In 1943 Four-Star General Henry H. Arnold was chief of the Army Air Forces. One day his secretary buzzed the intercom: “Colonel Scott is here, sir.”
Hap Arnold (which was not shorthand for Happy) sneered, “Oh, you mean God’s personal pilot?”
Colonel Scott was Robert L. Scott, Jr., recently Major General Claire Chennault’s fighter commander in China and author of the runaway best seller God is My Copilot. And soon to be a major motion picture.
Scott had made headlines by offering to strafe the miner’s union boss who repeatedly violated a no-strike pledge for the duration. Scott pled, “I was just expressing my personal opinion, sir.”
Arnold grew red-faced. “Damn it, Scott, while you wear that uniform you don’t have a personal opinion!”
So ended the session. Bob said, “I think that’s when General Arnold began looking for a way to send me back to China where I could get killed.”
Bob Scott was multi-talented. Retired brigadier general, double ace, repeated posts as group-wing commander, innovative big game hunter, and best-selling author.
I knew Bob well, from 1966 onward. The next year he diverted amid a business trip from Phoenix to deliver my high school graduation address in Oregon. On one trip he asked, “Can I borrow your mama’s kitchen?” He baked a key lime pie. We became hunting partners and frequent correspondents—I have nearly 100 of his letters.
Recently I re-read Copilot for the fourth or fifth time. It had occurred to me that popular as it was, with multi-multi editions and millions of copies, there had never been an index.
So I compiled one.
Short version: 90 individuals are named, though many are surnames only. Besides Chennault, the most frequently cited players were Colonel (later Major General) C.V. Haynes of prewar B-17 and CBI Theater multi-engine fame; Flying Tiger ace Tex Hill (who during an overnight stay showed me his pappy’s Texas Ranger Sunday-go-to-meetin’ gun); 23rd Fighter Group successor Bruce Holloway (a future four-star); and then-Major John Alison, respected ace and leader whom Bob relied upon repeatedly in China.
Meanwhile:
Bob did not write Copilot. He spoke into Dictaphone rolls in a New York hotel, each day delivered to Simon & Schuster where “a Yankee secretary with a tin ear” deciphered his Georgia accent.
That Yankee secretary probably accounts for some unusual style. Every direction around the compass is capitalized. So is “general” as in “the General.”
The text reflects wartime knowledge of Japanese aircraft. Single-engine fighters are always “Zeroes” when in fact the Imperial Navy had few units in the 23rd’s operating area. The Japanese Army flew Nakajima Ki-43 “Oscars” which vaguely resembled the Mitsubishi A6M.
Japan’s twin-engine fighter, the Ki-45 (code name Nick) is always rendered as “I-45.”
But the list of aircraft in Copilot is impressive. Bob never denied that he was “a time hog” and flew as many as ten hours a day. Along the way he flew the antiquated A-3 Falcon attack plane, the P-12, P-26 “Peashooter,” B-17, C-47, P-43, and almost every model of the P-40 series. He described his pet P-40E, “Old Exterminator,” in at least half a dozen places, until the veteran was retired too heavily damaged to repair.
The oddest aspect of Copilot is the absence of any title inspiration in the text. Only later did Bob describe the session in a Kweiloin cave where medical missionary Dr. Fred Manget removed rivets driven into Bob’s back by Japanese shells detonating on his P-40 seat’s armor plate. A Chinese attendant asked how he flew the plane, navigated fired the guns, dropped the bombs, and fought “the barbarian.” Still in pain, Bob snapped, “Of course I fly alone in a fighter. I’m the only pilot!”
At that point Doc Manget—a 33-year China hand—intoned, “‘You’re not up there alone, son — not with all the things you’ve been through. You’ve got the greatest co-pilot in the world even if there is only one of you in the fighter ship — no, you’re not alone.’
A title was born.
Near as I can determine, apparently Bob did not write a full account until about 1961 in Boring a Hole in the Sky. It was one of 13 books he wrote: autobiographies, adventure tales, and novels.
Bob was a fine writer, and it’s intriguing to read his books in succession, noting how his style evolved. He traveled in rare circles, and among his literary confreres was another Simon & Schuster author, Ernest Hemingway. Bob was an unexcelled raconteur, never moreso than his description of a lost weekend with “Ernst” and “Miz Mary” in a snowbound Idaho cabin.
Much of Copilot is devoted to visceral hatred of the Japanese. Bob and others freely spoke of their satisfaction in killing the enemy, whether aloft, ashore or afloat. Chennault, who had fought Japan since 1937, had always said, “Kill them whenever you can.”
Late in the book, Bob discussed the notion that pilots who had seen the work of their guns and bombs were unable to sleep, “waking up in horror ‘with blood on your hands’…I never knew a pilot who thought about it. All the pilots I ever saw were so happy about their first kill…that I knew we were not the soft race we had been charged with being early in the war.”
But time passed.
Gradually Bob’s God laid a healing hand on his heart and mind. In 1970 at an aces reunion I photographed Bob holding a golf club with a smiling Saburo Sakai—and if you don’t know who he was, you’ve stumbled across this blog by accident.
Bob closed Copilot with a heartfelt paragraph that said in part, “The sun was going down now, even from our vantage point up there at 25,000 where Holloway and I were patrolling. We called for the other ships to land, and as we saw them go into the Lufbery circle and rat-race that fighter pilots like to land from, Holloway rolled over and dove straight for the ground. I started to roll with him—then I turned back for one more look at the setting sun. To those earthbound creatures, the sun was down. There the shadows of the approaching night covered the ground but up here I could see above the mountains, and the sun still shone on my fighter…I pulled straight up and looked into the vivid blue of the Yunnan skies.”
For more detail, here’s a link from 2018.
https://historynet.com/col-robert-l-scott-gods-pilot/
