A life of action

Tommy Hitchcock’s pivotal role in two world wars outshines even his world-class achievements in polo, writes Melanie Vere Nicoll

To most observers of the polo world, Tommy Hitchcock represents an extraordinarily gifted player who epitomises a bygone age of unimaginable wealth, glamour and privilege. Born in 1900 in Aiken, South Carolina, he began his career at 12 and was top-ranked at 16. By the 1930s, he was at the height of his game, having achieved a 10-goal rating that, with the exception of one year, he would maintain until he retired from the sport, in 1939.

For six of those years, Hitchcock was the only 10-goaler in America, famed on both sides of the Atlantic for his courage, skill and, some would say, recklessness. Indeed, a teammate once wryly commented that he was a 12-goaler in a sport that allows for a top rating of only 10 – an observation that will resonate with many of today’s players. Over the course of his career, he was credited with bringing the game to a much wider audience, resulting in tens of thousands of spectators flocking to Long Island to watch the US Open. In 1921, there were more than 45,000 for the first match of the Westchester Cup, in which he was playing – numbers many of today’s clubs can only dream of.

Hitchcock’s friend F Scott Fitzgerald found him intriguing enough to base two characters on him: Tom Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Tommy Barban in Tender is the Night. While both were wealthy, mysterious men, Barban was also

Opposite Tommy Hitchcock at Meadowbrook in the 1930s This page During his time as head boy at St Paul’s School an adventurer and a courageous soldier who inspired both admiration and fear in others.

In her book Citizens of London, Lynne Olson writes movingly about the Americans, like Hitchcock, who stood and fought with Britain in the early years of World War II. In the excerpt that follow, she describes his involvement in both wars, and his true passion, which – interestingly for a 10-goal player – was not polo.

The supremely self-confident Hitchcock was aloof, reserved and fiercely competitive, with a slight whiff of danger about him. Unlike Harriman, Whitney and others in the upper-class society circles in which he moved, he was not a ‘clubbable’ man. He did not join private clubs or other organisations for their social advantages, nor did he allow many people to get close to him.

In 1917, a few months before the US entered World War I, Hitchcock, then 17, left St Paul’s School early and joined the Lafayette Escadrille in France. With the help of former president Theodore Roosevelt – a family friend, who wrote a letter persuading French officials to permit the underage schoolboy to enlist – he became the youngest American to win a pilot’s commission during the conflict.

As aggressive in the air as he was on the polo field, he shot down two German planes

(winning a Croix de Guerre) before being downed himself, inside German territory, on 6 March 1918. Badly wounded, he spent several months in a prisoner-of-war camp, where his two main thoughts, he later said, were of food and escape.

That summer, while being taken by train to another camp, he stole a map from a sleeping guard and leapt from the train. Escaping detection, he hiked nearly 100 miles to neutral Switzerland. He was not yet 19.

For Hitchcock, combat flying was the ultimate thrill. ‘Polo is exciting,’ he said, ‘but you can’t compare it to flying in wartime. That’s the best sport in the world.’

When the war ended, in November 1918, he went to Harvard, playing polo in his spare time. On the field, a friend noted, ‘He was a chase pilot – first, last, and always.’ Even at the height of his career, he never took the pride in his polo prowess that he did in flying and in his later accomplishments as an investment banker. On the morning of one key international match, he spent several hours before the contest calmly discussing the philosopher Nietzsche with a friend, who asked incredulously, ‘How can you sit there and talk about philosophy on a day like this?’ Hitchcock shrugged. ‘Why not?’ he replied. ‘It’s just a game.’

In the early 1930s, he became a partner in the investment-banking firm Lehman Brothers and brokered a number of key deals, including the purchase of one of the country’s leading shipping companies. Unlike many of his Wall Street associates, he was a fervent isolationist as Europe drew closer to war in the late 1930s. Having seen the carnage of the previous world war, he abhorred the thought of another, and believed America should stay as far away from the conflict as possible.

But as soon as the United States entered the war, the 41-year-old Hitchcock volunteered his services as a fighter pilot to General Hap Arnold, chief of staff of the US Army Air Forces. Despite his fame and the fact he ‘knew more people than God’, the air force turned him down, telling him he could have practically any Washington desk job he wanted, but he was too old to fly again in combat.

Angry and frustrated, Hitchcock turned to close friend and US ambassador Gil Winant, who was in Washington for consultations with Roosevelt. If he couldn’t fly, Winant said, why didn’t he come to London as assistant US military attaché, to act as liaison between the Eighth Air Force and the RAF’s Fighter Command? At least he would be in a place where there was real fighting, instead of mired in the bureaucratic combat of Washington. And if he could help persuade the two air forces to work together, he would be performing a real service. Hitchcock accepted the job.

As an assistant military attaché, he was assigned to the American Embassy rather than

This page, from top Hitchcock during his service in the Lafayette Escadrille, 1918; with his father, Thomas Hitchcock Sr, at a polo match in the 1930s Opposite ‘The First Goal, Scored by Mr Hitchcock’: a depiction of the 1927 Westchester Cup by Paul Brown

Polo’s exciting, but you can’t compare it to wartime flying, the best sport in the world

to the high-testosterone headquarters of the Eighth Air Force. His modus operandi was vastly different from that of the Eighth’s leaders: he thought it far more important to co-operate with – and perhaps learn from – the RAF rather than compete with it.

Drawing on his own experience as a fighter pilot, Hitchcock concluded that the British were superior to the Americans in fighter combat tactics and training procedures, as well as in many aspects of the design and engineering of fighter planes themselves. ‘In those days, it would kill any idea if you said to Americans: ‘British operational experience has shown…’, Tex McCrary, a friend of Hitchcock’s, wrote late in the war. ‘Somehow, if a thing was British, two strikes were already chalked up against it in America. Tommy reversed the formula. If an idea had been tested and okayed in Britain’s battle lab, then Hitchcock called it right. He knew the toughest air-fighting in the world was over here. Anything that survived had to be good.’

Shortly after he arrived in Britain, he paid a visit to the RAF’s development facility at Duxford, a few miles outside Cambridge, to observe the performance tests of a promising new fighter, produced in America solely for British use. The brainchild of a German emigré who once designed Messerschmitt fighters, the P-51 Mustang had been built by California’s North American Aviation Co for the RAF, which planned to use it as a low-level tactical fighter-bomber.

Once the test flights began, the RAF knew it had something special. The Mustang, with its streamlined frame, was faster than the Spitfire, had a longer range and, at medium and low altitudes, was nimbler at diving. But the Mustang’s test pilot and others who saw the plane in action believed its performance could be enhanced if its underpowered US engine was replaced by the high-performance Merlin engine manufactured by Rolls-Royce, a British company. RAF officials agreed, and the Mustang was mated with the Merlin.

Hitchcock was stunned at the results. Observing the Mustang hybrid in the air and poring over charts outlining its performance, he realised it was, in the words of historian Donald Miller, ‘the plane the Bomber Mafia had claimed was impossible to build – a fighter that could go as fast and as far as the bombers without losing its fighting characteristics’. In a memo to Air Force headquarters in Washington, Hitchcock urged that the plane be transformed into a high-altitude fighter, predicting that its cross-breeding with the Merlin ‘would produce the best fighter plane on the Western Front’. His superiors, however, were not impressed. In their eyes, the Mustang belonged to the British; that alone made it inferior, despite its US origins. As Hitchcock noted, ‘Sired by the English out of an American mother, the Mustang has had no parent to appreciate and push its good points.’

Faced with bureaucratic intransigence, Hitchcock refused to give up. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1942, he worked to drum up support for the Mustang hybrid, sending a flood of statistics to Washington demonstrating its sterling test performances and hosting lavish dinner parties at his elegant London flat to lobby RAF and Eighth Air Force higher-ups, as well as visiting dignitaries from the Roosevelt administration. He even took the Mustang up for a test spin himself, much to the chagrin of his nephew, Averell Clark, a USAAF fighter pilot who had flown with the RAF’s Eagle Squadron before the US’s entry into the war. Standing with his uncle on

the Duxford airfield, Clark exclaimed: ‘Look, Uncle Tommy. You’d better not fly that thing. The test pilot is the only guy who’s been up in it.’ Hitchcock stared hard at his nephew. ‘Oh, the hell with that,’ he snapped, then strode to the Mustang, climbed in and took off. ‘He was right to do it,’ Clark said years later. After all, ‘it was mainly his idea’.

In November 1942, Hitchcock flew to Washington to take the fight for the Mustang to General Arnold. ‘The word “channels”, like the word “no”, was an utterance he sometimes could not hear well,’ observed his biographer Nelson W Aldrich Jr. ‘He planned on going straight to the top.’ When, despite Hitchcock’s best lobbying efforts, Arnold expressed little interest in the Mustang, he turned to one of Arnold’s civilian bosses, undersecretary of war Robert Lovett.

The two had been friends since the Great War, when Hitchcock had flown for France and Lovett had been a pilot in Britain’s Royal Naval Air Service and then in his own country’s Air Corps. The undersecretary did not need to be convinced of the quality of Rolls-Royce engines – the British planes he had flown during the war had been equipped with them – and after considerable investigation on his own, agreed with Hitchcock that the US Army Air Force must push forward with the adoption of the Mustang as a long-distance escort for bombers.

There was little doubt, in the minds of many people involved in the Mustang effort, that, if it hadn’t been for Tommy Hitchcock, the Air Force would never have adopted the plane that ultimately became the best, most famed American fighter of the war. ‘He was largely responsible for the P-51B, for pushing that project until it got through,’ Lovett observed. ‘The only person who could have done this was someone who was both knowledgeable as a pilot and who had the qualities of leadership to take disparate people and get them moving in a common direction.’ Shortly after D-Day, Tex McCrary wrote that ‘the tenacity and sincerity and sheer butt-headedness of Hitchcock pushed the plane through the ranks of all its critics until it became the fighter it is today.’

But Hitchcock had no intention of resting on his laurels. After spearheading the struggle to accelerate P-51 production in the United States, he returned to London in the spring of 1943 with little enthusiasm for resuming his duties as assistant military attaché at the embassy. ‘Life in London,’ he wrote to his wife, ‘is much too easy to make one think that one is actually engaged in waging a war.’ In his work on the Mustang, Hitchcock had been bitten once more by the combat bug: his ambition was to fly the plane for which he had pushed so hard. ‘Fighting in a Mustang,’ he told friends, ‘ought to be like playing polo, but with pistols.’

Shortly after his return, the 43-year-old Hitchcock took time off to attend the RAF’s central gunnery school, where, in the company of young Britons who were at least 20 years younger, he learnt how to fly and fight in a Spitfire. Most of his friends and acquaintances considered his ambition to fly a Mustang in combat, perhaps as the head of his own squadron, to be little more than a pipe dream. However, late in 1943, he was assigned to a base in Abilene, Texas, to assume command of the 408th Fighter Group, then in training for combat in Europe.

No one knew how he did it, and the taciturn Hitchcock never explained. But it happened, and the assignment gave him more personal satisfaction than anything he had done since his days as a Lafayette Escadrille pilot in the Great War. ‘The amount of work that must be done is staggering,’ he wrote to his wife.

‘In 90 days’ time, the group is supposed to be ready to fight for its life. I do not feel I know all the answers, but I have got what I wanted and it’s up to me to make the very best of it.’

Then almost as suddenly as it materialised, the dream fell apart. Hitchcock’s unit was disbanded in early February 1944 and he was made deputy chief of staff of the Ninth Tactical Air Command in England, whose fighters were to supply direct tactical support for ground forces in the coming invasion. Again, there was no official explanation for the decision.

Once back in England, he swallowed his disappointment and flung himself into his new duties as head of the Ninth’s research and development efforts. He spent considerable time with its pilots, many of whom had just arrived from the United States. ‘Tommy Hitchcock had a tremendous dynamic and a magnetic influence on these young men, and it was not because of athletic prowess or reputation,’ said Lieutenant General Elwood

Opposite The P-51B Mustang This page, from top Hitchcock during his time in the US Army Air Force; with the Greentree team ‘Pete’ Quesada, the 9th’s commander. ‘Most of the boys in our fighter groups didn’t know a thing about polo or give a damn about it. Their admiration for him was deeper – they quickly recognised his character, his depth of knowledge and the sympathy that comes with experience. He knew how to talk to them.’

Hitchcock took satisfaction in the sterling performance of the Mustang, which was fast becoming the fighter workhorse of the war. He was delighted when his nephew, who was now a group leader, reported to him that his men had shot down 160 enemy aircraft in their first month flying Mustangs, compared to a score of 120 kills in the previous 11 months.

In early 1944, however, there was a growing worry about the Mustangs – several had crashed for no apparent reason. According to Quesada, they were ‘just diving into the ground. We couldn’t understand it, and Tommy couldn’t either.’ As head of research and development, Hitchcock was the man responsible for finding out what had gone wrong. He and his advisers believed a new fuel tank, which enabled the Mustang to fly to Berlin and beyond, was destabilising the plane when it dived in combat.

Although he had test pilots in his command, Hitchcock insisted on testing out the hypothesis himself. On a bright April morning, he drove to the airfield near Salisbury and climbed into a test Mustang. Flying toward a bombing range, he put the plane into a dive from a height of 15,000ft. Suddenly, it hurtled down, faster and faster, until it smashed into the ground, sending a plume of oily black smoke into the sky. His body was found nearby.

In a front-page story reporting his death, The New York Times wrote that the accident ‘brought to a close one of the most gallant men and one of the most spectacular careers in modern American life’. Gil Winant, who notified Hitchcock’s family of his death, wrote to his widow 11 days later. Just as he had done in polo, Hitchcock ‘spent every minute of his time in war trying to win’, the ambassador told her. The Mustang, Winant wrote, ‘is tangible evidence of Tommy’s contribution to victory. Without it, we would not be winning the air war over Germany today.’

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour (Scribe UK, £10.99) by Lynne Olson