Military Figure. He was a United States Army General, an aviation pioneer and a Congressional Gold Medal Recipient, who was called "The father of the United States Air Force." Born William Mitchell into a wealthy family, whose father was the United States Senator from Wisconsin from 1883 to 1889, he enrolled in George Washington University in Washington, D.C but did not graduate as he was interested in a military career. At the start of the Spanish-American War, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a private and rose rapidly in the Signal Corps, which at first, controlled the development of Army aviation. In 1916, he learned to fly, and became the air adviser to General John J. Pershing in World War I. At the end of the war, Mitchell was promoted to Brigadier General, and made assistant chief of the Air Service, becoming the leading advocate of the Air Forces' independence of the Army and the Navy. His belief in the future of military aviation developed resistance among leaders of the traditional Army and Navy, especially his claims that the Air Force made large capital surface ships obsolete. In 1921, he demonstrated this by attacking a surrendered German battleship, cruiser and a destroyer, sinking all three by bombers in less than 20 minutes, and to counter those who argued that American ships could not be sunk, repeated the demonstration on three obsolete American battleships. To counter critics that said the bombers sank those ships because they were undefended, he had aerial targets towed behind bombers parallel to antiaircraft guns, who then attempted to knock down the targets. After an hour of firing all their guns at the aerial targets, only one bullet hit the target. In October of 1924, his critics sent him on an extended tour of the Far East, but when he returned, Mitchell predicted that the next war would be with Japan, that Japan would attack the American fleet at Pearl Harbor without warning and without a declaration of war while negotiating peace, and that the next war would be one between airplanes and submarines, with the surface fleet being subordinated to the role of transporting Army troops and supplies. All that he theorized came true just 15 years later. When his critics silenced him, he went to the public to obtain support for a proper national defense. In response to the Navy's first helium-filled rigid airship, the Shenandoah," crashing in a storm in September of 1925 and killing 14 of the crew, Mitchell issued a statement accusing senior leaders in the Army and Navy of incompetence and the statement was considered treason. At the direct order of President Calvin Coolidge, he was court-martialed for insubordination, and the board ordered him suspended from service for five years. Rather than accept the court-martial verdict, he resigned from the Air Service. With his rank lower than colonel, his retirement pay would be lower. He had no platform to give his speeches. The North American B-25 Mitchell bomber plane and Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport is named in honor him. He married twice. He and his first wife had three children before the divorce. He remarried and the couple had two children.