Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, October 1, 1993 TAG: 9401140011
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Paxton Davis
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Called "Man of Daring," it was a series of pen-and-ink pictorial biographies, with brief text, of the sort of heroes whom boys were then encouraged to admire and, if possible emulate - men like the Wright brothers, Ernest Shackleton, Admiral Byrd, Lawrence of Arabia. Among them was a daredevil flyer, still young, named James H. Doolittle.
Doolittle was already a hero of mine. The boys' magazines of the day - Open Road for Boys, Boys Life, American Boy - dwelt on similar material in each issue. Among the heroes of the day were the test and racing pilots who were the pioneers of the rapidly developing aviation stirring the world.
Jimmy Doolittle, as the book and the magazines and the sportswriters and we called him, was perfect for the part, and as authentic an American frontiersman as the '30s could provide. He was born in Alaska, the son of a miner, and grew up so small he had to learn to fight to protect himself.
At the University of California he specialized in geology and boxing, once knocking out a welterweight opponent in two minutes. He was a flyweight himself and soon grew famous as a college boxer.
But when America entered World War I, he rushed to enlist as a flying cadet. He ended as an instructor and a member of the Army Air Corps, either actively or as a reservist, for the rest of his life.
During the late '20s and '30s, he gained national attention as a test pilot for the Army and won high visibility for his feats - which the Army encouraged because it was trying desperately to sell air power and needed dramatic exploits by its aviators to do so. Doolittle was the first man to perform the "outside loop," till then considered impossible; the first to fly a sealed-cockpit plane on instruments alone and land safely; and the winner of numerous air races that were the rock concerts and athletic extravaganzas of their day. It was in that role that the boys of America came to love him - and, besides, he was still alive, unlike Kit Carson and Felix van Inckner, Germany's famous "Sea Devil."
He became a bigger hero still in the spring of 1942 when he led a band of raiding American bombers on the first attack on Japanese territory after Pearl Harbor. It was the exploit by which he would be remembered - and revered - for the rest of his long life, which ended, at 96, earlier this week. By then an Army Air Force colonel, he trained a handful of young B-25 pilots and their crews in a mission whose destination he could not reveal.
On April 18, 1942, he led his plane and the 15 other B-25s that followed it off the deck of the carrier Hornet in a flight over the Japanese mainland, their target Tokyo and five other Japanese cities. They could not return to the Hornet and could not have landed on it if they had. They bombed Japan, as intended, but afterward some went down. Some crashed into China. Doolittle himself crash-landed near Vladivostock.
As a strategic mission, it accomplished little material damage. But those who criticized it for failing to do so missed the point. The United States had just suffered staggering losses in the Philippines and across the Pacific. Doolittle and his men revived American spirits and shocked the Japanese. His raid showed we could attack Japan, after all, and would do so.
Later Doolittle became an important general commanding bombing forces over Germany, and after the war was regarded everywhere as a great American hero. Modest and unassuming, he lived up to the role; and lived so long he survived many of the younger men who'd flown with him over Japan.
But what a shame, it seems to me, that - as important and striking as it was - the Tokyo raid became the central event of his life. For men of my age he was the shining knight, of pure heart and dauntless courage, who made aviation one of the great accomplishments of the 20th century.
\ Paxton Davis is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.
by CNB