THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, July 31, 1996 TAG: 9607310031
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: 172 lines
The pride of the Kaiser's navy was designed to take a beating.
The battleship Ostfriesland had taken 18 hits in World War I's Battle of Jutland. It had even struck a mine, only to shake off its injuries and steam for port.
Its skin was thick, its decks hard, its innards girded with watertight compartments. It sped through the roughest of seas on powerful engines, outrunning lesser foes. Its guns were fearsome.
Only one weapon could sink such a ship, American admirals believed: another battleship.
But on a hot, windy afternoon 75 years ago this month, the mighty Ostfriesland sank to the Atlantic's bottom off Cape Henry without another battleship in sight.
The Ostfriesland was designed to take a beating, but it was unready for Billy Mitchell.
Taking off from a swampy aerodrome in Hampton, Army Brig. Gen. William L. Mitchell led seven spindly biplanes over the Atlantic on July 21, 1921, then ordered them to swoop down on the anchored Ostfriesland.
The first dropped a one-ton bomb over the ship at about 12:15 p.m. that Thursday, only to see it fall short of its target. A harmless column of water leapt from the sea.
Five other pilots joined the attack, diving Martin MB-2 bombers toward the battleship from 1,700 feet. Only one of their bombs hit, shattering the tip of the warship's bow, doing no real damage.
But two of the bombs fell into the ocean within yards of the Ostfriesland's hull. Their detonations sent a shock wave through the water that split the ship's seams.
Congressmen, the Navy secretary and the chief of naval operations, standing on the deck of a nearby Navy transport, watched, goggle-eyed, as the battleship listed to port, rolled onto its back and slid, stern-first, under the waves.
By 12:40 p.m., the Ostfriesland was gone.
Mitchell, still circling overhead, had done what the brass said could not be done: With a squadron of planes made of canvas, wood and wire, he had sunk a capital ship - and, in the process, had shredded the Navy's doctrines about how to wage war.
That afternoon off the Virginia capes marked the beginning of the end of set-piece battles at sea, of men-o'-war and broadsides, and the beginning of a new style of combat built around aircraft carriers and lightning strikes from the sky.
The man behind this airborne triumph was a 41-year-old tempestuous visionary, a confident loudmouth who regarded the airplane - still a fledgling, faddish addition to America's military arsenal - as the key to the country's fighting future.
Born in France in 1879, Mitchell had grown up in Wisconsin, enlisted as an Army private during the Spanish-American War, and later won an officer's commission.
In late 1915, assigned to the Signal Corps in Washington, D.C., he decided to fly. He commuted each weekend to Newport News, where inventor, daredevil and pioneer aviator Glenn Curtiss ran a flying school beside the James River.
A few months later, when the United States entered World War I, Mitchell was ready to put his flying skill to work. He became the top air commander of western Europe, leading a fleet of 1,500 American and French planes - the largest concentration of air power seen to that time - to help crack the German salient at St. Mihiel.
Later, in the Meuse-Argonne campaign, he sent 200-plane bombing formations against German positions. He returned to America the assistant chief of the Army's air service - and obsessed.
The Navy had its own aircraft by then, but valued them for little more than reconnaissance. The airplanes of the day, after all, were mechanically unreliable and heart-stoppingly rickety, and the seagoing service was busy with other worries - most notably, maintaining a large fleet of battleships.
These massive vessels, bristling with modern guns and sheathed in steel, were the linchpin of naval warmaking: They could lay siege to coastal cities, close down shipping lanes, destroy weaker ships and, by their mere presence off a foreign shore, send a powerful reminder of America's might and resolve.
Along came Mitchell.
Why spend millions on a battleship, he asked, when it could be sunk by an airplane costing one-thousandth as much?
His superiors scoffed. Mitchell stuck by his claim. An airplane fitted with bombs, he argued, could sink anything afloat. He said it often enough that he began to wear on the Navy's patience.
So it was that in the summer of 1921, more to shut Mitchell up than to vindicate him, the Navy invited a group of Navy and Army flyers to an ordnance test off the capes.
The Navy would assemble a collection of worn-out American vessels and German ships seized in the war, which the modern fleet would use as targets. Mitchell's flyers could have a crack at them, as well.
Through June and July, the flyers dropped tens of thousands of bombs of explosives on a German submarine, a destroyer, a cruiser. They scored few hits, but managed to sink them all.
Navy leaders were unimpressed. There was little challenge in dropping explosives on a defenseless, stationary, lightly armored destroyer, and little surprise in seeing it sink.
The exercises entered their final two days with the appearance of the 546-foot Ostfriesland. Sixteen Navy and 16 Army planes appeared overhead on July 20. By the time they headed back to the coast, the ship's deck was pocked with smoking holes, but it showed no danger of sinking.
Then came the noon of July 21 and the whine of Mitchell's Army planes, sluggish under the weight of their bombs, their canvas skins flapping.
The Navy wasn't too happy that it happened,'' said Paul McAllister, a civilian historian for the Air Combat Command at Langley Air Force Base, the Hampton bog from which Mitchell launched the attack.
``Certainly, there was a great celebration here at Langley. It was a tremendous vindication for the airmen. But the official reaction of the Army and Navy was more subdued.''
To put it mildly. While Langley reputedly erupted in a massive bonfire party, airmen and civilians snake-dancing through the night, the brass began issuing a series of rationalizations for the sinking.
Had the battleship been moving, had its guns been manned, the aircraft would not have succeeded, the Navy said. A joint Army-Navy board headed by John J. Pershing ruled that the battleship remained ``the backbone of the fleet.''
That view did not end with government. Hampton Roads' largest newspaper, The Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, ruled in an editorial that ``this test has not sustained Gen. Mitchell's contention.''
``This is not to make light of the work of bombing planes,'' the newspaper argued. ``But it is to say that the burden of proof rested upon advocates of the airplane to demonstrate its undubitable superiority to the capital ship, and the airplane has failed to establish its case.''
A minority saw the future unfolding, however. William Fulham, a retired Navy admiral, wrote Mitchell that he had proved the airplane ``the greatest of all revolutions in warfare afloat and ashore.
``Forts are gone,'' he wrote, ``and no nation that has good sense will lay the keel of another battleship of the present type.''
For all its protestations, the Navy learned from the experiment. A year after the bombing, the service was constructing the first aircraft carrier, the Langley. Two years after the Ostfriesland sank, the Navy invited Mitchell to sink two American battleships off the coast at Cape Hatteras. This time the service was more of a partner than a competitor in the effort.
The Army was to adopt his thinking, as well: Mitchell argued in 1923 that traditional field battle might be rendered meaningless by aircraft, which could ignore enemy troops in favor of bombing cities and factories far behind the lines. That philosophy was played out in both theaters of World War II.
The lessons Mitchell learned were harder. Increasingly outspoken in his drumbeat for aviation, he eventually was busted to colonel and exiled to Texas.
That didn't quiet him: When the Navy dirigible Shenandoah broke up in a storm over Pennsylvania in 1925, Mitchell accused his superiors of ``incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense.''
Court-martialed and found guilty of making statements to the detriment of good order and military discipline, he was suspended from the Army for five years and denied pay and benefits. President Calvin Coolidge later restored half of his salary, but Mitchell quit the service.
It wasn't until five years after his 1936 death that Mitchell's prophecies about naval aviation were brought home to many Americans.
On a December morning that year, an armada of torpedo bombers and fighters swarmed over Hawaii and bombed the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. The battleships there were modern and manned. Japanese planes sank them, nonetheless.
Mitchell had not only seen the possibility of such an attack, but had been sure of this one, specifically.
Since the 1920s he had warned American leaders of Japan's military growth. He had predicted that a Japanese attack on the Navy was inevitable.
He had predicted that it would happen at Ford's Island, part of Pearl Harbor. He even predicted the time of day it would come.
He was off by 25 minutes. ILLUSTRATION: Photos Courtesy of the Hatteras Monitor Collection
The Ostfries sinks after being hit by Mitchell's pilots
Mitchell tested his ideas by bombing ships off Virginia.
FILE PHOTOs
Army Brig. Gen. William L. Mitchell
KEYWORDS: U.S NAVY NAVAL AIR WARFARE AIRPLANE BOMB by CNB