A Concise History of the US Air Force - Air Force Historical Studies ...

direct or indirect support of other components of the Nation’s armed for-
ces.” It believed the primary target was the adversary’s army. The most
vocal opponent of this view was Assistant Chief of the Air Service,
Brigadier General Billy Mitchell, who saw in strategic bombing the prop-
er use of air power. Close air support and interdiction, he asserted, only
perpetuated trench warfare and the horrors of World-War I-like slaughter.
He argued for a force that could strike directly at an enemy’s vitals, “cen-
ters of production of all kinds, means of transportation, agricultural areas,
ports and shipping,” forcing “a decision before the ground troops or sea
forces could join in battle.”
Mitchell’s actions created opponents as well as adherents. A
series of highly publicized ship-bombing tests begun in 1921 overshad-
owed the ideas he had espoused in books such as Winged Defense: The
Development and Possibilities of Modem Air Power-Economic and
Military. Air Service bombers sank several unmanned, anchored ships,
including battleships. Mitchell’s apparent success, despite poor bombing
accuracy, diverted both the public’s and the Congress’s attention from
more critical aerial achievements and issues of the period. Mitchell’s
troubles with Army and Navy leaders eventually led to his court martial
after he spoke intemperately about the crash of the airship Shenandoah in
1925. (He blamed the loss on “incompetency, criminal negligence, and
almost treasonable administration.”) President Coolidge, famous for his
reticence and nicknamed “Silent Cal,” expressed a widely-held view
when he contended, “General Mitchell [has] talked more in the last three
months than I [have] in my whole life.”
Behind such scenes, Chief of the Air Corps Major General James
Fechet urged his officers in 1928 to look beyond the battlefield, beyond
close air support, and find a way for the Air Corps to win a war indepen-
dently. He imposed only three limitations: First, the Air Corps had to get
the most for any money available. Second, civilians could not be targets
of aerial attack. Secretary of War Newton Baker had ruled earlier that
doing so “constituted an abandonment of the time-honored practice
among civilized people of restricting bombardment to fortified places or
to places from which the civilian population had an opportunity to be
removed.” Americans would not undertake terror raids, he said, “on the
most elemental ethical and humanitarian grounds.” Third, anything the
Air Corps did would have to solve or avoid the evils of trench warfare.
One officer who answered Fechet’s challenge was Lieutenant
Kenneth Walker. Conventional wisdom taught that while airmen achieved
high accuracy when they bombed from high altitudes, they exposed themselves
to deadly ground fire. Walker showed that daylight high-altitude
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