The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (52 page)

The carrier people Low contacted were skeptical. It might be possible for some sort of bomber to fly off a carrier, but the pilot would not be able to return because the landing speeds were too fast. Navy Captain Donald B. “Wu” Duncan, King’s air officer, told Low that none of the army’s big four-engine bombers would fit on a carrier because of their wingspans and they also required too much takeoff footage. He asked Low what sort of plane he had in mind.

“How in hell would I know?” came the reply. “I’m a submarine man.”
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There were difficulties with most of the twin-engine medium bombers as well, Duncan said, except perhaps for the B-25, which, with a wingspan of only 67 feet, was enough to clear the carrier’s “island”—the tall superstructure that looms over the starboard side of the deck. (The wingspan of a B-17 Flying Fortress, by contrast, was 103 feet.)

North American Aviation built the B-25, named the Mitchell, after the late General Billy Mitchell. It was powered by two 1,700-horsepower Wright engines to a maximum speed of 300 miles per hour at level flight carrying a payload of 2,400 pounds of bombs with a range of 1,500 miles. Best of all, it would fit on an aircraft carrier and might actually be capable of successfully taking off from one. The beauty of it was that these planes could be launched while the ship was out of range of Japanese land-based interceptors.

The hitch, Duncan said, was retrieving the planes after the raid. He suggested a sort of Rube Goldberg scheme in which the B-25s would take off about five hundred miles from Japan, make their bomb runs, then return to the carrier, which would already be retreating toward Hawaii, and ditch in the ocean to be picked up by rescue crews. But nobody was very comfortable with that last part of it.

Low suggested to Duncan that, as the air officer, he draw up an operations plan and give it to King, which Duncan did on January 15, 1942, thirty-nine days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while some of the fires in the damaged ships still smoldered. Duncan’s plan totaled fifty pages—written out in longhand, because he didn’t type and didn’t want to trust anything like this to office workers. Duncan immediately realized that the main element in the scheme would be surprise, which became a paramount issue; if Japanese intelligence got any whiff of the plan its forces could ambush the task force and destroy it.

Duncan proposed to use the newly completed aircraft carrier
Hornet
to launch a raid. The B-25s involved would need to be modified and lightened and navy carrier pilots would instruct the army pilots in the fine art of taking off from a pitching deck at sea. King read over the proposal with intense satisfaction, and next day, for security, he carried it personally to Hap Arnold. The two men could scarcely have been less alike, Arnold with his sunny, gregarious disposition
^‡
and dour old Ernie King. While their personalities clashed, they cooperated famously with a shared devotion to winning the war.
^§

Hap Arnold liked the plan and King suggested that he order some army B-25s to Norfolk to see if they could take off from the
Hornet
, instructing Duncan and Low: “Don’t mention this to another soul.” At this point King and Arnold also decided to bring Roosevelt into the scheme, and the president not only delightedly gave his blessings but made clear his desire that the highest priority should be put behind the mission. While the B-25 “tests” were being conducted, Arnold sent for the most trusted troubleshooter on his staff, James H. Doolittle. He figured that the army’s role in this adventure would need a spearhead, someone who could pull the whole thing off seamlessly—if anybody could.

J
IMMY
D
OOLITTLE HAD COME
back into uniform at Arnold’s request on July 1, 1940, as a troubleshooter for aircraft factories and related industrial endeavors as the United States ramped up its military output following the fall of France. He had spent the intervening year and a half helping companies such as Ford and General Motors convert from automobiles to airplanes.

“Do you think, Jim,” Arnold asked, “that we have a plane that can take off in five hundred feet, carry a payload of two thousand pounds, and fly two thousand miles?” Doolittle immediately sensed what Arnold was getting at and asked for a day or two to study the question. When he reported back to Arnold next day that the army’s B-25 might do the job, Arnold told him to work with Duncan and Low on the modifications to the planes and training of air crews. Doolittle had known “Wu” Duncan from the old flying days, and he read his plan with mounting excitement. The two met next morning, right before Duncan left for Pearl Harbor to explain the plan to U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Chester W. Nimitz and his carrier commander William F. “Bull” Halsey.
^‖
For his part, Doolittle also left that afternoon, for Wright Field in Ohio, where he began to attack the problem of how to modify the B-25s for this strange, important, highly secret mission.

Doolittle’s superb skills as an aeronautical engineer now put him in an ideal position to supervise the conversion of the Mitchells; he was already familiar with the mechanics of the plane and first set about to add enough extra fuel tanks to give the plane the range it required. Next would be to find other ways to lighten the aircraft.

Meantime Duncan, who had returned to Norfolk from Hawaii, arranged for two B-25s to be hoisted aboard
Hornet
to see if they could make a takeoff. In fact, to Duncan’s delight they got off the deck so quickly that one pilot feared, as the plane reared up, that his wing would hit the projection from the ship’s “island” that stuck out four stories over the flight deck. Granted, the planes carried no extra fuel, full crew, or heavy bomb load. Nevertheless the experiment was considered a success.

What allows an aircraft to take off from the ground (or, in this case, the deck) is a factor called lift, which is a direct function of the speed of the airflow over the wings. Every plane has a takeoff speed—the speed at which it can become airborne—depending on atmospheric conditions. On a carrier, there is the added factor of the speed of the vessel, plus the speed of the wind, as the carrier will always turn into the wind to launch. In the experiment Duncan conducted with the B-25s, the speed of the ship was 20 miles per hour, and the speed of the wind was 25 miles per hour—a total of 45 miles per hour of airflow over the wings. Since the minimum takeoff speed of the B-25 was a low 68 miles an hour, the pilot had only to accelerate to about 23 miles per hour to get airborne. In fact, a takeoff by a 25,000-pound plane in less than 500 feet would have been impossible except from an aircraft carrier. Wind at sea, then, would be an important factor in the raid.

Another problem was usable deck space aboard the
Hornet
. The navy had calculated the ship could carry sixteen B-25s on deck. The planes were too large to get down the elevator to the ship’s hangar, so they would have to be lashed down and exposed to whatever weather came their way. But they took up so much room that the first planes to take off would have considerably less usable deck space in which to reach takeoff speed. Doolittle set to work on that problem along with the others.

Selecting the flight crews was singularly important, but the question ultimately solved itself. Three squadrons of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group stationed at Pendleton, Oregon, were about the only ones who fit the bill. The Seventeenth was the only intact B-25 unit in the Army Air Corps, its pilots were used to flying and navigating over water, and it had had actual experience patrolling for Japanese submarines off the Pacific coast. On Christmas Eve of 1941, less than three weeks after Pearl Harbor, it had sunk a Japanese sub off the mouth of the Columbia River.

Now, if only they would volunteer. By now, Doolittle—the great risk calculator himself—had calculated the odds of surviving the mission at under fifty-fifty. In the U.S. military “acceptable losses” would have been in the neighborhood of 5 to 15 percent depending on the mission. He was not about to
order
any airman to accept a challenge such as this.

On February 3, 1942, Doolittle brought twenty-four planes and a hundred and forty officers and men of the group to an airbase at Columbia, South Carolina, where the Seventeenth’s officers informed them the army was looking for volunteers for an important but highly dangerous mission that would take them out of the country for two to three months. That was all they knew; one of the men thought to himself that “dangerous is a pretty bad word when you’re talking about airplanes.” However, to a man they signed on, even the married ones.
⁴

From there they flew to Eglin Field, a remote bombing and gunnery range in a sparsely populated part of the Florida panhandle, arriving between February 27 and March 3. A flying instructor from the Pensacola Naval Station, Lieutenant Henry L. “Hank” Miller, was waiting for them. Miller surprised the senior captains by telling them he was there to teach them how to take off from a carrier in a B-25. They were further surprised to learn that he had never even seen a B-25, let alone flown one. And they became disturbed when they realized that he had not mentioned carrier landings in his introduction.

P
RESENTLY
D
OOLITTLE ARRIVED
at Eglin Field. When the men were assembled he entered the room to audible gasps; he was already a legend in the Air Corps. He reiterated what they had been told by their commanders, that they had volunteered for a very dangerous mission. Anybody could still drop out for any reason, and “nothing would ever be said about it,” he told them. Some wanted to know more details but Doolittle was not forthcoming. He was extremely concerned about secrecy and the less anyone knew the better. Even he kept no written records. He told them the mission was top secret and not only were they not to discuss it with their wives, they were not to discuss it with each other, even if they managed to hazard a guess about where they were going. All rumors would be investigated by the FBI, he said. He again gave them a chance to back out. No one did.

They had less than three weeks to get ready. Coached by the navy lieutenant Hank Miller, they began to practice minimum speed takeoffs, which proved quite frightening to pilots used to mile-long runways. “They had always been taught to have plenty of airspeed before attempting to lift a plane off the ground,” Doolittle explained. “Yanking a plane off the ground at near stalling speed took some courage and was very much against their natural instincts.”

Doolittle himself underwent training by Miller because, unbeknownst to Hap Arnold and the brass in Washington, he intended to lead the mission, and he wanted to make sure that at the age of forty-five he could still cut it like the twenty-five-year-olds.

While this practice was undertaken, the planes were being modified on a rotating basis. The crews found many problems, such as that the electric machine-gun turrets did not work properly, and neither did the machine guns. By some oversight the rear turrets lacked machine guns entirely, and so machinists stuck two broomsticks in the tail and painted them black so to a Japanese fighter pilot they would at least look like twin .50s.

The planners also had to deal with the problem of collecting the planes after the mission. The original notion of flying back to the carrier and ditching turned out to be a nonsolution owing to uncertainty over weather, which made the highly dangerous practice of ditching a large airplane impossible.

The planning team finally decided that the pilots, after completing their bomb runs over Japan, would fly west across the Japanese mainland and the East China Sea to the region of Chuchow, which lay inland from the Chinese coast in territory that was disputed between the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese imperial army. There they would land on designated airfields held by Chiang Kai-shek’s army, turn the B-25s over to the Chinese Nationalist army, and then be flown to India and put aboard a ship back to the United States. It was a bold, complicated plan, fraught with danger, but getting the Chinese involved—or even the American military advisers—was the only available option.

The weight of the airplanes was an ongoing concern of Doolittle’s, and everything not needed for the mission was stripped out, leaving room for guns, ammunition, fuel, bombs, the five-man crew, and little else. When they were finished they had stripped enough weight and added enough tankage for fuel to extend the range of the B-25 from one thousand to twenty-five hundred miles. In so doing they would carry more than a thousand gallons of high-octane gas—three tons of it in all. Since the bombing would be low level, they could remove the top secret Norden bombsight. One of the squadron commanders, Captain C. Ross Greening, designed a replacement consisting of two strips of aluminum that could be made in the field’s metal shop for twenty cents. The heavy radios were eliminated as well.

There were constant problems to be overcome. The machine guns had to be removed and the metal smoothed by hand filing. Most of the Seventeenth’s gunners had never fired twin .50-caliber machine guns, let alone from a turret at a moving target going 300 miles per hour. Then the crews found that the bomb racks would not release the bombs. The new rubber bladder gas tanks leaked. And every day the pilots and crews continued to practice taking off in five hundred feet or even less, with the plane being loaded heavier and heavier.

There was also bombing and gunnery practice and low-altitude flying, known as “hedge hopping,” which a B-25 was never designed to do—and, in fact, hedge hopping was illegal under air corps regulations—but Doolittle made them do it anyway because he figured that if during the attack they came barreling in right on the deck, twisting and turning around hills and towers and buildings, it would confuse the Japanese radar, if they had radar, and throw off their antiaircraft batteries.

Meantime, the
Hornet
weighed anchor in Norfolk and headed for the Panama Canal and the Pacific Ocean. For Doolittle, the clock was ticking. He went to Washington to make a progress report and sprung it on Hap Arnold that he wanted to lead the mission. Arnold said no, but Doolittle “launched into a rapid-fire sales pitch,” which he’d long planned out, opening with the assertion that he was “the one guy on the project who knows more than anybody else,” and closing with “They’re the finest bunch of boys I’ve ever worked with.”