Ten years ago, Hollywood foisted on the world more of its lies about history in the form of the movie Pathetic Harbor … excuse me, Pearl Harbor.  In it, a grossly miscast Alec Baldwin played a yahoo character named “Jimmy Doolittle” who did not come even remotely close to the James H. Doolittle you can find in the pages of this book.  In fact, speaking of lies, at one point in it Jimmy has something to say about how say, the press used to tell fibs about him, and summed up such malarkey like this: “When truth goes out the window, we all lose something.”  Well, we certainly lost something when Hollywood dumped garbage all over the man’s name in 2001, but the truth about his life remained intact and unsullied.  And all of that truth can be found on each and every page of I Could Never Be So Lucky Again.

Jimmy was modest to a fault when he penned this book after years of encouragement from others that he put his life story down on paper. In spite of winning numerous awards and honors such as the Schneider Cup, the Bendix Trophy, the Thompson and Clifford W. Henderson trophies (both at once), and the Medal of Honor, and assisting aviation technology during the 1920’s and 1930’s to the point aircraft of today boast very, very few flight instruments on their control panels Doolittle did not have a hand in either perfecting or creating from scratch, when he recounts his achievements he does not to act like, well, a Hollywood prima donna like the joker Hollywood tried to drop into his shoes (and fell flat on its face while doing so!)  Indeed,  Doolittle is to be posthumously commended for how in this book's pages he always gives credit where credit was due and always accepts modestly the credit due to him in either his efforts in the field of aviation or his military career which saw him lead against the Japanese home islands on April 18th, 1942, the famous air raid that now bears his name and, later, the famous 8th Air Force in Europe and, briefly, the Pacific.

His account of the Doolittle Raid is, in my view, one of the highlights of the book, and it's the part I have re-read the most.  That mission truly was the ultimate achievement of the man, one which saw all his aeronautical expertise mesh with the qualities of a born leader who then gave the United States and her allies a much needed boost after four months of bad news since December 7^th, 1941 as their bombs shook the confidence of the Japanese and helped trigger the decisive battle of Midway two months later.  In fact, the whole book is worth re-reading again and again, for Jimmy was as adept with the written word as he was with the mechanics of flight, interspersing the technical stuff with personal anecdotes and family history.  I found it especially poignant he more or less came from a broken home when he and his mother returned to Los Angeles from the Yukon when he was a boy but his father stayed put.  A father who had been somewhat domineering to the boy who one day became the toast of his country for a valorous mission against her enemies.

Thank you, Jimmy, for all that you did for aviation, and for America.