Billy Mitchell
A not so long time ago in a Navy not so far away, the emphasis was on building Super Dreadnoughts, since everyone with a brain and any military experience knew that the only way to win Sea Supremacy was to have bigger battleships than the other guy. There was one really stupid guy named Billy Mitchell who kept insisting that airplanes were actually also useful for naval warfare, and even went so far as to suggest that an airplane could sink a battleship! Clearly the guy was an idiot.
Of course, the real test of Mitchell's idea was not the US navy tests in which he did indeed sink a battleship with bombs from a plane (although the Navy did say he cheated...a rather stupid concept in the context of warfare). The real proof was at Pearl Harbor.
Now, when you say that this first publicly released test video was unimpressive, you remind me of the Navy saying that Mitchell cheated because he dropped his bombs too fast while sinking the battleship Ostfriedland, which had been the pride of the German Navy in WWI. This was a first test. Calling it a failure because you could have done the same with a machine gun is like saying airplanes are useless in warfare because the Wright Flyer didn't have the cargo capacity of a B-52.
