the basis for the beginnings of the U.S. Air Forces that came in World War II. I'm under, you know, B. Urella, the Guardian. Remember him? Oh, sure. I know a lot about C. Urella. He fought in France as a fighter pilot. He wasn't a fighter pilot. Yes, right. He wasn't a fighter pilot. He didn't fight in France. Oh, you've got to read it. Well, you'll read my next book. I have a book coming out called Striking the Hornet's Nest that will be out next fall. It's called Striking the Hornet's Nest. It's called The Northern Bombing Group and the Origins of Strategic Bombing. Anybody here hear about the Northern Bombing Group? We talk about strategic bombing. What was the first U.S. combat unit to conduct strategic bombing? It was the U.S. Navy's Northern Bombing Group in World War I. Another unwritten aspect. What's happened is it's very little good research work that has been done on World War I aviation. It was all, you know, when World War II came along, everybody spent tons and tons of time re-analyzing and writing about World War II. A lot of people were in it and World War I has been given very, very short thrift. One of the exciting things that happened to me when I did my research on Billy Mitchell was to find his flight log for his training that nobody had ever sighted. It is interesting now. In 1916, when he was in the signal corps, he went down to Norfolk and he took flying lessons at the Curtis School. So he wanted to fly. But of course, and he submits a bill for this under some obscure training bill for the National Guard, and they decline it. They say, no, you can't get paid because you're married and you can't fly. Yes? Did the second marriage last? Yes, it's interesting. Mitchell was a womanizer and probably a drinker, heavy drinker, not surprising. He has children by his first wife and it's not clear what happens in 19, trying to think, 23 or 24, their relationship is really shaky, so shaky that she's friends with the Secretary of the War and through her contacts, he has Mitchell sent to Walter Reed Hospital for psychiatric evaluation. And I got the report. So they find, they don't consider him psychotic, but they send him away on a long trip. They send him to Europe to study aviation. Guess what? Get him out of Washington again. Get him out of Washington. You're absolutely sure that there's been a relative of Walter who didn't firefight or fly with him? I doubt he didn't because he was in Italy getting Caproni planes. Well, you've got to remember the loyalty we had. He used to read the funny papers to us every Sunday morning in northern New Jersey and New York was doing the paper strike. The reason I say that is because, maybe, but it's kind of strange to see a fighter pilot being sent to Italy to procure bombers. Well, he did. He got the cross. What year did they throw him out of the Army? Mitchell? He didn't throw him out of the Army. 1925 was when the court martial was and he resigned in February of 26. What did he do after that? He lived over his wife's money and the book profits that he didn't get. He died in 1938 of a heart attack. You know, so he was, he was, after he was court-martialed for a while he was very active in writing and then he became irrelevant, essentially because what he was arguing didn't have any legs. Remember, the airplanes at that time didn't have a lot of, the performance was very limited. He became irrelevant to the services because they were battling over who was going to get airplanes. There wasn't enough money around. So the Army was, not the Army, but see the Air Service reported to the general staff of the Army and to the general staff of the Army it's just like in World War I. They were fighting the ground war. In World War I, Pershing was mostly interested in, as I said, tactical air. Why? Because they were interested in supporting the ground troops. They didn't have any vision of what we would call strategic bombing. Now, if you read the Air Force material they'll tell you about the studies that were going on Air Tactical School in 1931 about precision bombing. But what was the doctrine? What was actually happening is up until 1938 they were still practicing on ships. There's a very interesting general LeMay. Colonel LeMay was then a major and a navigator on a set of B-17s that intercepted this Italian cruise ship and they made all the headlines because they intercepted at 600 miles at sea. Again, what is it? You got brand new B-17s, they're heavy bombers. What is the Army trying to do? We can defend the coast defense. We can go out 600 miles. What they didn't tell you is they knew exactly where the ship was because they got radio reports from where she was steaming. They didn't carry any bombs. They had only dropped a bomb on a moving ship once. So they were still desperately trying to come up with a mission so they could get money to buy airplanes. As an aside, the initial request by the Air Service to buy B-17 was denied because the Secretary of War didn't think he needed them. And the only reason they got them was as an experimental squadron. So even as late as 1938 there was no talk about strategic bombing. In my opinion, this all came about when Roosevelt, as the beginning of World War I, began to come under threshold, began to realize you needed an air force without specifying what it was. And the first thing he started talking about was we needed to have hemispheric defense. And it wasn't until 1941 that what became the Army Air Forces are asked to write a war plan that Arnold picks three guys from the Air Corps Tactical School. And what were these three guys writing? Three guys were all writing precision bombing. And that's, in my opinion, where this whole idea of strategic bombing comes from. Of course, the Air Force never thought it out. They never thought about weather. They never thought about having long-range fighters. They never thought about the fact that all their bombing tests were in perfect weather conditions and stable targets. And that's a lot of reasons why the Air Corps, if anybody knows the history, had a lot of problems in Europe in the beginning of World War in 1942 and 43. What was the Navy doing? The Navy was sinking carriers with dive bombers because in 1929 and 1931, the Navy had figured out that the best way to achieve air superiority was attack the platform that launched the planes before they could get to you. So if you look at the difference between the Navy and the Army, in my opinion, the Navy was doing all the right things to learn how to fight the war, and the war came, they were in place. What was the Army doing? Question. At the same time, this is what I'm juggling with in my mind, right around 41, you're getting ready to mass produce these bombers to go over to Europe. And they're coming off the line.  Well, it turns out that one of the people who was involved was a guy. His name was Robert Lovett. Anybody hear the name of Robert Lovett? It's a World War I naval ace. Okay. It turns out, this is my book on the Hornets Nest. It turns out Lovett is one of the key players in establishing the Northern Bombing Group. And Lovett is very well tuned into all the requirements of strategic bombing. And I think it's in 1941, he was the Assistant Secretary of War for Air, which has been a vacant position. And the records are very hard to figure out. But he's one of the people, because that was his job, production. He's one of the people to do that. Also, my reading, because I'm researching this, a lot of this had just had to do with Roosevelt. Roosevelt deciding this is what we're going to do. And the first production order was 500, 500 bombers. So there's a myth about, he asked, Roosevelt asked for 50,000 planes. Well, that's what he asked for, but he got 9,000. So the bombers really only came out, started coming into production in 43, after the war was well underway. But they're cranking them out, boo boo boo boo, just like you were making tanks and everything. Everything. You amazed me how much happened for World War II in such a short period of time. Well, what you'll find out, I'm sorry I have to go back to striking the hornet's nest. Because one thing, I got into striking the hornet's nest because a lot of things I found out about Mitchell. Because when you read about Mitchell, you read about a lot of things that the Army was doing. Why didn't the Army have any strategic bombing units? Because the planes they were promised weren't produced. In September 1917, orders were placed for Caproni bombers and Hanley Page bombers. And they're going to come out in June, and they're going to have this huge force that the Army is going to have, and it was supposed to break the back of the Germans. Well, the only problem was, they couldn't make these damn planes in the U.S. It was a real production problem. But that was one of the lessons that was learned from World War I. And it's interesting that Lovett was involved with that. Mitchell, by the way, I was just reading a Ph.D. student who's doing work for the Air Force. And he keeps getting confused with strategical and strategic. And I don't believe Mitchell was aware of any of this because he was on the front lines. He was organizing combat units. He was doing operations. And all this other stuff was happening in the logistics end or in the states. And I don't think he was involved in it at all and knew anything about it. And when he comes to the states, he's not talking strategic bombing. He's talking about coastal defense. He really never talks about strategic bombing. And how could you? Who was your enemy and what were you going to use for aircraft? And again, if you go back to a lot, you've got to be very careful what you read the Air Force. Because remember, a lot of what was written by the Air Force was written after the war in 1947. And what was the Air Force trying to do? They wanted to show you how great the strategic air command was. So you always... I mean, I have a lot of fun because I like to look at a broad picture. I like to put things into context. I like to look at what the people is. And I hope I've given you an idea of who Mitchell was and why he did what he did. That's what I think. And what I've tried to do in the book is justify it with the facts. Yes? I was going to say that I understood that he was still considered one of the fathers of the American Air Force, but he was Mitchell. The reason... The reason he's considered that is because he wanted an independent Air Force. He advocated it. But as a scholar, the man who really made it happen was Mason Patrick. So I don't want to denigrate Mitchell. He was a great advocate of air power. No question about that. And he rightly deserves all the credit for what he did in World War I. And he said this is what makes him a very complex man. And I wouldn't say difficult to understand. It made it very interesting for me. So I hope I've shared some of these insights to you. Read the book, you'll see. Then you can write me and say, well, this isn't right or this isn't good.


Over 600 people vanished in Brazil, and no one has any idea where they went. Back in 1923, a small village was set up called Huér Verde, located in the jungles of Brazil. It was quite a busy village, all things considered, and visitors passed through all the time. However, one day, a group of visitors came through the village and found that it had become a ghost town. Food was still cooking on fires, clothes were being washed, but every single person from the village had vanished without a trace. A police investigation later that day found a single clue written on a board in one of the buildings. The note simply read, there is no salvation, no sign of any of the villagers was ever found. Follow for more creepy true stories.