Jimmy Stewart had developed a love of aviation long before he became a famous actor. He took his first airplane ride in a Curtiss biplane while he was in high school—15 minutes for $15 that he had saved while working around the family’s J.M. Stewart Hardware Store in Pennsylvania. When Charles Lindbergh made his historic ocean crossing from New York to Paris in 1927, Stewart created a window display of it for the store, complete with a model of the Spirit of St. Louis that he built. The 19-year-old Stewart would race across the street to the newspaper office to get updates of Lindbergh’s progress off the teletype, then return to the store window to move the model plane closer to the Eiffel Tower he had fashioned.

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After graduating from Princeton University, Stewart passed a screen test in New York in 1935, and moved to Hollywood under contract to MGM. His success allowed him to fulfill his lifelong dream to fly, and he received his private pilot’s license that same year, followed by his Commercial Pilot Certificate in 1938. He owned a Stinson 105 two seater and often flew cross-country to visit his parents in Pennsylvania. The leading role in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington made Stewart a mega-star in 1939, the same year that Adolf Hitler’s army stormed into Poland.

Stewart, whose father and grandfather had both served during wartime, wanted to fight for his country—but MGM did everything it could to dissuade him from enlisting. Then he was drafted in 1940, and after he was turned down because his weight did not meet the required minimum, he decided to volunteer. In February 1941, the 32-year-old Stewart finally managed to pass his physical, and in early March, seven days after receiving the Academy Award for Best Actor in The Philadelphia Story, he received his orders to report for duty as a buck private.

Assigned to the Army Air Forces, he was sent to Moffett Field in San Francisco and quickly met the qualifications to start flight training. He won his wings in early 1942 and received a commission as a second lieutenant. His ultimate goal was to fly combat overseas, but he got bogged down Stateside as a flight instructor in Boeing B-17 bombers. The main obstacle to getting into combat was not with Stewart’s piloting ability but the fact that commanding officers did not want to risk losing a high-profile movie star in combat.

Finally in summer 1943, through a friend in higher places, Stewart managed to wangle a transfer into a Consolidated B-24 bomber squadron that was in its final stages of training for combat in the European Theater as part of the Eighth Air Force’s 445th Bomb Group. He arrived in England in November 1943, and two weeks later Captain Stewart was flying his first bombing mission against Nazi Germany.

As squadron commander of the Brunswick mission over Germany in February 1944, Stewart earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, for holding the formation together during Luftwaffe fighter attacks and heavy antiaircraft fire, and for directing a bombing run in which the bombs were accurately released over the target. His abilities as a pilot and his leadership skills moved him up the ladder quickly. In March, after flying 12 missions with the 445th, Stewart was reassigned to the 453rd Bomb Group and promoted to operations officer.

He directed the bombing operations of approximately 48 Liberators, as well as still being permitted to make occasional combat flights as a pilot. He flew eight more such missions, including one over the heart of Berlin, in which he lost several of his men. Badly shaken, but not physically injured, Stewart recuperated in the hospital for several weeks and, reluctantly, agreed to end his combat flying. For the rest of the war, he conducted combat briefings at Hethel Airfield in England while serving as wing operations officer and chief of  staff for the 2nd Combat Bomb Wing. By war’s end, Stewart had reached the rank of colonel and had been awarded a number of decorations, including two Distinguished Flying Crosses and three Air Medals.

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