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A model plane, on its maiden flight, glides to a landing. A young boy picks it up, adjusts and rewinds its rubber band, and sends it soaring again into the sky; watching its every turn with complete absorption and earnestness.</p>
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Many years later a pilot sits in a tiny experimental plane suspended beneath a B-29. At a signal he feels his little plane leave the mother bomber, flying now under its own power. With the same earnestness of the boy he intently watches his instrument panel as the altimeter registers 30,000, 40,000 feet, altitudes pilots in the days of the young plane-builder could scarcely have dreamed a human being could ever so fly—and live to tell about it. When he steps from the plane a few minutes later Captain <em>Jim Fitzgerald</em> had known the thrilling experience of flying faster than the speed of sound.</p>
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Last September, less than a year after that flight was made, Jim died as a result of a TF-80C crash while on duty at the X-l Project at Muroc Lake, California. Only twenty-eight at the time of his death, Jim had nevertheless lived to completion so many of the things of which a young boy dreams. His ambitions were typical of those of many another boy: to become an Eagle Scout and a West Pointer, and above all—to fly!</p>
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My most vivid memory of the boy, Jim, is of him building and flying his model airplanes, a hobby which possibly influenced his selection of a life work more than any other. The house reeked of airplane glue as gliders, stick-models, and later on gas-models went into production. When finished they were taken to the local golf course and tested for defects. For Jim, the big event of the year was the annual N.A.A. Model Airplane Meet at Sky Harbor, near Nashville, Tennessee, in which he and the members of his “Air-Dusters” Club competed with other Tennessee Aviation enthusiasts. Few were the times, too, when he failed to come back with at least one trophy—a medal, loving cup, or perhaps a new model kit. Jim dearly loved his model planes, continuing this hobby in his leisure time through all his high school years, and even when home on leave after he began his military career.</p>
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Jim was born at South Pittsburg, Tennessee, July 13, 1920, the oldest son of Mr. and Mrs. J. T. Fitz Gerald, Sr. Here, in a small southern manufacturing town in the heart of the Cumberland Mountains, he found easy access to outdoor life. Surely such ideal country lent considerable incentive to a future scout.</p>
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When he was fourteen, Boy Scout Troop 63 was organized in South Pittsburg, and he lost no time in joining, passing his Tenderfoot test the same night. He became a Patrol Leader and Troop Scribe the second year, and his next few years were happily spent in the outdoor life of the Scouts. In 1938 he graduated from South Pittsburg High School as Vice President of his class; but what was more important to him—he had become a Life Scout that same year. The next year he became Senior Patrol Leader and was awarded a Certificate of Honor by the Chattanooga Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America, after nomination by his troop: “for having best exemplified the Scout Oath and Law in relation to Scouting, Home, Church, School”.</p>
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But attainment of the coveted Eagle Scout goal was temporarily postponed. A six weeks C.M.T.C. training course at Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, In the summer after High School graduation, served to spur on a decision he had made two years before, to go to a military school, his preference being the United States Military Academy at West Point. For years he had saved newspaper and magazine articles about this famous institution and carefully studied the validating examinations of past years published in the official <em>Register of the Officers and Cadets</em>. With this in mind he took a postgraduate course at the High School the next winter; and began trying to get an appointment.</p>
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At the same time a free air school in Chattanooga, forty miles away, proved an attraction hard to resist. From the time Jim built his first model plane his enthusiasm for flying, for all of aviation, had grown in leaps and bounds. The school, under the Tennessee Bureau of Aeronautics, gave a fifty-hour flying scholarship to the fifteen students ranking highest in the course in ground work. With a buddy, Jim hitch-hiked there two nights each week, studied hard, and won one of the scholarships. At last could be realized his dream, born of his boyhood hobby; that of flying a real plane.</p>
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But Jim’s feet were to stay on the ground yet a few years longer. Determined to be ready for West Point should he get an appointment, he decided to give up the flying scholarship and to enter West Point Preparatory School at Fort McPherson. Georgia. During the period of anxious waiting for the appointment, while there, Jim wrote home: “I believe I’m going to make a resolution, and that is not to have my profile mapped until a U.S.M.A. shako can be in the picture, however far in the future. That is the height of my ambition”. Jim qualified for the appointment by taking a Civil Service examination, and later took the validating exams after receiving an appointment by Representative Estes Kefauver of the Third Congressional District of Tennessee. On July 1, 1940, he was sworn in as a West Point Cadet by Brigadier General Jay L. Benedict, Superintendent.</p>
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Letters home during that first summer, though few in number and brief in content, described his life as a new cadet: rifle drilling, first parade, summer camp, dreams of being an upper classman the next year. Jim expressed himself with such typical statements as: “We have a heck of a time at meals”; “For lack of time, I shall have to refer you to the chapter in West Point Today, entitled ‘Beast Barracks’ “It’s a long wait until June but it’ll pass somehow. Not ‘til now have I realized how a prisoner must feel after getting out of Devil’s Island”.</p>
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This year, 1940, in another way, was an eventful year for Jim. In September, at the end of Plebe-summer, he was notified that his Eagle Scout Badge was being sent to the Commandant. Jim mentioned how odd it seemed, “After waiting so long for it, to receive it at such a time and at such a place”; his full schedule at the Academy making the care free Scouting days seem many years in the past.</p>
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Wistfully he thought, too, of joining a model airplane club at the Point, but for fear of hurting his “academic standings” decided to wait until he became “an upperclassman” and had “more time for such”. However, that leisure time never arrived, for soon after “Pearl Harbor” the four year West Point course was compressed into three; and the Class of June, 1944, became the Class of June, 1943. Other things, too, kept him busy: in Second and First-class years, he was on the <em>Howitzer</em> Staff, was Corps Organization Editor, and on the Ring Committee. In First-class year he became a Cadet Lieutenant. Back at the Point after yearling Christmas leave, Jim’s class heard the first rumors that those who wanted Air Corps after graduation were to substitute most of the next summer furlough for their first flight training; and would graduate with wings. This was good news and no one was happier than Jim when it became official. With such a summer in store the remaining weeks of academics seemed to drag by. Finally, came that day at Bennettsvllle, South Carolina, in June, when he flew for the first time “following through on the controls” while his instructor “took the ship off, climbed, banked, practiced forced landings, etc.” Advanced training was at the newly-completed Stewart Field, his class being the first to graduate from the “Wings of West Point”.</p>
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Following graduation came a year of fighter and combat training, particularly in the P-47 “Thunderbolt”, at various fields in Texas, Florida, and Louisiana. While stationed at Abilene, Texas, in April 1944, Jim was ordered overseas, where he was assigned to the 78th Fighter Group of the Eighth Air Force in England. On August 8th, during his twenty-eighth combat mission with the Group, he was shot down and taken prisoner. He was imprisoned at Stalag Luft III In Moosburg, Germany, where he stayed until liberated in April, 1945. While he was in prison, Jim’s family was notified that he was being awarded the Air Medal and the Purple Heart. Jim was extremely disappointed that his combat days had been cut short, and in his letters spoke constantly of going to the Pacific Theater after his liberation. Too, he had heard of the latest development in aviation; the jet-propelled plane.</p>
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Jim got back to the States in May, but remained in Washington for weeks before coming home. He was determined to do everything he could to persuade the officials at the Pentagon either to give him duty in the Pacific, where he could do more flying; or to assign him to jet-plane work. Refused Pacific duty, he was more successful with his other choice, as he was assigned to the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field, Dayton, Ohio. Here he chose the Flight Test Division and soon flew and helped test the P-80 Shooting Star when it was first developed.</p>
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In June, 1946, Jim was selected to take a P-80 to the Birmingham Air Carnival, Birmingham, Alabama; one of the first big post-war air shows. While here he was introduced to the President of T.A.C.A. Airways of South America; who, in turn, introduced Jim to his secretary, Miss Lillian Odette Pankey, of Mobile, Alabama. A few weekends later Jim flew to Mobile and told this pretty auburn-haired girl that she was the one he was going to marry. After a year of “Dayton to Mobile” flying he persuaded her that he was right, and in July, 1947 they were married. In May of the next year their son James Thomas Fitzgerald, III was born.</p>
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At the time of their marriage, Jim was stationed temporarily at Air Tactical School at Tyndall Field in Panama City, Florida, restlessly counting the days until he was to return to Wright Field where research on a new rocket plane, the Bell XS-1, was going forward. Jim said that he “certainly would like to be assigned to that project. It is the most fascinating problem there is in aeronautics: this flying faster than the speed of sound, and the research that accompanies such”. Shortly after his return to Wright Field in the fall, he was assigned to this project and transferred to Muroc Base in California. Here, in October, 1947, the tiny XS-1 made aviation history when it pierced the Sonic Wall, flying faster than the speed of sound. Jim described the X-l as “the most thrilling thing I have ever witnessed in flight”.</p>
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At Muroc, Jim spent the last year of his earthly life doing a work with which he thought no other work could compare. He loved to fly. But he couldn’t have been satisfied with merely flying. He was tremendously interested in the future development of aviation as a whole; and the mechanics and research part had a never-ending fascination for him. What more could he have desired than his work in the very newest developments in jet-propelled and faster-than-sound planes? Loving his work as he did, he didn’t seem to consider that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he and four others had flown higher and faster than anyone else in the world.</p>
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He was again awarded the Air Medal in June 1948, by Secretary of the Air Symington. A Washington newspaper correspondent who interviewed Jim upon this occasion gave a true description of him: “This pleasant-faced lad with the easy smile is taking the role of peacetime hero in stride. The flashes of the photographers’ bulbs, the grinding of the newsreel cameras, and the intricacies of a television appearance have left him as they found him—the guy from South Pittsburg, who just happens to like to fly. Whenever it seems to him that too many of the laurels are falling his way, he points out earnestly that all the credit must go to his buddy, Captain Chuck Yeager, who was the first to break the supersonic wall last October.” This was typically Jim—”modest and unassuming”, disclaiming all credit for himself. It remained for Chuck to tell Jim’s family that Jim himself had exceeded the speed of sound, not after several attempts, but on his first flight in the X-l.</p>
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On September 2, 1948, Jim, flying a Lockheed TF-80C Shooting Star, a two-place jet-training plane, had “left Long Beach, California to fly non-stop to the National Air Races in Cleveland, Ohio. He was forced to land in Denver when wing fuel tanks failed to function properly; and proceeded from Denver by normal flight stages utilizing only the internal fuel tanks”. On September 9th, after his return to California from the National Air Races, he left Muroc to return the plane to the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As he was making a landing approach, the controls of his plane locked, causing it to dip, dig its left wing into the ground and somersault; crashing in some rose bushes 300 yards north of the Metropolitan Airport in Van Nuys. Jim remained unconscious for eleven days in the Birmingham General Hospital in Van Nuys, dying on September 20.</p>
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Knowing how Jim loved the Point it seemed appropriate that he should be buried there. His body was accompanied from California by an honor escort of brother officers of the Air Force from Wright Field and Muroc Base. The band of which he was so proud played the Chopin Funeral March as he was carried from the Old Chapel to his last resting place in the beautiful West Point Cemetery. The service was conducted by the Rev. Frank E. Pulley, Chaplain at the Academy. Although I feel that Jim, with his high sense of values, would place little importance as to where his body was laid to rest, I feel certain that he would be pleased that it was at his beloved West Point.</p>
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To be like Jim an account of his life should express something of the lovable unaffectedness of his nature; his kindness and thoughtfulness; his love and respect for his fellow-man. You should be able to see him, as a father, losing his usual modesty in proudly showing pictures of his wife and little son. For these are the simple, personal touches that give life to the written record.</p>
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Perhaps his boyhood spent largely so close to nature developed his appreciation for the simple things in life. He once said that when he was a little boy he thought the graceful way of a bird was one of the most beautiful things in this world. Even as a grown man he loved to watch a bird fly. I am sure that the near perfection of a beautifully designed plane, as it circled in a distant sky, must have always had for him a deceptive resemblance to that little winged creature which had originally inspired its design.</p>
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Many letters paying tribute to Jim as a flyer, officer, and as a friend offer quotations suitable to describe him as others saw him. This one from a letter written by President Larry Bell, for Bell Aircraft, seems to sum up them all: “We had not known Jim for so long but we felt we knew him extremely well. He made a tremendous impression on all our people when he visited our plant and spoke to our employees in the afternoon and to our engineers in the evening. I have been associated with Aviation for thirty-six years and naturally have met and know a great many military officers. None have ever made a finer impression on me than Captain Fitzgerald. He possessed that rare quality of professional skill and personal modest charm that endeared him to everyone that knew him.</p>
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“His feat in exceeding the speed of sound in his first flight in the X-l airplane to me is one of the most notable accomplishments in aviation and certainly a tribute to his skill and courage. The Air Force, yes America, has suffered a great loss.”</p>
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Tony Durante, one of Jim’s roommates at the Point, expressed this opinion of him: “Those who knew him were drawn to him by his warm and friendly, but quiet and unassuming personality. Never one to give voice to empty words, Jim’s smooth, subtle humor stood him in good stead with officers and cadets alike”.</p>
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To Lillian, his wife, Jim was a “loving and faithful husband” To his little son a “tender and understanding father”.</p>
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Jim would not want a lot of praise or sentimental words written about him. Although he was often excited and pleased when he was successful in gaining the things that he wanted (some of which he had worked years to get), it was typical of him to attribute his success to mere luck, and to name some other person whom he thought deserved credit much more than he; expressing regret if this person had failed where he had succeeded. He never mentioned his promotions. We, his family, learned about them on his next furlough when he came home with another bar on his shoulder, and only then when we happened to notice it. When another Oak-leaf cluster was added to his Air Medal for his work in the X-l, we read about it in the paper. But that’s the way Jim was.</p>
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<em>—Fay Fitzgerald</em></p>
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