Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  The volunteers next learned that their training would be even stranger than their modified Mitchells. The man in charge wasn’t even a soldier but a sailor, Lieutenant Henry Miller, who announced they would be lifting off from a five-hundred-foot taxi at fifty miles an hour. Since a Mitchell, fully loaded, required a thousand feet to launch, the pilots asked Miller if he had ever done this himself. Hank admitted that he’d never even seen a B-25 before.

  The technique was harrowing: wheel brakes on, elevator trim tabs at three-fourths, then blow the throttle all the way. While the B-25 reached full power and shook on its tricycle struts, the wing flaps were turned down, and then the brakes released. The plane tilted back, skidding on its tail as it zigzagged down the runway before wobbling into the air, so lacking in grace that it inspired Ted Lawson to call his plane The Ruptured Duck. “At around four or five hundred feet, the airplane would leap in the air, and the copilot—who was in charge of the gear—pulled it up,” said Brick Holstrom. “Actually, it was stalling on and off, and then recovering from the stall, that was the trouble [a stall being when the wind, speed, and position of an aircraft combine to make it suddenly falter in altitude].”

  A select few of the mission’s officers knew its destination, as well as that in Washington, it was known only as Special Aviation Project #1. One of those in the know was Ski York, who “was fairly well convinced that none of us would come out of this thing alive. I was surprised that, with such a conviction, my excitement and nervousness was replaced by a deep and unusual, for me, calm. My only real thought was that I had not been as good a husband as I could have been, and I blamed myself for being such a bastard at times.”

  On Tuesday, March 3, 1942, the Special Aviation Project #1 volunteers were called to the Eglin Ops Office to meet their commander; for these airmen to learn that he was none other than the world-famous pilot Lieutenant Colonel James Harold Doolittle . . . the thrill was indescribable. Hearing Doolittle’s introductory speech, one said, “Within five minutes, we were his . . . we’d have followed him anywhere. . . . I don’t think there was any doubt in anybody’s mind that as long as he was with us, whatever he wanted to do, we’d go ahead and do it.”

  Perhaps if the volunteers had spent a little time thinking about how Doolittle had spent his adult life, though, they would have had second thoughts. The man chosen by the chief of the Army Air Corps to lead this team was no stranger to death-defying stunts and hopeless causes, and that this lieutenant colonel had survived to the age of forty-five was remarkable, since nearly every one of his professional colleagues had been killed on the job.

  • • •

  In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, CNO Harold Stark was demoted to lead US Naval Forces–Europe and moved to London; his official biographer reported this new assignment as voluntary. Stark’s replacement as CNO, Ernest King, insisted he’d been fired, and wanted to know why Marshall hadn’t been demoted too, since surely the army shared blame with the navy for the Pearl Harbor fiasco? A daughter called King “one of the most even-tempered men in the navy. He is always in a rage.”

  When Navy Secretary Frank Knox made King commander in chief of the US Fleet on December 23, 1941, one of King’s first orders of business was to change the acronym CINCUS to COMINCH. He admired Marshall—“I don’t know what the hell this logistics is that Marshall is always talking about,” he said, “but I want some of it”—but had as little as possible to do with inferior-in-rank Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold. That army-navy camaraderie was reciprocated; Eisenhower found the admiral “the antithesis of cooperation, a deliberately rude person . . . a mental bully. . . . One thing that might help win this war is to get someone to shoot King.”

  The last time that the United States Army and Navy had cooperated was during the Civil War. When it came to unity of command in the Pacific, Marshall wanted his General MacArthur in charge, King insisted that it must be his Admiral Nimitz. The Washington Post’s analysis of the Roberts Commission Report pointed out how this history helped lead to December 7: “The Army thought the Navy was patrolling. The Navy thought the Army had its detection service operating. Neither bothered to check with the other—or maybe they were not on speaking terms. . . . The two services were totally uncoordinated, and neither knew what the other was doing—or in this case, not doing. And the air force, so supremely important in the new warfare, apparently was regarded by both as a minor auxiliary.”

  Thrilled that the might of America had finally been enlisted against Hitler and Mussolini, British military chiefs had been shocked to discover during the Arcadia Conference of Christmas 1941 how independently the American service chiefs operated. George Marshall’s counterpart, Sir John Dill, wrote of American military power that “the whole organization belongs to the days of George Washington, who was made Commander in Chief of all the forces and just did it. America had not, repeat not, the slightest conception of what the war means, and their armed forces are more unready than it is possible to imagine.”

  Who in America at that moment didn’t want revenge for Pearl Harbor? In the wake of December 7, every member of Congress was deluged with telegrams and phone calls insisting on a counterstrike and suggesting how to do it. Few knew that Roosevelt had been covertly fighting the Japanese for some time. That covert action began on December 23, 1940, when the president ordered 120 Curtiss P-40 fighters and three hundred men to Asia as volunteers for China’s air force, training in Burma. Headed by Louisiana-bayou-bred Claire Chennault, the American Volunteer Group was known as the Flying Tigers, “a rough bunch,” Herb Macia said; “the pilots were paid on the basis of kills.” Tigers got $300 a week and a $500 bounty for every Japanese plane shot down; after the war, a group of Flying Tigers would start a motorcycle club—the Hells Angels.

  Cordell Hull was gung-ho about the operation, telling Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, “What we have got to do, Henry, is get five hundred planes to start from the Aleutian Islands and fly over Japan just once. . . . That will teach them a lesson. . . . If only we could find some way to have them drop some bombs on Tokyo.” On July 23, 1941, Roosevelt approved a Second American Volunteer Group of sixty-six Lockheed Hudson and Douglas DB-7 bombers shipped to Nationalist China and from there to bomb Tokyo. By December 7, 1941, however the SAVG’s crewmen were still training and its planes were still being assembled at Lockheed.

  After Pearl Harbor, FDR would demand that US military leaders “find ways and means of carrying home to Japan proper, in the form of a bombing raid, the real meaning of war.” Stimson dismissed it as a “pet project,” and Marshall thought it was implausible. But no American wanted revenge for Oahu as much as the navy, notably Ernie King, who discussed the idea with his key officers.

  On Saturday, January 10, 1942, King’s ops man, Captain Francis “Frog” Low, was in Norfolk, Virginia, inspecting the navy’s newest carrier, the USS Hornet, which would be a significant part of rebuilding America’s Pacific Fleet. Low was sitting in the plane for the trip back to Washington when out the window he noticed one of the runways had the dimensions of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck painted on it, used for training carrier pilots. Just then, as two fat army bombers came in for a landing, their shadows fell across the flight deck.

  In Washington, Low went to his commander’s flagship, the Dauntless, to offer King an unorthodox idea: “If the army has some plane that could take off in that short distance, I mean a plane capable of carrying a bomb load, why couldn’t we put a few of them on a carrier and bomb the mainland of Japan?” King replied, “That might be a good idea. Discuss it with Duncan and tell him to report to me.”

  A detail-oriented perfectionist who’d eventually become vice chief of naval operations, Captain Donald “Wu” Duncan heard Low out but had an immediate objection: army bombers could never land on a carrier deck. Low said that maybe they could land elsewhere, perhaps in the sea, picked up by destroyers. What about the rest of the idea? The two looked over the specs of the army’s midrange bombers. The B-23 Dragon’s ni
nety-two-foot wingspan meant it was too wide; the B-26 Marauder needed a takeoff that was too long; but the B-25 Mitchell might just fit. Duncan then had two submarines, Trout and Thresher, look into weather patterns between Midway and Japan. The subs noted that the Pacific’s monsoon season would begin at the end of April, meaning a hot crisis deadline. After discussing all these details with King, the CNO said, “Go see General Arnold about it, and if he agrees with you, ask him to get in touch with me. But don’t mention this to another soul.”

  Army Air Corps chief Hap Arnold was immediately taken with Low and Duncan’s plan since on January 4, the Allies had been working out the preliminaries of Operation Torch—the invasion of North Africa—when Admiral King had suggested that his carriers ferry air corps planes across the Mediterranean. General Arnold greatly appreciated Duncan’s mind for details, and thought the army needed someone of equal caliber to work with the navy on planning this mission, an officer who could face the short timetable needed, and who had the guts to rattle the service’s slow-moving bureaucracy and whip the operation right out of it. Only one man in the AAC could do all that—Jimmy Doolittle—and he worked down the hall.

  On February 2, in a cold and foggy dawn, crewmen from fo’c’sle to fantail watched as Hornet’s deck crane lifted aboard two fat B-25s. At 0900, tugs pulled the carrier away from her berth, freed her lines, and watched as she roared down Hampton Roads in the snow. Her captain ordered full power into the wind—launch position. Who aboard didn’t hold their breath as army pilots climbed into their planes and revved their engines?

  The Mitchells would have only six feet of starboard clearance to keep their right wings from hitting the tower. Hornet’s flagman watched the rise and fall of the bow for the exact moment when he would drop his flag and instantly fall prone to the deck. The first Mitchell then rumbled, shaking down the runway. The navy men, especially the air wing, so used to their sleek SBDs, had only one thought: He’s a sinker. The B-25 powered itself harder and faster, just barely missing the island with its right wing, and just before the end of the deck . . . she was airborne.

  At 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, March 24, telephones rang out across Eglin Field in Florida, ordering twenty-two crews to assemble. The mission was on. On April 1, the volunteers arrived at Alameda Naval Air Station outside San Francisco, where the Hornet was now anchored. Her deck was 809.5 feet long, 127 feet wide, lined with 20-millimeter and 1.1-inch light guns, and painted in Measure Twelve Camouflage. Beneath the deck was a 565-foot hangar bay enclosed by steel roller curtains, which could be raised to ventilate the fumes from the eighty planes warming up their engines before being lifted, by three elevators, onto the deck. Her forty-foot-high, midship starboard island housed the navigation bridge, chat house, captain’s deck, admiral’s quarters, signal bridge, flight control, and gun director’s platforms. Fully loaded, a Yorktown-class carrier such as Hornet displaced twenty-five thousand tons, was manned by a crew of three thousand, and cost $32 million. Her commander—who’d had REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR painted in huge white letters on the ship’s stack—was fifty-four-year-old Captain Marc “Pete” Mitscher. Often described as Lincolnesque for his height and tight-lipped demeanor, a truer mark of Mitscher’s character might be found in his pioneering of a captain’s wearing a baseball cap, which quickly became a navy tradition.

  That April Fools’ Day (the perfect moment for launching this mission, one raider would later come to believe), the Mitchells were winched aboard Hornet and tied down to the open deck with wheels chocked. All the airmen, even those whose planes didn’t make the cut, were then ushered aboard this giant city of steel.

  Two carrier groups would be employed for Special Aviation Project #1; one to carry the men and their planes from the continental United States, and the other to provide defense in enemy waters; together they would be known as Task Force 16. The defenders—carrier Enterprise, cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City, oiler Sabine, and destroyers Balch, Benham, Ellet, and Fanning—would depart from Pearl Harbor to meet with Hornet and her convoy in the middle of the Pacific.

  Aboard, tensions ran high. Colonel Horace “Sally” Crouch said that “the marine personnel in particular resented our being there and treated us with contempt. When they would see you in the passageways or otherwise like that, there was a very active minority group who made it very apparent that it was an insult for their ship to be used as a transport vehicle.” Hank Miller had warned the airmen not to talk about their mission, a silence that led to sailor scuttlebutt so serious that Marine Sergeant George Royce told his detachment that while he didn’t know any more about all this than they did, if they were smart, they’d take out government life insurance immediately. When Corporal Larry Bogart learned that the commander was the infamous Jimmy Doolittle, he paid out enough in premiums to quintuple his benefits.

  On April 2 at 1018, Hornet, Vincennes, Nashville, Gwin, Grayson, Meredith, Monssen, and Cimarron weighed anchor and set off under a heavy fog, the USS Hornet destined never again to see the continental United States. As the task force cleared the Golden Gate Bridge, the bosun’s whistle sounded, and Captain Mitscher announced over Hornet’s loudspeakers and simultaneously via semaphore to the other ships: “The target of this task force is Tokyo. The army is going to bomb Japan, and we’re going to get them as close to the enemy as we can. This is a chance for all of us to give the Japs a dose of their own medicine.”

  Cheers broke out across the decks of every ship as the army and the navy united to strike a blow of vengeance. “The sailors I saw were jumping up and down like small children,” said Mac McClure. “It was like you were at a football game and somebody has just kicked a goal at the last second,” bombardier Bob Bourgeois remembered. “People went wild. I rejoiced just like everyone else. I was glad to see somebody was going to retaliate for Pearl Harbor.” A ditty soon swept across the ships: “Heigh-ho! Heigh-ho! We’re off to Tokyo! We’ll bomb and blast and come back fast, heigh-ho! Heigh-ho!”

  At a meeting with his fliers, Doolittle outlined the industrial and military targets that American army intelligence had chosen in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya; the crews were allowed to pick their strikes. Everyone wanted to take out Emperor Hirohito and the Imperial Palace, so they cut cards to see who would claim the prize. But Jimmy Doolittle had seen the whole of England unite in common cause after the Luftwaffe’s strike on Buckingham Palace, and vetoed an attempt on the palace. Later in life he’d consider this one of the best decisions he’d ever made.

  The plan was to launch at dusk, arriving over Japan at night. Flying three hours ahead of the rest, Doolittle would drop incendiaries over the wooden cities of Japan. The fires would serve to light up the targets, and the men could then see their way clear.

  As the days passed, the thrill of this history-making endeavor and the visceral joy of giving payback for December 7 wore away, and serious thought as to what they would be facing began to occupy the airmen’s minds. Military intelligence had concluded they would be greeted over Tokyo by three hundred 75 mm antiaircraft guns and five hundred Japanese planes. The men knew how horribly the Japanese treated their POWs and feared capture. “Personally, I know exactly what I’m going to do,” Doolittle said. “I don’t intend to be taken prisoner. If my plane is crippled beyond any possibility of fighting or escaping, I’m going to bail my crew out and then drive it, full throttle, into any target I can find where the crash will do the most damage.” He’d already thought through the odds and come up with his own professional estimate of their chances: fifty-fifty.

  Though Task Force 16 took a zigzag course across the Pacific to avoid detection, what US military intelligence hadn’t learned was that Japan had a flotilla of fishing boats posted six hundred miles off its coastline, radio-equipped and on round-the-clock lookout for enemy forces. It would be Task Force 16 that discovered this picket line, at dawn on April 18.

  The sky that morning was a dark gray murk. At 0508, eleven scouts were launched, one of them a Dauntless pilote
d by Lieutenant O. B. Wiseman. The lieutenant came out of cloud cover directly over an enemy ship forty-two miles directly before Task Force 16. Returning over Enterprise, Wiseman’s rear gunner slid open the tail hatch and dropped a beanbag with a note detailing the enemy ship’s position, and that they’d been spotted.

  Dive-bombers from Enterprise joined with the fleet’s guns and after twenty-nine minutes of attack and 924 six-inch shells fired, the picket boat, Nitto Maru, raised a white flag, The ship’s radioman had, however, already sent a message to Japan’s Fifth Fleet: “Three enemy carriers sighted at our position 650 nautical miles east of Inubo Saki [central Japan’s historic lighthouse] at 0630.” Commander in Chief of Combined Forces, Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, ordered all ships within a day’s run on a course to the Nitto Maru. Five carriers, 6 cruisers, 10 destroyers, 9 submarines, 90 fighter planes, and 116 Japanese bombers now headed toward Task Force 16.

  The original goal was to get within 450 miles of Japan. At 550 miles, the air crews could still make it, but with little margin for error. Instead, six hundred and eighty-eight miles from Tokyo and over two hundred miles from the launch site, the mission had been compromised. “We knew that the pilots really didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting to China,” said Hank Miller. At 0800, Enterprise blinker-lit a message: LAUNCH PLANES. TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND: GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU.