Mitchell returned to the States as a hero in 1919 and was appointed assistant chief of the U.S. Army Air Service. He was appalled at how quickly the organization he had helped to build in war had disintegrated in peacetime. He decided that the nation must not be deluded into the belief that “the war to end all wars” had really accomplished that end. “If a nation ambitious for universal conquest gets off to a flying start in a war of the future,” he said, “it may be able to control the whole world more easily than a nation has controlled a continent in the past.” Such statements embarrassed his superiors. He soon provoked the Navy admirals into open hostility through his tirades against their super-dreadnought concepts.

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Mitchell the hero soon became known as Mitchell the agitator as he tried to prove that airplanes could actually accomplish the things he forecast. He proposed a number of daring innovations for the Air Service that stunned the nonflying Army generals–a special corps of mechanics, troop-carrying aircraft, a civilian pilot pool for wartime availability, long-range bombers capable of flying the Atlantic and armor-piercing bombs. He encouraged the development of bombsights, ski-equipped aircraft, engine superchargers and aerial torpedoes. He ordered the establishment of aerial forest-fire and border patrols, and followed that with a mass flight to Alaska, a transcontinental air race and a flight around the perimeter of the United States. He encouraged Army pilots to set speed, endurance and altitude records in order to keep aviation in the news.

With each success, Mitchell became more determined that the nation’s money should be spent on aircraft and not expensive battleships. He stepped on the egos of the ground generals and the battleship admirals–especially the latter–with his fiery rhetoric and boasted that Army planes could sink any battleship afloat under any conditions of war. Dynamic and impetuous, he sought out the American press and announced that if he were given permission to bomb captured German battleships, he would prove his assertions.

Newspaper reporters and editors, sensing open interservice warfare that would make headlines and sell papers, thought he should be given the opportunity to conduct tests against actual warships that were going to be scuttled or scrapped anyway. The New York Times summarized the general feeling by saying that the country could not afford to ignore Mitchell’s claims.

The Navy’s ironclad die-hards fought the idea of actual tests and preferred that their word be taken that aircraft could never sink the super-safe, first-class fighting ships of any nation. Strong pressure was brought to bear on President Warren G. Harding and Congress to withhold permission to use the German ships as targets. An angry Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels offered to stand bareheaded on the bridge of any ship Mitchell chose to bomb.

Not all of the admirals disagreed with Mitchell, however. Admiral William S. Sims, commander of U.S. naval forces in European waters during World War I, remarked: “The average man suffers very severely from the pain of a new idea….It is my belief that the future will show that the fleet that has 20 airplane carriers instead of 16 battleships and 4 airplanes will inevitably knock the other fleet out.” Admiral W.F. Fullam, author of an exhaustive study of the use of air power, concluded that with the progress then being made in aviation, “Sea power will be subordinated to or dependent upon air power.”

Mitchell continued to expound his views in speeches and articles for national publications. With the press strongly behind him and despite Navy foot-dragging, permission to demonstrate his theories was finally granted. The tests were scheduled for June and July 1921. While the ships were being assembled off the Virginia coast, Mitchell amassed an armada of airplanes as the 1st Provisional Air Brigade and ordered exhaustive bombing practice against mock ships near Langley Field. Army ordnance personnel produced the new 2,000-pound bombs that would be needed to sink a battleship.

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