Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (13 page)

Edgar McElroy’s copilot was shocked to see his hand in the air. “You can’t volunteer, Mac!” he exclaimed. “You’re married, and you and Aggie are expecting a baby soon. Don’t do it!”

“I got into the Air Force to do what I can,” McElroy answered. “Aggie understands how I feel. The war won’t be easy for any of us.”

Oklahoma native Corporal Bert Jordan had been on guard duty all night. He arrived late to morning formation and found his fellow fliers with hands raised.

“What are you holding your hand up
for?” he asked.

“Well,” one answered, “they want somebody to go someplace.”

Jordan was already tired of South Carolina, living in tents in the cold and mud. His feet itched; he felt eager to travel.

“I just wanted to get out of Columbia so I held up my hand,” he recalled. “I was one of the fortunate or unfortunate, whichever the case may be, to be selected.”

Bill Birch felt the same way. “It was disgusting,” he recalled of the rain and mud. “So I figured whatever came up, I’d volunteer for it.”

Herb Macia knew for sure he wanted to go when he knocked on the door of Jack Hilger’s office, unaware that the major already had plans for him.

“Herb, what do you want?” he asked.

“I’m ready to volunteer for that mission.”

“You are already a volunteer,” Hilger informed him. “You are on my mission and you are on my crew and you are going to be a navigator and bombardier.”

Most of the officers in York’s squadron were in Minneapolis for fuel tank installation. He phoned his deputy Captain Davy Jones, directing him to meet him at Wright Field, where the aviators climbed up into the catwalk of a hanger.

“Doolittle has been here looking for volunteers. It’s a dangerous mission,” York told him. “You go back and tell the troops that much.”

Jones returned to Minneapolis and summoned his fellow airmen to his hotel suite. Two dozen men crammed inside, some stretched out on the beds, others in chairs. Cigarette smoke clouded the air.

“There’s been a change,” Jones told them. “We’re not going to work out of Columbia. Captain York wanted me to talk to you and see how many of you would volunteer for a special mission. It’s dangerous, important and interesting.”

“Well,” one of the others prodded. “What is it?”

“I can’t tell you. I don’t even know myself,” Jones said. “All I can tell you is that it’s dangerous and that it’ll take you out of the country for maybe two or three months.”

“Where?” someone asked.

“I’m sorry I can’t tell you any more,” Jones said. “You’ve heard all the particulars I can give you. Now, who’ll volunteer?”

All did.

Not everyone would be so lucky
.

“Don’t go denuding the outfit because I have to go to Europe,” Mills warned York. “I need some good people, too.”

The flood of volunteers exceeded the two dozen crews Doolittle needed. “We had so many,” remembered York. “We had to pick and choose.”

One of those unable to go was Robert Emmens.

“You have to stay behind—you are the oldest guy in the squadron now—and run the squadron,” Hilger told him.

Richard Knobloch returned to base after visiting his girlfriend to learn the news of the mission. “Knobby, you should have been here,” one of his friends told him. “They want volunteers to fly with Jimmy Doolittle.”

The opportunity to fly with such a famous aviator thrilled Knobloch. “Boy, here’s a chance for a great adventure,” the pilot thought. “I’m going to be a hero.”

“How about me?” Knobloch asked. “Didn’t anybody put my name in?”

“No,” someone told him. “Too late now.”

Knobloch went to his boss, the squadron ops officer, and begged to go.

“It’s too late,” he told him.

So Knobloch hurried to see Captain Baumeister, the squadron commander. “Sir,” he pleaded. “I want to go on this operation.”

“It’s too late,” Baumeister said.

Knobloch pleaded his case all the way up to group commander Mills, who only echoed the others.

“Will you at least put me on the alternate list? I want to go,” he begged. “Here’s an opportunity to fly with a great aviator, Doolittle.”

JAPAN’S RAMPAGE ACROSS ASIA
and the Pacific had left Roosevelt exhausted and irritable with Congress, the media, and even the American public. The news had grown so bad in recent weeks that Secretary of State Hull had begun cleaning out his desk and the perennially sick Hopkins landed in the hospital. Isolationist newspapers, from the
New York Daily News
and the
Washington Times Herald
to the
Chicago Tribune
, once critical of the president’s foreign policy now targeted his handling of the war. Editorials argued that Japan was
the real menace and that America should concentrate its strength in the Pacific, not in Europe, while others even criticized military sales and loans to Allies as weakening American power. “There is a prevailing desire in the press for offensive warfare,” noted one White House analysis of the editorial opinion. “It appears to be motivated, not merely by an eagerness for revenge against the Japanese, but also by a recognition that only offensive strategy can bring the war to a successful conclusion.”

America’s efforts to rebuff the Japanese had met disaster in December when the Navy attempted to relieve Wake, a remote outpost built on the 2.5-square-mile rim of a submerged volcano. More than five hundred marines and sailors—aided by about twelve hundred civilian construction workers—repelled the Japanese for fifteen days, a story that gripped the American public. The carriers
Saratoga
and
Lexington
rushed toward Wake as the Japanese charged ashore. “The enemy is on the island,” Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the garrison’s senior officer, signaled on December 23. “The issue is in doubt.” With the
Saratoga
just 425 miles away, the Navy aborted the operation, afraid to risk the loss of a carrier or trigger another attack on Hawaii. Wake fell that afternoon. Some on board the
Saratoga
wept, while
Enterprise
aviators vented in an unofficial log: “Everyone seems to feel that it’s the war between the two yellow races.” Even Roosevelt felt Wake’s loss “a worse blow than Pearl Harbor.”

The British had proven equally impotent seven weeks later to stop the fall of Singapore, a far greater strategic loss than Wake. Constructed atop a mangrove swamp over some two decades—and at a price of some $400,000,000—the equatorial fortress had served to check Japanese expansion into the Indian Ocean. Singapore’s fall opened the doors for the Japanese to cut off lifelines to Russia and China, target India, and possibly link up with German forces in the Middle East. The loss put the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and even Australia in the Japanese crosshairs. Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, whom Roosevelt tapped to serve as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China, captured his shock over Singapore’s loss in his diary. “Christ,” he wrote. “What the hell is the matter?” For the first time the press speculated that the United States might lose the war. “There can now be no doubt,” observed a reporter in the
New York Times
, “that we are facing perhaps the blackest period in our history.”

Attention next focused on the Philippines
, where some 110,000 American and Filipino troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur had retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island of Corregidor. The Japanese had entered Manila on January 2 and cut off any hope of reinforcement. Despite the media’s lionized coverage of the gallant stand, Roosevelt knew MacArthur’s forces were doomed. During a February news conference, when pressed about America’s inability to supply more planes, Roosevelt barked at a reporter, “If you will tell me how to get a bomber in there, they can have a bomber.” The Germans and Japanese mocked MacArthur in shortwave broadcasts, paying tribute to his struggle as a way to embarrass the United States. “In the name of fair play and chivalry,” one broadcast trumpeted, “the Japanese nation demands that the United States give General MacArthur the reinforcements he needs, so he will be able to wage a war that would be to his satisfaction, win or lose.”

The unity that had enveloped the nation in the wake of Pearl Harbor had now vanished, replaced by fear, hostility, and racism directed at many of Japanese descent. Long-simmering jealousy along the West Coast over the economic success of many immigrants fueled public pressure to relocate families to internment camps in the nation’s interior; the proponents of such action ranged from the governor of California to the entire West Coast congressional delegation. “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched,” declared an editorial in the
Los Angeles Times
. “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room of the badlands,” wrote syndicated columnist Henry McLemore. “Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.” Some senior military leaders also championed the idea. “A Jap’s a Jap—it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not,” announced Lieutenant General John DeWitt, head of the Army’s Western Defense Force. “I don’t want any of them.”

Roosevelt felt pressure even from members of his own cabinet. “It looks to me like it will explode any day now,” warned Assistant to the Attorney General James Rowe Jr. in early February, one of the few who argued against such a move. “If it happens, it will be one of the great mass exoduses of history.” Roosevelt viewed the issue as one of military necessity, a step that had to be taken to protect the country. He signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, relocating more than 100,000 citizens and aliens to internment camps. “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications
of this step,” Attorney General Francis Biddle later wrote. “Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him—the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president.” But the decision bothered Eleanor. “These people were not convicted of any crime, but emotions ran too high,” she wrote in
Collier’s
in 1943. “Too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental-looking people.”

Social tensions spread beyond those of Japanese descent. A White House public opinion analysis revealed how in the black community the war had triggered a “deep undercurrent of bitterness and resentment.” Many begrudged the Marine Corps’ refusal to admit blacks and the Army’s policy of segregation. Others complained that the Navy accepted blacks only for menial jobs, such as that of mess attendants. “The Navy has a woeful need of men, but it doesn’t need us,” wrote
Pittsburgh Courier
columnist Marjorie McKenzie. “Can we honestly feel like strong, courageous, loyal Americans in the face of that?” Another flashpoint of tension centered on the refusal of the American Red Cross at the war’s outbreak to accept blood from blacks. The organization agreed under pressure to reverse the policy, though it still segregated blood by race. “It is a matter of the deepest resentment,” noted an administration report, “that White men who ask Negroes to sacrifice their lives refuse to have Negro blood mingled with their own.”

Roosevelt understood that the continued defeats and the growing social tensions threatened the war effort. As the news deteriorated, his demands for an attack on Japan increased. Roosevelt hammered that point home in a January 28 White House conference, questioning whether the United States could even set up bomber bases in Mongolia, a discussion Arnold captured in his notes: “The president stated that, from a psychological standpoint, both of Japan and the United States, it was most important to bomb Japan as soon as possible.” Arnold cautioned Roosevelt afterward in a memo that Mongolia—far outside the control of the Chinese government—was not a safe option. Roosevelt needed to be patient. “For this reason I feel that the plan, which is now in progress, for carrying out an attack upon the Japanese enemy’s center of gravity, by making use of facilities for which the Chinese Government can guarantee us a reasonable degree of security on the Eastern Asiatic mainland, is the logical and most effective plan.”

The president in the short term
would have to look elsewhere for ways to distract the American public. Eleanor used her daily newspaper column to try to buoy public morale after the fall of Singapore. “Perhaps it is good for us to have to face disaster, because we have been so optimistic and almost arrogant in our expectation of constant success,” she wrote. “Now we shall have to find within us the courage to meet defeat and fight right on to victory.” The president took to the airwaves in a fireside chat on February 23, echoing his wife in an effort to dispel growing public apathy. What America needed, he knew, was a victory. “Let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it,” Roosevelt told an estimated audience of sixty-two million. “We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.”

CHAPTER 5

For a while we’ll have everything our own way, stretching out in every direction like an octopus spreading its tentacles. But it’ll last for a year and a half at the most.