The Influence Of Alexander Mitchell On The Navy

Born in Nice, France to John L. Mitchell, a wealthy Wisconsin senator and his wife, Harriet. Mitchell. William Lendrum "Billy" Mitchell grew up on an estate near Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Alexander Mitchell, his grandfather, was one of the wealthiest people in Wisconsin for his generation and established what became the Milwaukee Road along with Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Mitchell Park and the street Mitchell Boulevard were named in honor of Alexander. Billy Mitchell was the eldest of ten, and coming from a wealthy family he attended Columbian College (now George Washington University), and at the age of 18 he enlisted as a Private during the Spanish-American War. He became interested in aviation and was able to the Signal Corps due to his father's influence.

In 1916 at age 38 he began taking private flying lessons because the Army considered him too
To attempt to counter Mitchell, the Navy elected to perform its own test, and in late 1920 the Navy sunk an old battleship using its own aircraft in hope of finding that there was an “…improbability of a modern battleship being either destroyed or completely put out of action by aerial bombs." Despite that Navy dead-set on disproving Mitchell, a leaked report revealed that “the Navy's "tests" were done with dummy sand bombs and that the ship was actually sunk using high explosives placed on the ship, Congress introduced two resolutions urging new tests and backed the Navy into a corner.” (Correll, J. T. Billy Mitchell and the Battleships. Pg. 64-65) The Navy responded by blocking all of the news regarding the tests from until all of the data could be analyzed, at which point only official report could publicize the results of the tests. Mitchell felt that it was the Navy attempt to bury the