This is a copy of an article that originally appeared at http://www.troa.org/magazine/september1998/stewart.asp .  This link does not exist any more and I have rescued the text from www.archive.org which allows you to go back and see the 'web' as it was back in the mists of time.. ...  There was no author attributed then and I apologise for not crediting the author.  It is a nice piece of work.

It was in Canada last year when the news of Jimmy Stewart’s death broke. As the words sunk in, I was poignantly reminded of another time, another country, where I first met and served with this remarkable American — wartime England.

It was at a cold, windswept, World War II bomber station known as Old Buckenham. The station, located near the North Sea between Cambridge and Norwich in England’s East Anglia, was home to our outfit, the 453rd Bomb Group, B-24 Liberators. Stewart, then a major, was the group’s operations officer, and I was an intelligence officer who handled much of the briefings for the air crews before their mission over Nazi Germany. Night after night, we worked together preparing the details of the mission. Stewart briefed on the operations aspect of the mission, and I did the intelligence side.

I have never known a brighter, more knowledgeable, hardworking, conscientious, or dedicated officer than Jimmy Stewart. The story of his military career is as remarkable as the man.

The first obstacles

Almost a year before Pearl Harbor, Jimmy Stewart — Academy Award-winning actor, aviator, Princeton graduate, piano player, and bachelor, a prime favorite with the Hollywood ladies — felt that America soon would be at war. With England fighting Hitler since 1939, radio announcer Edward R. Murrow’s bleak broadcasts from London, and the Pacific war against the Japanese going badly for Britain, Stewart decided that if America entered the war, he wanted to be in uniform and overseas on combat duty.

As unselfish as this decision was, Stewart faced two major roadblocks. One came from his boss, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, who used every persuasive tactic at his command — choice of roles, contract revisions — to persuade Stewart to stay out of uniform and to continue making pictures for MGM. The other roadblock came from the U.S. government.

In September 1940, the Selective Service Act became law, and men between the ages of 21 and 36 were required to register. Being 32, Stewart registered and was quoted later as saying, “The only lottery I ever came close to winning was the drawing for the first draft before Pearl Harbor.” However, when Stewart was called up for a physical late in 1940, he was turned down: underweight. That could have ended the whole affair, but Stewart decided to go the volunteer route. He appealed the Army’s underweight decision, embarked on an eating binge, made the weight requirements, and at the age of 33, reported for induction on March 22, 1941, at Fort McArthur, Calif.

Because he had been a pilot for years, owned a Stinson 105 airplane, and had more than 300 hours in his logbook, Stewart was assigned to the Army Air Forces and sent to Moffett Field near San Francisco. Based on his flying experience, educational background, and age, Stewart applied for a commission as an Army Air Forces pilot. He was accepted and immediately began an extensive schedule of flight training and ground-school class work. He shared life with his fellow enlisted soldiers, doing his share of KP, close-order drill, and guard duty.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Jimmy Stewart was pulling guard duty at Moffett Field. Taking advantage of Stewart’s fame, the Army Air Forces scheduled limited public appearances, including several on network radio with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy. Stewart had reached the rank of corporal when his commission came through on Jan. 19, 1942.

Newly commissioned as a second lieutenant and wearing his Army Air Forces pilot wings, Stewart was immediately called to active duty. After a 40-hour refresher course at Moffett in instrument, night, and formation flying, he was sent to the instructor’s course at the advanced flying school at Mather Field, Calif., where he became a twin-engine instructor.

In the following months, Stewart flew bombardier students in a twin-engine Beechcraft, learned about the Norden bomb sight, flew the glamorous four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress at Hobbs Field, N.M., and finally moved to Gowen Field at Boise, Idaho, the staging area for combat crews.

At this point in his career, Stewart’s dream of seeing combat hit a snag. While the other 29 graduates of the B-17 transition school were immediately given crew assignments and began training for overseas duty, Stewart, to his dismay, was assigned as an instructor in the first-phase training at Gowen. Apparently, nobody wanted to take responsibility for sending a famous movie star into combat.

After six months, Stewart went to his commanding officer, Col. “Pop” Arnold, commander of the 29th Training Group at Gowen, with his desire for combat duty and fear of being kept in the States as an instructor or perhaps recruiting officer. Seeing Stewart’s determination, Arnold made a quick phone call to a friend, Col. Robert Terrell, who was at the time forming the new 445th heavy bombardment group of four-engine B-24s in Sioux City, Iowa. “I just felt that if he wanted combat duty this bad, I’d help him,” Arnold said later.

The 445th was scheduled for overseas movement in three months, and Terrell agreed to take Capt. Stewart as a squadron operations officer. Shortly after Stewart joined the group at Sioux City, this item appeared in the unit history: “The novelty of having this movie star in our midst soon wore off, especially since he proved himself to be a hard-working, sincere, and regular fellow.”

On the move

In late November 1943, Stewart led his B-24 squadron on the “southern route” to England — Florida; Puerto Rico; Brazil; Dakar, Africa; and the long flight over the Atlantic from Marrakech, Morocco, to Prestwick, Scotland. Only a short time later, I flew the same route in a B-24 Liberator with my 453rd group, and several times after Stewart joined the 453rd, we talked about the hot days and cold nights of Marrakech while waiting for the field order to come down for the next day’s mission.

Home base in England for the 445th was Tibenham, less than 100 miles from London. Terrell had his crews in the air immediately. In 18 days, the 445th flew seven missions, and, of these, Stewart flew four. He was promoted to squadron commander and major in January 1944, and continued to fly a heavy combat schedule, including Brunswick in February, for which the 8th U.S. Army Air Force commander, Gen. Jimmy Doo little, awarded Stewart the Distinguished Flying Cross (his first of two).

On March 22, while still at the 445th, Stewart was a leader of the 1,000-plane raid on Berlin, perhaps the climax of his flying career with the 8th.

Hard times at the 453rd

Meanwhile, my group — the 453rd — only a few miles from Tibenham, was not faring so well. We had been committed to combat the first week of February, bombed an airfield at Tours, France, and flew in “Big Week” — the series of strikes against the German aircraft industry. During this time, Col. Joe Miller, the group commander, was shot down. The new commander, Col. Ramsay Potts, a battle-tested B-24 specialist who had been on the historic and pivotal Ploesti mission and earned a Distinguished Service Cross, set about reshaping the unlucky 453rd. He stood the group down, led practice missions, and, within days, replaced the group operations officer.

Enter Maj. Jimmy Stewart — slim, soft-spoken, overseas cap slightly askew, leather jacket, high-top shoes — who had already established himself as a solid combat pilot, squadron commander, and mission leader at the 445th. Potts told me later, “I did not request Stewart by name. I did want somebody with his background as my group operations officer. Gen. Ted Timberlake [commander of the 2nd Bomb Wing, which consisted of the 389th, 445th, and 453rd] sent him to the 453rd. I’ll always be grateful.”

Potts and Stewart hit it off from the start. They were both combat-tested, mission-minded, and hardworking, and shared a true belief in the daylight precision bombing of Germany. (The Americans bombed in daylight, the Royal Air Force at night). They lived together in a little house near the Officers Club and sometimes went to the movies in nearby Norwich. As Potts said to me once, “Jimmy had never seen a movie he didn’t like.”

Never one of the boys

My own personal relationship with Stewart was professional, not close, not casual. I enjoyed briefing with him and greatly admired his knowledge and skill with words. The crews saw him not as a famous figure, but as their leader who had made the scene, a man they liked and trusted.

At night, working with me preparing the mission, Stewart was crisp and businesslike, reserved, but he knew his job and was a keen student of daylight precision bombing. It was interesting to see him at the bar of the Officers Club after a tough day and hear his discussion of the mission with the returning pilots. But even then, he was slightly aloof. He was never one of the boys.

This is not to say Stewart was unfriendly. Rather, he went about his work with a cool, professional detachment — a single-purpose approach that did not allow for personal involvement. This, I think, was the reason for his success in the war. He was determined to prove that he was more than an actor, more than a Hollywood star. He was determined to prove that now he could measure up as a man doing a really important job in the military crucible and not just a celluloid hero.

Meanwhile, the 453rd was forging ahead at a rapid pace. Morale was high. In his recent biography of Stewart, Donald Dewey notes, “... within a couple of months of the arrival of Potts and Stewart, the 453rd’s proficiency rate on raids rose from nearly the bottom to near the top among 8th Air Force units.”

Stewart was promoted to lieutenant colonel just before we were to work together on the 453rd’s D-day missions, and he rose to that momentous occasion.

In July, Timberlake called Stewart to the 2nd Bomb Wing headquarters, made him chief of staff, and promoted him to full colonel. In doing so, Timberlake passed over some of Stewart’s senior officers, later saying, “Stewart was the best man available.” He also added Stewart to the short list of officers in American military history to rise from private to colonel in slightly more than four years.

Stewart’s duties, while still operational and mission-oriented, did not call for actual combat flying, yet he would occasionally jeep to Tibenham or “Old Buc” to fly missions. Capt. Carroll (Cal) Stewart (no relation), Timberlake’s aide and later a journalist in Nebraska, afterwards told me, “Jimmy was a superior pilot, never overlooked a detail, never shirked, a tireless operations officer who got along with the young fliers. He was proud of his military service but did not want to parade it around.” Shortly after the war ended in the spring of 1945, Stewart was appointed the 2nd Combat Bomb Wing’s commanding officer — thus coming full circle. He spent his entire combat tour assigned to B-24 Liberator units in the 8th Air Force, rising from squadron operations officer to wing commander.

I have always felt that Stewart was extremely lucky to have three superb officers as his mentors: Terrell, Timberlake, and particularly Potts, who retired from the Air Force Reserve as a major general.

That last mission

After he was discharged from the Army Air Forces on Sept. 29, 1945, Stewart was immediately appointed to colonel in the U.S. Army Air Forces Reserve. He was promoted to brigadier general in 1957 and retired — from the U.S. Air Force Reserve — in 1967. But, before retiring, the decorated officer had one last mission:

After Stewart’s death in 1997, Air Power History published a memoriam that included this little-known item: “In 1966, during his annual two weeks of active duty, Stewart requested a combat assignment and participated in a bombing strike over Vietnam.” Stewart’s stepson, 1st Lt. Ronald McLean, was killed at age 24 in the Vietnam War.

In his World War II years, Stewart flew 20 combat missions, among them the tough ones: Brunswick, Bremen, Frankfurt, Schweinfurt, and Berlin. His wartime decorations included the Distinguished Flying Cross with Oak Leaf Cluster, four Air Medals, and the French Croix de Guerre with Palm.

With myriad honors of a celebrated and eclectic career, including the highest in his profession, the Academy Award, it is not hard to believe that Jimmy Stewart reached the best time of his life in those eventful and dangerous years of World War II.