The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell
1955 theatrical poster
Directed by	Otto Preminger
Produced by	Milton Sperling
Written by	Milton Sperling and Emmet Lavery Dalton Trumbo (uncredited) Michael Wilson (uncredited) Ben Hecht (uncredited)
Starring	Gary Cooper
Music by	composed and conducted by Dimitri Tiomkin
Cinematography	Sam Leavitt, A.S.C.
Edited by	Folmar Blangsted, A.C.E.
Production company	United States Pictures
Distributed by	Warner Bros. Pictures
Release date	December 22, 1955 (1955-12-22)
Running time	100 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Box office	$3 million (US)

The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell is a 1955 film directed by Otto Preminger. It stars Gary Cooper as Billy Mitchell, Charles Bickford, Ralph Bellamy, Rod Steiger and Elizabeth Montgomery in her film debut. It is based on the notorious court-martial of General Billy Mitchell, who is considered the founder of the U.S. Air Force. When it was released, Mitchell's sister Ruth, who served in World War II with Yugoslavian Chetnik guerrillas and later wrote a book about her brother, toured doing publicity for the film.

Brigadier General William Mitchell tries to prove the worth of the Air Service as an independent service by sinking a battleship under restrictive conditions agreed to by Army and Navy. He disobeys their orders to limit the attack to bombs under 1,000 pounds and instead loads 2,000 pounders. With these, he proves his aircraft can sink the ex-German World War I battleship Ostfriesland, previously considered unsinkable. But his superiors are outraged.

Politically vocal, he is demoted to colonel and sent to a ground unit in Texas. A high-profile air disaster occurs in which his close friend Zachary Lansdowne is killed, the crash of the dirigible USS Shenandoah. This is followed by a second disaster in which six planes, poorly maintained because of lack of funds, flying from a base on the California coast to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, crash.