The Amazing Pearl Harbor Prediction of Billy Mitchell

Billy Mitchell is often referred to as the Father of the United States Air Force. He was the first one to suggest that airplanes could be used to drop bombs on enemy naval ships. But a recent visit to a museum with my father illuminated a really bizarre fact: Billy Mitchell predicted the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 17 years before it happened. In this episode, we learn all about Billy Mitchell, military aviation history and his amazing prediction. Then we chat with Comedian Jay Black, who joins us live from a cruise ship gig!

If you ever fly through the Milwaukee airport, it’s a tiny little airport, but there are two things there that are really great. One of them is the Renaissance Book store, which is a used book store that’s a lot of fun to go through. The other is an entire museum dedicated to hometown hero, Billy Mitchell. So let’s learn a little about this amazing aviator.

Billy Mitchell is often considered the “Father of the United States Air Force.” That’s because he was the first one to argue that it would be possible to create bombers that could fly over and attack battleships from the air. Mitchell was born in 1879 in Nice, France while his American parents were on vacation. His father was a wealthy Wisconsin Senator who had served in the Civil War. His grandfather had established a railroad and bank in Milwaukee, so he was born into wealth. Mitchell went to Racine College and Columbian University (that was the original name of George Washington University) but dropped out to fight in the Spanish American War. He fought for General MacArthur – this was Arthur MacArthur, the father of the famous General Douglas MacArthur in the Philippines during the Phillipine-American War in 1899 and eventually joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, which was the group that handled the Army’s communications and information systems. 

In 1901, he was in Alaska helping to lay telegraph lines through the wilderness and experienced Otto Lilienthal’s experiments with gliders. In 1908, he had watched Orville Wright fly his 1908 Flyer in Virginia. Wright had spent the week flying his aircraft daily and showing it off to the military at Fort Myer. These were his first experiences with aviation and he became particularly interested in the use of aircraft to fight wars. When he was eventually promoted to serve on the General Staff of the Signal Corps, he was the natural choice to head up the new Aviation Section of the Army Signal Corps. He had been the one talking non-stop about how future wars would be fought using aircraft. This was around 1913 and by 1916, at the age of 38, he took private flying lessons and became an aviator himself – just before the United States entered into World War One. 

Until the first world war, the United States military had only used aircraft for reconnaissance, mostly through the use of balloons, but then with the 1909 Wright A Flyer. In France, Mitchell studied the production of aircraft for the use in military. He met with Royal Air Force Commander Sir Hugh Trenchard, who was also calling on the use of offensive military aircraft at the time. 

In 1918, Billy Mitchell had been promoted to Brigadier General and in the battle of St. Mihiel, Mitchell conducted aerial attack campaigns that wreaked havoc on German forces. He spent the war and the next few years arguing that the Air Force should be its own dependent armed service separate from the Army and should be used to bomb enemy naval forces. In 1921, he started lobbying to the military that he could use a Martin MB2 bomber to sink battleships. So he arranged for a demonstration, moored an out of commission captured German battleship in place, gathered a bunch of big wigs like the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy and showed them once and for all that he could bomb the ship, which he did successfully. And while the test showed how effective aerial bombing could be, the military – particularly the Navy, did not like Mitchell’s heavy-handed tactics and criticisms of the armed forces. 

There is a lot to cover in Billy Mitchell’s military career – so much that we can’t cover it all here. The important part of this story happened in 1923, just after his bombing demonstration. Mitchell traveled to the Far East on an inspection tour. And it was that tour where he really saw the destructive threat of air superiority. In his report submitted to his commanding officers after his trip, he warned that Japan was dead set on expansionism and would one day attack the United States.

When Billy Mitchell returned from the Pacific in 1924, he submitted a 328-page manuscript. It ended up getting hidden by the military and eventually lost in the files of the War Dept for decades, but when it was rediscovered, people who read it were amazed at what they saw. 

The report detailed what Mitchell thought would happen in the future. Keep in mind, this was 1924. He said Japan would attack Hawaii as part of their expansionist plans. And they would focus that attack on Oahu. These are his exact words as written in the report:

“There is no adequate defense against air attack except an air force. This can be supplemented by auxiliaries on the ground, such as cannon, machine guns, and balloon barrages, but without air power these arrangements act only to give a false sense of security, such as the ostrich must feel when he hides his head in the sand.…”

He continued, “Attack will be launched as follows: Bombardment Attack to be made on Ford’s Island at 7:30 A.M.…Attack to be made on Clark Field (Philippine Islands) at 10:40 a.m.”

The details in the report were staggering. He went into great minutia on what forces Japan would have, the time it would take to reach their target, the defense of the Hawaiian Islands, and more. 

The military didn’t take it well. They saw it as more criticism and insubordination. That was just one of the reasons he was court-martialed in 1925, an act that General Douglas MacArthur described as “one of the most distasteful orders I ever received.” The blimp “Shenandoah” had crashed in 1925, killing 14 and 3 different sea planes had crashed killing their pilots. After these events, Mitchell had written a statement blaming senior military leaders. They obviously saw this as mutiny and President Coolidge himself ordered the Court Martial. They ended up finding him guilty and suspended him from active duty while reducing his pay by half for 5 years. He resigned the following year and spent the rest of his life preaching about air power. In 1936, he died from heart disease at the young age of 56. This was 5 years before the unthinkable would happen in Hawaii. It was, of course unthinkable to everyone who wasn’t named Billy Mitchell. 

Remember his prediction said Pearl Harbor would be attacked at 7:30am and the Philippines would be attacked at 10:40am. On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked by air by the Japanese starting at 7:48am. They also attacked Clark Field in the Philippines. His prediction on that attack was only off by about an hour. 

Of course Mitchell never lived to see his prediction come true. He never lived to see the Air Force become it’s own entity. He never lived to see the American military’s air superiority. All of these things, he was right about and died before they ever happened. He’s been given his due respect since then. He’s the only person to have a military aircraft named after him. He’s widely regarded as the father of the American Air Force. The Internet Says it’s True.

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