First World Flight: The perils of genius, and the rewards of perseverance
Written: Mar 11 '03
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Pros: A page-turner, fascinating glimpse into another era of flight and the military ethos. Great pictures!
Cons: Billy Mitchell comes off as a really high-maintenance employee.
The Bottom Line: A fascinating look at a messianic and prophetic personality, and the men who believed in him.
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| pageclot's Full Review: Spencer Lane - First World Flight: The Odyssey of ... |
Paul Moore: It must be nice to always believe you know better, to always think you're the smartest person in the room.
Jane Craig: No. It's awful.
- Broadcast News
While reading First World Flight, Spencer Lane's homage to Billy Mitchell and to the men who completed (with massive logistical support) the first round-the-world flight, I was reminded both of the above quote from Broadcast News and of William Manchester's American Caesar, covering the life and times of Douglas MacArthur. I wonder if brilliant people carry within them the seeds of their own destruction. MacArthur was perhaps one of the most brilliant American commanders in World War II, yet he was ever suspicious of what fresh plot was hatching against him in Washington. He used the presses to advance his own causes, hogged the glory in the Pacific theatre, and dabbled, sometimes disastrously, in politics. The power of his intellect and personality allowed him to dominate most of those with whom he came into contact. And yet... his military career ended on a sour note, recalled by Truman from Korea.
Younger than MacArthur, Billy Mitchell's life followed a similar path. He had the same drive to succeed, the yearning to know everything, the charisma, the physical courage, elements of paranoia, and the desire to always be in the limelight. And like MacArthur, Mitchell's military career ended suddenly and controversially. Oddly enough, MacArthur served on Mitchell's court martial panel.
Spencer Lane's First World Flight is the story of two "odysseys". One odyssey is Billy Mitchell's, and Lane ably relates the genuinely heroic accomplishments of Mitchell's early military career, as a member of the signal corps, and later on, in World War I, flying borrowed French planes fearlessly over the sinuous front lines, spotting for artillery, and gathering intelligence for use by the American military. Through Lane, one gets the impression of Mitchell as a forceful, ambitious, tireless military machine, always thinking, always right, always frustrated with the lack of support from the powers that be. In the environment of World War I, watching, from the air, as the youth of Europe and America hurled themselves at each other, only to be cut to pieces by artillery fire, it must have been very frustrating to know that it didn't have to be that way, that air power was the way out of the deadlock.
Mitchell was a big believer that with a few more dollars, a bit more support, a few more planes, and the power of the Air force to shape its own destiny, the war could be won a lot quicker, and lives saved. He was brilliant; there's no denying that, and tended to act ahead of getting orders, under the assumption that it's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to wait for permission. It's pretty easy to see where, in a military very different than today's technocrat meritocracy, Mitchell would rub people the wrong way. His flouting of rules and convention held the sting of reproach for plodding military careerists who had spent a lifetime filling out papers correctly, making the right friends, and marrying a rich woman so you can use her money to meet the right people who can put your career on the right track.
Although Spencer Lane obviously admires Billy Mitchell, he does not gloss over his many character flaws. His distance from his first wife and children, his desire for martyrdom, insubordination, and monumental tactlessness are not explained away as the natural and rightful character traits of a genius.
Mitchell's most famous exploit was the sinking by aerial bombing of some obsolete Navy battleships, deemed impossible by some Naval experts. Several tests were carried out, under fairly restricted circumstances (limits on the size of the bombs, number of bombs allowed, time allowed), and to an unbiased observer, air power appeared to have conquered the mightiest ships that the navy had to offer. Of course, there were very few unbiased observers. The navy had an interest in demonstrating the relative invulnerability of their ships to attack from the air. The Army Air Force (especially Mitchell) felt it their sworn duty to demonstrate the extreme uselessness of battleships in "modern" warfare, by sinking them. The test itself was not particularly conclusive, as the airmen were led to their target, they were not fired on by anti-aircraft batteries, and they were not pounced on by opposing enemy fighters before they could release their bombs. But the bombs did sink a few ships.
It's far more interesting to linger on the motivations of the Air Force and the Navy than to debate the relative merits of their positions, and Lane does a great job of this.
Tellingly, Lane relates how, after Billy Mitchell's court martial and dismissal from service (for insubordination, in criticizing the Navy and Army for the crash of the dirigible Shenandoah), resistance to the unified Air Force that he'd been fighting for for years evaporated. Could it be that the resistance wasn't to the ideas, but to Mitchell, and that he was the greatest impediment to having his ideas taken seriously? With Mitchell, I think you either love him, or find him really annoying, and you can probably guess which way I lean.
Where Lane, and First World Flight really shines is in his detailed descriptions of the other "odyssey", the flight around the world of three rather large bi-planes, flown by Army personnel. The background to the flight is interwoven with Mitchell's history, appropriate as he saw the World Flight as a way to galvanize support behind air power in general, and the idea of a separate Air Service specifically. During the flight, Mitchell was on a tour of Pacific military installations, but his mark was on all aspects of the flight, as he was instrumental in the choice of aircraft, the route, and had introduced many of the people undertaking the mission into the Army Air Force.
The Flight
Life in the early days of automobiles and airplanes was a little bit different than it is now. To people who lived back then, servicing your car was something you did habitually, not every 100,000 km. They weren't afraid to get a little grease under their fingernails, and reading of the amount of "servicing" required of airplane engines of the early 1900's is simply astonishing. In an era of military budget cuts, the nascent Air Force personnel had to be, by necessity, not only pilots, but mechanics as well. The men chosen for the trip around the world (4 pilots and 4 mechanics) were handpicked by Mitchell for their perseverance, competence, and positive attitudes. To be in the Army Air Force during the late teens and early 1920's was to be sorely tested. The Army was not convinced of the need for this new drain on slim treasury allocations, and members of the Air Service made do with obsolete and sometimes dangerous equipment and shockingly bad living conditions. About the only consolations of the Airman's life was its perceived glamour, and of course, the flying.
What these young, mostly unmarried (only one of the 8 was married) confident and tough individuals did is almost unthinkable to me. It's tough enough standing outside in freezing conditions trying to push my car back onto the driveway. I can't imagine what it was like to fly in Alaska in winter, in an open cockpit of a heavy, unwieldy modified torpedo boat, at speeds of 110 mph, in snowstorms, without a radio and with only rudimentary navigation equipment. To me, it is simply madness, but such was the tenor of the times that to these men, it was an adventure, and they considered it their duty to their country to be first around the globe. The toughness of these men harkens back to another age, when you chopped your own wood, fixed your own engine, took your chances against nature and with luck and perseverance, prevailed. It is no wonder that these men, as soon as they reached civilization, were treated like kings.
Spencer Lane makes this all real. With a variety of styles, (excerpts of diaries, letters, traditional (almost fiction-like) narrative, and telegrams), First World Flight draws you in to the point where you'll be staying up late to finish it (like I did). Mixed into the story of the American's attempt to circle the globe are the stories of other country's attempts to do the same thing, including an Italian flying boat that barely escaped disaster, and a British entry saved only by the generosity of the US Navy. He manages to capture a flavour of the time, as well, when 16 year old girls could drive cars across the continent in an adventure of their own, just to meet briefly with the handsome leader of the First World Flight (this episode is only subtly creepy). The airmen had so many close calls with navigation, mountain crashes, diplomatic difficulties in Japan, and the unreliability of their Liberty modular engines (none of which operated for more than 50 hours without replacement), it seems like a miracle that any of them survived. By the time the aviators get back across the Atlantic and onto the relatively safe ground of North America, you'll be rooting for their success.
Coda
After the success of the world flight, Lane sadly recounts the slow decline of Billy Mitchell, and the failure of the flight to fundamentally change the funding of the Air Force by the government. In the end, although the World Flight may have been more an exercise in logistics and heroism than the catalyst to expansion, it should stand alongside the Moon Shot as an example of "What you can do when you put your mind to it".
Recommended:
Yes
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