Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (9 page)

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 com
pletely 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.