The Pittsburgh Press (June 5, 1944)
Roving Reporter
By Ernie Pyle
London, England – (by wireless)
Here I’ve been gallavantin’ around with lieutenant generals again. If this keeps up, I’m going to lose my amateur standing. This time it is Jimmy Doolittle, who is still the same magnificent guy with three stars on his shoulder that he used to be with a captain’s bars.
Gen. Doolittle runs the American 8th Air Force. It is a grim and stupendous job, but he manages to keep the famous Doolittle sense of humor about it.
Doolittle, as you know, is rather short and getting almost bald. Since arriving in England from Italy, he has diabolically started a couple of false rumors circulating about himself.
One is that his nickname used to be “Curly,” and he occasionally throws his head back as though tossing hair out of his eyes. His other claim is that he used to be six feet tall but has worried himself down to his present small height in the past five months.
Jimmy Doolittle has more gifts than any one man has a right to be blessed with. He has been one of America’s greatest pilots for more than 25 years. He is bold and completely fearless. Along with that he has a great technical mind and a highly perfected education in engineering.
In addition to his professional skill, he is one of the most engaging humans you ever ran across. His voice is clear and keen, he talks with animation, and his tone carries a sense of quick and right decision.
He is one of the greatest of storytellers. He is the only man I’ve ever known who can tell stories all evening long and never tell one you’ve heard before. He can tell them in any dialect, from Swedish to Chinese.
Above all he loves to tell stories on himself. Here is an example:
The other day he had his plane set up for a flight to northern England. The weather turned awful, and one of his crew suggested that they cancel the trip. As Jimmy said, he would probably have canceled it himself, but when the junior officer suggested it, he sort of had to go ahead and go.
They were hanging around the operations room, getting the latest reports. The crew thought Gen. Doolittle had left the room. The junior officers were talking about the dangers of making the trip in such weather. They didn’t think the general ought to take the chance. And then he overhead one of them say, “I don’t think the b****** gives a damn about the weather.”
The poor officer almost died when he discovered that the general had heard him.
Other passengers said that throughout the flight this benighted fellow just say staring at the floor and now and then shaking his head like a condemned man.
The general thinks it was wonderful. No, he didn’t do anything about it, for he was flattered by the compliment.
Doolittle says:
But only one thing saved him. If he had used the word “old” in front of b******, I would’ve had him hung.
He tells another one. He was at a Flying Fortress base one afternoon when the planes were coming back in. Many of them had been pretty badly shot up and had wounded men aboard.
The general walked up to one plane from which the crew had just got out. The upper part of the tail gun turret was shot away. Gen. Doolittle said to the tail gunner, “Were you in there when it happened?”
The gunner, a little peevishly, replied, “Yes, sir.”
As the general walked away the annoyed gunner turned to a fellow crewman and said in a loud voice: “Where in the hell did he think I was, out buying a ham sandwich?”
A frightened junior officer, fearing the general might have overhead, said, “My God, man, don’t you know who that was?”
The tail gunner snapped:
Sure I know, and I don’t give a damn. That was a stupid question.
With which Jimmy Doolittle, the least stupid of people, fully agrees when he tells the story.
Another time the general went with his chief, Lt. Gen. Spaatz, to visit a bomber station which had been having very bad luck and heavy losses. They thought maybe their presence would pick the boys up a bit. So they visited around awhile. And when they get ready to leave, a veteran Fortress pilot walked up to them.
He said:
I know why you’re out here. You think our morale is shot because we’ve been taking it on the nose. Well, I can tell you our morale is all right. There is only one thing that hurts our morale. And that’s having three-star generals coming around to see what’s the matter with it.
Jimmy tells these stories wonderfully, with more zest and humor than I can out into them second-handed. As he says, the heartbreaks and tragedies of war sometimes push all your gaiety down into the depths. But if a man can keep a sense of the ridiculous about himself, he is all right. Jimmy Doolittle can.
More of this tomorrow.