WWII: Was it part of your job to write God is My Co-Pilot?

Scott: Not originally. After speaking to the congregation at St. Paul’s Cathedral in Buffalo, New York, I was taken the next day to Charles Scribner, the famous publisher. He asked if I would have time to write a book. I said yes, and then he learned that in a few days I was supposed to be in Arizona, and he wanted to know how I could write a book so quickly. I said that if he gave me a dictaphone with disks, I would do it. The next day he sent me the machinery and I started dictating in my hotel room at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. I didn’t know it, but Scribner was pacing up and down in the hall outside my room. After 10 hours, he knocked on the door and asked for what I had written. I gave him 17 disks and was finished two days later. Later I met Ernest Hemingway, and he said, ‘I stand at the mantlepiece with a piece of paper and a pencil and only write two pages a day, but you turn out a bestseller in three days!’

WWII: How did you arrive at the title?

Scott: I was never seriously wounded, but once I had caught some plexiglass fragments in the back of my neck. Dr. Fred Manget, a medical missionary, and his Cantonese intern were removing them from my neck, and the intern kept talking to me to take my mind off the pain. Commenting on how many things I had to do up there at one time — fire the machine guns, change fuel tanks, drop the bombs and so forth — he asked me who had been up there with me, and I said, ‘I was up there alone.’ Looking at the potential seriousness of the wound, Dr. Manget said: ‘You’re not up there alone — not with all the things you’ve been through. You’ve got the greatest co-pilot in the world even if there is only one of you in the fighter ship — no, you’re not alone.’ He was right. I had already been in a hundred experiences where I could have gotten killed, but here I was. My brother went up once and received a bad wound. I was never seriously wounded. Scribner didn’t want me to use the title. He said that people would think it was the book of a religious nut. He later told me [after the book had become a bestseller] that he had been wrong and that I had known more than he did.

WWII: Later on, they made that book into a movie. How close did the filmmakers stick to the truth?

Scott: Warner Brothers did it. I was a technical director. The movie was not very close to the book, though. They had me being shot down in the movie. I was never shot down. The only real true point was when they had me shooting at the Japanese generals in the penthouse of the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong. We bombed the Hong Kong docks, and I strafed the hotel. Years later I visited the hotel and could see the damage done by my firing at the roof. When a bullet hits concrete, it takes out chunks. They had left the holes there as a memorial to the war.

WWII: Did you ever bomb Japan?

Scott: Yes, I bombed some power stations.

WWII: Whatever became of your famous fighter, Old Exterminator?

Scott: When I left for the States, it was given to other fliers. Later, it was partially cannibalized, but the body continued to fly. It was thought that it was indestructible, but it was shot down. The Japanese took it and displayed it in Tokyo. They thought that they had gotten me! After the war, someone bought the P-40 as an ornament for his business and for 40 years it was out in the open in front of his business. Dick Hansen of Batavia, Illinois, discovered it. He had always loved flying and he bought and restored it.

WWII: Of all the planes you’ve flown, what has been your favorite? You’ve flown all of our planes and you’ve even flown a MiG and a Zero.

Scott: The P-40, because that was the only one I ever got to shoot at the enemy with. But to a flier, the last plane he flew is always his favorite, so since the last plane I flew was a McDonnell-Douglas F-15 the other day, that’s my favorite.

WWII: An F-15! Recently?

Scott: Yes, the Air Force lets me take up an F-15 every year on my birthday. [It should be noted that to fly the F-15, General Scott must at age 87 pass the standard Air Force physical.]

WWII: You fought against the Japanese. Do you still hold any animosity toward them today?

Scott: No. I fought against machines, not men. Once I was playing golf with a famous Japanese flier in a promotion. We played all day, and he never said a word. I thought that he couldn’t speak English. That night we were on a television show together, and the commentator asked me if I had any hatred for my enemy, pointing to the silent flier beside me. I replied: ‘He wasn’t my enemy. His country had some politicians that went wrong just like our country has had some that have gone wrong. I fought against his government. That was the enemy. He was not my enemy.’ At that point he turned to me and embraced me. He had understood everything I had been saying. I fought planes, not men.

WWII: Is it true that you’ve walked the entire Great Wall of China?

Scott: Yes, I did. In 1980. I had an article in Reader’s Digest about it.

WWII: How did that come about?

Scott: I had read about the Great Wall as a child and had always wanted to see it. In 1944 I was back in China, and we were bombing power plants. There weren’t any Japanese planes in the air at that time, so we were shooting at trains. I was flying with 1,000-pound bombs attached to my P-51. We were escorting B-29s sent to bomb steel mills in Korea. On the return I flew over Peking and over the Great Wall. I was fascinated with it and followed it all the way to the Yangtze River. My plane made a shadow over the wall and I said out loud, ‘O God, let me one day walk were my shadow walks.’ For years, I wrote the Chinese government trying to get permission, but got nowhere. Finally in 1980 I joined a tour group with the idea of abandoning the group and walking the wall whether they wanted me to or not. I ended up going to the American Embassy and doing it legitimately. I walked the entire thing.

WWII: That must have been some walk.

Scott: Yes. It’s 1,900 miles long.

WWII: Where did you sleep?

Scott: On the wall each night. The wall passes through only one city, so I had to sleep on the wall. I spent 93 nights on the wall and only one in a hotel.

WWII: Where did you get anything to eat?

Scott: Well, for one thing, I carried 1,200 oatmeal cookies in my 65-pound pack. The recipe calls for a cup of either raisins or nuts. I put in a cup of both. They are very nutritious.

WWII: What about water? Was finding it a problem?

Scott: At the end of each day I would look for the smoke of a house near the wall. I was afraid to drink the water because when I was there during the war, we couldn’t. Mao had, however, cleaned things up. But I didn’t trust it. I would go toward the smoke and there would be a peasant hut. They would always have melons, and I would point to two and hold out four kinds of money. The Chinese would always refuse the money but give me the melons. They always said the same words in Chinese, which I did not understand. After hearing them so many times, I memorized the sounds, and later when I got back I asked an interpreter what they had been saying. The words meant, ‘No money. You are a guest of my country.’

Update: Robert Scott died at the age of 97 on February 27, 2006.

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This article was written by Jamie H. Cockfield and originally appeared in the January 1996 issue of World War II magazine. For more great articles subscribe to World War II magazine today!

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