A Job for Jimmy

(See Cover)

Lieut. General Dwight David Eisenhower, the Allied commander in French North Africa, was interrupted by a message at a press conference. General Eisenhower glanced at the message, then exclaimed: "It's from Jimmy Doolittle."

The message said that Brigadier General James Harold Doolittle, commander of the U.S. air forces in the invasion, had arrived at his station. It also said that he had arrived in a fashion he approved. He had just had a fight.

At 4,000 feet above the Mediterranean, four German fighters had attacked General Doolittle's Flying Fortress. Unwilling to risk Doolittle & staff in combat if it could be avoided, Pilot Lieut. John C. Summers dived toward the sea. At 50 feet the Fortress leveled off and shot for the land. Fifty-caliber bullets from the top turret sent one of the German fighters limping away. Two others attacked. The Fortress copilot sagged to the floor with a bullet in his shoulder. Jimmy Doolittle yanked his soft khaki cap down on his balding head, climbed into the copilot's seat. The gunners fought off two other Germans before the Fortress got clear and proceeded to its destination.

The only astonishing feature of this episode was the fact that General Doolittle was not flying the Fortress when it was attacked. Said one of his cronies in London, upon hearing that the copilot was wounded before General Doolittle took over: "I hope Jimmy didn't shoot the lad to get at the controls himself."

Better than Hollywood. The most diverse flying team of World War II went into North Africa with Jimmy Doolittle. His own 12th Air Force, spawned and trained by Major General Carl ("Tooey") Spaatz's 8th in Britain, toted a battalion of U.S. parachutists 1,500 miles from Britain to Oran (previous paratroops record: the Luftwaffe's 325-mile hop from Namsos to Narvik). U.S. fighter pilots in British Spitfires took off from British carriers, strafed Vichy columns and airdromes, met a few French Dewoitine fighters in Algeria. British Fleet Air Arm pilots in Albacore torpedo-bombers also fought in Algeria.

At Casablanca U.S. naval planes dive-bombed harbor and shore positions, fought French aircraft. R.A.F. fighters and bombers paced Britain's First Army and its supporting U.S. troops into Tunisia. This week both U.S. and British flyers plumped paratroops on Tunisian airports, bombed and strafed German strong points.

Already the individual exploits of some of Jimmy Doolittle's flyers had been recorded. In a brush with the French they lost two Spitfires (one pilot was saved), downed three Dewoitines. Lieut. Colonel F. M. Dean destroyed five French tanks near the interior Algerian airdrome of Sidi-bel-Abbes. Lieut. Thomas Taylor attacked a gun post near Oran, got two bullets in his plane, then got a tank.

They made mistakes. A plane bombed an Algerian airdrome whose commanders had already been "arranged," causing a three-hour argument before the field was surrendered and planes flew in from a carrier offshore. A few transport and bomber pilots lost their way, landed in Spanish Morocco and were interned.

But for the most part the British and U.S. Naval, R.A.F. and Army air teams worked in complete precision, arrived by the clock at airdromes which paratroops, ground forces and negotiation had already secured in Algeria and French Morocco. Said 21-year-old Lieut. Carl Payne: "It's better than any Hollywood movie. Now we want to give the Germans and Italians hell." Said Major Harrison Thyng, after the first days in Algeria: "This really is no test. The days ahead are what we are looking to."

Bizerte, Sicily, Rome. Nonetheless, even before the assault on Tunisia began, the first days were a tough test for Jimmy Doolittle and his staff. Their first job was paramount: to quarter fighters, bombers and transports on strange airdromes across the face of northwestern Africa, to jump into immediate operation, at the same time to move in the mechanics, fuel, equipment, replacement planes and parts and all the complex material paraphernalia and personnel of an expeditionary air force. Thanks to colonial France's pre-war air development, they did not have to build airdromes: Algeria and French Morocco alone have more than 200 listed airports, both on the coasts and in the interior. Tunisia has another 20.

If the actual occupation was primarily a task for the naval and ground forces, the full realization of the occupation's strategic objectives in the Mediterranean will call for a vast air effort. For North Africa to Doolittle & Co. is not merely a territory: it is a series of airfields connected by a coastline; and the value of those fields is: 1) that they border a huge stretch of the Mediterranean; 2) that they are on the air-and-naval road to southern Europe.

Neither the airdromes nor any amount of aircraft on the fields will in themselves give the Allies final command of the Mediterranean and of the road to Europe. If the Allies take Bizerte, Tunisia's naval and air center only 260 miles from Malta and 150 from Sicily, they will still not have assured command even of the southern Mediterranean. What they will have, and will extend if Rommel is crushed and all North Africa falls to the Allies, are the positions from which they can contest for that command with the Axis.

So long as the Axis has Sicily and Sardinia, and enough planes to operate from their many airfields, that contest will be continuous and costly to both sides. Jimmy Doolittle's flyers and the R.A.F. will be on the defense as well as the offense, covering the naval bases and anchorages at Oran, Algiers, Bizerte, and the Allies' shore positions along the whole coast. Over the Mediterranean itself they can provide one supreme advantage: eastbound convoys, along the entire sea's length, can be protected by a cover of land-based fighters.

By short-range assault from North Africa, Allied airmen can make Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and the coasts of southern Europe hot nests for the Luftwaffe. But such attacks probably will not even neutralize the Axis bases, much less destroy them. Only one thing will give the Allies absolute command: the occupation of Sicily, Sardinia and Italy's tiny but important island of Pantelleria between Malta and Tunisia.

From the bases already won, U.S. and British airmen can do much to relieve Malta. They can cover any final blow at Rommel's rear. They can launch the continuous bombings of Italy which Winston Churchill promised last week. They can pound the Nazis in southern France. They can keep tabs on the French fleet at Toulon. They can harass, if not prevent, any Axis move through Spain toward Gibraltar and the Mediterranean ports of Spain. With ground troops they can move upon Spanish Morocco if Franco wavers in his neutrality. By the Allies in North Africa, the Allies in Britain and the Allies in Russia, every foot of Nazi territory can now be attacked from the air.

Jimmy Doolittle will have plenty to do.

Via Nome. Jimmy Doolittle was born at Alameda, Calif. 45 years ago, but he first found his fighting fists in Nome, Alaska, where his father hunted unsuccessfully for Yukon gold. Now a solid five feet, five inches of lean and tangy meat, Jimmy was then the smallest boy in school, and so he had to try to lick all the other boys. At high school (Los Angeles Manual Arts) and college (U. of California's School of Mines) he was successively bantam, welter and middleweight boxing champion.

In October 1917, he found out what his hands were for. He began to fly for the Army, first as an enlisted cadet in the Signal Corps, then as a second lieutenant and instructor. He also, in 1917, married Josephine ("Jo") Daniels (no kin to Josephus), whose hair has turned white in some 25 years with Jimmy Doolittle. Devoted Jo Doolittle had a good deal to do with making Jimmy Doolittle the foremost U.S. airman of World War II.

Via St. Louis. On his way up, in the hairy days of aviation, Jimmy Doolittle was known to most people as a stunt man, a racer, a one-shot artist who kept on coming back but never seemed to do much but fly his planes. This illusion did not prevail among his fellow airmen. Many of them considered him the finest pilot in the air. They knew that Jimmy Doolittle could do beautiful things with an airplane. But they also knew him as a painstaking, brainy man of parts, who had a sound knowledge of aerodynamics, a Doctor of Science degree from M.I.T. (where he studied in 1923-24) and a reputation as a great research pilot. Nevertheless the spectacular Doolittle stories burgeoned, and they are part of his legend today:

> In 1922, when he was a first lieutenant in the Regular Army, he wrecked a DH4 on a night take-off for a transcontinental flight from Jacksonville to San Diego--a major project then. Fellow officers found him hanging from a strut, weeping. Did the engine quit? No. Did the undercarriage wash out? No. Structural failure? No. Well, what happened? "Damn poor piloting," said Jimmy Doolittle.

>Doolittle later made the Jacksonville-San Diego flight in 21 hours, 19 minutes (it had never been done before under 24 hours). Still later, he broke many other records. Once, for American Airlines, he and Jo Doolittle flew a Lockheed transport through cloud, fog and snow from New York to San Diego in eleven hours, 59 minutes--just four minutes better than the previous transport record. "Damn poor piloting," said Doolittle, who had made the flight mainly on his instruments.

> In 1926 Curtiss-Wright borrowed Doolittle to demonstrate its planes in Chile, in competition with German pilots. At a party one night Jimmy Doolittle took on an average cargo of highballs, did a handstand on a window ledge two stories above the street. The ledge began to crumble. Ashamed to call for help, he fell to the sidewalk and broke both ankles. A German pilot insisted on running the plane trials on the scheduled day. Doolittle had his feet strapped to the rudder bar, chased the German from the sky. Later, with his crutches in the plane, he soloed across the deathtraps of the Andes to Buenos Aires.

>The Luftwaffe's late, great Ernst Udet exhibited three German planes in Buffalo. Doolittle casually asked Udet for permission to try one. Udet watched Doolittle whip around the sky, hid his head in his hands and moaned: "Oh, my God, my poor plane!"

> Still a first lieutenant in the peacetime Army, Doolittle resigned in 1930 and went to work for Shell Oil Co. In St. Louis he took off in a new Travelair racer, lost an aileron while he was testing the ship only 100 feet above the airport. Doolittle wangled the ailing plane to 300 feet and dropped out. His parachute broke his fall when he was ten feet off the ground. Then he walked around in circles, staring intently at the ground. "Looking for my rip cord," he explained. His elder son, Jimmy Jr., then ten years old, pointed to the wreckage and asked Jimmy Sr.: "We lose much in that, Pappy?" "About everything we've got," answered Jimmy Sr., poking calmly in the ruins.

> The whole family--mother and two sons--shared Pappy's rigorous self-control. When Jimmy Jr. was in his early teens, he had his father's handiness with his fists. Before he was to attend a decorous dance in St. Louis, Jimmy Sr. warned him to keep his fists in his pockets. Jimmy Jr. came home with a look of guilt on his face. Without a word, Jimmy Sr. took him into a bedroom and walloped him. When his licking was over, Jimmy Jr. burst out: "Damn it, Pappy, the dance isn't until next Saturday!"

> Jimmy Sr. was always (and unjustly) ashamed of missing combat in World War I. After Jimmy Jr. went into the Army Air Forces last year, Jimmy Sr.'s worst fear was that his son would beat him into action. Again in service as a major, but on desk duty, Jimmy Sr. pinned the Army wings on his son's tunic when Jimmy Jr. was commissioned. In his emotion, Father Doolittle forgot to return the new pilot's salute. Said Jimmy Sr., walking blindly away: "I feel like a heel."

> Lieut. Doolittle, waving his shavetails, bawled out an old sergeant. The sergeant saluted, said: "Sir, if I may say so, I served with your father, and what a gentleman he was!" Lieut. Jimmy later reported this incident to his father and asked: "Damn it, Pappy, what could I say?"

"Nothing," said Father Doolittle. "You'd already said too much."

At last reports Doolittle II was in New Caledonia. He may now be in the Solomons. Doolittle III (19-year-old John) is at West Point.

Via Tokyo. Last year Doolittle did a standout job nudging the automobile industry into production of planes and engines. Last February, as an Air Corps friend says, "Jimmy got ants in his pants, and we couldn't keep him down."

In April the public heard that Tokyo had been bombed. Not until five weeks later did President Roosevelt, decorating the crews of 16 B-25s, reveal that Jimmy Doolittle had prepared and commanded the raid on Japan. (Doolittle said that "somebody else" thought it up.)

According to Air Forces apocrypha, Jimmy announced after he was on his way: "I was a lieutenant colonel when I took off, I'm a colonel now, and when we get over Tokyo I'm gonna look down and say: 'This is from Brigadier General Doolittle, you bastards, and how do you like that?' " When he landed, actually unaware that he had been promoted, Doolittle was met by famed Brigadier General Claire Chennault. Chennault took a star from one of his shoulders, pinned it on Brigadier General Doolittle's.

The sour, belated news that some of his men were captives of Japanese (TIME, Nov. 2) and that many of his planes had crashed after dropping their bombs did not cloud Jimmy Doolittle's fame. Nor did it tinge the devotion of the Tokyo flyers who returned with or followed him to the U.S. Last week, in Washington's Walter Reed Hospital, three of them eagerly scanned the news of Jimmy in Africa and wanted to be with him. They remembered that Doolittle, during the flight to Tokyo, roamed all over his plane, taking notes on likely improvements. They remembered that after he returned he wrote personal letters to the wives or families of every man on the flight, giving them the news which was still withheld from the public--mainly because full publicity might have endangered some of the survivors.* Every letter was different. "They had to be different--like mine, for instance," said Captain Ted Lawson last week, pointing to the stump of his left leg. Said Lieut. C. L. McClure, a navigator whose shoulders were dislocated:

"When we first got back to Washington, we got in early on the train and came out here. When General Doolittle didn't find us at the station, he jumped into a cab and came on out to see us all. When Dad and Mother came to Washington to see me, Dad was anxious to meet Jimmy. I knew he was busy, but I called his office at the War Department and asked if my father could come down there to see him. Hell, he came out here to meet them.

"It means an awful lot to a flyer--having confidence in the guy who's running the show. With the General, if it's not right, he won't let you do it. Some of us want to go over to Africa and be with him there."

Whether Jimmy Doolittle's zest and aptitude for personal leadership will carry him through the biggest job of his life, with all the complexities of command in the unusually complex Mediterranean theater, is still a question. But it is not a big question in the minds of airmen who have known him since he was a fledgling. Said one of them last week: "Time just went by, and he improved with time, that's all."

* General Doolittle also spent many hours and much energy in Washington battling with the tape-bound War Department, getting his men compensation for clothing they had lost.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.