“It was a table cloth that General Jimmy Doolittle’s wife had used over the years, and they were apparently big entertainers,”
Guy I used to work with married one of Doolittle’s granddaughters. He mentioned the big dinners they would have.
Jimmy Doolittle, besides being a brilliant pioneering aviator, was...
One.
Sick.
F**k.
There were two stories (besides his part in encouraging the use of 100 octane fuel and the Doolittle Raid) about him that made me admire him as much as I admire anyone (and this is from memory-bear with me if I get some details wrong) :
In 1926, the night before Jimmy Doolittle (then a young Captain) was supposed to do an aerobatic demonstration of Curtiss P-1 in Argentina to convince the Argentinians to purchase the planes, he attended a party, and everyone was smashed. He was demonstrating various handstands and such, and bragged that all young American men were capable of it, that they were all Errol Flynn wannabes.
The Argentinians didn't believe him, so he went outside to a 2nd story balcony and, while drunk, did a handstand on the ledge of the balcony. They all applauded, and he was feeling his oats (he had been a gymnast in college, and couldn't resist really showing off) so while hand-standing on the ledge, he executed a complete horizontal leg split, which caused his admirers to break into raucous applause, and at that moment...the ledge he was hand-standing on crumbled, gave way, and he plummeted to the paved courtyard below, managing to land on his feet but breaking both of his ankles in the process.
They took him to the hospital, where they casted both of his lower extremities, but because he had to do the demo, he signed himself out of the hospital against the advice of the clearly angry doctors. When he took the plane up (with both feet in casts!) he manhandled the plane so violently that he destroyed both of the casts in the process, putting the plane thorough its demonstration.
He landed and went back to the hospital, where they refused to cast his legs again, and he had to find some unlicensed doctor somewhere to cast his feet and he gave specific instructions to the doctor on how to make the cast smaller so he could fly.
He went up the next day, and broke one of the casts, and was unable to push that rudder pedal, so he did the entire show with only using the other rudder pedal, nobody noticed, and the Argentinians bought the planes!
After a few more days, he ended up ripping the casts off himself, IIRC. I think he had to have both of his ankles later re-broken to get them to heal correctly.
First to perform an outside loop, then thought impossible. First to perform an instrument blind takeoff, flight, and landing. Won all the aeronautical trophies. First American to obtain a doctorate in Aeronautical engineering. For his doctoral thesis at MIT, he wrote a brilliant, groundbreaking paper on test flight and handling characteristics.
In WWII, besides planning and flying the Doolittle Raid, he was instrumental in changing fighter doctrine when he was assigned to the Eighth Air Force, breaking the convention that the fighters had to stay with the bombers at all costs, freeing them up to go after the German fighters.
The way the story goes (from Air Force Magazine):
"...In January 1944, the new commander of Eighth Air Force, Maj. Gen. James H. Doolittle, was visiting his subordinate commander, Maj. Gen. William A. Kepner, at VIII Fighter Command, when he noticed a slogan on the wall. It read: “The first duty of Eighth Air Force fighters is to bring the bombers back alive.” Kepner said the sign was there when he got there. Doolittle told him to take it down, that it was wrong. A new sign went up: “The first duty of Eighth Air Force fighters is to destroy German fighters...”
And then there was the story about the B-26. When he took over the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, there was a near mutiny going on. Pilots didn't want to fly the B-26, it had a bad reputation of having poor flying characteristics, was unreliable, and was thought of as a deathtrap by many pilots. He had all the pilots assembled next to the runway, and told them there was nothing wrong with the Marauder. He randomly chose a pilot from the group and instructed him to bring him to whatever plane at random that pilot normally flew, and told the group they were going to take it up and demonstrate its superior flying characteristics. He took that B-26 up and flew it like none of them had ever seen, put on a real show with that ungainly looking cigar-shaped twin engine plane. There were no more complaints after that about the B-26!
A real wild man. A boxer, gymnast, world class flier, war hero, pioneer aeronautical engineer, and...Hell raiser!
A real man.
A Real American.
His wife was apparently quite a cook, and her Mexican food was known far and wide.