The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom Page A

helped pull them from the wreckage as the ambulance arrived. Jimmy’s instructor gave him a look and motioned for him to get back in the plane.
    “I was shaken by what I had seen but nodded in agreement,” Jimmy said, then he went up for his first lesson. “If there is such a thing as love at first sight, my love for flying began on that day at that hour.” After seven flying hours he soloed and, after that, the class practiced cross-country flying, aerobatics, and formation flying.
    At graduation Doolittle was commissioned as a second lieutenant and military aviator. At the time, crashes were frequent and many were fatal. An army report noted that “teaching men to fly is probably the most dangerous occupation in the world,” which is precisely what Jimmy Doolittle was assigned to do after he received some advanced training in the S-4C Scout, a much unloved plane. As an instructor himself, whenever there was a crash Doolittle immediately asked for volunteers to go flying. Anyone not volunteering was usually washed out of the program.
    The war ended before Doolittle could get into it, despite his repeated attempts for an overseas transfer. He thought about returning to finish his engineering degree but he had caught the flying bug. Fortuitously, the Army Air Service had decided at about the same time that it needed publicity to keep up a visible public presence to avoid downsizing after the war. To that end, the service began offering its crack pilots for aerobatic exhibitions and demonstrations, known as flying circuses, in towns and cities throughout America. Doolittle was tapped as one of the stunt fliers.
    The army aerobatic circus that Doolittle belonged to traveled more than nineteen thousand miles in the month of April 1919 alone, making one-day stands in eighty-eight cities and forty-five states using eighteen different planes, including French, British, and captured German Fokkers.
    Talented as an aviator, Doolittle was also something of a prankster and a daredevil. He was grounded and confined to the post for wing walking and axle sitting, considered stunts by the army brass. Once he buzzed a couple of army privates walking down a country road and almost decapitated one of them, wrecking his plane in the bargain. On another occasion he wrecked one of the Jennys after chasing a flock of flying ducks down into what turned out to be a box canyon.
    Jimmy’s schedule left him and Joe apart for long periods, as he moved about the country and she remained home at her job in California. One day while she was at work, Joe got a phone call from a reporter saying that Jimmy had been killed in a crash in Buffalo. Her reply was, “I don’t believe it,” and she didn’t, but after she hung up she sent a telegram to the post commander at Gerstner Field in Louisiana, where Jimmy was supposed to be stationed. As it turned out, the army had two James Doolittles listed as aviators, and the one whose middle initial was “R” had in fact been killed that day. Jimmy’s middle name was Harold.
    In another instance, Joe was riding on a streetcar when she glanced at the headline of a newspaper being read by the passenger sitting in front of her, which read “Flier Killed in Crash,” and with the subhead, “Lt. James Doolittle …” She could not see the rest because the passenger turned the page. Too shocked to ask to see the paper, Joe got off at the next stop and purchased a paper, only to learn to her immense relief that it was yet another Doolittle.
    The couple decided that Joe would join Jimmy in his army life and she moved to Ream flying field near San Diego. They paid a rent of $55 per month, leaving them exactly $2.83 a day to live out of his second lieutenant’s pay.
    One time Doolittle decided to surprise her by growing a beard and wearing it when she got off the train, but instead of acting shocked or remarking on the beard she began describing her trip and chatting about this and that, all the while Doolittle