Pacific Crucible: War at Sea in the Pacific, 1941-1942

by Ian W. Toll

  Every catwalk, every gun gallery, every bridge wing on the Hornet was crowded with sailors and officers who stood watching with white knuckles and clenched jaws. A camera crew headed by the Hollywood director John Ford recorded the scene from a post high on the Hornet’s island. On the Enterprise, half a mile away, many of the observers remained skeptical, and a few insisted that the planned takeoff was impossible. It would be cancelled at the last moment, they said, or else end in disaster. Kernan wrote that a betting pool rode on the outcome, and “there was soon heavy money down on both sides: would they make it, would they not?” Finding himself among the pessimists, Kernan wagered ten hard-earned dollars that fewer than half of Doolittle’s planes would get into the air.

  The navy control officer stood near the Hornet’s bow, leaning back against the gusts, and waved a checkered flag in a circular motion. That signaled the first B-25 in the queue, the aircraft piloted by Colonel Doolittle, to pour on throttle while standing on the brakes. With the twin engines screaming so loudly that onlookers feared they might burn themselves out, and the entire body of the airplane quaking against the wooden wheel chocks, the checkered flag came down in the “Go” signal. The chocks were pulled away in unison and Doolittle released the brakes. His plane lurched forward and hurtled down the port side of the flight deck, the left wing hanging well over the port side of the ship. As the Hornet’s bow came up, the 75-knot headwind applied its powerful lift and Doolittle’s wheels left the deck.

  “I would say he was 50 feet in the air within 50 feet of the bow,” said Jurika, watching from the bridge. “He went off with the least run and hopped right into the air.” At first, the plane was only moving about 30 knots faster than the carrier, so it appeared to be hovering, edging forward only gradually, like a tremendous kite rising on a string. Lieutenant Lawson wrote that Doolittle “hung his ship almost straight up on its props, until we could see the whole top of his B-25.” On the brink of a stall, he forced his nose down, banked left, and flew back along the port side of the carrier, then banked left again to circle across the Hornet’s wake. He was on his way to Tokyo.

  Doolittle’s successful takeoff fortified the morale of the fifteen other pilots, as it had been intended to do. Now they prepared to follow him, one by one, with renewed confidence. But the second B-25, piloted by Lieutenant Travis Hoover, careened off the bow without gaining altitude. From the perspective of men standing on the Hornet’s stern, it seemed to drop into the sea. Hoover nosed up and poured on throttle, trying to claw his way into the air, and very nearly stalled. “The pilot held the nose up so high that he was dragging his tail skid,” recalled Fisher. “He ballooned up, almost stalled out, cleared the flight deck, and then we lost sight of him as the bow pitched up. I thought he’d crashed, but we finally saw him very low over the water. His props were blowing salt spray off the surface!” He staggered into the air and banked left, following Doolittle.

  Each time a B-25 lurched forward to begin its takeoff run, its prop wash added to the cumulative strength of the actual wind and the apparent wind generated by the Hornet’s speed through the water. “It sure was windy!” recalled George Bernstein, a plane-pusher normally assigned to Torpedo Squadron Eight (VT-8). “We had to literally drop to the deck and hang on with our fingers in the tie-down fittings when the B-25s revved up. I had a line attached to myself and to other men on the team to keep us from blowing in towards the props.” One crewman, aviation machinist’s mate Robert W. Wall, lost his grip. He was wafted into the air and thrown into the spinning propeller of another plane. His arm was severed at the shoulder. Lieutenant Bill Farrow, pilot of the plane that had taken Wall’s arm, was badly shaken by the accident, and nearly crashed on takeoff, but managed to claw his way into the sky as Hoover had done.

  By hook or by crook, all fifteen planes got airborne and fell in behind Doolittle. Without fuel to spare for a rendezvous, they flew away one by one, in a long, irregular procession stretching away toward the gray western horizon. The sailors shouted in exultation, and even Lieutenant Miller, who was exasperated by the army pilots’ failure to keep their stabilizers in neutral position as they took off, was moved by their courage: “I think without a doubt every officer and man aboard the Hornet would have pinned every medal in the world on those people who went off that deck in those airplanes.” On the Enterprise, wrote Kernan, “we all cheered loudly and choked down a few patriotic tears. I thought my ten dollars well lost in a good cause, as if I had actually contributed the money to success in the war.”

  THE NITTO MARU’S CONTACT REPORT was received aboard the Yamato shortly after breakfast. The little sampan had reported sighting not two but three American aircraft carriers, a detail that must have seemed fantastic to the Combined Fleet staff. The Americans were thought to have only three carriers in the entire Pacific Ocean. Were they all now charging toward Tokyo, and from only a few hundred miles away? The absence of any follow-up transmissions from the Nitto Maru only seemed to confirm the report. Admiral Ugaki recorded that the fleet staff “plunged into activities at once.” From Yamato flashed the signal: “Enemy task force containing three aircraft carriers as main strength sighted 0630 this morning 730 miles east of Tokyo. . . . Operate against American fleet.” Yamamoto ordered Tactical Method No. 3, which involved sending units of both the First and the Second Fleet to sea to intercept the intruders. Admiral Nagumo, whose carrier force, Kido Butai, was off Formosa, on its way home from the Indian Ocean, was ordered to proceed at speed to the waters east of Japan.

  Critically, however, the Nitto Maru’s crew had failed to note that one of the carriers was carrying twin-engine bombers. If they had, the fleet staff might have put one and one together, and concluded that an enemy airstrike was already en route to Tokyo. An ordinary carrier bombing raid could not be launched outside a radius of about 200 miles, so if the American carriers had just breached the outer picket line, it was safe to assume they were still 400 or 500 miles away from launch position. That meant the capital could not be threatened until the following morning. At 9:45 a.m., a Japanese patrol plane flying along the east coast of Japan reported the appearance of a strange twin-engine bomber. The report was not taken seriously, because (as everyone knew) such airplanes could not operate from carriers. Another Japanese picket vessel spotted incoming B-25s and radioed, “Three enemy planes, course southwest,” but that report was also shrugged off as an obvious error.

  The first bombers arrived over Tokyo Bay shortly before noon on April 18. They had approached the coast at very low altitude, a measure to avoid detection from the air or ground, and to avoid the effective “cones” of the antiaircraft batteries. In an eerie reenactment of Pearl Harbor, Japanese observers on boats and on the ground assumed the intruders were friendly planes, and waved merrily at them. “You see,” Lawson wrote, “the emblems on our plane were the old style: blue circle with white star and a red ball in the middle of the white star. Maybe that’s what confused them. I’m sure we weren’t being hailed as liberators.” The B-25s passed near several Japanese military aircraft which made no attempt to engage or pursue them. Prime Minister Tojo himself was flying over the bay in a Japanese army plane that passed so near one of the incoming bombers that a fellow passenger could identify the pilot as a Caucasian.

  A witness at a navy airfield on the bay realized belatedly that enemy planes were directly overhead. “Everyone at our airfield was in a state of shock,” he said, “but there was nothing we could do about it. All of our airplanes were lined up on the airfield. But the enemy aircraft didn’t even take a look at them. Instead the attackers disappeared and flew towards the Yokohama area.”

  Koiwa Kazuei was a civilian employee of the Yokosuka navy arsenal. He was on the telephone when an air-raid alert sounded, followed closely by the sound of large explosions outside his window. Looking out, he recalled, “The sky was full of the unfamiliar low-flying squat black American military aircraft. Antiaircraft fire exploded in the sky high above them.” In a dry dock in front of
his office, the warship Daiho had been hit, and was emitting “a ferocious cloud of black smoke. . . . Large numbers of wounded were being carried on stretchers to the infirmary next to the docks.” As he watched, he was joined by the commanding officer of the facility, Vice Admiral Ishichi Tsuzuki, who remarked, with a rueful smile, “The enemy is quite something.”

  The first group of B-25s, including the airplane piloted by Colonel Doolittle, climbed from the deck to about 1,500 feet as they flew over Tokyo. They hit several targets in Tokyo, including an oil tank, a steel mill, and a power plant. Some of the B-25s passed directly over the Imperial Palace, but Doolittle had issued explicit orders not to drop any bombs on the complex, though it could easily have been done. The next wave of planes remained at treetop altitude, the better to avoid the now-alerted fighter patrols and antiaircraft batteries. Lawson wrote that he flew up a valley toward Tokyo, so low that his aircraft was “lower than the hills on either side.” One of the B-25 pilots reported that he flew under a power line to throw off pursuing fighters.

  When Admiral Yamamoto was told that Tokyo had been bombed from the air, he became physically ill. His chief steward, Heijiro Omi, attested that he had never seen the admiral look so depressed. He retreated to his stateroom, shut the door behind him, and did not emerge for several hours, during which time Ugaki took effective command of the fleet. Thirty-two medium bombers with fighter escort took off from Yokosuka Naval Base to fly search and destroy missions to the east. A squadron of submarines that had been dispatched to Truk was radioed instructions to sweep back to the north. Three of Nagumo’s fleet carriers—Akagi, Hiryu, and Soryu—were ordered to work up to full speed and track down and destroy the unknown intruders that had approached the Japanese homeland. (The carriers, returning via the Bashi Channel from their raids in the Indian Ocean, were in desperate need of repair and recuperation. They had been at sea a long time, having traveled some 50,000 miles since December 7; the accumulated wear and tear to equipment was beginning to tell, and their crews were nearing exhaustion. Even then, four months into the war, the Japanese were beginning to suffer from their blithe unconcern for the effects of fatigue on crew effectiveness.) But no Japanese ship or aircraft had the range or speed to catch the American carriers as they raced away at near-peak speed, dead east on the compass. By nightfall they had safely vanished into the cold, interminable wastes of the North Pacific.

  Immediately after the last B-25 had gone aloft, the task force had turned eastward. With the Hornet’s flight deck clear for the first time since leaving San Francisco, the plane-pushers hurriedly brought the fighters up on the elevators. Later that morning, several were launched to fly combat air patrol, and to join the Enterprise air group in flying a wide air search pattern. The task force ran across several more picket boats during its retreat, which were sunk (with difficulty) by the orbiting American airplanes.

  Task force radio operators picked up Japanese naval transmissions sent out in plain language, a clear sign that the enemy was flustered and in disarray. The messages themselves were so confused that they only confirmed that the Japanese had no idea how they had been attacked. Long-range radio bearings suggested that ships were operating at high speeds throughout the seas east of Japan. But no land-based aircraft could possibly reach the retreating task force. Unless enemy submarines happened to be in the vicinity, the American carriers had made a clean escape, and they knew it.

  Every ship in the task force tuned in to Radio Tokyo, hoping to learn from the Japanese themselves that Doolittle’s bombers had reached the target. At about 2 p.m. local time (noon in Tokyo), the English-language broadcaster suddenly cut short his script. There were a few seconds of confused mumbling in Japanese, and then the channel fell abruptly silent. The first B-25s had apparently arrived over the city. The news was announced over the Hornet’s loudspeakers, prompting a new round of celebrations among the crew. After about thirty minutes of silence, the announcer came back on the air, this time speaking in shrill, rapid-fire Japanese. Throughout the task force, officers and sailors pressed into the radio rooms to listen. Though few could decipher a single word of Japanese, the howl of air-raid sirens could actually be heard in the background, and anyone could detect the panic in the announcer’s voice. Those who understood Japanese translated for those who could not.

  Atrocities had been committed, the announcer reported—bombs had fallen on temples, schools, train stations, and hospitals; thirty schoolchildren lay dead, having been strafed from the air. Apparently, rumors were being reported as fact. A woman’s voice broke in several times, pleading for blood donors. “Give your blood as the men at the front are giving theirs,” she shrieked. “Your lives are in danger. Your country is in danger. Tomorrow—even tonight—your children may be blown to bits. Give your blood. Save them. Save yourselves. Save Japan.” Robert Casey, listening in the Salt Lake City’s radio room, remarked: “We should have thought the whole of Japan in ashes.”

  It was only after several hours that the quavering radio voices began to subside. They had apparently been handed new scripts. They now calmly declared that military and civil defense officials had the situation well in hand. The air raid had done little damage, and the enemy planes had all been shot down or chased away. At one point it was said that nine bombers had been shot down, though it was not known what kind of planes they were or to what nation they belonged. Another report asserted that the capital had been attacked by an “armada of Chinese, American and Russian planes.” Departing from the script, the broadcasters debated whether the airplanes had come from the south (China or the Philippines), from the north (the Aleutians or Soviet Siberia), or perhaps even from some secret airfield hidden in Japan itself. Then a fourth possibility was raised: perhaps the Americans had built a “supercarrier” with a flight deck a quarter of a mile long, capable of launching and landing large bombers. “You notice that nobody on the Jap radio yet knows whose planes they were,” remarked one of the officers on the Salt Lake City. “They give themselves away guessing.”

  On the morning of April 19, the U.S. carriers and cruisers rendezvoused with the destroyers and tankers, and the entire Task Force 16 turned south for Pearl Harbor. Rough seas made for accidents, and several planes were lost. The Hornet had been operating at sea for so long that the perishable provisions were barely edible. “They had stocked the fantail with cases and cases of potatoes,” recalled Stephen Jurika. “All of them were sprouting. Everything was sprouting.” For the last half week before raising the green mountains of Oahu, the crew ate their fill of canned Spam.

  ALL OF DOOLITTLE’S B-25S escaped Japanese territory unscathed. But as they passed over the East China Sea, the sixteen airplanes were widely scattered, with fuel tanks running dry and darkness gathering. Doolittle climbed over the cloud cover and flew through the night, navigating by dead reckoning. He could not pick up the radio beacon intended to guide him to the airfield in Chuchow, China. With his engines running on fumes, he and his crew strapped on their parachutes, opened the main hatch, and stepped out into the void. Fourteen other aircrews also bailed out over China. One of the B-25s turned north, toward Russia, and landed at an airstrip near Vladivostok; the crew was interned by the Soviets for more than a year. Of the eighty airmen who flew the mission, only four were killed in action. Of the remaining seventy-six, eight were captured by the Japanese.

  In the United States, the press was cleared to report that bombs had fallen on Japanese soil. No details were released until months later, but the headline was enough to prompt a round of public rejoicing. Ten-year-old James Covert of Portland, Oregon, recalled wrapping a bedsheet around his torso and holding a flashlight above his head, like a torch—“I was the Statue of Liberty, and all the family danced around me.” In Washington, a reporter asked Roosevelt for the location of the airfield from which the mysterious American bombers had taken off. The president’s deadpan reply: “They came from our new secret base at Shangri-la.”

  The news was especially significant
because it came little over a week after the surrender of 78,000 American and Filipino troops at Bataan. The “battling bastards” had held out for well over three months, but their strength and morale were sapped by malnutrition and various illnesses that could not be treated for lack of medicines. They had given up hope of seeing the promised “mile-long” convoy of ships bringing food, ammunition, and supplies from the United States. With the surrender of Bataan on April 9, the Japanese had apparently made little or no preparations to handle such a large number of prisoners, and the result was the Bataan “Death March,” in which some 10,000 Allied prisoners were murdered, one of the most infamous atrocities of the Second World War. Though the details would not be publicized until much later, those searing events of April 1942—the murder of surrendered prisoners on the road out of Bataan, the bombing of a Japanese city by Doolittle’s B-25s, and the subsequent execution of three captured American airmen—did much to embitter both sides and brutalize the war.

  By the morning after the Doolittle raid, Japan’s state-controlled media had recovered its composure. The new official line emphasized that the bombing attack had been ludicrously ineffective, a mere pinprick. In a pun that must have perplexed its audience, a radio announcer suggested that it was not a “do-little” but a “do-nothing” raid. In fact, as Mitsuo Fuchida later remarked, it would have been more accurate to call it a “do-much” raid. Though it had been brief and relatively benign, the attack was interpreted by many Japanese as a dark portent of the future. In their living memories, and even in their written history, the Japanese had no experience of foreign incursions; they had never dared to imagine that their homeland could be violated in such a manner. The navy fighter pilot Saburo Sakai, stationed in the South Pacific, received a letter from a female cousin who lived in Tokyo. The raid, she told him, “has brought about a tremendous change in the attitude of our people toward the war. Now things are different; the bombs have dropped here on our homes. It does not seem any more that there is such a great difference between the battlefront and the home front.” Sakai added that the news “unnerved” his fellow airmen: “The knowledge that the enemy was strong enough to smash at our homeland, even in what might be a punitive raid, was cause for serious apprehension of future and heavier attacks.”