| Jimmy Stewart was too modest to recount his war experiences and there is very little material on his tour as bomber pilot. I found this audio clip from 1990 when he spoke at Princeton about his life and briefly about WW2. The entire audio clip can be found at princeton dot edu. Nearly two years before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Stewart had become a private pilot and had accumulated over 400 hours of flying time and was considered a highly proficient pilot. Along with musician/composer Hoagy Carmichael, seeing the need for trained war pilots, Stewart teamed with other Hollywood moguls and put their own money into creating a flying school in Glendale, Arizona which they named Thunderbird Field. This airfield trained more than 200000 pilots during the War, became the origin of the Flying Thunderbirds, and is now the home of Thunderbird School of Global Management. Later in 1940, Stewart was drafted into the Army Air Corps but was rejected due to a weight problem. The USAAC had strict height and weight requirements for new recruits and Stewart was five pounds under the standard. To get up to 148 pounds he sought out the help of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's muscle man, Don Loomis, who was legendary for his ability to add or subtract pounds in his studio gymnasium. Stewart subsequently attempted to enlist in the United States Army Air Corps but still came in under the weight requirement although he persuaded the AAF enlistment officer to run new tests, this time passing ... |
