Billy Mitchell was court-martialed in 1925 for being too loud about something he had already written down in a confidential 1924 report. The Japanese attacked sixteen years later. He was off by twenty-five minutes.
A Pirep featured story · KMKE Milwaukee Mitchell International, Milwaukee, WI
William "Billy" Mitchell, son of a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, grew up on the family estate outside Milwaukee and called the city home all his life. In France in September 1918 he commanded nearly 1,500 aircraft over the St. Mihiel offensive, the largest concentration of airpower yet assembled. He came home certain of one thing the Army and Navy leadership did not want to hear: the airplane had made the battleship obsolete.
In July 1921 he got his demonstration: bombing tests against surrendered German warships off the Virginia Capes. The target was Ostfriesland, a dreadnought that had survived the Battle of Jutland. The rules required pauses between hits so inspection parties could board; on the final day Mitchell's Martin bombers dropped six 2,000-pound bombs in succession instead, and the ship rolled over and went down in less than half an hour. The Navy said the test proved nothing.
In 1924 the Army sent him on an inspection tour of the Pacific. He came back with a 324-page report, and buried in it was a description of how a war with Japan would open: an air attack on the fleet at Pearl Harbor, beginning at Ford Island at 7:30 in the morning, with Clark Field in the Philippines hit at 10:40 the same day. The report was filed and forgotten.
In September 1925 the Navy dirigible Shenandoah broke apart in an Ohio storm, killing fourteen, days after a Navy flying boat attempting San Francisco to Hawaii disappeared at sea (the crew, missing nine days, ultimately sailed their dead aircraft to Kauai). From San Antonio, Mitchell handed the press a statement accusing the services' leadership of "incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense." President Coolidge personally ordered the court-martial. On December 17, 1925, twenty-two years to the day after Kitty Hawk, Mitchell was convicted of insubordination and suspended for five years. He resigned instead, kept preaching airpower from the lecture circuit, and died in 1936 at 56. Milwaukee buried him in Forest Home Cemetery.
On March 17, 1941 the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors renamed the county airport General Mitchell Field. Nine months later, on a Sunday morning, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor opened at 7:55. Mitchell had called the hour seventeen years in advance and missed it by twenty-five minutes. The Army named its new medium bomber for him too; when Doolittle's raiders lifted off for Tokyo in April 1942, they flew B-25 Mitchells.