Bill Downs and I had not been able to keep up with news from the outside world while we worked at the mines that summer of 1917. When we got back to the Berkeley campus to enroll for our senior year, everyone was talking about the war in Europe and the plans for the United States to send troops over to fight the Huns. Many of our classmates had already joined one of the services. Bill and I caught the fever and, without thinking very far ahead, decided we should join the crowd.
Bill joined the infantry, but I held out for what I thought would be a much better opportunity—to learn to fly with the Aviation Section of the Army’s Signal Corps. The recruiters said that as many as 5,000 pilots would be trained immediately, so I expected to get into uniform within a day or two of signing up for the Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps. I didn’t enroll at UC for my senior year.
Instead of going to flying school right away, I was told to wait for orders. Days went by without any notice to report and I ran out of funds. Since I was not enrolled, had no money left from my summer work, and had developed a continuing desire to nourish myself, I found a little restaurant where I could get a bowl of soup for 15 cents. They always placed two stacks of bread at each table, so I ate both stacks with my soup. I got away with this for two days and then the proprietor discovered why his bread was disappearing so fast. When he saw me come in the door on the third day, he quickly removed the bread. I had to take some definitive action to get a job.
I found a job in a tin can factory working the night shift and worked for a week, nearly starving while I waited for that first paycheck. When I went up to the window to get it, I was told the company always withheld the first week’s check for all employees until they quit or were fired. I had to quit in order to eat.
Unemployed again, I found a job at the January Jones Mine near Eureka in Napa County, California. No one there seemed to care about my past experience in Nevada or my mining education. They put me to work pushing a hand car full of quicksilver ore and then operating a water liner. When the compressor broke down, I had to drill by hand.
My orders finally came in October, sending me to my alma mater, the University of California, for aviation ground school. I left the mine with a great deal of relief.
Unknown to me at the time, if I had just registered as a senior and then gone into uniform, the university, as an indication of appreciation for the patriotism of those near graduation, would have given seniors their degrees. Years later, through the efforts of two friends of mine, I finally was granted the degree because of the experience and education I gained in the service.
Now designated a “flying cadet,” with pay of about $50 a month, I had eight crowded weeks of ground school ahead. It was relatively easy for me—at least, the courses in theory of flight, meteorology, map reading, engines, and structures were. I didn’t like close order drill at all. Navigation was difficult but interesting, while Morse Code was almost impossible. More people seemed to wash out of ground school for failing the code tests than anything else. I guess there was a psychological handicap there, but I persisted and finally got through it.
During ground school I was tempted into entering the Pacific Coast Amateur Boxing Championship bouts as a lightweight. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to train and I wasn’t in as good shape as I should have been. I was badly mauled for the first time in my life and, although not knocked out, lost by a decision.
After I started college, Joe had gone to work for the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. in Los Angeles. She thought she would like to be a librarian and had taken some courses in library science in high school. By the time the war began, however, she had acquired considerable information and experience running the Holowitz, a filing system that was possibly a forerunner of some of today’s computer concepts. She went to work in the shipyard and eventually had several hundred girls working for her.
When the Christmas vacation arrived, I persuaded Joe that we should get married even though I hadn’t finished ground school. She consented, although her mother still considered me incorrigible. But we were both over 21 now and didn’t need her permission. I always said Joe wouldn’t marry me until I got a uniform on and then always had to leave the area because that remark made her furious.
I hitched a ride with a friend to Los Angeles and we went to City Hall on Christmas Eve in 1917. I didn’t have a dime because we hadn’t received our December pay yet, so Joe paid for the license with money her mother had given her for Christmas. We were married by the clerk of the court.
Joe had about $20 left, which was enough to get us on a train to San Diego and a brief honeymoon over the holidays. We spent most of the time at one of the cafeterias where servicemen and their girlfriends or wives were given free meals.
The start of 1918 saw Joe back at work in Los Angeles while I returned to ground school at Berkeley. I graduated a couple of weeks later and was sent to Rockwell Field on North Island, San Diego, for pilot training where two small fields had been operating in the area since 1912. Back in 1914; civilian flying instructors had been added to the staff because the Army officers were untrained and had no precedent to guide them in training others. An Army report noted that teaching men to fly was probably the most dangerous occupation in the world and that men who could do it were rare “and their services are cheap at almost any price.”1
When my class arrived for primary training, there were only 14 civilian instructors available as a teaching force. My instructor was Charles Todd, a very calm individual. He gave me the first-day briefing and we climbed into the Curtiss JN-4 “Jenny” for my first flight. As we taxied out, we heard two trainers overhead and then the sickening sound of metal and wood impacting, followed by silence. Two Jennys had collided over the field and crashed a few yards in front of us.
We shut off the engine and both of us ran over to the nearest Jenny. There was one student in it who had been flying solo. He was dead. We rushed to the other plane and found a student and instructor badly injured. We helped them out of the wreckage and awaited the ambulance.
When the wreckage was cleared, Mr. Todd looked at me carefully and said we should get on with our business. I was shaken by what I had seen but nodded in agreement, and we went up for my first lesson. If there is such a thing as love at first sight, my love for flying began on that day during that hour.
I was eager to fly solo and, after about six hours of instruction, was terribly distressed that Mr. Todd wouldn’t let me go. I felt quite confident and adept and wondered if he was ever going to let me go up alone. He must have sensed my impatience and said, “Now I want you to fly this plane just exactly three feet off the ground. I don’t want you to fly at two feet or ten feet. Fly as far as you can exactly at that altitude.”
This was called grass cutting, and to my amazement, I found that I couldn’t do it. I was either bumping the ground or hopping up to about 20 feet—overcontrolling. For the first time I had a realization of my inadequacies. Just after I had completely lost my confidence, he climbed out of the airplane and said, “Now you fly it around.”
Every pilot remembers his first solo and I remember mine vividly. I took off easily and flew around for a while, exhilarated at my mastery of the machine. When I got ready to land, I cut the power and everything seemed to be all right. But then I began to have doubts about whether I was too fast or too slow. It seemed that during the glide and just before landing there were many more things to remember than I had to when the instructor was along to take over if anything went wrong. But I got down all right and Mr. Todd seemed satisfied. My logbook shows that I soloed after seven hours and four minutes of dual instruction.
In the weeks following, we practiced cross-country navigation, aerobatics, and formation flying. There were a number of our classmates who “washed out” for one reason or another. They say that one out of four was eliminated in ground school for academic deficiencies; half of those remaining for the flying phase were eventually let go or quit for various reasons.
Crashes were frequent during that period and many were fatal. When you witnessed one, it was very desirable that you get up in the air as soon as possible to wipe out what you had just seen. It was hard because you knew everybody in your class. Crashes always bothered me but never changed my mind about wanting to learn to fly.
The basic reason for most crashes in the early days was because a student stalled the plane and got into a spin. At first, none of us knew why airplanes got into spins or what to do to get out of them. Later, we learned why they happened and how to recover from them. Stall and spin recoveries became a vital part of all flight curricula.
Graduation from flight school was March 5, 1918, and commissioning as a second lieutenant and rating as a reserve military aviator was six days later. I was eager to go overseas to get into the scrap. However, instead of getting orders to proceed to the port of embarkation on the East Coast, most of my classmates and I were ordered to Camp Dick, Texas, which was called “the concentration camp.” At first we thought this was merely a place where they outfitted us before sending us on. Not so. There were no aircraft there, and there was nothing to do. We were housed in smelly barracks that had once been a livestock collecting point.
Two of my barracks mates there were to become lifelong friends—John S. “Jack” Allard, a Bostonian, and Bruce Johnson, from Binghamton, New York. Both were from families of means and we got along famously. After many days of doing nothing, we were sent to the port of debarkation at Hoboken, New Jersey, but since there wasn’t enough equipment available for us to fly in France, and no ships available to take us there, we were sent to Dayton, Ohio, briefly, and then to Gerstner Field near Lake Charles, Louisiana, where we took advanced flying instruction in the Thomas-Morse S-4C Scout, a pursuit aircraft. The Scout was a nice step up from the Jenny and I liked it because it could get up to 100 miles per hour. Bruce called it “the most miserable piece of aircraft engineering ever foisted off on an unsuspecting pilot.” Most were powered by a Gnome rotary engine; some had the Le Rhône engine. The engine rotating out front and its resultant centrifugal force made the Scout difficult to control.
We didn’t wear parachutes in those days; they were used only by balloonists. However, we did have safety belts, which were invented by Major General Benjamin D. Foulois, the Army’s sole pilot when he took the Army’s Wright Flyer to San Antonio in 1910 and was told by the chief signal officer, “Teach yourself to fly.” But safety belts have to be buckled. One of the student pilots at Gerstner, Major John P. Mitchel, a former mayor of New York City, was flying a Scout one day when he flipped the plane into a violent maneuver and literally threw himself out of the cockpit. He had forgotten to fasten his safety belt. Mitchel Field on New York’s Long Island is named for him.
During this period, Joe was working at the Terminal Island shipyard in Los Angeles and received a phone call from a newspaper reporter who told her that I had been killed in a crash in Buffalo, New York. I’m sure Joe was shocked, but she answered calmly, “I don’t believe it.” She was reasonably sure I wasn’t in Buffalo and said so.
She hung up the phone and wired the post commander at Gerstner. I immediately called her. There was a logical reason for the mixup. There was another James Doolittle stationed at Gerstner; however, his middle initial was “R.” A veteran Lafayette Escadrille pilot who had been wounded and was then a civilian instructor, he had been on a training flight to Buffalo and had been killed. I guess it was only the first of many heart-stopping instances for Joe during my subsequent flying years.
Fortunately, the stay at Gerstner was short-lived. A hurricane whipped across the Gulf of Mexico and leveled everything on the field. About 300 planes were smashed into splinters and fabric remnants. There were no buildings left; several men were killed and many injured.
While the mess was being cleaned up, Jack, Bruce, and I were transferred back to Rockwell Field on San Diego’s North Island. We thought we were going to get more advanced training, but to my great distress I spent the rest of World War I there and at Ream Field, located eight miles south of Rockwell Field on the oceanfront and adjacent to the Tiajuana River, as a combat and gunnery instructor. I was then 21 and it seemed to me a sad commentary on life that I should be sending other people out to combat instead of going myself. The only good thing about the assignment was that I was near Joe.
The requirements of a good pursuit and gunnery school were plenty of level ground, large expanses of water or unoccupied country for aerial gunnery, and still water for placing targets to be fired at from the air. These features were obtained at Rockwell, Ream, and Otay Mesa—the last was used for formation and aerobatic flying.
We had no special training to be instructors. They just took us up, showed us a maneuver, then said, “You’ve seen how to do it; now go teach your students how to do it.” You didn’t want to look foolish before your students, so being an instructor had its compensations: you learned how to fly with greater precision than you might otherwise. You did not want to embarrass yourself by announcing to a student that you were going to demonstrate a maneuver and then be unable to do it. I think I really perfected my flying skills during that period.
Despite my desire to have fun in an airplane, I took my instructional duties seriously and never did any stunts with students, who might be tempted to try to duplicate them when they didn’t have the experience. Therefore, I stuck to the curriculum and didn’t take kindly to any student trying to show off or get smart. I wanted them to emulate my seriousness about flying.
One day when I was on the final approach for a landing in a Jenny with a student, a solo student pilot in a Thomas-Morse Scout came across at right angles underneath our plane. Neither my student nor I saw him. His plane smashed into our underside and took our landing gear off, damaged our propeller, and weakened our lower wing. We belly landed without injury, but the fellow in the other plane was dead. His upper wing had collapsed and he had plummeted onto the flying field. Our propeller had taken his head off.
Immediately after the accident, I insisted on taking the same student back up in another plane for another lesson. One of the other instructors believed I was wrong to take a novice pilot up so soon after the tragedy and accused me of not caring about the other lad’s death. But I did care and thought about it for a long time. I wondered if there was anything I might have done to prevent it, even though he wasn’t my student. They say that if you fall off a horse, you should get back in the saddle as soon as possible or you may never ride again. That was my thinking in that instance.
When I returned and my student got out, I gestured to those waiting who had seen the accident and yelled, “Next!” If any one of them had refused to fly then, I would have eliminated him. I wanted to impress on them that flying is serious business and is unforgiving of carelessness, incapacity, or neglect.
Joe learned about this accident while riding a trolley car on the way back from a funeral. A passenger sitting in front of her had a newspaper with a headline that read “Flier Killed in Crash.” The subhead began “Lt. Doolittle …,” and that was all she could see before the person turned the page. She was stunned and got off at the next stop to buy a paper. When she read the story, she found out that I was all right. It was a repeat of the false alarm she had received while I was at Gerstner Field, another one of many instances when she thought I might have met my maker.
In another instance, a student and I were taking off for a dual ride when a solo student drifted across our flight path slightly below us just as we were getting airborne. Our lower wing blanked him from our view. Our plane’s propeller sliced off his plane’s tail and he dived into the ground and burned. He could not escape.
Life wasn’t all monotony and tragedy; there were lighter moments that could have been tragic. We flew the Hisso-powered Jenny on gunnery practice with a Lewis machine gun mounted on the top wing so it would fire over the propeller. After you fired all of your ammunition, you were supposed to clear your gun to make sure there were no bullets left in it. One chap remembered to do it belatedly as he was coming in to land. The gun still had bullets in the belt and they began to fire as he was directly in line with a bunch of latrines, all of which seemed to be occupied. As the bullets sprayed by the clapboard buildings, about six guys came dashing out with their pants at half mast. Fortunately, no one was hurt. From then on, there were new regulations about clearing your Lewis gun before returning to the field.
It was during my assignment at Rockwell and Ream that Lieutenant Colonel Harvey B. S. Burwell, the commander at Rockwell, came into my life. A strict disciplinarian, he was one of the youngest lieutenant colonels in the Regular Army, and was very bright—in fact, a genius. I made repeated formal requests through channels to go to France, but Colonel Burwell always turned me down. When the armistice was signed on November 11, 1918, I think he was grateful that he wouldn’t have to sign those letters back to me anymore.
The end of the war meant a big decision had to be made. Should I return to college and get a mining degree or stay in uniform and take my chances that there was a career for me flying airplanes? I had found a great deal of pleasure in flying and I enjoyed the military life. The men who got out of the service and took up barnstorming lived a rather precarious existence, from the point of view of both eating and living. I was making about $140 a month and the money was there on payday without fail. The security of the military life was very appealing to me as hundreds of men were demobilized and had to look for jobs while the nation tried to rebuild a peacetime economy. But it was the flying that made up my mind.
During the war, most Army flying in the States was limited to the local area. Seldom did we fly far from our bases. But the armistice brought quick changes because funds were still available for the time being and the Air Service took it upon itself to arouse public interest in aviation. The official policy was that the Air Service should accept invitations to put on exhibitions and demonstrations. Any reasonable request to flying field commanders for air shows received prompt approval. We found that county fairs, patriotic parades, and other large public gatherings were excellent events to show off what we and our planes could do. The word came down from Washington that we could attempt to set or break records and make cross-country flights that were considered newsworthy and would project a favorable image of the Army Air Service.
One of the first approved postwar events that helped me decide to stay in the Army was a giant military air show at San Diego, including a large flyby of 212 planes, scheduled for November 25, 1918. The Los Angeles Times, in the gee-whiz writing style of the day, announced that “nothing on so massive a scale as this will be or has ever been attempted either in this country or in Europe. The flight will probably be the last of its kind held in this country or Europe for many years, according to Colonel Harvey Burwell, commander at North Island, as the large permanent aeronautical institutions will be reduced to peace strength within a short time.”
After the event the Times reported:
Promptly at 10 o’clock the comparatively slow-going Curtiss training planes left the ground at Rockwell Field and began to circle the island. Fifty of these got into the air and then an equal number of fast two-seaters rose and started to trail them. Then forty of the spidery Thomas-Morse Scouts took the air and the huge squadron moved over Point Loma, gradually working into the form of a huge V, which we all know stands for Victory.
Meanwhile from East and Ream fields, the two subsidiary training plants, seventy more fast machines preceded by five strata-stunt artists climbed to get into the aerial swim. Soon the 210 fast planes were swarming over North Island like so many bees and being herded into formation by the fifteen leaders who conversed [by radio] quite as casually as you and I pass the time of day!
By 11 o’clock the formation was complete, and with the quintet of daring acrobats the greatest fleet of airplanes ever assembled in this country proceeded to write victory in the sky while thousands of spectators in the streets and on housetops cheered themselves hoarse, their excited shrieks and yells completely drowned by the shattering roar of the mighty motors.
So close to one another that they seemed almost to touch, they formed a ceiling over the sky that almost blotted out the struggling rays of the sun and with majestic solemnity they patrolled the air, magnificent in the perfection of their formation, and while they framed a perfect background at 5,000 feet, the five acrobats below swooped, dived, looped and spun in as perfect unison as though they had been operated by a single hand.
It was a fun exhibition, for we “five acrobats” executed “the side slip, the verille, the barrel roll, loop, reversement and many other stunts employed by pursuit pilots while engaged in deadly combat.” According to the paper, “The five daring acrobats whose daring skill provided the chief thrill of the day were Lieutenants D. W. Watkins, H. H. Bass, J. H. Doolittle, W. S. Smith, and H. O. Williams, all from Ream Field, who won the right to form the stunt squad in open competition from a score of the pilots.”
Extensive air circuses were also put on at Kelly Field, Texas; Hazelhurst Field, on Long Island; Bolling Field, Washington, D.C.; and Ellington Field, Texas, that received much front-page space in local newspapers. In April 1919, a Victory Loan Flying Circus was organized in three groups that traveled more than 19,000 miles making one-day stands in 88 cities in 45 states. Eighteen different aircraft were used, including French and British aircraft and Fokkers captured from the Germans.
The spirit of this newly found freedom to fly was contagious. After instructing students, I took an airplane up at every opportunity and practiced aerobatics. I tried to invent new stunts and realized there was a similarity between aerobatics in the air and acrobatics on the ground in that you mentally previewed a maneuver, then did it as you had planned. If you failed, you tried it again and again until you mastered it. And one principle that I learned in acrobatics carried over directly to aerobatics: never change your mind in the middle of a maneuver; you’ll mess it up every time.
I admit to being a bit of a mischief maker and am guilty of having had a little fun in an airplane. One incident during this period reminds me of my stupidity. It happened while I was hedge hopping. I saw two soldiers walking along a road and decided to give them a little scare. I buzzed a few feet over their heads, thinking they would be completely surprised. However, they just waved at me. I was indignant and came around for another pass lower than before. I zoomed over them and felt my wheels hit a bump. I looked back and saw one of the soldiers lying prostrate on the ground.
I was so shocked at my miscalculation that I didn’t look where I was going and caught a barbed wire fence in my landing gear, and as I pulled up, the fence came along. The extra weight caused the plane to stall and smash into the ground. I wasn’t hurt and was consumed by the thought that I had killed someone because of my stupidity. I jumped out of the wreckage and rushed to the two boys, one of whom was rubbing his head. Amazingly, he wasn’t hurt, but said he had a slight headache. One wheel had just grazed his head, and he had fallen flat on his face, which softened the blow. Instead of being angry at me, he said, “Gee, Lieutenant, I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”
I was greatly relieved because my foolishness could have killed him. But I had to face Colonel Burwell because I had wiped out a $10,000 government airplane. The colonel was a man who believed in going by the book. He didn’t want to ground me because he needed every instructor he had, but he did confine me to the post for a month.
Although it meant I couldn’t be with Joe off post on weekends, being able to continue flying enabled me to keep on having fun and doing mischief in the air. I had a friend named John McCullough who would fly dual with me. When we were airborne, I would do some wingwalking, just as many exhibitionists were doing at country fairs—all out of sight of the colonel, of course. One day, feeling especially exuberant, unknown to McCullough, I made a five-dollar bet with some friends that I could sit on the axle between the wheels while he made a landing. We took off and I got out on the wing, climbed down on the gear, and then motioned to McCullough to land. He kept motioning me to come back inside the plane, but I refused. He was afraid of running out of fuel so he landed with me sitting there gripping the landing gear struts. I won the bet but McCullough was very angry.
I didn’t know it but the famous movie director Cecil B. DeMille was making a film on the field, and the cameras were rolling when we landed with me sitting there with a silly grin on my face. It so happened that Mr. DeMille and Colonel Burwell were good friends. That night, the two of them were reviewing the rushes from that day’s filming when the sequence of a man sitting between the wheels came on. It wasn’t too clear a shot but the colonel was positive he knew who the culprit was. He jumped up, called his adjutant, and shouted, “Ground Doolittle for a month!” The adjutant later told me he asked the colonel how he knew it was me and Burwell replied, “It has to be Doolittle. No one else would be that crazy!”
Now I was not only confined and grounded but Burwell also made me officer-of-the-day for a month. This meant I had to be in proper uniform all day and couldn’t work in the shops with the mechanics, as I often did on my time off, or participate in any kind of athletics. But there was one thing I could do: ride my motorcycle all over the post doing my duty as OD.
One day while I was racing around the perimeter road “inspecting” the field’s boundary, I saw a Thomas-Morse Scout coming in for a landing. I steered the cycle directly in its path, knowing the pilot would go around. He did and came around for a second attempt. I ran in front of him again and the pilot, frustrated, finally landed on the other end of the field. My selection of this particular airplane couldn’t have been worse. The pilot of the Scout was Colonel Burwell.
I was confined to the base for another month.
My records show that during the period of five months I was an instructor, I was confined to the post for three months and grounded for a month and a half.
Being free of spirit and a rebellious fighter pilot at heart, I conceived a scheme to get back at the colonel. I went to the post athletic officer, a fellow named Barrett, and suggested that he should organize some boxing bouts for the troops for evening entertainment. It would be good for morale, I argued, and their morale was low right then.
I had heard that Colonel Burwell had been on the boxing team at West Point and suggested that the men might enjoy an evening of boxing, especially if Colonel Burwell and I went a few rounds. He was only a little taller and heavier than I was, so it would be a fairly even match and the troops would love it. Barrett said it was a great idea.
The colonel was no dummy. He had heard about my professional boxing and told Barrett he would do it on one condition—that Barrett box him after our match was finished. Barrett lost his enthusiasm for the idea at that moment, to my great disappointment.
Sometime during this period, I gave Joe her first airplane flight. It had to be done on the sly, since we weren’t allowed to carry civilian passengers in a military airplane. I borrowed a car and drove her to an orchard that was located between Ream Field and San Diego and let her off. Knowing that she would be hungry before I could get back, I gave her a half dozen bananas. I drove to the field and checked out an airplane. As soon as I could, I flew back, picked her up, and gave her a ride.
During the course of that ride, I had the opportunity to show Joe some stunting. But I had forgotten about those bananas. Joe became nauseated and got rid of them over the side of the cockpit during the exhibition of my prowess as an aerobat.
Adding insult to injury, consider that this was an airplane that used castor oil in its Hisso engine. The oil came out of the exhaust in tiny blobs. She had a helmet and goggles on and when she took them off, there were those two big white eyes surrounded by a black face up to where the helmet began.
I didn’t think it was very wise to let her off where I had picked her up lest some suspicious person wonder why this military plane was giving rides to girls. So I let her out on the other side of the bay where there was a smelly potash plant with a pasture beside it big enough to land on. She got out and was nauseated all over again. She went to a phone at the plant, managed to call a cab, and then took a streetcar to get back to the Coronado Hotel where we were staying. As she walked through the long corridor we called Peacock Alley to the elevators, she noticed people staring at her and smiling. She smiled back, wondering how they knew her secret. When she got to her room and looked into the mirror, she burst out crying. She said she had never seen anyone as horrible as she with her castor oil-besplattered face and two big gogglelike eyes. She vowed she’d never fly again. (She later began to take flying lessons at DeMille Field in Hollywood until she decided it was too expensive for our budget.)
When I told a group of friends about her first flight and everybody laughed, she began to bawl. She said my sense of humor was warped. It was a long time before I mentioned that episode in her presence again.
Anxious to find relief from the boredom of life as flying instructors, we pilots were always trying to think of something that would put aviation in the news. Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell, who had become an outspoken advocate of aviation’s potential after the war was over, was beginning to make waves nationwide. At our level, the bottom of the rank totem pole, we pilots liked what he said and were eager to do what we could to advance the case for Air Service appropriations in Washington. The battle of the budget then brewing would be the first of many between the Army and Navy.
Even before the war was over, the push had been to show what the airplane could do. One truly historic event took place on May 15, 1918, when a group of Army Air Service pilots under the leadership of Major Reuben Fleet inaugurated the first scheduled airmail service between Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. With a surprising flight completion rate of well over 90 percent, they did an excellent job showing how the airplane could speed up mail delivery. The Post Office Department took over with civilian pilots in August of that year.
Lieutenant John E. Davis made a widely publicized 4,000-mile flight from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes and back during October 1918. He made the flight without any mechanical difficulties, without knowing the route or the location of any landing places, and without a mechanic or landing lights for night flights. He covered the distance from Ellington Field to Mount Clemens, Michigan, and back in 64 flying hours over a period of nine days.
Other record-breaking flights were being attempted. On September 8, Lieutenant M. B. Kelleher took a de Havilland DH-4 to 23,000 feet using a new oxygen breathing apparatus. Ten days later, Captain Rudolph W. “Shorty” Schroeder set an altitude record of 29,000 feet over Dayton, Ohio.
At Love Field, in Dallas, Texas, Lieutenant William T. Campbell looped his Jenny 102 times. Several men jumped out of planes to test the practical use of parachutes. Speed dashes became common. On July 31, 1918, Major C. K. Rhinehart and Captain Fred Harvey made a flight from New York to Washington in two hours, fifteen minutes. A few days later, a de Havilland was flown from Dayton to Washington in two hours, fifty minutes. Many other record-setting flights were made between major cities.
Other potential uses of aircraft were tested. For the first time in the country’s history soldiers under orders for duty were transported by air, from Rantoul to Champaign, Illinois. Planes were used to spot fires and direct fire-fighting crews. The Navy got into the act when a three-engined seaplane took off with a record number of 50 men aboard.
Major Albert D. Smith, stationed at our field, led the first transcontinental flight of Army planes across the country from San Diego to Jacksonville, Florida, in December 1918, which gave me an idea. I suggested that a flight of three Jennys be authorized to fly from San Diego to Washington, D.C., to show how the airplane could link an Army post located at one of the most distant points in the United States with the nation’s capital. It would prove how speedily important messages, people, and things could be transported across the country in an emergency.
Colonel Burwell promptly bought the idea with no questions, somewhat to my surprise. The word had come down to all field commanders to encourage and approve any worthwhile flights that would give the Air Service some favorable publicity. I prepared a flight plan and selected Lieutenants Walter “Sump” Smith and Charles Haynes as the other two pilots, along with three mechanics. It wasn’t easy to find an air route across the country in 1919. The only maps we had were Army maps, which were unreliable or out-of-date in regard to mountain heights and important landmarks. Now that the war was over, Army landing fields were few and far between and we would have to land in pastures or on roads when we needed fuel. We would take what tools the mechanics could stash in the cockpit; I had a spare propeller strapped outside my plane.
In the spring of 1919, we left Rockwell Field and headed northeast. We landed uneventfully at Indio, California—about 90 miles away. We gassed up and headed for Needles, near the Arizona border, 120 miles farther. This stretched the Jenny’s range to the limit but I decided to risk it. Shouldn’t have. When we arrived, the airfield we thought was there wasn’t. The town was there, but we could see only desert with no clear stretch of rock-free area to land on. We couldn’t go anywhere else, so I landed on the main road outside of town. Smith followed and had no difficulty, but Haynes ran out of gas in the main tank and didn’t have time to switch to the emergency auxiliary tank. His engine died during the approach and he landed among a bunch of rocks. He was unhurt but his Jenny was mortally wounded and he, his mechanic, and the plane had to return by train to Rockwell.
Smith and I and our mechanics stayed in Needles overnight and were ready to go next morning. I took off down the highway and circled while Smith began his takeoff run. As he lifted off, a wingtip clipped a telephone pole. His plane spun around and stopped in a cloud of dust. I landed quickly and found the two of them were all right, but the plane was not flyable. Now two wrecks had to be shipped back to Rockwell.
Colonel Burwell was not happy when I telephoned him to report the mishaps. He called me a “damned Chinese ace”—a term developed from the reputation Chinese pilots had in those days for crashing more of their own planes than they shot down of the enemy’s. He ordered me to return to Rockwell.
We were returning through the Imperial Valley on top of an overcast when we bucked into heavy headwinds that rocked the Jenny and caused the plane to lose or gain hundreds of feet. I didn’t know what my ground speed was but a landing seemed appropriate, since we didn’t seem to be going anywhere. I found a hole and dropped down through it to see farmland in a valley. I picked out a likely clear space and touched down.
My bad luck held. The field had been freshly plowed and was soft. When the full weight of the plane settled down, the front wheels caught and the Jenny flipped over on its back, leaving us hanging upside down. I unbuckled the safety belt and fell out into the mud. As I did, I ripped the seat of my pants wide open on the edge of the cockpit.
Some farmhands rushed out and helped us turn the plane over. Fortunately, not much damage had been done. The propeller had split but we put the spare on quickly and made a few minor repairs to the tail. The sudden stoppage of the propeller didn’t seem to have harmed the engine, so I cranked it up and flew back to Rockwell.
When we landed, a mechanic told me to report to Colonel Burwell immediately. It sounded urgent so I went right to his office, covered with oil and dirt, and he gave me a bawling out to which I was fully entitled. His tirade did not require or invite a reply, so when he finished, I saluted smartly and about-faced to leave, leaving my bare posterior in full view. Apparently, he thought it was my way of having the last word, so he bawled me out again with great, new embellishments, saying something to the effect that I was so stupid that I couldn’t even keep my ass in my pants.
Another flight shows the primitive conditions under which we operated in those days. I had to fly from San Diego to March Field near Riverside, California, which had just been built. Upon landing at March, I found I had no castor oil left in my engine. I had to go to all the drugstores in the Riverside–San Bernardino–Redlands area to find enough to fill the tank.
Flying fields were few and far between in those days, and consequently, when you had trouble, ran out of gas, or were forced down by weather, you landed wherever you could—on a road, a street, or any flat piece of country. If you landed on a farm and it wasn’t planted, the farmer would usually be kindly disposed toward you. On the other hand, if you landed in a field and destroyed his young wheat—or particularly if people came to see your plane—the farmer would be especially annoyed. An airplane was so rare that people would come from miles around to see and touch it, and it was these people coming onto his land who usually stomped his crops flat and caused the farmer to be somewhat opposed to airplanes landing on his property.
During this period, my immediate superior officer at Ream Field was Lieutenant Robert Worthington. We were very close and he did his best to advise me how to stay out of Colonel Burwell’s doghouse. He came up with the suggestion that it would be better for all concerned if Joe would give up her job in Los Angeles and move to San Diego. This wasn’t an easy decision for us because she was making more money than I was, but we decided to do it. Bob Worthington helped us find a three-bedroom rental house with a three-car garage close to the field, and we moved in. But the rent was $55 a month, and we wondered how long we could last on the remaining $85 from my lieutenant’s pay. Joe had the answer: rent out the two extra bedrooms and the garage, which we did.
Bob Worthington was about 12 years older than I and had a lovely wife named Louise. They helped us get settled and Louise discovered immediately that Joe did not know how to cook. Joe’s mother had never taught her how to make anything more than fudge; apparently, she thought Joe would marry a rich man and wouldn’t have to learn to cook. Louise helped her with simple recipes and Joe obtained a copy of Fannie Farmer’s cookbook. She learned quickly, and cooking for her became an art form. She not only learned to prepare memorable meals but became adept at making home brew, which made our house a popular place for my imbibing pilot friends during the days of Prohibition.
There were many times in our lives when I tested Joe’s patience and forbearance to the limit. I had many pilot friends who wanted to enjoy a few hours of home life. Since I was living off post, our house became sort of a pilot’s lounge. I would bring them home at all hours of the day and night, and Joe would somehow manage to stretch whatever food and drink we had on hand without saying a word. She seemed to enjoy being a hostess and listening to their wild flyers’ tales. Her tolerance was tested severely one time when I invited 25 friends to dinner and then couldn’t get there myself. Somehow she managed to stretch whatever she had on hand. I never heard that anyone complained of going hungry.
Joe became my social conscience and my memory for names, dates, places, and events. Her excellent recall enabled me many times to look brilliant when, actually, I have always had a poor memory. She was a stabilizing force between my individualistic proclivities and the requisites of military life. A newspaper reporter asked me one time what was the most important thing I had ever done in my life. My response: “Got married to Joe.”
While I was being domesticated, my urge to try different things in an airplane got stronger with each passing day. I tried all kinds of aerobatics to test the limits of the plane and my own limitations. I took pride in performing maneuvers no one else could do. However, I always practiced them thoroughly at a safe altitude before I performed them close to the ground.
One day, Bruce Johnson and I were up in a Jenny fooling around over a mountainous area when we sighted a flock of ducks below us. In those days, going after ducks in a Jenny was great sport. The plane and the ducks were capable of about the same speed, but the ducks could dive away faster than we could when they tired. I dove down and flew among the mountain peaks and canyons in hot pursuit. The ducks eventually did tire and dodged away. I lost sight of them. To my very great embarrassment, the ducks had led me into a dead-end canyon where the walls were higher than the Jenny could negotiate. I couldn’t turn in either direction so had no choice but to give it full throttle and pull back hard on the stick, hoping that I could urge the struggling Jenny over the top. The nose went over but the tail didn’t make it. We went smashing into the brush and rocks on top of the peak.
Bruce and I were unhurt but the airplane was a mess. We both cussed our bad luck, and I was concerned about how I was going to explain this latest mishap to Colonel Burwell. A crowd gathered and, finding us unhurt, went away without offering any assistance. When another crowd gathered later, Bruce wanted some sympathy so he complained that he was hurt internally. He was promptly invited into town where he spent the night as the guest of a pretty widow who had an attractive maid.
One thing I remembered from previous Burwell lectures was that the pilot had to stay with the plane in the event of a forced landing or crash. Since I was the pilot, I had to spend the night in the wreckage huddled against the chill. Once again, when I returned to our base, I felt the wrath of the colonel as he reminded me that the taxpayers had to pay for my foolishness and that I had no right to wreck their airplanes. He was right, of course. I had no defense.
In spite of my crack-ups, I never had any thoughts about quitting. In those early days, airplanes were quite fragile and landed slowly. A crack-up was not always serious, particularly if you could hook your wingtip on a tree or on anything that would cause the plane to break up gradually. Going in headfirst or nose-first, of course, could be dangerous. But if you were able to break the initial impact, you could often walk away without a scratch. As a reminder of those days, I have two facial scars—a cut over an eye and one on my chin—acquired when I stuck my face into the instrument panel on one occasion. Perhaps my experience as a tumbler helped. A tumbler learns how to fall and not be hurt. I think some of the things I learned in tumbling became very useful in aerobatics and in the frequent crack-ups I had.
On one occasion, in my exuberance to prove what an airplane could do, I thought I should help one of our enlisted mechanics with an onerous chore. He had been given the extra duty of sweeping out a hangar on a Saturday afternoon as punishment for some “crime” he had committed during the week. I felt sorry for him and told him if he would open both big hangar doors, get my plane out, push the other planes back, and step out of the way, we could get the place cleaned out in record time. He helped me crank up the old de Havilland and I took off. After he cleared the hangar and gave me the all-clear signal, I aimed for the open doors and flew through one side and out the other. Most of the dirt and dust was propelled out the door in the opposite direction from which I had come. The mechanic seemed very grateful. We congratulated ourselves that we had discovered a new use for airplanes!
In 1918, the commanding officer of Rockwell Field, headquarters for the air training units, was Colonel Henry H. “Hap” Arnold, one of the nation’s first pilots. Lieutenants Ira Eaker and Carl “Tooey” Spaatz were also assigned to Rockwell. We didn’t think so then, but all four of us were to become lifelong friends, although we would have some honest differences in the future. Hap had learned about some of my escapades at Ream Field and on one occasion had passed the order to Burwell to ground me temporarily. He stated in his memoirs he thought it was for riding on the axle of a landing plane to win a five-dollar bet. Hap must have forgotten that Colonel Burwell had seen my escapade on Mr. DeMille’s film and had already meted out my punishment.
After World War II, when his excellent autobiography Global Mission was published, Hap sent me an autographed copy. Inside the cover he wrote, “To Jimmy Doolittle: As a lieutenant you caused me worry but as time passed, your real qualities came out. Your skill as an airman, your ability as an aviation engineer and finally your all-around aviation knowledge brought admiration of all who came in contact with you.” I value that inscription very highly. In my opinion, Hap deserves much more credit than he has been given for his farsighted direction of the Army Air Forces during World War II.
* * *
Ream Field closed early in 1919 and I was transferred to nearby Rockwell. In the latter part of that year, it was announced that the military budget for the following fiscal year would be cut and the number of students made available for flying training would be greatly reduced. The 1920 budget for Army aviation was so meager that Major General Charles T. Menoher, chief of the Air Service, announced, “Not a dollar is available for the purchase of new aircraft.” The Army, which had numbered nearly four million men on Armistice Day, was to be reduced to about 19,500 officers and 254,000 enlisted men. The Army Air Service would have about 1,500 officers and 16,000 enlisted men.
There were to be only nine instructors left at Rockwell in the summer of 1919. Transfers elsewhere were inevitable. In July 1919, orders transferred Bruce Johnson and me to the 104th Aero Squadron at Kelly Field, in Texas. It didn’t take me long to get in trouble there. My personnel file shows that I received a form letter from the commander of the Air Service Flying School with certain blanks filled in. It said Lieutenant Doolittle was “hereby restricted to the limits of the Post for 30 days beginning 12 noon, August 14, 1919, to 12 noon, September 13, 1919 for the reason of stunting de Havilland airplane.” I don’t remember what I did, but I’m sure I deserved the restriction.
One of the tasks assumed by the Air Service was to patrol the Mexican border from Brownsville, Texas, along the Rio Grande to El Paso and then westward all the way to San Diego. Airfields were established every 150 miles or so, usually at or near Army posts.
In October 1919, Bruce and I were transferred to the 90th Aero Squadron at Eagle Pass on the Rio Grande. We were under the administrative control of the 12th Cavalry, which was located at Camp Robert E. L. Michie, at Del Rio. Our patrol area extended from Las Caeves to Del Rio.
There had been trouble along the border since 1913. The 1st Aero Squadron, under the command of Captain (later Major General) Benjamin D. Foulois, had been ordered to take part in General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing’s punitive expedition in pursuit of Mexican revolutionist Pancho Villa in 1916. During World War I, Mexican bandits raided American ranches to secure supplies, cattle, and horses, and U.S. Army troops would chase them back across the border. The biggest clash came in August 1918 when more than 800 American soldiers fought 600 Mexicans near Nogales, Arizona. In June 1919, Villa’s men attacked Juárez across from El Paso and stray fire killed an American soldier and a civilian and wounded six other persons. American troops crossed the river and dispersed the bandits.
By no stretch of the imagination could the area where we were assigned be considered a garden spot, especially in the baking heat of the summer. However, it was a welcome change from instructing; my only regret was that I had to leave Joe behind in San Diego.
Living conditions were less than comfortable. We had to sleep in Army pup tents. We were given de Havilland DH-4s to fly, known as “flaming coffins,” and Curtiss JN-4 “Jennys.” Our job was never well defined. We were supposed to look for illegal border crossers, smugglers, horse thieves, and any unusual activity that looked suspicious. Many Americans remembered the days in 1916 when Pancho Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, and knew that the Mexican government still had no control over what happened along the border.
Although our machine guns were loaded, we were instructed not to fire on the Mexicans, even if they fired on us first. If they did shoot at us, we were supposed to make notes of when and where and report it when we got back to Eagle Pass. Fortunately, they missed most of the time, but not always. Lieutenant Fonda Johnson, one of the pilots who had rented one of our bedrooms at San Diego, was struck in the head by a single bullet and died instantly.
Since we couldn’t fire on the Mexicans legally, we devised a method of paying them back when we saw smoke from their rifles coming from clumps of brush where they usually hid when they heard us coming. They were no doubt there to run off some cattle, so we would fly around until we found a few, then fly low overhead and stampede them toward the Mexicans’ hiding places. The Mexicans would flush out of the brush and jump into the river, shaking their fists and screaming at us.
The boredom on the ground was more than we could stand sometimes, so we tried to find new things to do in the air. Fifty miles west of Del Rio on the Pecos River near Comstock, there was a Southern Pacific Railroad bridge known as the Pecos River High Bridge, said to be the highest in the world when it was built before the turn of the century. It looked easy to fly under, so I did. But I had to bank the wings nearly vertical to get between the upright piers.
A few weeks later, I had a forced landing at Langtry. As I stood around waiting for someone to arrive to help me repair the engine, the biggest, toughest Texan I have ever seen rode up on horseback and said, “I’m looking for the SOB who flew under the Pecos River High Bridge and tore down the telephone wires which were strung under it. I’m the lineman who had to swim the river and restring them.”
I expressed sympathy at his inconvenience and advised that I would endeavor to get his complaint to the proper party when I returned to my base. Luckily, I was flying a plane other than the one I had been using when I flew under the bridge. Consequently, the cuts dug in the struts by the telephone wires were not there to indicate my culpability.
Bruce Johnson had a special knack for acquiring the necessities of life for us during those days: food, tequila, furniture, and other comforts of civilization that we so badly yearned for. He obtained rifles and shotguns for hunting and even managed to “liberate” a piano for off-duty partying.
Bringing tequila into the United States was supposed to be illegal, but there was no enforcement unless somebody provoked the border officials. On one trip across the river to Piedras Negras in a car they hired with a driver, Bruce and a friend of his, neither one of whom had a pass, tried to hide a case of tequila under their seats when they passed through the border checkpoints. They had no trouble at the Mexican side, but American border patrol officers spotted the tequila and arrested them. They were turned over to the Army and charged with smuggling and illegally crossing the border. They were sent to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio to stand a general court-martial.
We couldn’t let that happen to Brucie and his buddy because conviction meant dishonorable discharges, which we didn’t think was fair. A bunch of us went to Fort Sam to appear as character witnesses. Fortunately, somewhere between the border and the court, the liquid evidence had mysteriously disappeared. The charge was dropped. Brucie, consumed with guilt, decided to resign his commission and go home.
Boredom and loneliness overtook all of us after about five months at Eagle Pass. I sent for Joe to join me, knowing full well that she might be unhappy with the accommodations. I found a house, more like a shack, which had no furniture. I hurriedly made a bed, table, and some chairs and acquired some odd pieces that made our collection what could only be called “early Army Air Service.”
Joe had decided early in our marriage that she would bloom wherever she was planted, so she really got into the cooking and baking routine as soon as she arrived. She got tips from a Chinese cook on the post and made it a point to learn how to make Mexican food. Her sister Grace joined us, and the two of them played hostess to my flying buddies. Their presence made life a lot more bearable for everyone. Grace met Lieutenant L. S. “Andy” Andrews, one of my squadron mates, and they eventually married. Andy later became a pilot for American Airlines.
We stayed at Eagle Pass for almost a year, then briefly at Del Rio. On July 1, 1920, I was transferred back to Kelly Field and assigned to the Air Service Mechanics School. It was a memorable day for me because I was promoted to first lieutenant. I graduated from the Mechanics School the following September with a grade of 95 and a few days later was commissioned as a first lieutenant in the Air Service, Regular Army. The slight increase in pay of the promotion was welcome, but the appointment as a regular was especially appreciated because, with upcoming budget cuts, only the reserve officers would be let go, not the regulars. The assignment was also pleasing because it meant Joe and I would be moving onto a permanent Army post with better quarters and all the advantages of living near a relatively large city. Besides, Joe was pregnant and was due in the fall.
On October 2, 1920, our first son was born at Fort Sam Houston Hospital. As seemed to be the custom in those early postwar days with the firstborn male child, we named him James, Jr. I’m not sure we did him any favors.
Our second son, John, arrived at the same hospital on June 29, 1922. We gave him the middle name of Prescott after the military doctor who had delivered both of them.
There is a special delight when a man’s wife bears him a son, and the feeling of elation is doubled when he has two. Our sons were active American boys with all the native abilities to bedevil, harass, and embarrass their parents. In other words, they were normal kids. Through the years of their growing up, Joe and I tried to guide their development carefully and did what we could to help them into adulthood with the best education we could afford for them. We believed we succeeded. It is difficult to describe how immensely proud we were when both boys were commissioned in the Air Force and received their wings. Both served their country with distinction in peace and war.
* * *
The assignment to Kelly Field was a most important one for me professionally, now that I was committed to make the Air Service my career. Although I had tinkered with engines, electrical systems, instruments, and all the other kinds of plane components in the shops at San Diego, Eagle Pass, and Del Rio for many hours, the tinkering had always been an unstructured learning experience. The chance to legitimately get my hands on airplanes and engines and be taught by men who knew what they were doing gave me a lift that I had not felt before. Besides, there were different types of aircraft to fly, including captured German planes.
I also attended the Parachute School. When you finished the course, it was optional whether or not you jumped in a ’chute you had packed. I chose to jump. That was my first. Of course, I had no way of knowing then that I would later owe my life to the hundreds of tiny silkworms that made the silk parachute canopies and that I would become a three-time member of the Caterpillar Club.
The opportunity to put to work what I was learning about airplanes came in April 1921 when Lieutenant Alexander Pearson attempted to make a solo cross-country flight from Douglas, Arizona, to Jacksonville, Florida, in a DH-4. He got lost and came down in the Big Bend country about 80 miles below the border, southwest of Del Rio. He was missing for nearly a week while making his way on foot to the Army camp at Sanderson, Texas.
The plane was badly damaged but, if repaired, could be flown out. It would take some doing. I volunteered to take a pack train with a new engine and spare parts, a couple of mechanics, and a detachment of cowboys. We took 20 carrier pigeons along to send messages back to Del Rio when we needed supplies. Planes from our base flew over frequently to keep an eye on us and dropped water, rations, and mail when weather permitted.
It took us nearly two weeks of hard work but we got the DH fixed up and I flew it out. I received a letter of commendation from Major General Joseph T. Dickman, commanding general of the VIII Corps Area, for “the energy, good judgment and courage displayed by you in the repair and recovery by air of the Pearson aeroplane during the trip into Mexico, April 28 to May 11, 1921, for that purpose.”
I was pleased, of course, to be so recognized. It was the encouragement I needed. I could now see my future more clearly. Not only would flying still be my main interest, but I was determined to become as knowledgeable as possible about airplanes and everything attached to them. As an officer and a pilot, I thought I should know as much as the enlisted men who worked on them. This assignment would prove to be a milestone in my life.
1. From a report by General George P. Scriven, as quoted in The Army Air Service, by Arthur Sweetser, New York: D. Appleton Co., 1919, p. 24.