Free The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh by Winston Groom Page B

doctors told him, would have to pass before the bones healed. What was he to say to the people at Curtiss-Wright? Or to his superiors in the army? A drunken stunt had put him hors de combat at a time when he might have sold planes and enhanced the army’s reputation immensely. Instead, he feared he would become a laughingstock. To complicate things further, the Chilean doctors misread the X-rays and his plaster casts were put on the wrong feet, each fracture being different, resulting in the bones being improperly set.
    Doolittle had no intention of lying in a hospital bed while others sold their planes to the Chilean air force. After nine days in traction he had his mechanic come with a hacksaw and cut him out of the plaster at the ankles, whereupon he escaped to the airfield, clattering across the runway on crutches to be lifted aboard his plane.
    With metal clips bolted on his flying shoes by the mechanic to hold his feet on the pedals, on June 24, 1926, Doolittle did a practice demonstration with the Curtiss P-1 Hawk. He flew all of his snap rolls to the right that afternoon and his right cast broke.
    That night he went back to the hospital to have the cast replaced and next day went out and flew a demonstration with all his snap rolls to the left.
    The left cast broke.
    Back at the hospital the doctors called him a “crazy Yankee” and blackballed him, so Doolittle found a German cast maker in town who fixed him up with extra heavy-duty prostheses that were reinforced by, of all things, women’s steel corset stays. These worked fine, but he still had to hobble around on crutches.
    By the day of the big airplane demonstration, word of Doolittle’s gallant persistence had gotten out, and crowds at the air show increased tenfold. Chileans are fond of underdogs and apparently viewed Doolittle in the same way as they might a one-legged bullfighter.
    He was driven to the flying field and assisted into the cockpit. The president of Chile, Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, was there, along with his cabinet and a large contingent of army and navy officers. Von Schoenebeck was already aloft, demonstrating his aerobatic routine in the Dornier. Doolittle decided he needed some competition, “So I took off, and climbed to meet him,” he said.
    Doolittle flew up beside a surprised von Schoenebeck and wagged his wings, the sign for a mock dogfight. The German saluted and the fight was on. Try as he might, it turned out there was no maneuver von Schoenebeck could perform to keep Doolittle off his tail, and he went through them all—barrel rolls, dives, Immelmanns, sideslips—but every time the German looked back there was the Curtiss Hawk, dogging him like a pesky horsefly.
    Doolittle was enjoying himself immensely. He knew his P-1 was faster (400 horsepower to the Dornier’s 260) and more maneuverable, and he whipped all around the German with close passes, then zoomed to show the Curtiss’s superior speed. After enough of this humiliation, von Schoenebeck broke off the engagement. As he began to descend, Doolittle saw that the fabric covering the Dornier’s upper wing was coming apart. ‖ Doolittle then went through his aerobatic routine and as a finale sped across the field in front of the spectators, flying upside down at treetop level. The audience clapped, cheered, and threw hats into the air as Doolittle was lifted out of his cockpit, and several of the Hawks were sold that day.
    Doolittle’s next destination was Bolivia, and he flew the Hawk due south between the mountains and the Pacific coast, setting a new record of 11 hours, 23 minutes between Santiago and La Paz. Unbeknownst to Doolittle, however, Bolivia and Chile were having one of their perennial border disputes and he arrived to find his residence, the Stranger’s Club, surrounded by a thousand-man mob of angry and arson-minded Bolivians shouting anti-Chilean and anti-American slogans, including the stock insult “Gringo go home!” Newspapers had reported that