Doolittle: A biography

by Lowell Thomas, Edward Jablonski

. with dw, 1976, 368pp

Genres: Aviation

368 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Lowell Jackson Thomas was an American writer, actor, broadcaster, and traveler, best remembered for publicising T. E. Lawrence. He was also involved in promoting the Cinerama widescreen system.

Reviews

[Nolan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compelling biography of one of the nation’s premier aviators. The book begins with his troubled childhood in Alaska with parents who were anything but good role models. Young Jimmy Doolittle was a eventually a boxer who started out as a brawler.

You’ll read about his first exposure to aircraft—an exposure that didn’t have as much impact as you would think.

Doolittle had planned to be a mining engineer, but his early student days were anything but impressive. That meant school had to wait until the young man grew up enough to handle the discipline.

Of course, the book includes the account of Doolittle’s famous raid over Tokyo in the spring of 1942, but if you read this, you’ll realize the man is so much more than that flyer who dropped bombs on Tokyo then ditched his plane in China because he didn’t have enough fuel to get anywhere else. He parachuted into a rice field that had been liberally coated with human excrement earlier in the day.

This is the account of a feud between Doolittle and Eisenhower that made the leadership of both men in the European theater more interesting and tense than it might have been. Eisenhower saw Doolittle as a hotshot superficial flyboy, an assessment which the authors claim was largely unfair.

This is about Doolittle the doctor—a guy who got a doctorate in aeronautics. This is the story of the Tokyo raider who also captured the record as the first pilot to make a trans-continental flight in less-than 24 hours.

There are numerous bits of information here that you doubtless never learned about the man. None of this relies so heavily on dates and places that you will bog down or lose interest.

[Chris Tschirhart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great Reading

[Mark Mortensen · Rating 3 out of 5]

James Doolittle lived a full life and made many contributions to aviation. He is best known for his WWII role, leading a total of 16 aircraft on a bombing mission over Tokyo. Few facts of the highly secretive mission would be divulged in advance and because the flight would be so daring and risky with no guarantee of survival only willing volunteers known as “Doolittle Raiders” would be accepted.

This endeavor would be the first attempt to fly a B-25 bomber off the deck of an aircraft carrier. On April 18, 1942 the brave volunteers waiting on the Hornet finally heard the definitive call through the loudspeakers: “Now hear this: Army pilots, man your planes!” The fate of the aviators is detailed in the biography.