Legendary military columnist, author Bob Dorr dies at 76

Robert F. Dorr, a master historian whose books and columns on aircraft and the U.S. military made him an invaluable author for decades, died Sunday after a battle with brain cancer.

Dorr's family announced on his Facebook page that he died peacefully at the age of 76 at INOVA Fairfax Hospital in Northern Virginia.

Dorr was a prolific writer, who wrote for the Military Times newspapers for nearly two decades, from June 1994 until December 2013. He published about 80 books, and estimated he wrote roughly 6,000 magazine articles and 3,000 newspaper columns over his six decades as a published writer.

He also served as an airman in South Korea for nearly four years, before separating as an E-4 in 1960. Dorr then served as a foreign service officer for the State Department for 25 years.

"Bob was a true talent, a gifted story teller with an incredible knowledge of military history, a devoted fan base and many, many friends," said Alex Neill, executive editor of Military Times. "We’re sad he is gone, but he leaves a library of good work and a legacy of accomplishment."

His writing career began as a 16-year-old high school student, when Air Force Magazine published an unsolicited piece he sent them arguing that Strategic Air Command's bombers needed escort fighters. But Dorr had already been interested in the Air Force and airplanes for more than a decade, since he was 5 years old. When he was 12, he used money he earned from a paper route to buy a typewriter and started writing stories about airplanes, as well as collecting what eventually became a massive archive of plane photos.

Dorr's books primarily focused on exhaustive histories of the Air Force and the American military. His best-selling book was 1991's "Desert Shield: The Build-Up: The Complete Story," which sold about 100,000 copies.

But towards​ the end of his life, Dorr also turned his writing talents to fiction in a wide array of genres. In 2014, he published his first fiction book, "Hitler's Time Machine" — a piece of alternative history imagining a struggle to keep Nazi Germany from creating a time machine that would win World War II. His final book, published in January, was a hardboiled murder mystery called "Crime Scene: Fairfax County." Another book published in January, "A Handful of Hell," collected pulp stories he wrote for men's adventure magazines in the 1960s and 1970s.

Dorr's first column for Air Force Times, published June 13, 1994, described the "perplexing challenges" likely faced by F-15 pilots who mistakenly shot down an American Black Hawk helicopter that April. His final column, published Dec. 9, 2013, was a call to recapitalize the Air Force's combat search and rescue fleet.

Dorr became widely known and drew a dedicated following for using his columns to defend rank-and-file troops and call out senior military and Defense Department leadership when he felt they had fallen short.

"I interviewed the big guys to convey to them what the little guys wanted," Dorr wrote in a Dec. 17 blog post. "Their own base visits were orchestrated and rarely told them what real airmen wanted and needed. My column was for the staff sergeants and the captains — not the very junior-most airmen but the ones doing the work. We have always had better than we deserve and we owe everything to them." 

What made Dorr such an​ skilled writer, said longtime friend and Defense News reporter Chris Cavas, was that his stories were never simply about the airplanes, but the men and women who made them fly.

"The fun thing with Bob was, he wasn't just a plane geek," Cavas said. "He didn't just write about the airplane. ... He loved telling the stories of pilots and aviators and engineers and designers, the whole panopoly of those who deal with aviation. It's machines, but all those machines come from people. He was a part of the culture, and he articulated the culture as well as anybody."

Cavas said that Dorr was known for his painstaking attention to detail in his reporting, and the enthusiasm for aviation that was evident in his writing.

"He was born loving airplanes," Cavas said. "When he was a kid, he was a member of the civil air patrol. That was the first uniform he wore. He had log books going back his entire life. He actually kept a log on every single flight he ever took, from the earliest days, when he was just a young kid. He could go back and tell you the date of that, the airplane, the model, often the serial number of the airplane, from where to where."

In his last blog post May 28, Dorr said his final article — on the Avenger torpedo bomber — would appear in the June issue of America in WWII magazine.