God Is My Co-Pilot

by Robert Lee Scott

A Novel. One of the finest combat stories ever written. A nice vintage collector's item. Number # 25739. Original price $1.50.

Genres: History, Biography, Aviation, Nonfiction, World War II, Autobiography, Military Fiction

206 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1943

Reviews

[Brian Rueger · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the first book I ever read. My father served during WWII and was part of the successor to the Flying Tigers. This book really influenced me in that I wanted to learn to fly and then go into the military. After this book, I read just about everything I could get my hands on concerning WWII fighter pilots.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

The novel God Is My Co-Pilot by Colonel Robert L. Scott was a very intense and interactive story. This work of non-fiction was exciting and never fostered a boring moment.

The story begins with twelve-year-old Robert Scott executing a carelessly planned prank on his church congregation. He is punished by his preacher and lashes out in vengeance. Young Scott carves a fifty-foot piece of canvas from a makeshift church tent and uses it to build a glider. Scott attempts to fly the glider and crashes it down a steep hill into rose bushes. From then on Scott moved onto buying his own plane and then his career "took off" and "landed" him in an extraordinary place. Scott goes on to become a mail-carrying pilot for the united states army after completing his pilot training for the military. Scotty, as he becomes known, was scheduled to be part of a secret military attack against the Japanese enemy of the Second World War. His mission was canceled due to changing intelligence and he was moved into India where he transported plane parts over the Himalayas. Scott obtains a position as a fighter pilot and begins flying attack missions for the military.

The stories that Scott tells of the missions he flew and the situations he got himself in and out of are truly amazing. His first person writing style makes it feel as if you are in the cockpit with him. Be subject to all his emotions and actions truly emerges yourself into the novel. The gripping details of Scott's recalled events are almost unbelievable. He never leaves you stuck in a boring or slow part of the story. I could tell that Colonel Scott lead a very interesting life and had truly mind-blowing experiences in his Air Force career.

I was deeply impressed by this novel and absolutely loved it. I felt a connection with the author and his stories because of how personal they were written. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants a definite thriller, a book that you just cannot put down. I do caution that there is deep emotion and some death with the stories that Scott exposes you to, so be prepared. However, the stories still do grab a hold of your mind and never let go. Be prepared to take a turbulent flight through the piloting life of Colonel Robert L. Scott.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this book a lot, especially because it was a neat jumping off point to another discussion with my grandpa about his experience in China Burma India in 1943 to the end of the war. He read the book 60 years ago, and my reading of it now is making him want to dig out his copy and try it again.

It was neat to have my grandpa's opinion on some of the book. He said he remembered the places the pilot was talking about, saw the top of Mt. Everest one time, and remembers clearly listening to the Tokyo radio and having the Tokyo Rose tell him, by name, that they were going to kill him.

I think the book was a realistic look at the life of a pilot at war, and the hatered for the enemy, on both sides.

[Brad Nerkowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

so far this story has been about robert l scotts journy to become a piolit. he bought his first plane at an auction for 75 dollars. and later joined the army's aircraft divioson.

this is my book review

GOD IS MY CO-PILOT
BY: COL. ROBERT L. SCOTT
PUBLISHED MAY, 1956 genre: nonfiction
Robert L. Scott wrote this book about his adventures as a mail carrier during horrible storms, getting lost over the Atlantic Ocean, running rescue missions in China for the Flying Tigers, and going2 miles over the top of Mount Everest. He was an amazing pilot and wrote a great book. He was a not allowed at first to fly because he was too old. So they made him a fighter pilot instructor. He was mad because his whole life he wanted to be a fighter pilot. So he begged and wrote letters to all the congress men so that they might let him fight. They finally let him fight and got hopelessly lost over the Atlantic and in huge storm clouds.
In this story the theme is not hard to realize once you know what you’re looking for since this book is non-fiction. The theme is undoubtedly that persistence and perseverance will lead you to any dream you desire. This theme is conveyed throughout the book from the col.’s building of his own glider at the age of twelve and crashed it. Later at 13 years of age he purchased an old world war one jenny for $75. Even after a street car conductor who had been helping him, crashed in it and died Robert still kept on the path to a career as a fighter pilot.
People who may like this book are people interested in aviation history, people who like war and want to get a good idea of just what war is like. This is similar to a previous book I have read also during ww2 also with the same enemy. Just like col. Robert felt hopeless in a b-17eflight over the Atlantic when the navigator had thrown them off course, the general of pacific operations had to guess a lot with the wrong call being deathly.
At one point in the story when Robert flies a single engine American ship 2 miles over MT Everest. “I passed over Everest and took my last pictures from the highest altitude that I reached-approximately 2 miles above the great mountain”. The connection between me and this book is especially strong because my dad had read this book also in his youth, and I also relate to col. Roberts enthusiasm for flight, the beauty of the moment of take-off, the ability to see things in a way you’ve never seen before. I enjoyed everything about this book from the great descriptions too the awesomeness of col. Robert’s amazing flight over the highest point on earth in only a prop driven plane back in the 19040’s that took the British months to replicate. Over all this is a very thought provoking book that will thrill the reader.

[Beau · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps this book is nothing more than a propaganda piece from the 1940s, but as a twelve-year-old boy, this book grabbed my attention like none other. I found an original print of it one fine summer in Greensboro, Vermont at the local library during a book sale and purchased it for 50 cents. My life has never been the same.

[Tim · Rating 4 out of 5]

God is My Copilot belongs in the top tier of aviation history books. It follows General Scott's early career in the Air Force and throughout WWII. The majority of the book covers his role as commander of the AVG, a collection of some of the best fighter pilots of WWII, many of whom came from the infamous Flying Tigers. He provides a perspective from the seldom talked about front of the China Burma India Theater.

One of my favorite stories of the book is when he's virtually the only fighter at an airfield near Kunming, China. His main job is to protect a small group of bombers during their runs. About once a day he goes on lone raids in his P-40. In order to fool the enemy he constantly repaints his propeller blades. Later,he hears stories from the indigenous Chinese about the fearsome fighter squadron stationed at the airfield and chuckles to himself knowing he was the only pilot there.

A teacher once impressed on us the power of the last line in a book. This book ends with a winsome poem by an RAF officer about the transcendent and supernatural experience of flight. The last line of the poem reads, "[I:] put out my hand and touched the face of God."

My grandfather gave me a first edition of this book. I think I've underestimated the quality of reading experience you get from old books and books in general. The musky smell, the weight and feel of old pages, and the sound of an aged spine. I especially appreciated the lettering and layout of the book. Clearly from when letters where arranged by hand and pressed onto the page. It's an entirely different experience and one I'll inevitably miss in the digital age.

[Edward Guillaume · Rating 4 out of 5]

Found this in my library collecting dust, but after reading it I was more than amazed of Robert L. Scott's account as a pilot. Published during the war, it can be seen as a propaganda piece, but I did find a lot of honesty in his accounts and even respect for the skill of the Japanese pilots and that the Imperial forces shouldn't be underestimated. He flew the P-40E, which is by no means a turn fighter against the Japenese Nate, Oscar and "Zeros" (which is what he refers to as the enemy planes; but then again a lot of pilots referred all Japenese fighters as Zeros), which makes me wonder he was either very lucky not to have been shot down, or an incredibly skilled fighter pilot. Either way, the book is a must read.

[Monte Lamb · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a memoir of a WWII pilot who fought in the China-Burma theater during 1942 and part of 1943. He shot down 13 Japanese planes with his P-40 fighter. He flew with the Flying Tigers as well as the US Army Air Corps. It is a well written book and gives good descriptions of air combat and the life they led while flying. It is not written as a religious book, but simply his personal experiences.

[Cindy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was interesting. It was written by someone who was there in China during WWII. It was certainly a product of it's time. The thoughts and opinions of Americans at the time are evident. It was really just a glimpse of one small area where the war played out - definitely not the big picture. But a part of the war that I hadn't even heard of before.

[David Freas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this book when I was in high school in the 60s, when World War II was still a bigger presence in everyone’s lives because most of our adult relatives had served in the military. I don’t remember much about it, except that I enjoyed it. In those days, there was still a sense of ‘Glory in War’ before nightly news coverage of Vietnam brought the horrors of war into our living rooms.

[Michele Simoneau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has been on my bucket list for many years. My Dad served in WWII on a B24 bomber. Maybe 50 years ago he told me that he had met Robert Scott during the war. I found Scott’s style of writing easy to read. The book is an interesting first hand account of a fighter pilot, but it also reflects the prejudices of the day. I also want to read his book about walking the Great Wall of China.

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book describing WWII combat over Burma and China by Col Robert Scott. Gives you an idea of what Grandpa "Chappie" flew and how he did it over the "hump" of burma for supplying soldiers, petrol, food and other supplies to china and back to India or Burma before the Japanese took over most of Burma.

[Nicholas Kokolakis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is a re-read for me. I think I read it as an Lt or maybe while I was at USMA. It was a nice, if self-aggrandizing account of learning to fly, making it through the academy, and combat operations in the P-40.

[Rob Roy · Rating 4 out of 5]

War time propaganda, but a fun read. Just don't think of it as history

[Eric Chang · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have commitment problem, read this book.

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding read this many years ago, was an excellent read.

[Rafeeq O. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert L. Scott's 1943 God Is My Co-Pilot is a fighter pilot's flying memoir, from a boyhood fascination with flying that probably should have killed him, through the learning and comic mishaps of flight school and the dangers of flying the U.S. Mail, to combat in the skies of China, where now he is the one doing the killing. The book is by turns witty and exciting and even savage, and always thoroughly entertaining.

Perhaps it should be noted first, of course, that the author's tale is one of a time far different from ours. It is not merely the dehumanization of the Japanese enemy, as when Scott in the midst of war in China, with friends dying in combat, tells his commanding officer, Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame, that he "wished that [he] could press a button and kill all the Japanese, to end the war, so that [he and his comrades] could all go home"...whereupon Chennault admonishes him, "Aw now, Scotty...we don't want to do that. We've got to learn to hate this enemy. Think how much fun it is to kill them slow," and the author merely concludes in some satisfaction, "Yes, sir, the General's business was killing Japs" (1943 Scribner's hardcover page 220). This is wartime, after all, and the book was written in the middle of the fighting, unlike, say, "Pappy" Boyington's Baa Baa Black Sheep or Saburo Sakai's Samurai!, which a decade or more later could look back rather more reflectively.

Scott's era also was one in which a White boy of Georgia in 1920 might think it not at all unseemly to play the prank of releasing a dozen pigeons into "a tent-meeting a Holy Rollers...at the tense moment of frantic prayer," nor, 23 years later, might the author think it amiss to describe those being pranked as "darkies...rolling on the floor" (page 1). As much as such things may sit quite differently with us nowadays, a reader of discernment should not stop, and stomp off in a huff--especially at the very first "offensive" thing, on the first page, no less--but instead should continue with a shrug, understanding the context of the times.

It also was a time in which a thirteen-year-old boy could "dri[i]ve [his] cut-down Model-T racing Ford" to another town and purchase a war-surplus JN4 "Jenny" biplane by himself...and for $75 (page 3), a sum which per the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator still would be only around $1,200 in 2023 money, or quite a deal, even if the crated-up thing does have to be reassembled (page 3). This old warhorse, by the way, was a much better way to get off the ground than the lad's first attempt, for that one had been in a home-built glider of doped canvas made when he "knew nothing of 'main-spars,' 'center sections,' or 'wing-loading'" and hence "from the roof of a high colonial home" took a 67-foot fall into a big rose bush that "probably saved [his] life," although "the thorns stayed with [him] a long time" (page 2). In any event, an ex-military pilot helps the young Scott put the Jenny together, and helps him learn to fly, in exchange for "use of the plane for 'barnstorming' over the State on weekends" (page 3).

Even the death of his partner in a crash that ended up with that man and the Jenny "both burned" up (page 4) doesn't dissuade Scott. Eventually he gets through Army flight training, though not without occasional mishaps, such as mishearing "Dive" when his instructor at "a bare four-hundred feet altitude" actually had called for a "glide" (pages 14-15). He survives the winter of 1934, when Army pilots were "flying the mail in tactical planes with open cockpits, in the blizzards of the Great Lakes region, the Rockies, the Northwest, in the cold of the prairies," with "no instruments for the ships, or at least not the proper type for flying blind" (page 28), and he survives becoming a flight instructor himself, even when one student purposefully tries to kill them both (pages 40-41 ).

Scott is not fated to die like that, though--not by catastrophic boyhood fall, not by too-low dive, not by desperately stuck rudder (pages 26-27), not by fuel starvation (pages 28-29), not by suicidal student. No, for "circuitous" as his path was (page 45), he was made for war, and in December of 1941 "[t]he actuality of war, grim war, had come," and he tells us,

"I knew then that the theoretical word 'Democracy' was not what we were to fight for. I knew it was for no party, no race, creed, or color. We were going to fight, and many of us were to die, for just what I had here--my wife and family. To me, they were all that was real, they were all that I could understand. To me, they were America." (page 42)

And so, despite at age 34 being considered "too old to fly a fighter plane in combat" (page 46), eventually with argument, pleading, and a couple harmless little embellishments of his experience in four-engined aircraft--well, flat-out lies, really, but a type of "white lie that was absolutely necessary if [he] was to go to war" (page 47)--the author gets into the game at last. He flies a B-17 across the Atlantic to Africa, through thunderheads and navigational errors, for a "dream mission" that ends up fading like a dream. He flies cargo to China over the treacherous Hump. He tests a new fighter plane by flying it over Mt. Everest, filming the event as his blood oxygen levels drop dangerously in the extreme altitude. He wages a one-man war with a P-40 borrowed from the Flying Tigers, painting on a traditional fierce shark mouth and then repainting the propeller spinner a different color for several missions of strafing or bombing each day to make it appear that many American ships are operating in the area (page 138). He ends up commanding all the fighters under Chennault, leading his pilots into battle again and again.

Robert L. Scott's God Is My Co-Pilot, fierce and proud and yet humble as well, a rousing saga of flying from a man who has climbed "Up, up the long delirious burning blue" and in "The high untrespassed sanctity of space / Put out [his] hand, and touched the face of God" (page 277), remains an exciting 5-star read even all these generations later.

[Wai Zin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a mixed feeling of this book.

It is quite interesting to read how Scott depicted their long flight from US to India, his lone patrol, how early warning system in China worked.

But I had a hard time believing some of Scott claims. They are quite outlandish. When he strafed a Japanese columns, there were hundred of deaths. When brave American pilots bombed everything blow up. It was like watching a Michael Bay's movie.

I was hoping for a honest memoir but this book feels more like a wartime propaganda.

I know that this book was written and published in 1943, in the midst of WWII about a CBI theater which was on the bottom of the priority for war efforts.

Probably Scott weaved a heroic tale to gather as much support as he can for a remote corner of war or he just like to tell tall tales.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This 1943 memoir/autobiography by a Flying Tiger pilot is excellent -- and funny. 4.49 stars.

May have read it a second time . . . it goes quickly.

The 1945 Warner Brothers movie was pretty good, too.

[Tanya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting book written by a WW2 pilot. A little difficult to read with all the technical descriptions, but surely let’s you see inside the heart and mind of this pilot.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a great story of a ww2 pilot. He wrote this book about his adventures as a mail carrier during horriale storms, getting lost over the Atlantic Ocean, running rescue missions on in China for the Flying Tigers, and going almost to the top of Mount Everest. He was a amazing pilot and wrote a great book. He was a not allowed at first to fly because he was to old. So they made him a fighter pilot instructor. When he heard that he was mad because his whole life he wanted to be a fighter pilot. So he begged and wrote letters to all the congress men so that they might let him fight. They finally let him fly in the mission and the rest is history.I really injoyed reading this book.

[Ronda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one that my dad recommended to me--he'd read it as a young man. I now would have to second dad's recommendation and would recommend to anyone interested in learning more about World War II. Keep in mind the time frame in which it was written and pair it up with a general WWII history.

[Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very readable personal account of an American pilot on the European front during world war II. Robert Lee Scott was a devout Catholic who attributes his survival to God, whom he says was with him always.

[Henry Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Someone put a quote from this on my grandfather's grave.

He was a good pilot.

I don't like god.

I don't think he did either.

I do like P-40s like a mother fucker.

Are 50 cal. machines like god?
I only ask because they sent a lot of people to "heaven"

[Frieda Davison]

One of his squadron is on the Spartanburg Veterans' Memorial

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Classic WWII tale of a man who knew what he wanted and went after it letting no seeming impossible obstacles prevent him from attaining his goal. Great life lessons and great story telling!

[Brenda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Met the author after a speech in Warner Robins, Georgia in the late 1980's. Wonderful book, humble man.

[Mark Polino · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s been along time since I read this and I’m always surprised by the “golly gee willakers” tone of books from this era. It mostly matched what I remembered.

[Chris Gager · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember almost nothig about it except that it was about flying the "Hump" in WW2 SE Asia. One of my Scholastic Magazine books in Jr. High. Date read is a guess.

[Michael Ellickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the title, this is not a book on religion. It's an autobiography of Robert L. Scott, who fought in Burma/China during WWII as a member of the U.S. Army Air Corp. It's an interesting read.