The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight

by Winston Groom

  PRESENTLY DOOLITTLE 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.”

  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

  BY 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 w
ould 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.”

  TO 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.

  ON MARCH 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.

  THE VOYAGE ACROSS THE NORTHERN PACIFIC 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 othe
r 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.