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

was driving her to their new home on the post, until finally he could stand it no longer and said, “Can’t you even see I’ve grown a beard!”
    To which she replied, looking him up and down, “You know, Doolittle, I did feel that you looked a bit different. I guess it is the beard.” 2
    In the spring of 1921 Jimmy went to parachute school. In those days it was optional whether or not you actually jumped, and Jimmy chose to jump in a chute he himself had packed. He noted that at the time most pilots didn’t wear parachutes because they were considered “sissified.”
    Many fliers changed their minds, however, after one of the army’s top test pilots, Lieutenant Harold R. Harris, became the first man in the U.S. Army to save his life with a parachute. Harris was performing a stress test at altitude with a Loening aircraft when the stick began to vibrate uncontrollably. One of his ailerons—the hinged part of the wing that controls aircraft movement—had failed, and the wing fabric was tearing off. Harris unbuckled his seat belt, stood up, “and was plucked out of the Loening like a cork out of a bottle.” At the last moment he managed to pull the rip cord on his chute and he floated down unharmed into somebody’s grape arbor.
    After that a sign was posted in the pilots’ room that read:
    DON ’ T FORGET YOUR PARACHUTE . IF YOU NEED IT AND HAVEN ’ T GOT IT, YOU ’ LL NEVER NEED IT AGAIN .
    A N ASSIGNMENT AT L ANGLEY F IELD , Virginia, in 1921 put Doolittle in the company of General William L. “Billy” Mitchell, a tireless aviation advocate who had been second in command of the U.S. Army Air Service in World War I.
    By the early 1920s a rivalry of sorts had developed between the traditional army branches and the newfangled flying-machine corps. There was even talk that the airplane would one day replace the infantry, artillery, and cavalry ‡ by being able to bomb enemies into submission—to destroy entire cities and whole armies and navies from the air. This alarmed the conventional military establishment, which reacted defensively by giving the flying corps short shrift in appropriations and shunting it aside to remote bases—or so it was charged.
    No one was more vocal during this period than Billy Mitchell. 3 Ever since the war ended, Mitchell had been a tireless promoter of U.S. airpower. In particular he believed that the air arms of the various services should be concentrated in one separate air corps, and he was positively incensed that nonflying officers were making the big decisions in the air corps. He insisted that in the next war—and there would be a next war, he predicted—the airplane would be paramount. He made the extravagant claim that airplanes could sink battleships, prompting then secretary of the navy Josephus Daniels to ridicule Mitchell, exclaiming that he would gladly “stand on the deck” of any such a ship “with my hat off” while Mitchell tried to bomb it.
    In July of 1921, with former navy secretary Daniels in attendance along with army and navy brass aboard an observation vessel, a flight of Mitchell’s army bombers flew over the captured German battleship Ostfriesland and released their loads of one-thousand- and two-thousand-pound bombs. One explosion occurred when a bomb bounced off into the water and blew the battleship’s hull inward. To the delight of the army observers and the dismay of the navy—especially Josephus Daniels—within minutes the big German warship rolled over and sank. Despite the fact that the battleship was standing still and not furiously maneuvering at sea, let alone firing antiaircraft guns, the demonstration was considered a milestone for the future of U.S. military aviation. Neither was its significance lost on the Japanese, who were just then beginning to develop fighter bomber–style warplanes.
    Doolittle had been posted to Mitchell’s command during this period and was an assistant squadron commander during the Ostfriesland