Subtitled “The Extraordinary Life of Jimmy Doolittle — Aviation Pioneer and World War II Hero” I’m not sure what to call this book…Written by Jonna Doolittle Hoppes and claimed to be a memoir…its not really that. It isn’t a memoir of Jonna’s until maybe the last few pages and its not a biography of its topic (which happens to be Jimmy Doolittle) as it largely consists of fictional remembrances and recreations of how things happened to and around Jimmy. But its not a work of fiction either.
Perhaps that’s why I can’t endorse it. It doesn’t really know what it is.
I read it because Jimmy Doolittle as an individual is supremely interesting…an MIT educated engineer, incredible pilot holding numerous firsts and records during the early days of aviation, an eventual 4-star general who directed and flew the famous “Doolittle Raid” and commanded the 8th Air Force during WWII, then went on to executive roles at Shell and TRW—all a long way from the hardscrabble life in Alaska he started with.
The book itself covers much of Doolittle’s life—though skims through the last 40 years of his life in a matter of dozen or two pages—and serves as a solid introduction to his major accomplishments and life events. What I wasn’t a fan of was the how Hoppes (Doolittle’s granddaughter) fabricated much of the book around what happened in Doolittle’s life. Hoppes obviously wasn’t there when Doolittle was a child but here we get descriptions of him standing in the middle of road with clenched fists facing down a bully and recreations of the talk going on around him, eventually picking his hat up off the ground, walking home with a girl skipping at his side…I mean…just…no. Its all a dream. The book is like watching a movie of his life created by Jerry Bruckheimer…Just nothing but the core elements are real…everything else is just fluff and ephemeral.
The book doesn’t add to what I assume are the prodigious amounts of other scholarly material on the man who is consistently named the most important man in American aviation history (he literally invented blind flight, essentially pushed the Air Force into a separate branch of the military, drove aviation fuel standards, set transcontinental speed records, changed military doctrine of air power from tactical to strategic, and crash landed more times than I can count while somehow walking away every time). He is a giant of the aviation industry in America and a true example of the American Hero archetype. A reader deserves to know the facts of such an individual, not invented conversations that never occurred.
The second half of the book also falls short of interest in that it is largely cut and pasting of letters between Doolittle and his wife during his time away in WWII leading forces in North Africa and Europe. There isn’t anything hugely impactful here as it is run of the mill conversations between husband and wife worrying about their kids and their daily life away from one another. The author uses these to enforce what is her main goal as a granddaughter—which is to show the love between her grandparents—an admirable aim and one she succeeds in. Its just that it leaves out so much that is worth examining in factual detail of such a giant of 20th Century history.