'Greatest man from the greatest generation': 105-year-old WWII pilot and POW dies
Robert Doolan, a World War II pilot who was held as a prisoner of war for almost two years, died Wednesday at the Western Hills Retirement Community. He was 105 years old.
Born and raised in Cincinnati's West End, Doolan graduated from St. Xavier High School in 1935. The attack on Pearl Harbor inspired him to enlist in the Army Air Corps in 1941, and he graduated as a second lieutenant navigator the following year.
During his 13th mission as a navigator on a B-17 Flying Fortress, German fighter planes shot him down, forcing him to emergency-land in Holland. He hid from German soldiers for weeks, shifting between safe houses, before members of Schutzstaffel, a Nazi paramilitary organization, captured him in Rotterdam.
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Doolan was taken prisoner at Stalag Luft III, a prison camp made famous in the 1963 movie, "The Great Escape." In 2017, he told The Enquirer that soldiers didn't give prisoners enough food and they rarely had meat to eat. Still, he said it was a "country club" compared to the treatment of prisoners in Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese camps.
In January 1945, Doolan and the other prisoners were forced to march to their next destination, a camp in Moosburg, Germany, where conditions were worse. Freedom finally came later that year, when Gen. George Patton liberated the camp.
When Doolan returned home to Cincinnati, he married Dolores Ann, his wife of 71 years. She died in 2017.
Doolan went on to graduate from the University of Cincinnati with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering, and he founded the Boy Scout Troop at St. Antoninus Church, which he led for 30 years. He and Dolores Ann had three children.
"My papa persevered through a difficult time during the war and influenced and inspired several generations through his service to his country as a scout leader, as an active church member and his scholarship program at St. Xavier," his granddaughter Sarah Lance Kilgore told The Enquirer.
Kilgore, a former Army nurse, is serving with her husband, a lieutenant colonel, at the NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, not far from where Doolan sheltered and was later captured by German soldiers.
"I have visited his crash landing site and made an emotional journey to Stalag Luft III, where he spent two years as a POW," she said. "A constant reminder of the greatest man from the 'greatest generation.' I am so proud of his 105 years and I miss him already."
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: Cincinnati WWII pilot and POW dies at 105
