The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (53 page)

Arnold seemed to relent and said, “All right, Jim. It’s all right with me if it’s all right with Miff [Brigadier General Millard F. Harmon, Arnold’s chief of staff].”

“I smelled a rat,” Doolittle said, “so I saluted, about-faced, and ran down the hall to Miff’s office.”

“Miff,” he said breathlessly, “I’ve just been to see Hap about the project I’m working on and said I wanted to lead the mission. Hap said it’s okay with him if it’s okay with you.”

Harmon was nonplussed—or, in Doolittle’s phrase, “caught flat-footed”—and replied, “Well, whatever is all right with Hap is certainly all right with me.”

Doolittle thanked him and made a fast exit, walking out the door just in time to hear Arnold’s voice on Harmon’s intercom, and Harmon replying plaintively, “But Hap, I just told him he could go.”
⁵

B
Y NOW A LAUNCH DATE
had been selected: April 18, 1942, a Saturday. Data from U.S. submarines especially equipped for weather observations had indicated this would be the ideal date, as clear skies were expected over Tokyo. Because only sixteen bombers would fit on the deck of the
Hornet
the group was cut back to twenty-two planes—six of them in reserve—and the one hundred and ten men who would man them. The planes would be loaded aboard in San Francisco, and they would sneak across the Pacific along roughly the same northern route the Japanese had taken to attack Pearl Harbor five months earlier. In mid-ocean
Hornet
would rendezvous with the carrier
Enterprise
, which would escort them the rest of the way, providing reconnaissance flights and fighter cover in case the Japanese discovered them. Bull Halsey himself would command the task force.

On March 22, “Wu” Duncan, monitoring the mission from Pearl Harbor, sent a top secret message to Admiral King in Washington:

TELL JIMMY TO GET ON HIS HORSE
.

That was the go signal to fly the B-25s cross-country to the air service depot in Sacramento where they would undergo last-minute checks and added equipment before proceeding to San Francisco. Next morning, Doolittle assembled the pilots and crews and told them they were moving out. He gave them another chance to back out, no questions asked, as well as a stern warning against even speculating or hinting to
anyone
about what they had been doing or where they were going.

Bull Halsey flew from Pearl Harbor to San Francisco and Doolittle met him there to discuss the operation. When Doolittle checked in a message was waiting: “Meet me at seven o’clock” along with the name of a popular restaurant—of all places to discuss a secret operation! He found Halsey seated at a booth at the appointed time. He had somehow arranged for the booths on either side to be vacant while they had dinner and, when the restaurant had cleared out, they got down to business. “Let’s start out by having a drink,” Halsey said.

Doolittle told Halsey that he understood the navy was in complete charge of the operation until the B-25s left the carrier, adding that, “My boys and I will be happy to serve under your orders.”

Halsey explained about the size of the task force. In addition to
Hornet
, it would include two heavy cruisers, two light cruisers, eight destroyers and tankers. A similar task force built around the carrier
Enterprise
would steam from Pearl Harbor and rendezvous somewhere in the northern Pacific to serve as escort.

“We hope to get you within four hundred miles of the coast. But if we are intercepted or attacked [
Hornet
] will be like a sitting duck until we can clear the decks of your bombers.”

Doolittle replied that in that case he would push the bombers over the side so
Hornet
could bring her fighters up to the flight deck.

“Not necessarily,” Halsey told him. “You will probably have enough time to fly your planes off the deck and head for Midway.” But, he added, “If the advance is sudden, without any radar warning, you will have to shove them overboard.” That would be up to Marc A. “Pete” Mitscher, the
Hornet
’s captain.

Halsey continued, “Suppose we are 1,500 miles off the coast of Japan and are attacked. You can either shove your planes overboard, or take off with your bombs, try to reach your targets, and hope for the best.”

Doolittle thought it over. “I’d rather take the chances of finding the targets. We have rubber rafts on the planes. Maybe one of our submarines could pick us up.

On that happy note, at Halsey’s suggestion, they had “one for the road.”

T
O THE DELIGHT OF THE PILOTS
, Doolittle ordered them to perfect their hedge-hopping techniques all the way from Florida to California. As bomber pilots they were trained to understand that their job was simply to load up and deliver bombs over certain targets from altitudes of 15,000 to 25,000 feet and, like truck drivers, return and load up more of the same. It was the fighter pilots—the top-gun hotshots—who had all the fun, swooping, zooming, diving, looping, pulling G’s. But now Doolittle’s boys would have a chance at that, too, all the way across America. The crews, on the other hand, tucked away as they were in other parts of the plane, would just have to hold on and take it.

Meantime, in just these short weeks, the Japanese had conquered most of the Pacific, and news from the war fronts was grim. While Doolittle was still training his men, Bataan Island in the Philippines was overrun, and in the so-called Bataan Death March as many as ten thousand Allied prisoners had been killed by the Japanese. What remained of the American and Filipino forces on the island of Corregidor had been reduced to a forlorn hope. Roosevelt had ordered General MacArthur to evacuate to Australia and take command of all Allied forces in the southwestern Pacific. The trouble was, there weren’t any Allied forces to speak of in the southwestern Pacific, and the Japanese were on the verge of shutting down the only remaining Allied pipeline, which was the route from the U.S. West Coast to Australia. If this was accomplished, there would be no place for the Allied forces to assemble to attack the Japanese-held islands. The Japanese were also in the process of finishing up their campaign for New Guinea, after which they intended to invade Australia and New Zealand, which would complete their conquest of the western Pacific. To that end, on February 27, 1942, they attacked and sank the small but important U.S. Asiatic Fleet in the Battle of the Java Sea.

It wasn’t any better in the European and North African theaters. England was still the target of German bombers, while in the Egyptian desert British forces were, at best, stalemated with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s panzer (mechanized tank) army. American convoys carrying war goods to England and Russia were suffering terribly from submarine attacks, while German armies were at the gates of Leningrad and Stalingrad as Russian resistance seemed to be crumbling. The year 1942 so far did not bode well for the Allies; in fact it was the only year the war actually could have been lost. But Doolittle’s raid on Japan was about to change much of that, in ways no one could imagine.

O
N
M
ARCH 23
THE CROSS
-
COUNTRY
hedge hopping began as the B-25s left the Florida panhandle and buzzed at treetop level, terrifying men, women, children, livestock, and wild animals and kicking up a two-thousand-mile dust trail from Eglin Field to Sacramento. There the planes received new propellers, additional sixty-gallon gas tanks in place of the lower gun turrets, and new back-strap-type parachutes for the crews. Supervising the work, Doolittle became furious at the slovenly attitude with which the civilian workers approached their jobs. He was rendered almost ballistic after finding out that the maintenance crews had readjusted the B-25s’ carburetors in direct violation of his orders not to touch them. It prompted him, Doolittle said, to “use some expletives I hadn’t used before and probably haven’t since.” Unable to explain the urgency of the mission, Doolittle phoned Hap Arnold, which turned things around fast.

The planes were flown to the naval air station at Alameda on San Francisco Bay, and even though all the aircraft could not fit on the deck, Doolittle told all the pilots to go aboard, as some might be needed as substitutes. Each in his army uniform marched smartly up the gangplank, saluted the flag and the officer of the deck, and “reported for duty.” Meanwhile the B-25s were hoisted aboard the
Hornet
by giant cranes, and the astonished and uninformed sailors began lashing them down. It was April Fools’ Day, 1942. Doolittle gave the air crews a talking-to about secrecy, then let them have a final night on the town, while he himself spent the night with Joe, who had flown out to see her sister and be with him. He told her he was going on a mission in the morning. She didn’t ask what it was.

At first, aboard ship, there was some resentment between the army and navy personnel. Seeing the bombers on deck, the navy people assumed they were merely part of some sort of ferrying operation that would take the B-25s to Hawaii or another Pacific island. Since the army men wouldn’t tell them any different, they felt put upon.

Then, on April 2, at noon, the carrier slipped her moorings and steamed westward beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. By late afternoon when they had rendezvoused with the cruisers and destroyers and were out of sight of land, Captain Mitscher sent a signal to all ships: “This force is bound for Tokyo.” Within moments a chorus of cheers from five thousand throats rose up toward the darkening Pacific skies.

T
HE VOYAGE ACROSS THE NORTHERN
P
ACIFIC
was anything but boring for the army fliers. Their training would continue with daily classes in navigation, gunnery, and carrier flight operations, as well as a special course taught by one of
Hornet
’s intelligence officers, Commander Stephen Jurika, on Eastern “cultural matters.” Jurika had spent the previous two years as assistant naval attaché in the American embassy at Tokyo and was well versed in the language, the city, the targets, the defenses, and the culture of the Japanese. He instructed the fliers on how to tell the difference between the Japanese and the Chinese if they reached China and were not sure if the area was occupied. The big toe of the Japanese, Jurika told them, is splayed out from the other toes from years of wearing thongs; Chinese toes are close together because the Chinese wear clogs. There was an important phrase in Chinese that they needed to learn,
Lushu hoo metwa fugi
, meaning, “I am an American.” The Chinese knew Americans as friends and would probably help them. If the Americans were shot down over Japan, however, the news was not so good. Capture by the Japanese, Jurika informed them, meant “they would be, first of all, paraded through the streets, then tried by some kangaroo court and probably publicly beheaded.”

The pilots and crews made regular trips to the wooden flight deck to inspect their bombers—and to pace off the takeoff distance. They checked the lashings and looked for corrosion from the salt air, charged batteries, cleaned guns, checked tires, calculated, and prayed. One pilot was nearly blown overboard doing this at night during a storm and had to be rescued by
Hornet
crewmen. Others involved themselves in spectacular card and craps games with the sailors, and were soon relieved of their money, apparently not having been exposed to the adage “never gamble with a sailor aboard his own ship.” There were rumors that, against regulations, some of the airmen had brought liquor aboard ship, which increased their popularity among the sailors.
⁶
Otherwise, Doolittle’s boys enjoyed themselves at the ship’s movie theater and ice cream station or took tours of the engine rooms and other interesting places. On April 5 a number of the airmen attended Easter service in the main mess hall.

Doolittle also conducted classes of his own, selecting targets in Japan and going over maps of the landing fields in China. Two things he ruled out, much to the dissatisfaction of the men, were using incendiary bombs to start fires in Tokyo’s residential areas, where houses were made of paper and wood, and bombing the emperor’s palace. He had been in England the previous year, at the height of the Blitz, and knew that killing civilians or bombing sacred places only made the enemy’s population more intransigent. Also, he knew that the grounds of the palace were heavily defended with antiaircraft guns.

Meanwhile, Hap Arnold’s effort to secure landing bases in mainland China was running into snags. The commander of the American forces in China and adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, Lieutenant General Joseph “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, found that Chiang was reluctant to adopt the plan because he feared massive Japanese retaliation against the Chinese civilian population. However, by the time the task force was at sea Stilwell was able to report to Washington that the fields would be ready, with special equipment to broadcast a homing signal for the incoming B-25s—the number 57. If the planes were forced to land at night, Stilwell said, they would be guided in by torches and bonfires, weather permitting. And if weather was not permitting, well, presumably it was every plane for itself.

The task force had been at sea little more than a week when Japanese intelligence picked up radio signals indicating that American carriers were headed Japan’s way. The assumption was made, however, that the carriers would launch their normal complement of carrier fighter-bombers, which would entail bringing the ships within about two hundred miles of the Japanese coast, where the task force could be swiftly and thoroughly dealt with by land-based bombers. Therefore, the Japanese awaited arrival of the American warships with a certain amount of anticipation.

As the task force plowed into Japanese waters,
Enterprise
sent up fighter interceptors as scouts, fanning out several hundred miles in advance of the carriers. On April 17, as they closed inside enemy territory, the B-25s were fueled, the machine guns loaded, and bombs brought aboard. Each plane’s bomb rack included three five-hundred-pound explosive (demolition) and one five-hundred-pound incendiary, enough to do considerable damage to steel mills, factories, refineries, naval yards, machine shops, and other selected targets. That morning, the tankers refueled the carriers for the final time and returned toward Pearl Harbor.