SMS Ostfriesland and Billy Mitchell

Curtis Lemay said that one day on Saipan he was approached by Gen Joe Stilwell. He told him that he wanted to sit down and talk to him but first he had a B-29 raid to launch. After they got the B-29's off Lemay sat down to talk to Stilwell, trying to explain what he was doing. He found Stilwell to be as yet unconvinced that even the wheel was of any real use in warfare and utterly focused on the traditional foot soldier approach to combat.

Months later, at the surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, Gen Stilwell approached Lemay and said he had been looking around Japan. He said that he knew what the Japanese had before and saw what the B-29's had left. He told Lemay that he finally understood what he had been trying to tell him.

I served 25 years in the USAF and I can tell you that the attitudes among military people sometimes resemble a Monty Python skt. The fact that so many supposedly intelligent and well-educated people refuse to focus on real objectives and instead say, "But we do things such and such a way in my career field and we have to do that here as well in order to act like the Air Force." is astonishing.

from Wiki; a brief account of Mitchells Post WW I promotions/demotions and job assignments.

Mitchell returned to the United States in January 1919; it had been widely expected throughout the Air Service that he would receive the post-war assignment of Director of Air Service. Instead, he returned to find that Maj. Gen. Charles T. Menoher, an artilleryman who had commanded the Rainbow Division in France, had been appointed director on the recommendation of his classmate General Pershing, to maintain operational control of aviation by the ground forces.[12]

Mitchell received appointment on February 28, 1919, as Director of Military Aeronautics,[13] to head the flying component of the Air Service, but that office was in name only as it was a wartime agency that would expire six months after the signing of a peace treaty. Menoher instituted a reorganization of the Air Service based on the divisional system of the AEF, eliminating the DMA as an organization, and Mitchell was assigned as Third Assistant Executive, in charge of the Training and Operations Group, Office of Director of Air Service (ODAS), in April 1919. He maintained his temporary wartime rank of brigadier general until June 18, 1920, when he was reduced to lieutenant colonel, Signal Corps (Menoher was reduced to brigadier general in the same orders).[14]

When the Army was reorganized by Congress on June 4, 1920, the Air Service was recognized as a combatant arm of the line, third in size behind the Infantry and Artillery. On July 1, 1920, Mitchell was promoted to the Regular Army (i.e., permanent) rank of colonel in the Signal Corps, but also received a recess appointment (as did Menoher) on July 16 to become Assistant Chief of Air Service with the rank of brigadier general. On July 30, 1920, he was transferred and promoted to the permanent rank of colonel, Air Service, with date of rank from July 1, placing him first in seniority among all Air Service branch officers. On March 4, 1921, Mitchell was appointed Assistant Chief of Air Service by new President Warren G. Harding with consent of the Senate. On April 27, Mitchell was reappointed as a brigadier general with date of rank retroactive to July 2, 1920

Please note that in 1916 Mitchell had been a Major.

Even in the severely reduced Army of 1920-21 a colonel/brigadier general was NOT a senior officer who made policy in any other branch of the army.
For many officers being in the AIr Service was NOT a fast track to promotion at this time. IF anything, for most officers, time spent in the Air service slowed their promotional track.
This was the opposite of war time. The Officers that stayed in the Air Service did so because the enjoyed flying and they believed in the concept.

Zipper730 said:

I figure if you have a goal that your superiors will like, you just tell them directly; if you have a goal that you have that they won't like but will work, you just tell them "some variation of the truth", or just risk some "inexactitude of terminology", while you implement your plan and carry it out. You of course tell the like-minded what you're doing if they can keep their mouths shut.

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First of all, in any properly disciplined military force, you are not authorized goals of your own. Your goals are determined by your superiors and passed to you in the form of orders.
Secondly, the behaviour you described above is exactly what the upstart radical young officers in Japan's Kwantung Army did in 1931 with the seizure of Manchuria and again in 1937 with the invasion of China proper. Neither of those actions was a result of national policy emanating from Supreme Headquarters in Tokyo, but came from the plotting of young officers to further a policy agenda at odds with the government's official position. And look where it got them.
There was a large and vocal minority in Japan (mostly younger) who revered the glorious successes of the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars and whose agenda could be best described as: "Make Japan Great Again!" While not large enough to triumph at the polls, this movement had become adept at manipulating the media through alternative narratives and manipulating the levers of power through political assassination. All in the guise of patriotism and "the glory of the Empire". And in reality, the need for "lebensraum", or "living space" for their overflowing population.
That behavior you described has been seen before. And it has consequences.
Cheers,
Wes

I worked with two particularly outstanding officers in my career that come to mind. Both were top notch guys and were chosen for an exciting new program that was so clearly superior to anything else we had - in concept - that it was decreed to be The Future. I was not lucky enough to be chosen for that fabulous program, and had to work on the old stuff it was replacing. No, I was not so lucky; I was incredibly more lucky! Because that fabulous clearly superior program turned out to be an unmitiaged disaster, never attaining even as much as 20% of its capability and costing over 100 times as much as had been promised. The Secty of the Air Force himself said it was a huge mistake that we would take years to recover from.

Then those same two exceptional officers were given key roles in another new effort, also one that would revolutionize everything. And in an even shorter period of time that new concept turned out to a horrible idea. A former Air Force Chief of Staff said that the problem was obvious; fire everyone they put in charge and go rehire the ones they fired.

So, with those disasters on their records, what so you think happened to those two outstanding officers?

They both made General. After all, it was not their dumb ideas that caused those disasters; all they did was try to implement them.

Me, I thought that original idea was great, but then I was in High School when they dreamed it up. By the time the second idea came along I had a great deal of relevant experience and I let everyone know it was a dumb idea. Needless to say, I did not make General, which is fine, because I would not have wanted to lie. Those other two guys did not have to lie because they were ignorant of what I had learned.

Zipper730 said:

Is that due to doctrine, or due to the fact that only those that can think strategic get to command at that level?

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The Army's training, equipment, doctrine, and focus is all about the battlefield and its supply and support. For just about any officer below the level of a theater commander, srategic operations against the enemy's heartland are seen as "above my pay grade".
"Who does this impudent young whippersnapper, only a Brigadier, and a brevet at that, think he is, flying in the face of the time honored lessons of millenia of warfare with his preposterous claims for these bloody kites? Why he's too bloody young to be a light colonel; whoever made him a general?"
Cheers,
Wes

XBe02Drvr said:

First of all, in any properly disciplined military force, you are not authorized goals of your own. Your goals are determined by your superiors and passed to you in the form of orders.

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Yeah but if you're the head of aviation or #2 in charge of aviation you have a degree of authority to implement things within the context of your superiors.

Secondly, the behaviour you described above is exactly what the upstart radical young officers in Japan's Kwantung Army did in 1931 with the seizure of Manchuria and again in 1937 with the invasion of China proper. Neither of those actions was a result of national policy emanating from Supreme Headquarters in Tokyo, but came from the plotting of young officers to further a policy agenda at odds with the government's official position. And look where it got them.

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Defeated by us in 1945?

There was a large and vocal minority in Japan (mostly younger) who revered the glorious successes of the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars and whose agenda could be best described as: "Make Japan Great Again!"

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Why does that sound familiar?

That behavior you described has been seen before. And it has consequences.

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Usually does

The Army's training, equipment, doctrine, and focus is all about the battlefield and its supply and support.

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That's true, but the concept of cavalry involved deep penetration. If you had an aviation arm that had to execute the Army's doctrine it could be built heavily around battlefield support with some ability to execute deep-raids. It'd probably end up more like the Luftwaffe admittedly. That said the size of the US theoretically would have naturally lead to a desire for long ranged aircraft. Not sure if altitude would have been emphasized as much.

How's the US Navy's doctrine in comparison?

Zipper730 said:

Sure, but the fact is that the concept could easily be extended to the (then) current day to wherever it matt

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In an ideal world, with flexible, forward thinking minds, so it could. The terrestrial military mind, steeped in the lessons of thousands of years of warfare, tends toward skepticism about newfangled ideas, which usually get a lot of good men killed for no good reason.

Zipper730 said:

That's true, but the concept of cavalry involved deep penetration. If you had an aviation arm that had to execute the Army's doctrine it could be built heavily around battlefield support with some ability to execute deep-raid

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You just unwittingly described the USAAC of 1939.
Interesting "what if": If Mitchell had had his way, would the USAAC of 1939 looked more like the USAAF of 1944-45?

Zipper730 said:

Yeah but if you're the head of aviation or #2 in charge of aviation you have a degree of authority to implement things within the context of your superiors.

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In theory, yes, but if you're only a Brigadier and all the rest of the Army's high command are ground pounders who outrank you and control your budget, as well as the regulations your branch operates under, your autonomy is limited.
Cheers,
Wes

XBe02Drvr said:

In an ideal world, with flexible, forward thinking minds

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Not even, in an ideal world we wouldn't need a military and weapons of war at all. That said, I know what you mean...

You just unwittingly described the USAAC of 1939. . . . Interesting "what if": If Mitchell had had his way, would the USAAC of 1939 looked more like the USAAF of 1944-45?

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I figure it would have looked like the RAF without any of the experiences learned in their imperialistic policies (i.e. involving close air support) unless we ended up failing to implement policy in Central America & South America and our attempts to flatten everything in sight failed.

In theory, yes, but if you're only a Brigadier and all the rest of the Army's high command are ground pounders who outrank you and control your budget, as well as the regulations your branch operates under, your autonomy is limited.

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Of course, but you know that there are sometimes ways to creatively interpret orders to suit your own purpose. Of course this cannot be done all the time, it requires discernment. If you get caught -- beaucoup trouble.

Zipper730 said:

Of course, but you know that there are sometimes ways to creatively interpret orders to suit your own purpose. Of course this cannot be done all the time, it requires discernment.

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True enough, but in the 20s and 30s the Air Corps was the most publicly visible part of the Army, making discernment and dissembling problematical. Creative interpretations would be hard to hide,
Cheers,
Wes

XBe02Drvr said:

True enough, but in the 20s and 30s the Air Corps was the most publicly visible part of the Army

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That's true, and aviation is fundamentally interesting -- that's why were both sitting here at our computers talking about it. That said, some of the promotion was Billy Mitchells doing.

The IJN had 2 issues. Japan was not strong and USA was. The Washington naval treaty was blasted as unfair by Japan but even in the real world, America could always outbuild and outspend and outgun Japan in every way.
So cannot beat on quantity so they went for quality. They built the best torpedo. They trained extensively in night fighting to find an edge. The aircrews were well trained and motivated and the training was harsh and only the best got through.

This was the force which the PoW and Repulse met. Doublethink! We can sink battleships because they are vulnerable but we build battleships because they are unsinkable.

The Yamato was big because the Japanese believed that were worth 2 battleships but it didn't cost 2 battleships.

It turned out cheaper to build a big one than 2 regular ones. So for a limited industrial base which was relatively poor it was a no brainer.

XBe02Drvr said:

First of all, in any properly disciplined military force, you are not authorized goals of your own. Your goals are determined by your superiors and passed to you in the form of orders.
Secondly, the behaviour you described above is exactly what the upstart radical young officers in Japan's Kwantung Army did in 1931 with the seizure of Manchuria and again in 1937 with the invasion of China proper. Neither of those actions was a result of national policy emanating from Supreme Headquarters in Tokyo, but came from the plotting of young officers to further a policy agenda at odds with the government's official position. And look where it got them.
There was a large and vocal minority in Japan (mostly younger) who revered the glorious successes of the Sino- and Russo-Japanese Wars and whose agenda could be best described as: "Make Japan Great Again!" While not large enough to triumph at the polls, this movement had become adept at manipulating the media through alternative narratives and manipulating the levers of power through political assassination. All in the guise of patriotism and "the glory of the Empire". And in reality, the need for "lebensraum", or "living space" for their overflowing population.
That behavior you described has been seen before. And it has consequences.
Cheers,
Wes

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This is not always the case. Rommel disobeyed orders so many times ive lost count. Manstein did the same as well as Guderian . Japanese military commanders frequently disobeyed orders.

Sometimes commanders acting on their own initiative were reprimanded , sometimes they were not.


In the American military tradition, there are few instances of military commanders disobeying orders and getting away with it unscathed. The result was that during the war American leaders were exceptionally unimaginative. That was repeated in the post war era. US military thinking for more than 100 years has been dominated by the overwhelming importance of firepower over manouver, which as a spinoff has tended to produce a military class almost incapable of creativity.

parsifal said:

has tended to produce a military class almost incapable of creativity.

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"Creativity is above your paygrade, soldier! Don't interpret, execute."

The Desert Storm air attacks started 28 years ago yesterday.

I recall what a surrendering Iraqi soldier said when our ground troops moved forward:

"Aside from destroying all our equipment and blowing up all our supplies your air attacks did not do anything."

Clearly they were a waste of time.

Not quite a waste of time - the US and allies were trying to fight a "humanitarian" war - we dropped leaflets with warnings like "don't sleep in your tanks tonight - we're coming back to destroy them." Lots of busted equipment, fewer dead bodies...

Cheers,



Dana

parsifal said:

This is not always the case. Rommel disobeyed orders so many times ive lost count. Manstein did the same as well as Guderian .

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If you have a winning record then disobeying orders can be overlooked (?). at least until there are a few failures on the board.
In peacetime there is no win/loss record.

In Mitchell's case he was trying to preach air power to a class of officers who didn't think the motor vehicle was here to stay (replace horses??? are you daft?) let alone budget arguments with the navy.

In defense of the Navy the ability of the aircraft of the early (or even late) 1920s to project power more than a few hundred miles and do it at night or in bad weather was severally limited.

Shortround6 said:

In Mitchell's case he was trying to preach air power to a class of officers who didn't think the motor vehicle was here to stay (replace horses??? are you daft?)

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Pershing and his contemporaries had shouldered trapdoor Springfields and rolling block Remingtons as cadets, and to them the bolt action rifle was a modern marvel, to say nothing of the machine gun. They looked at the Curtiss Jenny and couldn't imagine the B29.
Cheers,
Wes

Has anyone actually looked at Mitchell's results against SMS Ostfriesland?

On 21st May the ship was hit with six 230 lb bombs (of thirty four dropped) and two 550 lb bombs (of eight dropped). This had little visible effect, so eleven 600 lb bombs were dropped, scoring two hits. Ostfriesland now took on a slight list astern, her port engine room flooded, but she was far from sunk.

This was not at all the result that Mitchell was after, but the Navy did get a chance to evaluate the damage, the reason they had agreed to the tests.

On day two Mitchell's men dropped five 1,100 lb bombs scoring three hits and holing the starboard side. Before the Navy could assess the damage the bombers followed up with seven 2,000 lb bombs. One hit 25' from the port side, then another, 5' closer. The ship was split open and sank in about 15 minutes.

The test proved that aircraft could sink ships, there was however nothing profound about aircraft dropping hundreds of bombs (in all the tests, not just Ostfriesland) to sink immobile and undefended ships. Sixteen Navy and sixteen Air Corps aircraft had dropped 38,320 pounds of ordnance on a defenceless battleship and eventually sank it.

The joint Navy-Army board report concluded, not unreasonably, that the battleship remained 'the backbone of the fleet and the bulwark of the Nation's sea defense' and that whilst aircraft added to the dangers faced by battleships they had 'not made the battleship obsolete'.

The Board also noted that from an altitude of 2,500 feet or less, aiming at an immobile target 546' long and 93' wide the aircraft had achieved an accuracy of 19%. It's why the USN developed the Norden sight. They might as well not have bothered. In fleet bombing exercises, using the USS Utah, in 1939, with Utah allowed unrestricted manoeuvre and bombing from 17,000' just 1.1% of bombs were estimated hits. In 1940 this rose to 1.9%. The corresponding figures for dive bombers were 18.1% and 23.1%. The chances of hitting a moving target from altitude, level bombing, were pretty close to zero and remained so throughout WW2.

Cheers

Steve

Only one bomb dropped by that flight of Kates hit and blew up the USS Arizona.

parsifal said:

This is not always the case. Rommel disobeyed orders so many times ive lost count. Manstein did the same as well as Guderian . Japanese military commanders frequently disobeyed orders.

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Basically that's the reality of things. The question is basically determined by whether you get caught at all, and if you do, if the superiors are more concerned with results rather than exact compliance.