"I Am Not A Very Timid Type ..."
By Robert S. Gallagher
Robert S. Gallagher [1] April 1974 | Volume 25, Issue 3 Robert S. Gallagher [1] April 1974 [2] The American public, reeling from a series of defeats at the onset of World War II, was thrilled by the dramatic announcement that, on April 18, 1942, a flight B-25 medium bombers had successfully struck Tokyo and other targets on the Japanese mainland. To keep the enemy off-balance rigid security was imposed on the details of the surprise carrier-launched raid. "Shangri-La," a smiling President Franklin D. Roosevelt replied when asked where the attack had originated. Not until a month later, when the President pinned the Medal of Honor on Lieutenant Colonel James Harold Doolittle, did the public learn the identity of the raid's leader. The name had a familiar ring to many Americans, for Jimmy Doolittle's amazing career had made newspaper headlines since 1922. That year the daring young Army aviator became the first pilot to fly across the continent in less than twenty-four hours. Born in Alameda on December 14, 1896, Doolittle had joined the fledgling Army Air Service during World War I. Although he spent the war years as a stateside flying instructor, he quickly established a reputation as one of the nation's top pilots. His aviation firsts are, like his personal awards and decorations, almost too numerous to mention. A pioneer information stunt-flying, Doolittle was the first credited with an outside loop - a hazardous feat previously considered impossible. As well as being a trained scientist, he was one of the Army's earliest test pilots, whose death-defying aerial acrobatics at air shows around the world were actually well practiced, carefully calculated exercises designed to foster interest in aviation. Little was known about the precise effects of gravity forces on the body or about the wind-gradient factor until Doolittle published the theses he wrote for his master's and doctor's degrees in aeronautical engineering at M.I.T. in 1925 and 1926. As a racing pilot and the holder of many early air-speed records over land and water, Doolittle scored record-breaking victories in the Schneider Cup in 1925, the Bendix Trophy in 1931, and the Thompson Trophy in 1932. In 1926 he received the Mackay Trophy, awarded annually to the country's outstanding flier. During the 1920's the Army twice loaned him to the Curtiss Wright Corporation for demonstration flights in South America. And in 1928 he was selected by the Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics to head up that foundation's Full-Flight Laboratory at Mitchel Field on Long Island, New York. The laboratory's experiments culminated in September, 1929, when Doolittle, using only the primitive instruments then available, made history's first blind takeoff and landing. He spent the 1950s as the manager of the Shell Oil Company's aviation department, vigorously promoting the production and use of ioo-octane fuel, which some aviation historians believe was his most significant contribution to the development of United States air power in World War II. As an Army Reserve major during this period, Doolittle served on numerous inquiry boards, including the 1934 effort to reorganize the Army Air Corps. In 1940 he received a special honor when he was elected president of the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences. That same year he returned to the Army and after the historic Tokyo raid became the commander of the 12th, 15th, and, later, the 8th Air Force, which he led in the assault on Fortress Europa. In May, 1946, Lieutenant General Doolittle left the Army and returned to Shell Oil as a vice president and director. Since his retirement in 1958 as a Shell executive he has maintained an active schedule as a member of various advisory boards and as a director of several insurance companies. He and his wife, Josephine, now live in Santa Monica, a few miles from his sparsely decorated oak-panelled Hollywood office in the Mutual of Omaha Building. There recently Doolittle - fingering scale models of some of the celebrated planes he has flown - swivelled slowly from side to side in his large leather chair and discussed with AMERICAN HERITAGE his years as a pioneer Army aviator. • I suppose the most obvious question to ask a pilot is how did you become interested in aviation?In the winter of 1909-1910 I saw the first air show that took place on the West Coast at old Dominguez Flying Field, near my home in Los Angeles. I was very impressed with the airplanes of that day, even though they were quite frail and of very little performance. Well, I was at that time an avid reader of Popular Mechanics, which about two years later published an article about how to make a glider with sticks and wire and unbleached muslin. So I made a small biplane glider and took it to a small nearby cliff and jumped. Unfortunately the cruciform tail hit the edge of the cliff, and the glider came down rather abruptly. I wasn't badly hurt, but the glider was pretty badly broken up. I rebuilt it. Then I tied it to the rear of a friend's automobile. Using my legs as the landing gear, I ran behind the car as fast as I could and leaped into the air.What happened?This time the glider came down on its nose and was completely washed out. But about this time Popular Mechanics came out with a picture of Alberto Santos-Dumont's monoplane, the Demoiselle. So I gathered up the pieces of my glider and built a monoplane. I saved up my money and bought a secondhand motorcycle engine to power it. Probably the luckiest thing that happened was that a storm came along and blew my airplane a block away and completely wrecked it. It would have been a very dangerous craft to fly, I am quite sure.Did that put an end to your early career as an aviator? Until I got into World War I, in 1917, yes. You know, there is an organization called the Early Birds, which is made up of people who before that war built their own planes and learned to fly them. Recently they invited me to join, but I had to decline their invitation, because by no stretch of the human imagination can I claim that I ever achieved controlled flight in my boyhood experiments. Did you have any other boyhood hobbies? That same year I built the monoplane - I was fifteen - I was the amateur flyweight boxing champion of the Pacific coast. My mother was very, very opposed to my boxing, so I boxed under the name Jimmy Pierce so she wouldn't be distressed. Later, when I was a student at the University of California, I was practicing tumbling in the gymnasium one day. These two middleweights were boxing, and they didn't seem to be doing very good. Well, I made some remark to the instructor, Marcus Freed, and he said, do you think you can do better, and I said, I know I can. So - even though I only weighed 135 and the middleweight class was 168 - I put on the gloves and knocked them both out. The next day I knocked out the school's third middleweight, and the following week I was the university's middleweight contender against Stanford in the West Coast intercollegiate championships. My opponent was a chap named Eric Pedley, who later became a great polo player. Pedley was a fine boxer, but when he came out against me in the ring, he must have wondered what in the world to do with this little bitty fellow. I guess he was afraid to slug me for fear he'd kill me. So he just put his left hand out tentatively, and I slipped under it and knocked him out with one punch. Did you continue with your boxing? Marcus Freed, my instructor, encouraged me to box professionally in San Francisco under the name Jimmy Pierce. Freed thought he might have a potential champion, and I was interested primarily in making a few bucks to augment my skimpy income. I won a series of preliminaries against poor opposition, and then Freed got me a bout with a chap named Spider Kelly, an old pro who couldn't hit but was a fine boxer. Spider was too adroit. He made a monkey out of me, and that was the end of my professional boxing career. Were the things that attracted you to boxing - the risks and skills and personal courage involved - at all similar to the attraction of aviation? Well, I have always been highly competitive, and that is useful no matter what sport you go into. And in those days flying was to a considerable degree a sport, yes. But what really helped me in aviation was to have fast reactions and a good sense of balance. I think I got those from my tumbling, not my boxing. Actually you started out to become an engineer, didn't you? From the time I was a very young fellow, I knew I wanted to do two things. I wanted to build things, and I wanted to see the world. It seemed to me that the best way to build things was to be an engineer, and the best way to see the world was to be the kind of engineer that went to different parts of the world. In those days that meant either a civil or a mining engineer. I decided to become a mining engineer. Were you influenced in this by your father, Frank H. Doolittle? My father was a carpenter by trade and an adventurer by inclination. He was even more foot-free than I. Before the turn of the century he sailed around the Horn from Massachusetts to California. There he met my mother. They were married, and when I was six months old, the first gold rush broke out in Alaska, and he was off. My mother and I joined him in Nome in the spring of 1900. I lived there for eight years, until my mother decided that there were severe limitations on a boy's education in Alaska, and she brought me back to Los Angeles. Did you ever see your father again? I visited him in Alaska the summer of 1914. He did some prospecting, and he did a great deal of grubstaking. In those days many people wanted to prospect, but they didn't have the finances necessary to buy an outfit and food and so forth. So my father would grubstake these fellows. It was then the common practice for the grubstaker and the grubstakee to share whatever the chap found. My father grubstaked a great number of people, and although some of them were successful, none of them returned even what he had given them. He died in 1917, rather a frustrated individual. That was the year you first got into aviation. I was working in the mines that summer, at the Comstock Lode in Virginia City, Nevada. Oddly enough, although it was only a couple of hundred miles, I guess, from San Francisco, we were practically isolated from the outside world. It wasn't until I returned to college that I first learned we were really at war. And immediately I came to the realization that I wanted to participate. I looked around at the various military services one could get into, and the thought reawakened my desire to fly. You see, I have always been, to some degree, a loner. I enjoy being with a few intimate friends, but I have always been able to enjoy life even if I am alone. So I naturally went into fighter-pilot aviation, because there is a basic difference between the fighter pilot and the bomber pilot. The fighter pilot is almost always a rugged individualist, whereas the bomber pilot is more inclined to be a team player. For much the same reasons you will notice that a fighter pilot usually does a superb job in wartime and does not adapt to peacetime activities as well as the bomber pilot. Well, at the beginning of World War I did you have much of an option between fighters and bombers? You had an option in that you were permitted to express a preference. Only the pilots who seemed to be the most apt were normally taken into fighter training. There was a great deal more latitude then, of course, because there weren't as many bombers. At that time the Army Air Service was considered a defensive arm, to be used mainly for observation and reconnaissance purposes. Both the Army and the Navy were greatly opposed to building long-range bombers, and this made it very difficult to procure the necessary funds for research and development. We did have the twin-engine Martin bombers, and then around 1923 or 1924 the Barling bomber was built. It was a very large airplane, flown at Wright Field by Harold Harris, but it was so heavy and so underpowered that its poor performance made the concept of long-range heavy bombers look bad. If my memory is correct, in the late twenties Boeing built a much larger bomber which they called the B-15, but it had certain problems, and the Army wouldn't buy it, so Boeing was permitted to sell it, as I recall, to the Japanese. What did the Japanese do with it? I would imagine that it was very useful to them for two reasons. First, to get some experience on how to build a big airplane, and second, to find out what made it unsatisfactory for American use. You learn as much from your failures, if you study them, as you learn from your successes. Since you were trained as a fighter pilot, do you find it paradoxical that your best-known exploit in World War II was at the controls of a big bomber? No. During the war I flew both bombers and fighters in North Africa and Italy. I did it for two reasons. First, I wanted to know as much and hopefully more about the equipment than the men who were flying it. Second, when I visited one of the bases in my command, I would arrive in one of their aircraft as a courtesy to my men. By any chance did you join the Army Air Service because you hoped the uniform might impress a young lady named Josephine Daniels? I don't think so. I had been courting Jo since high school. In fact, I've known her now for sixty-four years. I certainly hoped that I would be able to impress her with the thought that I was serving my country, but exactly what uniform I was in would have been academic as far as she was concerned. Where did you receive your flight training? At Rockwell Field in San Diego. Jo and I were married the day before Christmas in 1917, and she went with me to San Diego. The training was much different in those days. We were in a terrible hurry to get pilots trained, and, of course, the airplanes were very simple. We flew the old Curtiss JN-4 or Jenny, and we practiced things like grass cutting, which meant holding the plane about three feet off the ground. After seven hours of flying with my instructor, good old Mr. [Charles] Todd, I soloed. It lasted thirty-nine minutes. Would you tell me about the Jenny? It was a very fine training plane, a two-seater, in which you could do almost anything that your skill permitted you to do. It was also quite a safe airplane to fly, although, with the ox-5 engine we had at that time, somewhat underpowered. I remember on one occasion landing in the Imperial Valley with an ox-5 Jenny. When I tried to take off, I found that I could not get the plane airborne. Each time it would just settle back down to the ground. I had to wait until early the next morning, when the cool morning air was heavier, in order to take off and come home. Were there a lot of crashes during flight training? Not a great deal, no. There was a periodic crash. Quite frequently a crash occurred because a pilot got in a spin. In those days the spin was referred to as the deadly spin, and it wasn't until I was fairly well along in my instruction that the spin became part of our training. You learned that as the plane begins to spin you push the nose over, pick up speed, and come out. I can remember discussing the pros and cons of this, wondering why this was. Before this the tendency was to pull the nose up, which caused the plane to stall, and with a single-engine plane that could be fatal. Isn't it sort of astounding, in retrospect, that so many people took off with so little technical knowledge of what they were doing? It was a good and a bad thing. It separated the sheep from the goats real quickly, but it seriously penalized the chap who might be a superb pilot but was a slow learner. Quite a large percentage of cadets were washed out in those days. Some quit of their own volition; others left because the instructor felt they were not sufficiently apt. It was pretty much of an instinctive thing. After you were commissioned as a lieutenant in March, 1918, and became an instructor yourself, what did you look for in your students? You look for a chap who has good eyesight, who has fast reactions, who has a good sense of balance, but most important, you look for someone who really loves to fly. It would be very difficult to make a good pilot out of a chap who hated it. We always incline to do best those things that we enjoy doing. Another thing you look for is a pilot who can learn his limitations. A poor pilot is not necessarily a dangerous pilot as long as he remains within his limitations. And you find your limits in the air, by getting closer and closer and closer and sometimes going beyond them and still getting out of it. If you go beyond and don't get out of it, you haven't learned your limitations, because you are dead. I understand that you got into trouble with one of your early commanding officers. Ah, Colonel [Harvey] Burwell, at Ream Field, near San Diego. We later became great friends, but at that time I'm afraid I was a bit of a problem to him. His friend Cecil B. De Mille came down to Ream Field one day and took some movies, one of which