A Question of Loyalty
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A Question of Loyalty plunges into the seven-week Washington trial of Gen. William "Billy" Mitchell, the hero of the U.S. Army Air Service during World War I and the man who proved in 1921 that planes could sink a battleship. In 1925 Mitchell was frustrated by the slow pace of aviation development, and he sparked a political firestorm, accusing the army and navy high commands -- and by inference the president -- of treason and criminal negligence in the way they conducted national defense. He was put on trial for insubordination in a spectacular court-martial that became a national obsession during the Roaring Twenties.
Uncovering a trove of new letters, diaries, and confidential documents, Douglas Waller captures the drama of the trial and builds a rich and revealing biography of Mitchell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
