A Question of Loyalty

July 12, 2004
A superb and charismatic Signal Corps officer and innovative air tactician in WWI, Mitchell, the son of a Wisconsin senator, faced an internal conflict: should he be loyal to his superior officers, whom he regarded as almost treasonably incompetent, or to what he saw as his country's best interests, which included a vastly larger, united and independent air arm? The result was a famous court-martial, which Time
magazine correspondent Waller (The Commandos
), with scholarship and balance, makes extremely comprehensible and gripping to readers more than 75 years on. The shorter biographical portion portrays Mitchell as egotistical, insubordinate, a so-so pilot, a racist, a spendthrift and borderline alcoholic, and heavily responsible in a messy divorce from his first wife. The trial itself was a media circus of modern proportions; Mitchell emerges as somewhat more than a gadfly if something less than a hero, essential to the growth of modern American air power but hardly a spotless martyr or a major strategic thinker. Agent, Kris Dahl at ICM.