Larry Dighera wrote:
On Sat, 11 Oct 2003 19:04:02 GMT, "Gene Storey" wrote
in Message-Id: :

Major General... Give me a break, what a joke.

Why not give him an honorary PhD while they're at it?

Wasn't Billy Mitchell the fellow who first demonstrated that aircraft
were capable of sinking battleships? I'd say that was a significant
contribution to the art of warfare.

Yes, and he was also courts-martialled for insisting that airpower alone could
win a war, a concept that the Army General Staff could neither accept nor
condone. When all was said and done, however, he was awarded a posthumous CMH
in 1946 for his conceptual contributions towards winning WWII.

Incidentally, he was also a visionary. After a staff visit to Japan in 1924, he
submitted a report in which he predicted the events that actually occurred at
Pearl Harbor in 1941.

I don't know what the rationale was for his posthumous promotion to Major
General, but I'm not inclined to pooh-pooh it out of hand.

George Z.