The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (70 page)

As the Ju 88s dived and fired, Summers threw the B-17 into a skid, which spoiled the Germans’ aim, but they lined up again for another pass. Doolittle watched helplessly through a porthole as Summers turned straight into the oncoming 88s, as if to deliberately bring on a collision. This caused the Germans to sheer off prematurely, but they ripped past blazing away with machine guns and 20 millimeter cannons. Still, the B-17 miraculously seemed to escape hits until, with shocking suddenness, the windshield shattered from a direct strike by one of the 20 mm tracers, which “looked like flaming footballs,” hurling glass into the faces of the pilot and copilot before ripping through Lohr’s arm and ricocheting around the cockpit, striking the instrument panel and scorching Lohr’s scarf in his lap.

Summers and Lohr were temporarily blinded by the flying shards of glass and Lohr, badly injured and bleeding profusely from his wound, staggered from his seat toward the rear of the plane. Summers screamed for Doolittle, who had never flown a B-17, and Jimmy scrambled into Lohr’s place in the copilot’s seat. General Lemnitzer was still blasting away with his machine guns but stopped long enough to help Lohr. Meantime, the number three propeller on the plane “began to run away,” caused apparently by damage to its governor sometime during the attack. This put them in immediate risk of its tearing loose and chopping into their own fuselage, “like a giant power saw.” If it did, Doolittle said, “it could cut the plane in half.” While Summers struggled to keep the B-17 from plunging into the sea, Doolittle tried to figure out how to feather the third engine prop. And there were still the German fighters to contend with.

The 88s continued their attacks from head-on, but apparently on their next pass General Lemnitzer hit one of them, and mercifully the third engine prop slowed down somewhat on its own, indicating to Doolittle that the rpm governor was not entirely out of action. Then, without so much as a howdy do, the four German fighters, one belching smoke, broke off the battle and headed for the coast. After the war, German records showed the Ju 88s had been low on gas from their patrol and nearly ran out of fuel on their way back to Biarritz. Using the B-17’s first aid kit officers managed to stanch the flow of blood from Lohr’s arm and the plane made it to the Rock of Gibraltar without further incident.

The North African invasion was a success, but not without serious casualties, many of them inflicted by the Vichy French, and the going from there on, with General George S. Patton commanding the ground troops, was painfully and bloodily slow. Doolittle and Patton, however, got on famously; “Old Blood and Guts” was most appreciative of the support his men received from the Twelfth Air Force.

The German reaction to the landings was to conduct ferocious bombing and tank attacks against the Allies as they moved eastward toward Tunisia and the Egyptian desert. These included frequent attacks on Doolittle’s airfields, and in one of them a German bomb killed his faithful crew chief Paul Leonard, who had consoled him on the Chinese hillside amid the wreckage of his plane.

While in Gibraltar, Doolittle first learned from one of Roosevelt’s radio addresses on the armed forces radio that three of his Tokyo raiders who had been captured had been executed by the Japanese. The president called it “barbarous.” He also learned that the carrier
Hornet
had been sunk in the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands. His own boys were grown up now; the oldest, James, was a combat pilot in the South Pacific, while John was in his first year at West Point. During this time, Jimmy wrote home once a week to Joe, who was busy christening ships for the navy and raising funds for servicemen, but his letters were mostly confined to small talk for security reasons.

Doolittle turned out to be excellent in high command, though the largest unit he had previously commanded was the raid on Japan. Now he led an air force of fifteen thousand men—one thousand of them officers—which would grow to twice that size before the year was out. Three weeks after the landings he was promoted to major general. He was very much a hands-on leader, who made a point of showing up at a combat squadron right before a bombing mission and climbing aboard one of the planes. It not only gave the fliers confidence to have the commanding general along on a mission, but it gave Doolittle firsthand knowledge of the problems they were experiencing. It also gave Ike Eisenhower fits, because as an air force commander Doolittle knew about Ultra, the high-priority top secret interception and decoding of German secret messages, and if he were shot down and captured he might be forced to reveal his knowledge of this vital source of intelligence.

One of the best illustrations of Doolittle’s leadership strategy came when Jimmy got word that many crews of the B-26 Marauder were rebelling against flying the twin-engine medium bomber, mainly due to its aerodynamic characteristics and high landing speeds. There were so many fatal accidents the B-26 had become known as a killer plane, or “widowmaker,” but Doolittle was determined to show the men that the aircraft should be “respected but not feared.”

He took his personal B-26 around to the various B-26 combat units and had the men assembled beforehand beside the runway. While they looked on, he would perform a perfect no-bounce landing, taxi up, feather the props, and climb out along with his crew chief, who was wearing coveralls. That in itself told the fliers Doolittle was serious, for regulations required both a pilot and copilot fly the B-26. Then he would select one of the assembled number to go for a plane ride with him while the others watched from the ground.

At one of the B-26 units Doolittle selected as his demonstration partner Major Paul W. Tibbets, who would go on in 1945 to pilot the
Enola Gay
when it dropped the first atomic bomb over Japan. Doolittle informed Tibbets, “It’s just another airplane. Let’s start it up and play with it.” Then, as Tibbets recounted in his memoirs, they began circling the field at 6,000 feet when Doolittle abruptly cut one of the engines and flew the plane all over the sky in full view of the startled pilots below. “Suddenly, he put the plane into a dive,” Tibbets remembered, “built up excess speed and put it into a perfect loop—all with one engine dead.” When they got to the bottom of the loop, Tibbets said, Doolittle restarted the engine and they made a low pass over the field, banked, and performed a perfectly smooth landing. “It was an important start,” Tibbets remembered, “in convincing [the pilots and operations people] that the B-26 was just another airplane.”
¹

On the battleground, the British under Bernard Montgomery drove Rommel’s German army westward out of Egypt in a pincers maneuver into the waiting arms of Patton, who was thrusting his army eastward out of Tunisia. The Twelfth Air Force was a critical part of this, as Doolittle noted in a confidential memo to his commanders: “We have had losses, but the enemy has paid a price of more than two-to-one for every airplane we have lost.”

In April 1943, on the anniversary of the famous raid on Japan, Doolittle convened the first reunion of the raiders when a dozen of his fliers now with the Twelfth Air Force met in a battered farmhouse in North Africa. There, in the middle of the battle, using army-issue coffee cups filled with brandy, they drank their first toast to one another, a tradition they have continued at reunions every year since.

In the 1960s each man acquired a sterling silver goblet of his own to drink the toast with. The goblets have the owner’s name engraved on two sides, one side to be seen with the cup standing straight up and the other so it is seen upside down. When one of their number passes away, his goblet is turned over—his name always readable—and placed in a display case at the U.S. Air Force Academy, guarded by two cadets.

A bottle of brandy corked in 1896, the year of Doolittle’s birth, also stays in the case. By tradition, when only two raiders remain, these men will uncork the brandy, drink a last toast, return their cups to the case, and the tradition will be ended.

In November of 2013 the final toast of the Doolittle raiders will be made at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. It will have been the raiders’ seventy-first reunion.

I
N
M
AY 1943
, the battle of North Africa ended with the surrender of 250,000 Axis troops, the last of Rommel’s army, whose troopships had been so decimated by Doolittle’s fighter-bombers that German and Italian fighting units were unable to escape their fate. Shortly afterward Doolittle received a “Dear Jimmy” letter from Eisenhower, sending him personal congratulations from Roosevelt on a job well done, accompanied by a generous spraying of words such as “superb,” “magnificent,”
etc.
The way was now clear for an invasion of Italy as well as a new air force for Jimmy Doolittle.

Late that year Eisenhower decided to split the air duties in the Mediterranean theater. When the Allies landed in Sicily in November the Twelfth Air Force was assigned to perform “tactical” or close support for the U.S. Army, which was marching north through Italy. Meanwhile, a new Fifteenth Air Force, commanded by Doolittle, became responsible for the long-range bombing of targets in southern Germany and other strategic areas.

It was around then that Doolittle paid a visit to his friend George Patton, with whom he had become close during the battles in North Africa and who had gotten himself in hot water with Eisenhower by slapping a soldier who had complained that he “just couldn’t take it” at the front. The incident, which had occurred some months earlier, had been revealed by the popular columnist Drew Pearson in his radio broadcast, and newspapers in the United States were demanding Patton’s resignation. Staving off calls for a court-martial, Eisenhower reprimanded Patton severely and ordered him to apologize to his entire army, unit by unit. It was one of the most humiliating punishments ever inflicted on a senior U.S. Army commander, and Doolittle felt that “Georgie” might need a little bucking up.

He flew over to Palermo, Sicily, one day, where Patton was in temporary exile as a sort of potted plant for various ceremonial occasions. Doolittle identified himself to the control tower and requested permission to pay his respects to the general. When he landed, Doolittle found Patton waiting for him on the runway in his jeep, with the three-star flags of a lieutenant general adorning the hood, wearing his polished helmet and famous ivory-handled revolvers. Patton, his face beaming like a harvest moon, rushed to Doolittle as soon as he climbed down from the plane, threw his arms around him, and broke into tears exclaiming, “Jimmy, I’m glad to see you. I didn’t think anyone would ever call on a mean old son of a bitch like me!”

A
STRATEGY CONFERENCE IN
C
AIRO
in late 1943 between Roosevelt and Churchill produced, among other things, orders for Doolittle to report on January 5, 1944, to Supreme Allied Headquarters at Bushy Park, about a dozen miles from London, as the new commander of the Eighth Air Force. It was the choicest plum, as well as the most difficult job of all, for not only did the Eighth have the strategic mission of daily, daytime bombing of Germany, with all of its horrifying casualties (battle deaths would run into five figures); it would also assume the tactical mission of supporting the coming invasion of Normandy in the spring of 1944.

The reason the Eighth was able to stage precision daylight raids over Germany lay in the fact that the B-17s had fighter cover. At the beginning of the war there were few Allied fighters that had the range to escort the big bombers past the coast of France, but over time with drop tanks and other devices long-range fighter cover increased to Berlin itself and even farther eastward. Still, there was something Doolittle found awry when he took over. Although the fighters had cut down on casualties during the B-17 raids they had yet to clear the skies of German fighters, which remained a dangerous threat to American troops as well as to aircraft. In addition, the Germans had found a way to arm their attack ships with rockets and other weapons that outranged the B-17 defenses.

Doolittle had been at Bushy Park less than a week when he walked into the headquarters of the Eighth’s Fighter Command and noticed a sign above the desk of the commander, General William E. Kepner, that read:

THE FIRST DUTY OF THE EIGHTH AIR FORCE FIGHTERS IS TO BRING THE BOMBERS BACK ALIVE
.

“Who dreamed that up?” Doolittle asked Kepner.

“It was here when we arrived” was the answer.

“Take the sign down. That statement is no longer in effect,” Doolittle told the startled Kepner. “Put up a new sign,” he continued, reading:

THE FIRST DUTY OF THE EIGHTH AIR FORCE FIGHTERS IS TO DESTROY GERMAN FIGHTERS
.

Kepner looked at Doolittle uncomprehendingly for a moment, then choked up; tears had come to his eyes. For two years he had been begging permission for his fighters to pursue the enemy and was repeatedly turned down. As a fighter pilot like Doolittle, Kepner understood that both the fighters and their pilots were designed for aggressive and offensive action, but much to the consternation of Kepner and his aviators they had been kept on the defensive as escorts. Doolittle told them now to go after the German fighters and shoot them down before they even got near the bombers. And if the Germans refused to rise up after the bombers, then he told them to seek out and destroy them on their flying fields.

It was an entirely new concept in modern aerial warfare, and as far as Doolittle was concerned it “was the most important and far-reaching military decision I made during the war.”

At this time Doolittle had more than five thousand combat planes under his command, including twenty-five heavy bomber groups and fifteen fighter groups. (He would soon have twice that number.) Among the 250,000 men of the Eighth were the actors Clark Gable and Van Heflin, who served in public relations, and Jimmy Stewart, who was a bomber pilot. Besides the Germans, Doolittle’s greatest enemy was the weather. He had begun to send out huge attack flights of six hundred planes or more deep into Germany, and the fickle European winter weather gave him fits. Weather forecasting was inexact, to say the least, and there was trouble and danger on both ends. If the target was closed in, there was danger of dropping bombs on innocent civilians and also exposing the planes and crews to unnecessary peril from German fighters and flak. As well, if the typical pea soup weather closed in on the bases back in England before the bombers returned, the crews, who lacked solid instrument training, were in extreme danger of crashing. Doolittle solved part of the problem by sending relays of fighters out ahead of the bombers to check visibility at the targets, but the problem of weather closing in on home base on return was never satisfactorily solved.