Jimmy Doolittle Reminiscences About World War II

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In 1943, General Eisenhower awarded Doolittle the Distinguished Service Medal, and ‘the citation that came with it,’ Doolittle told me, ‘was one of the oddest you’ll ever see. It says in substance that this man has improved more during his service with me than any other senior officer in my command.’

In 1944, Eisenhower ordered Doolittle not to fly any more combat missions because ‘I had been briefed on plans for the Normandy invasion, and if I were to be captured, those plans might be compromised.’ Later, when it became time for their first bombing raid on Berlin, Doolittle pointed out to General Carl Spaatz that, ‘having led the first American bombing attacks on both Tokyo and Rome, I would like to lead this one too.’ Spaatz agreed, but a day or two before Doolittle was to fly a P-51 ahead of the bombers, he was informed that his part in the mission had been scrubbed. ‘I’m almost certain,’ said Doolittle, ‘that General Eisenhower passed the word to General Spaatz that he didn’t want me flying over Germany.’ Although Doolittle understood the logic behind the decision, he thought that ‘it would have been interesting for me to be able to remember that I had led the first American bombing raids on all three Axis capitals.’ Doolittle described the relationship between Eisenhower and Patton. ‘Even General Eisenhower considered George Patton a great leader of men,’ he said. ‘Whenever there was a difficult job to do, Ike would give the job to Georgie. [He] would do the job, and then Ike would take him out of circulation before Georgie could get himself into trouble again. Georgie was sort of like an English pit bulldog. After he’d done his fighting, you put him back in his corner.’

I asked General Doolittle about the accuracy of the movie, Patton. He replied that ‘Georgie was a profound student of military history. The movie implied that he believed in reincarnation and also that he believed he’d been a commander in every great battle that ever occurred. I’ve discussed those things with [Patton] at length, and that was simply not correct. Georgie did visit every historic battlefield that he could. He would put himself first in the position of one commander, then the other. Knowing from history exactly what had occurred, Georgie would then work out what had to be done. That was the only part of the movie that I thought was not quite factual.’

When Eisenhower established his headquarters on the Continent following the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944, Doolittle ‘was left as the senior American army officer in England’ and as such reported weekly to the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. During those visits, ‘I became more impressed with Winston Churchill . . . than by any other man I’ve ever met,’ Doolittle said. ‘He was absolutely unique, a great mind and a great heart.’ Asked to recall other men whom he admired, Doolittle described U.S. Army Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall as ‘a man of the greatest competence and the loftiest moral ethics.’ General Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of the Allied forces in the Pacific, he said, possessed ‘implicit self-confidence to the extent that it could be described as egotism, but he was just as good as he believed he was.’ After World War II, Doolittle and MacArthur became involved in business together, and the two got to know each other well. Doolittle remembered MacArthur as ‘a great man, and I’m sure that he was also a very ambitious man. I’m certain in my own mind that when he defied President [Harry S.] Truman in 1951, he considered it necessary in order to belittle Truman and move himself a step toward the White House. That was the only thing he had left to aspire to. . . . But the little man from Missouri had both the guts and the authority to call his bluff.’ Commenting on the career of General Arnold, Doolittle allowed that he was the best commander in the field of military aviation. But Doolittle also admired another fine officer and aviator, Brigadier General William ‘Billy’ Mitchell, with whom he had served during his first stint in the air corps. Doolittle maintained that Mitchell, who sacrificed his career to champion the cause of military aviation between the world wars, ‘had great vision, and his ideas were all sound, but in this world there has inevitably to be room for compromises. . . .’ Doolittle added that if Mitchell ‘had a little less oak and a little more bamboo in him, I think he could have done even more good, because [he] was a little ahead of his time.’ As we talked that April afternoon, I asked General and Mrs. Doolittle how and where they had met. Both, they replied, had been students at Los Angeles’ Manual Arts High School in 1910. ‘Joe was a nice little girl,’ said Jimmy. ‘At that time, I was an ornery little boy, and I couldn’t see any future in nice little girls.’ But about three years later, he became increasingly conscious of Joe and eventually decided that this was the girl he wanted to marry. ‘I tried to think of any advantages she might want to consider in marrying me,’ he admitted, but ‘actually they were hardly even measurable, but I promised that someday I’d take her on the world’s most beautiful cruise, up the Inside Passage to Alaska.’

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, American History, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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