Cobb County GaArchives Obituaries.....Scott, Robert Lee February 27, 2006 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Barbara Brown Hootman bhootman@juno.com September 5, 2007, 3:57 pm New York Times National, Tuesday, Febraury 28, 2006 US GEN WEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, material may be freely used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material, AND permission is obtained from the contributor of this file. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or presentation by other organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for non-commercial purposes, MUST obtain the written consent of the submitter, and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent. _______________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________ Contents of Obituary: *The New York Times National Tuesday, February 28, 2006 OBITUARIES Robert Scott, War-Hero Author, Dies at 97 by Richard Goldstein Brig. Gen. Robert L. (Lee) Scott Jr., one of America's most celebrated World War II fighter pilots and author of the best-selling war-time memoir "God is My Co-Pilot",died yesterday at an assisted living center in Warner Robins, Georgia, home of Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Georgia. He was 97. His death was announced by Paul Hibbitts, director of the Museum of Aviation at the Base. General Scott was the honorary chairman of the museum's foundation. In Spring of 1972,Robert Scott, then a colonel in the Army Air Forces, as awarded the Silver Star for helping to evacuate thousands of Allied troops and refugees trapped when the Japanese over ran Burma. Braving blinding storms and pursued by Japanese fighters, he ferried evacuees to India aboard a C-47 transport place, flying over 17,000 foot peaks. Piloting a Curtiss P-40 fighter painted with the single eye and tiger shark teeth of the Flying Tigers, he also roamed the skies on one man missions. Operating out of , Dinjan, India he strafede Japanese truck columns on the Burma Road linking Burma to, China, dropped500 pound bombs on bridges across the Salween River and hit barges loaded with Japanese troops. It was Claire L Chennault who had given Colonel Scott the P-40 he used to harass theJapanese in Burma and who had allowed him to fly missions ith the Flying Tigers in Japanese occupied China. General Chennault commanded the Flying Tigers, a band of American volunteers who fought against the Japanese under contract to the Nationalist Chinese government. When the Tigers were absorbed by a regular United States Army task force, he sent Colonel Scott out in July 1942 to le ad multplane missions against the enemy. As commander of the 23rd Fighter Group in General Chennault's newly created China Air Task Force, Colonel Scott flew out of Kunming in south western China and shot down at least 13 Japanese planes over the next 6 months. In early 1943 the Pentagon brought him back to the United States for a nation wide tour exhorting war plant workers to greater efforts. Near the end of that tour, Colonel Scott was asked by the by the Scribner Publishing house to relate his experiences in a book. But he had only three days to do so before he had to report to Luke Field in Arizona as its new commander, so he simply spoke his recollections: 90,000 words: onto wax cylinder recording devices. Those recollections became the book "God is My Co Pilot", which provided the Amereican home front a vivid account of aeriasl combat and received outstanding reviews. In the introduction Colonel Scott told how he had come to choose the title. He had returned to Kunming after an explosive bullet fired from a Japanese fighter hit the armor behind his cockpit seat, thus sending five rivet heads into his back. While Dr. Manget, a medical missionary, attended to his wounds (in a cave), a Chinese orderly maarveled at how Colonel Scott could fly his plane, drop his bombs and fire his guns with no one to help him. As Colonel Scott told it: " I heard the old doctor say, 'No, Son, you're not up there alone. Not with all the things you came through. You have the greatest co pilot in the world even if there is just room for one in that fighter ship. No, you're not alone.'" Colonel Scott said that on hearing these word, he experienced a vision: blazing lights in the cave spelling out "God is My Co Pilot". Warner Brothers bought the movie rights to the book and Colonel Scott became a technical adviser for the movie. But he was less than thrilled when he attended a studio preview of the film, released in 1945 and starring Dennis Morgan. As he recalled it in his autobiography, "The Day I Owned the Sky", (Bantum 1988), "I was embaressed as the story flashed across the screen ; it was pure Hollywood, and I could not help wanting to disappear a few times". Robert Lee Scott, Jr. was born on April 12, 1908, in Macon, Georgia. He embarked on his flying career as a boy scout, when he built a glider to get a merit badge and took off from the sloping roof of a neighbor's house. Seconds later a wing collapsee, and he wound up in the woman's Cherokee roses. It would be the only time he ever crashed. After graduating from West Point in 1932 and serving with a fighter squadron in Panama, he was training Army pilots in California when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on Deember 7, 1941. He pleaded for combat duty but was told that at age 33, he was too old. Thhn, apparently mistaken for another pilot named Scott, and though he had no experience flying the B-17 Flying Fortress bombers, he was selected to fly with a wave of bombers in an attack on Tokyo, hours after James H. Doolittle and his pilots were to stage the first American bombing raid against Japan. He quietly got some pointers on how to fly a bomber from a fellow officer, thentook a B-17 to Karachi, a jumping off point for the Pacific. General Doolittle carried out his raid on April 18, 1942, but the secondary mission was scrubbed. Instead Colonel Scott was assigned to carry supplies in Army C-47 transports from India to China over the Himalayan peaks known as the Hump. He was commanding the ferrying operation when he was selected to lead the fighter pilots in General Chennault's China Air Task Force. After World War II, he served with the Air Force in a variety of state side and over seas posts and received the star of the Brigadier General in 1954. After retiring from the military service in 1957, he continued his writing career. He was the author of 14 books, most on aviation. He also worked as an insurance executive. His wife, Kitty, died in 1972. He is survived by a daughter, Robin, of California. At age 72, General Scott realized an obsession: a quest to travel along the Great Wall of China. He had been intrigued by a photograph of the wall he saw as a teenager in an issue of National Geographic and had flown over it in WWII. In 1980, he followed the route of the wall in vehicles, on foot and even atop a camel. When that journey ended, he asked a stonecutter to carve a memorial to his old boss from the China of WWII. The marker was placed on a peak overlooking Kunming, facing the spot where the Flying Tigers airfield, long since converted into a modern airport, had sat. As General Scott recalled in his autobiography, "Before we went back down the mountain to Kunming, I stood at the memorial and saluted General Claire Lee Chennault just as though her were there." ----General Robert Lee Scott's mother, Ola Burkhalter Scott, is buried in the Millbrook Baptist Cemetary, Aiken, SC. He is my second cousin. I don't remember him from my visits to my relatives in Aiken, SC., but I vist his mother's grave, and my gggrandmother's grave at the Millbrook Baptist Cemetary, on a regular basis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------- Additional Comments: a memorial to his old boss from the China of WWII. The marker was placed on a peak overlooking Kunming, facing the spot where the Flying Tigers airfield, long since converted into a modern airport, had sat. As General Scott recalled in his autobiography, "Before we went back down the mountain to Kunming, I stood at the memorial and saluted General Claire Lee Chennault just as though her were there." ----General Robert Lee Scott's mother, Ola Burkhalter Scott, is buried in the Millbrook Baptist Cemetary, Aiken, SC. He is my second cousin. I don't remember him from my visits to my relatives in Aiken, SC., but I vist his mother's grave, and my gggrandmother's grave at the Millbrook Baptist Cemetary, on a regular basis. --------------------------------------------------------- File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/ga/cobb/obits/s/scott8063gob.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/gafiles/ File size: 9.5 Kb