Doolittle is as gifted with brains as he is with courage.
—NEW YORK TIMES, SEPTEMBER 23, 1927
THE PLAN LAID OUT by General Arnold was the perfect operation for Jimmy Doolittle, a man who on first glimpse did not appear to be such a formidable fighter. The gray-eyed Doolittle stood just five feet four—two inches shorter than Napoleon—though he frequently upped his height a couple of inches on official records. His short stature had shaped his personality from his childhood days along the Alaskan frontier, where his father, Frank Doolittle, had relocated the family from California during the gold rush at the turn of the twentieth century. The rugged town of Nome looked to Doolittle as he disembarked the ship like a sea of tents, shacks, and cabins. Mud paths served as roads, and public sanitation consisted of toilets built atop pilings along the waterfront to let the daily tides flush away the waste. Dysentery and typhoid fever flourished, as did crime in a town that boasted two dozen saloons and liquor stores. Doolittle even watched one day as half a dozen wild dogs tore apart his best friend in the streets.
Doolittle’s small size was a disadvantage among his peers. Students picked on him in school, and as punishment one time his teacher made him write twenty-five times on the chalkboard, “Jimmy Doolittle is the smallest boy in the school.” Doolittle raised his fists for the first time at the age of five when he battled a native Alaskan child. “One of my punches caught him on the nose and blood spurted all over his parka. It scared us both,” Doolittle later recalled. “I ran home to my mother, certain that I had killed an Eskimo.” He soon proved he was a capable fighter despite his small size. Word spread, and bigger children lined up for the chance to battle the scrappy youth. Doolittle, in turn, found that he actually enjoyed the challenge of a good fight. “Since my size was against me, I decided my survival could be insured only by a speedy attack right from the start,” he later wrote. “I found it was easy to draw blood if you were nimble on your feet, aimed at a fellow’s nose, and got your licks in early.”
Doolittle’s father never found much gold, but instead worked mostly as a carpenter. Tools fascinated the younger Doolittle so much that his father gave him his own set and encouraged him to learn to work with his hands. Doolittle helped his father build furniture and even houses, developing important mechanical skills that would prove vital years later when he worked on engines and airplanes. Doolittle joined his father in the summer of 1904 on a six-week trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles that turned out to be transformative. “The sights and sounds in the three big cities were strange and exciting to me at age seven, since I had forgotten everything of what I had seen before we went to Nome,” Doolittle later wrote. “I saw my first automobile, train, and trolley car. There were modern houses and stores with paint on them. My values changed right then and there. I saw everything in a new perspective and I wanted very much to be a part of the exciting life I saw all too briefly during that trip.”
His mother, Rosa, agreed and packed up and returned to California in 1908 with her then eleven-year-old son, leaving his quixotic father behind in Alaska. Rather than return to Doolittle’s native Alameda, she settled near family in Los Angeles. The schoolyard brawls that had helped shape Doolittle’s time in Alaska continued. One such fight caught the attention of an English teacher and boxing instructor, Forest Bailey. “You’re going to get hurt badly fighting the way you do,” Bailey told Doolittle. “You get mad when you fight. If you lose your temper, you’re eventually going to lose a fight because you let your emotions instead of your head rule your body.” Bailey stripped Doolittle of his rough street-fighting form and coached him instead on how to bob and weave as well as target his blows with greater power to compensate for his short arms. These skills helped the fifteen-year-old Doolittle, fighting as a 105-pound flyweight, win the Amateur Boxing Championship of the Pacific Coast in 1912.
But the teenage hothead continued to battle outside the ring as well, landing in jail one Saturday night on a charge of disturbing the peace. The police phoned Doolittle’s mother to come retrieve him. Never a fan of his boxing, she had finally had enough. “She wants you to stay here until Monday morning,” the officer told Doolittle. “She’ll drop by then and get you out in time for school.” The adolescent was stunned that his mother would leave him in jail for the weekend, but the experience taught him an invaluable lesson. “Being incarcerated in a cold, unheated cell for two nights and being totally deprived of the right to leave was a shocking experience for me,” Doolittle later wrote. “I vowed never again to let my emotions overcome reason.” His mother tried to bribe him with a motorcycle to quit boxing, but the crafty teen instead adopted the pseudonym Jim Pierce and used his new bike to motor up and down the West Coast, earning as much as thirty dollars a bout boxing professionally in various clubs.
Doolittle let his emotions overcome him again when he met Josephine Daniels, a classmate at Los Angeles Manual Arts High School who went by the nickname Joe. The pretty young woman with long dark hair rebuffed her cocky suitor for several years until, like a boxer, he finally wore her down. The two of them could not have been more different. “She was a very good little girl. I was a very naughty little boy,” Doolittle recalled. “She got all A’s; I had a hard time getting C’s.” Joe came from a cultured family, who had moved to California from Louisiana. Her parents frowned on Doolittle, a roughneck who cared little for academics and often sported bruises and a split lip from his battles in the ring. Even Doolittle’s own mother warned Joe that she could do better than her troublesome son. “There’s no doubt that Joe changed my life,” he later said. “I began to comb my hair, wear a tie, look after my clothes, and watch my language around her.” During his senior year of high school he asked her to marry him.
“You must think I am out of my mind,” she answered. “I could never marry a man who wants to fight all the time.”
“I’ll give up fighting,” he argued, telling her of his plans to return to Alaska and hunt for gold. “As soon as I have some money, I’ll send for you.”
“My mother would never approve.”
“I am going to marry you,” he countered, “not your mother.”
When he graduated from high school in spring of 1914, Doolittle accepted his father’s invitation to return to Alaska. Doolittle and his father had never been close, and the reunion failed to remedy the pair’s strained relationship. The younger Doolittle soon set off on his own, living in a tent and eating nothing but salmon as he panned unsuccessfully for gold. Doolittle realized after several weeks that he had had enough. He hitchhiked back to the coastal town of Seward and bade his father farewell, not knowing that it would be the last time he ever saw him. Doolittle hired on as a steward aboard a Seattle-bound ship and then stowed away on a freighter to Los Angeles, his dream of striking it rich now over. He planned instead to enroll in college and earn a degree. “Alaska was not the land of opportunity I thought it might be,” he later wrote, adding, “It was a far wiser Jim Doolittle who entered college.”
Doolittle studied at Los Angeles Junior College for two years, then enrolled at the University of California School of Mines at Berkeley, where he boxed on the varsity team and professionally to help pay the bills. He resurrected the alias Jim Pierce to hide his bouts from his mother and Joe. He slugged his way through a string of weak opponents before he climbed into the ring with a nimble pro. Doolittle knew right away he was in trouble. “He made a monkey out of me,” he later recalled. “That was the end of my boxing career.” Doolittle decided instead to focus on his education, though his battles in the ring had taught him an invaluable lesson in life, one he would articulate years later in a letter to his wife after the couple’s youngest son lost a college boxing match. “Luckiest thing in the world that John was whipped by the Syracuse boy. Some time in life we have to learn how to lose and the sooner the better,” Doolittle wrote. “Every boy should learn how to win graciously and lose courageously.”
The United States entered World War I in 1917, prompting many of Doolittle’s classmates to enlist. Never one to miss out on a good fight, Doolittle decided to skip his senior year and join the Army. He had no desire to serve in the infantry or coastal artillery, but saw potential in the fledgling air force after a recruiter told him the Army planned to train as many as five thousand new pilots. Flight had long fascinated Doolittle, who as a teenager had attempted to build both a glider and a monoplane on the basis of plans he found in the magazine Popular Mechanics, neither of which ever flew. He attended ground school for eight weeks at the University of California, using his holiday break to persuade Joe to marry him. Doolittle had no money, so Joe paid for the license with cash her mother had given her as a Christmas gift. The couple wed Christmas Eve at Los Angeles City Hall. Joe’s remaining twenty dollars paid for the honeymoon in San Diego, where the couple survived off cafeterias that offered service members free meals.
Doolittle finished ground school and then reported for pilot training at Rockwell Field near San Diego. He had never before been up in a plane and was excited for the experience when he climbed into a Curtis JN-4 for his first flight, on January 28, 1918. The two-seater biplane commonly known as a Jenny was America’s first mass-produced aircraft. Made from little more than wood, fabric, and wires, the trainer had a maximum speed of just seventy-five miles per hour. Doolittle and instructor Charles Todd taxied out for takeoff when two planes collided in the skies over the airfield and crashed. Doolittle jumped from the cockpit and darted to the wreckage of the closest plane, occupied by a student pilot who had flown solo. To Doolittle’s horror, the student was dead. In the second plane Doolittle found an instructor and student, both badly injured but still alive. Doolittle and Todd helped pull the two injured aviators from the wreckage as the fire truck and ambulance roared up.
“You all right?” Todd asked Doolittle.
The crash had rattled him, but he confirmed he was fine.
“Okay,” Todd replied. “Let’s go.”
Doolittle climbed back into the Jenny, and Todd fired up the engine. The biplane roared down the runway and lifted off into the sky. Doolittle quickly forgot the tragedy on the ground below as Todd guided the plane up to twelve hundred feet. Doolittle’s logbook shows that the flight lasted just twenty-two minutes, time enough to hook Doolittle on aviation. “My love for flying,” he later wrote, “began on that day during that hour.” The eager student soaked up his time in the cockpit, soloing after just seven hours and four minutes of instruction. Doolittle graduated from flight school and earned his commission as a second lieutenant on March 11, 1918. He knew exactly what type of pilot he wanted to be. “I naturally went into fighter pilot aviation, because there is a basic difference between the fighter pilot and the bomber pilot,” he later recalled. “The fighter pilot is almost always a rugged individualist. The bomber pilot, in that he works with a team, in the airplane, is much more inclined to be a team player.”
Much to his frustration, Doolittle sat out World War I, bouncing around from various posts before landing as an aviation instructor at Ream Field near San Diego. “I was pretty upset,” he later recalled. “My students were going overseas and becoming heroes. My job was to make more heroes.” The experience was not without tragedy. When Doolittle came in one day on his final approach, a student pilot in another plane cut beneath him. Neither Doolittle nor the student with him saw the other plane. The collision damaged Doolittle’s propeller and took off his landing gear, forcing him to put the plane down on its belly. He then learned the gruesome news that his propeller had decapitated the other flyer. Another time as Doolittle and a student took off, a solo pilot drifted across his flight path. Doolittle’s propeller cut off the tail of the other plane. To his horror the other plane crashed and burned, killing the student. In each case Doolittle applied the same approach Todd had taken with him.
“Who’s next?” he called out after one mishap.
“What in the hell have you got in your veins—ice water?” one of the other instructors demanded of Doolittle. “Doesn’t that kid’s death mean a thing to you?”
“I’ll think of that kid tonight,” he fired back. “Meanwhile my job is to make flyers out of these men. So is yours.”
When World War I ended, on November 11, 1918, Doolittle faced a difficult decision: return to the University of California to finish his mining degree or remain in the Army. Many aviators who left the military bought up some of the more than eight thousand Jennys built during the war that the military now sold as surplus for as little as a few hundred dollars. These pilots traveled the nation barnstorming, performing aerial stunts like wing walking, barrel rolls, and loops. Others offered rides to curious passengers for a couple of dollars apiece. Doolittle knew not only that barnstorming was dangerous and nomadic work but that the pay was abysmal. He now had a wife to support. “I was making about $140 a month and the money was there on payday without fail,” Doolittle later wrote. “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.”
“What future is there in being a pilot?” one of Doolittle’s friends asked.
“Someday aviation is going to be real big business,” he replied. “I’m going to stay in the Army and let the government teach me everything there is to be learned about airplanes.”
The military air show late that November in San Diego convinced Doolittle he had made the right decision when he and other pilots dazzled the crowd with aerial acrobatics. “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,” gushed the Los Angeles Times. “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.” The air service looked to increase the public’s enthusiasm for aviation, encouraging aviators to perform stunts at county fairs as well as attempt record-setting flights, anything to garner headlines. The adventurous Doolittle jumped at the opportunity. “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,” he wrote. “If you failed, you tried it again and again until you mastered it.”
Doolittle pushed himself and his airplane to the limit, much to the frustration of his commanding officers, a reaction captured in an early efficiency report. “He is energetic mentally and physically and possesses but one serious drawback,” the report noted. “That is his inclination occasionally to use poor judgment; i.e., take exceptional and unnecessary risks in flying.” That recklessness was on display one afternoon when he spotted two soldiers walking on a road and decided to give them a fright. He buzzed the soldiers, only to look back and find them waving at him. The indignant Doolittle circled back and flew even lower. This time he felt a bump. A glance over his shoulder horrified him: one of the soldiers lay face down. Doolittle felt certain he had killed the soldier and in his shock failed to spot a fence. He snagged his landing gear on the barbed wire and crashed a $10,000 taxpayer-funded plane. Much to Doolittle’s relief, he had only grazed the soldier. “Gee, Lieutenant,” the gracious soldier offered, “I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”
Another time Doolittle bet friends five dollars he could sit on the wheel axle while landing, a stunt that happened to be caught on film by movie director Cecil B. DeMille, who was shooting at the field that day. When Doolittle’s commanding officer saw the grainy footage, he knew exactly who it was. “It has to be Doolittle,” he erupted. “No one else would be that crazy!” News of his antics rose up the chain of command. Hap Arnold at the time commanded nearby Rockwell Field when one of his subordinates barged into his office. “Colonel,” he said, “there’s a man down at Ream Field whose conduct has been so bad it requires your personal attention.” Arnold grounded him for a month. Though many of Doolittle’s antics were no doubt reckless, each time he pushed himself he did so in an effort to learn the boundaries of his ability. “The only really dangerous pilot is the one that flies beyond his limitation,” Doolittle later said. “A poor pilot is not necessarily a dangerous pilot, as long as he remains within his limitations.”
Despite Doolittle’s exploits that at times drove his superiors to distraction—from flying through a hangar in order to sweep it out to severing phone lines when he flew under a bridge—there was little doubt the young aviator possessed unique skill. His early efficiency reports often glowed about him, predicting a bright future.
“Doolittle is more valuable to the Air Service than any officer I know,” stated one such report.
“Dynamic personality,” argued another. “An exceptional combination of very capable engineer and superior pilot.”
“One of the most daring and skillful young aviators in the Air Service accomplished in the highest form of combat training.”
Doolittle used his daring in 1922 to attempt to make the first cross-country flight in less than twenty-four hours, from Florida’s Pablo Beach to San Diego. Doolittle had organized a similar transcontinental flight from California to Washington several years earlier; it had ended in failure after two of the three Jennys had run out of fuel or crashed just a few hundred miles into the flight. Doolittle returned to San Diego, only to bang up his own plane after he put it down on a soft and freshly plowed field, having battled heavy winds. The veteran aviator was determined to avoid the same mistakes that had plagued him before. Doolittle spent two months mapping his route, studying decades of weather data, and overseeing each day adjustments to his plane. “The preparations for this flight were mainly personal,” Doolittle wrote in his report. “Physical, in order to stand the severe strain of the trip, and mental to obviate all chance of worry which, I believe is the factor most apt to cause mental fatigue and bad judgment.”
On the evening of August 6 Doolittle climbed into the cockpit of a specially built De Havilland DH-4, a biplane with a maximum speed of 128 miles per hour. The confident aviator had publicized his planned feat, and thousands turned out to see him off. He throttled up the engine at 9:40 p.m. and roared down the beach. Several hundred yards into the takeoff, the plane hit a patch of soft sand and veered toward the surf. The plane crashed into the waves and flipped over, crushing the nose and ramming the motor back four inches. Doolittle’s elbow smashed the tachometer. He unbuckled his safety belt and dropped out, landing on his head and knocking his helmet and goggles down over his face. Disoriented and convinced he was underwater, he grabbed the fuselage to pull himself up. “I was shocked to find how heavy I was because I thought I would be more buoyant in the water,” he later wrote. “When I pushed the helmet and goggles off my eyes and put my feet down, I found I was standing in only about 10 inches of water!”
The crowd erupted in laughter at the sight of the dazed airman struggling to save himself from drowning in the shallow surf.
One woman asked whether he was hurt.
“No,” a humiliated Doolittle replied, “but my feelings are.”
The young aviator refused to give up. He oversaw the plane’s repairs, ranging from a new motor and propeller to tail section and wings. Armed with thermoses of ice water and hot coffee—each equipped with special drinking straws—Doolittle climbed back into his repaired De Havilland a month later. This time he made no advance publicity of his trip. Eighteen lanterns lined the edge of the surf as he raced down the beach and lifted off at 9:52 p.m. on September 4. A few hours into the trip Doolittle ran into a massive electrical storm. The lightning crashed so close that he could smell the ozone while the cold rains stung his face. “I realized the storm area was too extensive to dodge, and plunged directly into it, trusting my compass to steer a straight course,” Doolittle later wrote. “At each flash of lightning I peeked over the side of the cockpit, saw familiar landmarks, and, after consulting the Rand-McNally road maps spread out before me, knew that I was flying high and free and true.”
Doolittle flew a straight course, passing just west of New Orleans and on to San Antonio, where he landed just past daybreak. He stayed on the ground only long enough to take on fuel before he charged back into the skies. The empty desert below coupled with the roar of the engine forced Doolittle to fight his body’s hunger for sleep as the hours droned past. Two fellow pilots intercepted the exhausted airman as he approached Rockwell, guiding Doolittle down to the field after twenty-two hours and thirty minutes. The 2,163-mile trip across eight states, which demonstrated how the Army could deploy planes from one coast to another in a single day, earned Doolittle both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the prestigious Mackay Trophy. Major General Mason Patrick, commander of the air service, sent Doolittle a letter of personal thanks. “I have read with a great deal of interest the report of your transcontinental flight,” Patrick wrote, “and desire to extend my most hearty congratulations for your fine work.”
Doolittle applied the next year for one of the Army’s six slots for postgraduate students at MIT. His failure to finish college would have rendered him ineligible, but colleagues persuaded officials at the University of California to award Doolittle his degree on the basis of his work with the Army. The new college graduate and now father of two young sons moved his family to Massachusetts in September 1923. Doolittle set out to solve the mystery of how much punishment a pilot could withstand, as well as a plane before it broke apart, hoping to shed important new light on unexplained crashes. Doolittle married his classroom work with almost one hundred hours of experimentation in the skies, putting a Dutch Fokker PW-7 fighter through a series of intense loops, rolls, and spirals at various speeds. He pushed himself and his plane so hard that he nearly ripped the wings off during a dive at two hundred miles per hour. “I was glad I wore my parachute that day,” he later said. “I almost needed it.”
Doolittle’s experiments helped define the limits of plane endurance and revealed important effects of gravitational forces on pilots. Though fliers could handle short spikes in g-forces, Doolittle found, sustained acceleration led pilots to black out. The key was blood pressure. The higher a pilot’s blood pressure, the higher acceleration the flier could endure. Doolittle published his findings in a paper that was translated into a dozen languages and led the Army to later award him a second Distinguished Flying Cross. The humble aviator who earned both a master’s and a doctorate of science from MIT later confessed that his academic success came down to the dedication of his wife, Joe, who each day typed up his class notes and drilled him on them. “We would often study together far into the night,” Doolittle recalled. “She would ask me questions, and her technique served to refresh my memory and reinforce what I had heard that day. She often put into words the thoughts I was trying to express.”
Doolittle applied his newfound expertise when the Army tapped him to compete in the 1925 Pulitzer and Schneider Cup races. A coin toss determined that his fellow Army pilot Lieutenant Cyrus Bettis would fly the Pulitzer Race at Long Island’s Mitchel Field, while Doolittle stood by as his alternate. The aviators would rotate roles two weeks later near Baltimore for the Schneider Cup. To drum up interest the pilots took to the skies over Manhattan, buzzing down Broadway and over Times Square. Doolittle soaked it up. “We performed aerobatics all over downtown New York City,” he later recalled. “It was a rare thrill to fly down the city streets and look up at the tall buildings. It was also interesting to do it inverted.” Doolittle cheered Bettis to victory on October 12 in the Pulitzer, studying how he and other pilots rounded the course pylons. Doolittle calculated that he could shave them even closer with sharper banks, moves that would guarantee his victory when he climbed into the cockpit to compete for the coveted Schneider Cup.
Unlike the Pulitzer, the Schneider Cup was a seaplane race—and Doolittle had never before flown one. The race required pilots to fly seven laps around a 31-mile triangular course for a total of 217 miles. The gun fired at 2:30 p.m. that sunny October 26, and Doolittle roared into the skies over the Chesapeake Bay. He charged around the course at an average speed of 232 miles per hour; 55 miles an hour faster than the preceding year’s record. Determined he could fly even faster, he took off the next day and set the world seaplane record over a straightaway course with an average speed of 245 miles per hour, smashing the previous record of 228 miles per hour. The self-taught seaplane newbie infuriated his vanquished Navy competitors. “The flying of Doolittle was masterly,” observed the New York Times. “When Doolittle banked around the home pylon he held his plane in so tightly that he passed over the heads of those on the judges’ stand so closely that they felt the wind from his propeller.”
The audience erupted in cheers when Doolittle taxied to the pier, prompting the gracious aviator to slip off his leather hat and offer a humble bow. Air force commander General Patrick greeted him at the pier’s end with congratulations. “This was one of the most able demonstrations I have ever witnessed,” he wrote in a commendation letter, “one of which I am extremely proud.” Even Secretary of War Dwight Davis telegrammed his congratulations. “Your splendid accomplishment in winning the Jacques Schneider once more proves America’s position among the nations of the world. The victory was won through your superior knowledge of aeronautics,” Davis cabled. “The War Department is proud of you.” Doolittle’s friends planned a proper celebration upon his return to Ohio’s McCook Field, forcing the victor into a naval uniform and then into a lifeboat mounted atop a truck bed. The gang then drove him through Dayton with signs attached to the boat that read, “Admiral James H. Doolittle.”
Doolittle’s fame grew so much that the Curtis Aeroplane and Motor Company asked the Army in 1926 to allow him to travel to Chile and Argentina to demonstrate the company’s P-1 Hawk fighter. “I believe it very desirable that this should be permitted,” Patrick advised the chief of staff. “We are trying hard here to keep aircraft manufacturers in being. Any foreign business they can secure is advantageous alike to them and to the United States.” Doolittle saw the opportunity differently. “It was a dream assignment,” he recalled. “I would get paid for stunting and there would be no rules about how low I could get or what maneuvers I could perform.” At a May 23 cocktail party at the Santiago officers club, conversation turned to famed silent picture actor Douglas Fairbanks, known for his swashbuckling roles. Under the influence of a few pisco sours—a popular South American cocktail—Doolittle boasted that all Americans could perform like Fairbanks. He walked across the room on his hands to prove it.
The Chilean pilots cheered his feat, which only encouraged the intoxicated airman. Someone volunteered that Fairbanks could do a handstand on a window ledge. Not to be outdone Doolittle climbed out an open window onto a two-foot ledge. He rose up on his hands to the eager applause of his audience. The ledge crumbled seconds later, and Doolittle plunged fifteen feet to the walkway below. The excruciating pain that shot through his legs when he hit alerted him that he was in serious trouble. X-rays revealed that Doolittle had broken both of his ankles. The injured aviator spent fifteen days in bed at San Vincente de Paul Hospital, followed by another forty-five days on his back at the Union Club of Santiago. Doolittle sank into despair. His recklessness meant Curtis had no one to demonstrate the company’s prized fighter. “Embarrassment overcame pain,” Doolittle later wrote. “There was no way I was going to stay in that hospital while my competitors were touting their wares at El Bosque.”
Doolittle summoned Curtis mechanic Boyd Sherman and instructed him to bring a hacksaw. Sherman cut his casts down below the knee and made clips to attach Doolittle’s flying boots to the pedals. The first time he went up he put so much pressure on his right leg in a snap roll that he cracked the cast. Doolittle’s furious doctors refused to treat him again, so Sherman helped him remove the casts. He then hired a German prostheses maker to fashion special casts reinforced with flexible metal corset stays. Doolittle took to the skies, buzzing his competition and dazzling the crowd on the ground below with his aerial acrobatics. His tenaciousness not only helped Curtis score its biggest military contract since World War I but wowed the military attaché, who sent a report to General Patrick, informing him that Doolittle left his room a total of four times to make aerial demonstrations. “These flights,” Colonel James Hanson wrote, “were made with legs in plaster casts, and he was carried to and from the aeroplane.”
Doolittle returned home to the United States at the completion of the trip and checked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Four months had passed since his fall, yet Doolittle still required crutches to walk. He had grown alarmed while still in Chile over his slow recovery and had a second set of x-rays taken, only to learn that the treating doctors had mistakenly reversed his casts, causing his ankles to heal improperly. By the time Doolittle reached Walter Reed, his prognosis did not look good, as revealed by the chief of the orthopedic service’s testimony before a board of medical officers. “His injury may result in a permanent disability,” the doctor told the board, “which will unfit him for the duties of an officer.” Rather than rebreak Doolittle’s ankles, doctors chose instead to set them in new casts and ordered him back to bed. This time he stayed put. When his treatment finally ended, in April 1927, Doolittle was relieved that a medical board found him fit for duty.
The restless Doolittle was itching to return to flying. He and other pilots at Walter Reed had discussed the challenge of flying an outside loop, a never-before-accomplished feat. Unlike a common aerial loop in which a pilot flies up and over backward, the outside loop required a pilot to fly first down and then loop underneath. Many aviators wondered whether the reverse forces would prove too much for the plane and the pilot. Doolittle decided to find out. He practiced the stunt until he felt confident he could pull it off. He summoned half a dozen fellow fliers to serve as witnesses and took off in a Curtis Hawk on May 25, 1927. He climbed up to eight thousand feet then turned the plane over and dove. From 150 miles per hour, his speed shot up to 280 as he turned the Hawk over on its back, remembering despite his disorientation to keep the stick pressed forward. He shot out of the loop and landed in the nation’s headlines. “Nothing to it,” Doolittle later told the press. “Why, it’s just an uncomfortable feeling that’s all.”
The famed aviator returned to South America in 1928 to demonstrate airplanes for Curtis, this time with a stern warning from Joe to avoid officers clubs that served pisco sours. Doolittle’s voyage home that summer by ship offered the thirty-one-year-old a chance to consider his future. With a wife and two growing boys to support, he started to contemplate a career outside the Army. “What would I do?” he wondered. “Who would want me? If I got a nonflying civilian job, would I miss flying and regret my decision to resign my regular commission?” Doolittle reached McCook Field without any resolution on his future, when an offer arrived from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, one that would allow him to remain in the Army yet tackle an important new project that promised once again to push the limits of aviation. Doolittle would head up a laboratory at Mitchel Field, overseeing a one-year experiment on blind flight. The analytical airman jumped at the opportunity.
Aviation had greatly evolved over the years, but foul weather still handicapped even the most experienced pilots. “Fog is one of the greatest enemies of modern transportation,” famed pilot Charles Lindbergh wrote in a January 1929 editorial. “It often brings shipping to a standstill and seriously delays ground travel, but the greatest effect of low visibility and bad weather is in aviation.” Blind flight presented three major challenges: takeoff, navigation, and landing, the last the most difficult. Overcoming those challenges called for new instrumentation to help orient a blind pilot. Doolittle recruited inventor Paul Kollsman, who had just devised a new barometric altimeter accurate to within a few feet. He worked with engineer Elmer Sperry and his son to simulate an artificial horizon that revealed the bank and pitch of a plane as well as a directional gyroscope that would provide a pilot with a more accurate heading than a compass. A radio beacon would help a flier navigate.
For more than ten months the team worked to develop the necessary equipment as well as devise proper flying techniques to master blind flight. Doolittle had personally made hundreds of blind and simulated blind landings. The time to finally test those strategies arrived on the morning of September 24, 1929. A heavy fog blanketed Mitchel Field. The impatient Doolittle had made an unofficial test flight shortly past daybreak as he waited on his team to assemble. That flight had revealed a dense fog up to five hundred feet, perfect conditions for the feat. Harry Guggenheim, the fund’s president, arrived to witness the official test. Even Joe turned out to watch. Doolittle climbed inside the rear cockpit of a Consolidated NY-2 Husky, zipping a canvas hood over the top. His only view would be the lighted dials that lined his instrument panel. Guggenheim insisted pilot Ben Kelsey accompany Doolittle as a precaution, though he would keep his hands above his head so ground observers could see he was not flying.
Doolittle throttled up his plane and took off into the morning wind, leveling off at about a thousand feet. He flew five miles west of the airfield before he banked and circled back. The radio beacon that consisted of two reeds that vibrated as he neared the signal alerted him as he passed directly over the airfield. Doolittle shot a glance at his air speed indicator as he clicked his stopwatch. He flew another two miles east before he turned back and began a gradual descent. Anxious witnesses on the ground watched as Doolittle cleared the edge of the field by fifty feet. The plane slowed to a glide, then dropped down to fifteen feet above the runway, when Doolittle pulled the nose up, touching down just a few feet from where he had lifted off only fifteen minutes earlier. “This entire flight was made under the hood in a completely covered cockpit which had been carefully sealed to keep out all light,” Doolittle later said. “It was the first time an airplane had been taken off, flown over a set course and landed by instruments alone.”
News of Doolittle’s achievement landed him again on the nation’s front pages and would forever change aviation. “On Tuesday a brilliant victory was recorded,” heralded the New York Times. “No more versatile aviator than Lieutenant James H. Doolittle of the army could have been chosen.” One of those most impressed was Hap Arnold, who a decade earlier had grounded Doolittle over his flying antics at Ream Field. “That took real courage,” Arnold would write in a 1941 letter. “There was no cheering crowd. No Audience. Just Jim Doolittle, risking one life that many others might live.” Doolittle celebrated with his team that night over dinner, each member autographing Joe’s white damask tablecloth. She later embroidered each signature with black thread to preserve them in what would become a Doolittle family tradition. “Over the years, everyone who broke bread at our table was asked to do the same,” he later wrote. “Joe painstakingly stitched over 500 signatures on the tablecloth.”
Doolittle’s concerns over his future returned after he completed his tenure with the blind-flight laboratory; this time he made the difficult decision to jump to the Shell Petroleum Corporation as head of the aviation department. “I left the Air Force in 1930 for one reason and one reason only and that was because my wife’s mother was ill, my mother was ill, her father was gone, my father was gone, it had come upon us to take care of them,” Doolittle later said. “We couldn’t do it properly on my military pay. When I went to the Shell Oil Company my pay was triple.” For Shell that was a bargain. The famed aviator, who remained in the Army as reservist, continued to race. He won the Bendix Trophy in 1931, setting a new transcontinental record of just eleven hours and fifteen minutes. The next year he cinched the Thompson Trophy. Doolittle had not only won three of air racing’s leading prizes but managed at 293 miles per hour to unofficially best the world’s land plane speed record by 15 miles per hour.
Doolittle had in the past promised to give up racing, but kept returning to the sport. “Air racing is like hay fever,” he liked to say. “It crops up when the season is ripe.” When Doolittle learned that newspaper photographers had shadowed Joe and his two sons during the Thompson race, hoping to record their horror if he was killed, he finally decided to quit. A wiser Doolittle acknowledged the danger in a speech the next year: “I have yet to hear of the first case of anyone engaged in this work dying of old age.” Racing had helped advance aviation, arousing public interest, sparking new ideas for wing and fuselage designs as well as increased engine power and improved fuels, but it had come at a great cost in the lives of pilots. Doolittle went on to shock many in aviation circles when he emerged as a vocal critic of the sport. “Aviation has become a necessity in our daily lives,” he told reporters in 1934. “It has long since passed the point where it can, or should be, used as a spectacle or as an entertaining medium.”
Doolittle instead focused his energy again on how best to advance aviation. He had grown alarmed as the air forces of other nations surpassed that of America, his beloved Army air service reduced to flying the mail. To remain strong, Doolittle believed, the United States needed to develop more powerful engines so that future warplanes could carry heavier loads. The only way to build a more powerful engine, he knew, was to develop a better fuel—and he worked for a fuel company. Aviation gas at the time varied widely, with some eighteen different leaded and unleaded fuels. Those ranged from the 65-octane gasoline used by the Army up to the 95-octane needed for special test work by the Wright Corporation. Doolittle felt the time had arrived to standardize and reduce fuel specifications. He pitched the idea to Shell to develop a 100-octane fuel, persuading the company to invest millions in a product that at that time had no market. Many of his colleagues dubbed the venture “Doolittle’s folly.”
But Doolittle had to do more than persuade just Shell; he had to convince the Army. He knew from his contacts in the military that the future fighters and bombers then on the design boards would never fly without stronger engines, but he was up against a reluctant brass that failed to grasp that motorcycles and fighters demanded different fuels. Shell delivered the first 1,000 gallons of the new fuel to the Army in 1934. Tests immediately confirmed Doolittle’s predictions, showing that even existing engines could produce as much as 30 percent more power with it than with regular fuel. Officials at Wright Field leaked the test results to the press, triggering a wave of interest from engine manufacturers. The Army held hearings and eventually ordered all planes manufactured to use 100-octane fuel after January 1, 1938. “Shell had taken a big commercial gamble,” Doolittle later wrote. “The venture paid off handsomely when the company was later asked to supply 20 million gallons of 100-octane fuel to the military services daily.”
Doolittle traveled extensively with Shell over the years and grew alarmed at the increased militarization he found in the Far East and Germany. He had developed a close friendship with German World War I flying ace Ernst Udet, visiting his home, where the two men drank French champagne and shot pistols into a steel box filled with sand atop the fireplace mantel. Doolittle’s friendship with the German aviator served as a barometer for the worsening relations between the two countries. As Germany marched down the path to war, Doolittle noted that Udet grew increasingly distant, even though he abhorred Adolf Hitler. Doolittle returned to Germany in 1939. This time his old friend seemed embarrassed to be seen with Doolittle. War was coming. Doolittle spotted great piles of wood and timber, which he recognized as potential fortifications, despite German protestations that the materials were bound for pulp mills. “On the streets, uniforms were everywhere,” he observed. “People went about their daily business with a grimness that was distressing.”
Doolittle returned home and sought out General Arnold. The two men had grown close over the years; Doolittle even asked Arnold in 1941 to write a recommendation letter for his youngest son to attend West Point. “This thing is very close to my heart,” Doolittle wrote, “or I should not take the liberty of inviting it to your attention.” Arnold was glad to help—and his muscle worked. “Don’t think for a moment that your commendation of John Doolittle wasn’t a real factor,” Senator Prentiss Brown of Michigan wrote Arnold. “While I cannot always oblige, the views of the Service officers on these appointments mean much to me.” Even though many in the air service felt Arnold favored Doolittle, the latter said he never sensed any special treatment. “General Arnold supported me in everything I did where he felt I was right,” Doolittle once said. “And he chewed my ears off whenever he felt I was wrong. The thought that personal friendship entered into his military decisions is contrary to his nature.”
Doolittle relayed to Arnold what he had seen in Germany, warning his boss that war was inevitable and that the United States would no doubt have to fight. Doolittle still felt bitter at having had to sit out World War I. He didn’t plan to let that happen again. He told Arnold he wanted to go back on active duty. “I am entirely and immediately at the disposal of the Air Corps for whatever use they care to make of me,” he wrote in 1940. “The only suggestion that I would like to make is to recommend that I be given such duty or duties as will best take advantage of my particular experience, associations and abilities.” Shell granted Doolittle indefinite leave, and Arnold was thrilled to see him again in uniform. “When he resigned from the Air Corps in 1931 to become aviation director of the Shell Petroleum Corporation, the Air Corps lost a real pilot and a real man. But not for long, because we have him back now,” Arnold wrote in a 1941 letter. “Jim Doolittle is a spectacular person, without meaning to be one.”
Arnold dispatched Doolittle to Indianapolis and later Detroit to help prep American businesses for the increased demands of war. “My job was to marry the aviation industry and the automobile industry,” Doolittle later said, “neither of whom wanted to get married.” He suffered a restless night after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As long as the United States had remained on the war’s sidelines, he had felt content to solve the problems of production. Not anymore. He fired off a one-page letter to Arnold, noting that he had 7,730 hours of flying time, much of it in fighters. “I respectfully request that I be relieved of my present duties and re-assigned to a tactical unit,” Doolittle wrote on December 8. “The reason for making this request is a sincere belief that, due to recent developments, production problems will in future be simplified and operational problems aggravated. I consequently feel that my training and experience will be of greater value in operations than production.”
Arnold read the letter and picked up the phone.
“How quickly can you be here?” he asked. “I want you on my immediate staff.”
“Will tomorrow be all right?” Doolittle answered.
Doolittle landed in Washington with a promotion to lieutenant colonel. His unique background as an aeronautical engineer, stunt pilot, and businessman made him a perfect candidate to serve as Arnold’s troubleshooter. His first job was to examine the Martin B-26, an unforgiving medium bomber involved in a series of fatal training flights. Pilots quipped that the plane’s name Marauder should be changed to Murderer. Arnold wanted Doolittle to investigate the problem and determine whether the Army Air Forces should cancel contracts for future B-26s. He visited the factory near Baltimore and spent hours in the skies testing the bomber, even demonstrating it before skeptical pilots. Doolittle realized that the problem was not the bomber but inadequate pilot training. He recommended continued production and devised an amended training program. “The B-26 was a good airplane, but it had some tricks,” Doolittle later said. “There wasn’t anything about its flying characteristics that good piloting skill couldn’t overcome.”
Doolittle was ready in late January for his next project.
That’s when Arnold summoned him for what Doolittle later described as “the most important military assignment of my life thus far.”