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

by Winston Groom

  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.

  In the afternoon, an unusual ceremony took place. A number of old sailors who had visited Japan in 1908 with Theodore Roosevelt’s Great White Fleet had been given medals by the Japanese. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor they sent the medals back to the U.S. State Department, which turned them over to the secretary of the navy who, at someone’s suggestion, sent them to Mitscher’s task force to be attached to the bombs meant for Tokyo and other Japanese cities. This was done on the flight deck to the accompaniment of much hilarity and the inscribing of things, most of them better left unsaid, on the bombs themselves. By nightfall the B-25s were ready, and Mitscher told Doolittle, “Jimmy, we’re in the enemy’s backyard now. Anything can happen.”7

  OVERNIGHT, THE WEATHER BEGAN to deteriorate. It was a tense evening aboard the Hornet as the fliers checked their B-4 bags that contained their personal items plus two pints each of navy-issued “medicinal” whiskey. Those who could, slept—but not for long. The “general quarters” alarm sounded at three a.m. when Enterprise’s radar picked up two surface craft. Half an hour later the craft slid off the radar screen and the “all clear” was sounded. The weather had not improved, though, and by daylight a gale was blowing and the seas grew tall as a three-story building. Right before six a scout plane reported an enemy ship forty-two miles ahead, and Mitscher swung north, hoping to avoid it. He and Doolittle stood on the bridge peering into the gloom as the minutes ticked by and Hornet rolled heavily onward in the great seas. Then, at 7:38, Hornet’s radar picked up a Japanese ship at 20,000 yards, and almost immediately the radio operator reported that the enemy vessel had sent out a signal. In all likelihood they had been spotted.

  U.S. naval intelligence was aware that the Japanese had established a defensive picket line of ships about three hundred miles off its eastern coast; it was not aware, though, that they had established a second early-warning line of fishing boats about seven hundred miles out. This was what the task force had encountered. Halsey, in the Enterprise, sent the cruiser Nashville to deal with the offending picket (later identified as the seventy-ton Nitto Maru), and soon Nashville’s big guns roared to life. People on the other ships ran to the sides to see what was going on. Less than two miles away in the mist lay the Japanese vessel. By then, on the carriers, there was no doubt—if they could see it, surely it could see them. Radio scanners on all ships were picking up messages in Japanese code.

  It turned out not to be a glorious day for American gunnery. In the thirty-foot swells the enemy boat was bobbing so much it took an amazing 934 six-inch shells before one finally hit and blew the bows off the enemy boat, sinking her.

  A Japanese survivor who was fished out of the water told of how he had spotted the American task force and ran to his captain’s quarters to report “two beautiful Japanese carriers” passing by. The captain went topside and after taking a look said to the seaman, “Yes, they are beautiful, but they are not ours.” Then, according to the sailor, after ordering the radio man to signal the warning, the captain “returned to his cabin and shot himself in the head.”

  Doolittle and the navy task force were in a nasty predicament. Halsey had wanted to get Doolittle and his bombers inside four hundred miles off the Japanese coast, but they were still eight or nine steaming hours away from that point. Japanese bombers were certainly being scrambled at this moment. Doolittle’s bombers’ fuel had been calculated down to nearly the last drop to get them to Japan and then to China. Worse, almost, instead of arriving over Japanese cities at night when they were fairly safe from Japanese fighters and antiaircraft, they would arrive in broad daylight; worse still, they would arrive over China at night. Doolittle did not hesitate. Within moments the Klaxon sounded and Hornet’s loudspeakers blared, “Army pilots, man your planes!”

  At the Hashirajima naval base near Hiroshima, the chief of staff to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan’s supreme naval commander, received word of the presence of the American ships and ordered his entire fleet to converge on the coordinates where the unfortunate Japanese fishing boat reported its location. This included an enormous five-carrier fleet under Admiral Chuichi Nagumo, who had been in command during the Pearl Harbor attack. Halsey’s intelligence section thought this force to be in the Indian Ocean, but it had returned and was at that very moment passing through the Straits of Formosa. Suddenly the air crackled with urgent radio signals between Japanese headquarters and myriad warships—nine submarines, the aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, air forces—creating a virtual field day for American code breakers, who snatched these signals out of the air at stations ranging from Hawaii and Alaska to San Francisco and Sydney. These were the most Japanese radio signals the American cryptologists had ever heard and would prove immensely useful in the near future.

  After Captain Mitscher’s announcement, Hornet immediately became a hive of activity. The army pilots, some of whom had been eating breakfast, others dressing or shaving—and some of whom were actually still asleep through all the gunfire—dropped everything, got their gear together, and rushed to the flight deck. From below, sailors were lugging up hundreds of five-gallon jerricans of aviation fuel—twenty-five gallons per plane—to try to make up the difference in distance because of the early takeoff. Doolittle had warned his pilots to make sure holes were punctured in each can before tossing them out so they wouldn’t leave a trail in the ocean leading back to the carriers. Navy men yanked the engine covers off the planes and unfastened the restraining straps. At eight in the morning a message was flashed from Enterprise to Hornet:

  LAUNCH PLANES X TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU—HALSEY.

  THE DECK OF Hornet was pitching wildly in the mountainous waves and the gale force winds whipped a salty spray all across the bows, soaking anyone on deck, as the huge carrier turned slowly into the wind to launch planes. Inside their cockpits the pilots could only hold their breath and pray as their engines sputtered to life and props slowly began to turn. Everyone understood what would happen if the takeoff was unsuccessful and their plane stalled; they would plunge into the sea and the Hornet would immediately run over them, sealing their fate. The airmen looked down the flight deck in breathless consternation as the carrier’s bow rose three stories or more on a swell, then came crashing down, only to rise up and plunge again, and yet again. If there was anything good about this weather it was the thirty-knot gale winds, which, coupled with the twenty-knot speed the carrier was making, would bring nearly fifty knots of wind speed across the wings of the planes even before the takeoff, giving them that much more lift.

  At about nine o’clock Doolittle’s plane was towed to the starting point, where a white line track had been painted straight down the deck. The pilots had to use this guide because there was less than a six-foot clearance between the bombers’ wings and the carrier’s island. There could be no wobbling. The flight officer on deck began furiously waving his flags in ever faster circles, signaling for Doolittle to rev up his engines to full power. “It was like riding a seesaw,” Doolittle said, “that plunged deep into the water each time the bow dipped downward.”

  Doolittle gave his engines more and more throttle until Lieutenant Ted Lawson, of Los Angeles, piloting Ruptured Duck seven planes behind him, “thought he would burn them up.” Then, Lawson said, “I saw that the [flight officer] was waiting, timing the dipping of the ship so that Doolittle’s plane would get the benefit of a risi
ng deck for his takeoff.… We watched him like hawks,” Lawson remembered, “wondering what the wind would do to him, and whether he could get off in that little run toward the bow. If he couldn’t, we couldn’t.” Then, Lawson said, “just as the Hornet lifted itself up and cut through the top of a wave, he took off. He had yards to spare. He hung his ship almost straight up on its props, until we could see the whole top of the B-25. Then he leveled out.” Above the roar of the revving engines, Lawson remembered, “I could hear the hoarse cheers of every navy man on the ship. They made the Hornet fairly shudder with their yells. I haven’t heard anything like it, before or since.” At that point they were 824 statute miles from the center of Tokyo.

  Several planes behind Lawson, Edgar McElroy, of Ennis, Texas, gripped the stick so tightly he thought he’d break it, as his copilot Richard Knobloch, of Fort Sheridan, Illinois, kept shouting, “Yes, yes, yes!” as Doolittle leveled off and came around in a circle over the ship.8

  The next plane, however, piloted by Lieutenant Travis Hoover of Arlington, California, seemed to stall out when it left the deck, with its nose nearly straight up, and to everyone’s dismay it began sinking tailfirst into the waves. Recounted Edgar McElroy, “We groaned and called out ‘Up! Up! Pull it up!’ Finally, he pulled out of it, staggering back up into the air.”

  One by one the B-25s roared off into the gloomy mist. One of the pilots, Lieutenant Bob Emmens of Medford, Oregon, recalled the takeoff this way: “Suddenly the island of the carrier was lost from sight as it had passed a mere eight feet from our right wingtip, and then, like a big living thing, our plane seemed to leap into the air as the deck of the ship disappeared under us.”

  When it came his turn, and the noise and vibration inside the cockpit became horrendous, McElroy said a kind of desperate prayer, “God please help us,” as the flight officer dropped the flags the moment the deck reached its low point. “Here we go!” McElroy cried, and they began rolling down the deck straight into the angry, churning water. “As we slowly gained speed,” McElroy said, “the deck began to pitch back up. I pulled up and we strained away from the ship. There was a big cheer and whoops from the crew, but I just muttered to myself, ‘Boy, that was short!’ ”

  The rest of Doolittle’s squadron took off without serious incident except for the last plane, Bat Out of Hell. She was revved and her props were spinning in a high-pitched blur when one of the sailors assigned to remove the restraining ropes slipped on the soaking deck and was sucked into the Bat’s propeller. It chopped off his arm, but the horrified airman in the Bat took off anyway.

  The moment the last plane was airborne Halsey ordered the fleet to come about and steer for Hawaii at full speed. He fully understood the danger they were in and knew that Japanese bombers—and probably the entire Japanese navy—would be headed their way. Watching from Enterprise as the planes took off, Halsey called it “one of the most courageous deeds in military history.”

  Each plane circled the carrier task force then broke into loose formations, depending on the location of their targets—Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe—and set courses toward the empire of Japan. Somewhere in the hazy squalls behind them they left the rising sun, with Lieutenant Jurika’s pungent phrase Lushu hoo metwa fugi—“I am an American”—ringing in their ears.

  THE B-25S SKIMMED in on the deck all the way, about twenty to fifty feet above the raging sea, flying slower than usual, about 170 miles per hour to save fuel (normal cruising speed of the bomber was 233 miles per hour and maximum dive 348 miles per hour). As they burned off gasoline the crews emptied the five-gallon cans into the tanks, stabbed puncture holes in them, and tossed them out of the plane. Lawson, in Ruptured Duck, remembered that “suddenly a dazzling, twisting object rushed past our left wing. It was startling until I realized it was a five-gallon can discarded by one of the planes in front of me. [It] would have downed us if it had hit a prop.” The fact remained, however, that the early takeoff had put an extra four hundred miles on their flight plan, and they would need every drop of gas they had.

  It took about five hours of flying to reach the coast of Japan, which the first planes encountered shortly before noon, Tokyo time. Ted Lawson felt somewhat disappointed. “I had an ingrained, picture-postcard concept of Japan,” he said. “I expected to spot some snow-topped mountain or volcano first.” Instead, the first land they saw “lay very low in the water in a slight haze that made it blend lacily into the horizon.”

  The crews had been warned to prepare for heavy antiaircraft fire and fighter attacks from the time they reached the coast, but instead they encountered numerous fishing vessels and later pretty little farms, “fitted in with mathematical precision.” The fishermen and farmers looking up at them waved and smiled. The weather had cleared and they flew on in the sunshine.

  The Tokyo-bound bombers—which included most of them—headed south. Before long Lawson encountered a flight of six Japanese fighters coming straight at them at about 1,500 feet. The brownish color of the B-25 must have been enough to camouflage them, as they kept on the deck and passed over a large forest. The enemy planes soon vanished from sight and were not heard from again. But the encounter caused a kind of shiver to pass through Lawson, he remembered later, like that of a man expecting at any moment to be shot in the back.

  It was supposed to be about twenty minutes to Tokyo from the spot where the planes hit the coast, but it took longer. Soon, however, the crews began to spot the snowcapped peak of Mount Fuji, just as Commodore Matthew Perry had done on his famous visit to Japan not quite a hundred years earlier. On the outskirts of the city, Doolittle also came upon a swarm of Japanese fighters—nine of them, by one count, in flights of threes, but the raiders went past apparently unseen.

  Doolittle reached Tokyo first. The city was immense—eight million people—and spread out more like Los Angeles than compact San Francisco. Once inside the boundaries his ship began to encounter antiaircraft fire. There were reportedly five hundred batteries within Tokyo’s environs. Nevertheless, the Japanese people had been told they were immune from attack—forever shielded by the “divine wind,” the kamikaze, which had protected them from invasion for a thousand years. By coming in at rooftop level the B-25s had the jump on the antiaircraft guns, for the most part, but Doolittle admitted the black puffs of flak “shook us up a little and might have put a few holes in the fuselage.”

  Doolittle spotted the large munitions factory that was his target and pulled up to 1,200 feet, which was the bombing altitude they all had practiced. His bomb bay doors opened. He was carrying the four five-hundred-pound incendiaries that were supposed to have marked the targets during the planned night attack. The bombardier dropped them and set the munitions factory afire.

  Afterward, as he sped to the coast, Doolittle saw five enemy fighters converging on him from above. There were two small hills ahead, however, and he swung around them in an S turn, “pouring on the coal.” The Japanese gave chase but Doolittle lost them. “They didn’t see the second half of my S,” he guessed. “The last time I saw them they were going off in the opposite direction.”

  Somewhere behind Doolittle, McElroy had climbed to 2,000 feet, “to see where we were,” when he began to take flak. He put the nose down and headed for Tokyo Bay. Ahead, he could see smoke rising around the city from the bombers that got there before him. McElroy’s destination was the big Yokosuka Naval Base across the bay in Yokohama, and as he approached it he could see the black bursts of flak exploding ahead. He soon was amid the layer of flak and the plane was jerked violently about by the aerial concussions, but McElroy headed straight for the torpedo factory and dry docks, where a big ship lay on the ways.a He called for the bomb bay doors to be opened.

  “Those flak bursts were really getting close and bouncing us around,” McElroy said, “when I heard Bourgeois shouting, ‘Bombs Away!’ I couldn’t see it but Williams had a bird’s eye view from the back and he shouted jubilantly, ‘We got an aircraft carrier! The whole dock is burning!’ ”
As McElroy turned south he looked back to see a giant crane begin to topple over. From the back of the plane there was “wild yelling and clapping each other on the back. We were all just ecstatic and still alive, but there wasn’t much time to celebrate.”

  Ted Lawson dropped his bombs without incident, though he had some scary encounters with antiaircraft flak. He looked behind him to see a steel smelter that had been his target “puff out its walls and then subside and dissolve in a black-and-red cloud” after a direct hit from a five-hundred-pound bomb. Then Lawson took Ruptured Duck back down on the deck and gunned her full speed, “expecting a cloud of Zeros from moment to moment.”

  In the city itself, the airmen saw bicyclers and children looking up and waving as they roared over the rooftops; citizens assumed that the B-25 was some new type of Japanese aircraft. The military had conducted an air-raid drill that morning and many thought this had something to do with it. Just as had Americans at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were expecting nothing more than a lovely spring day with their cherry trees in blossom. Then the bombs began to fall.

  At the U.S. embassy, the ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and his staff and their families were being interned by the Japanese until they could be exchanged for Japanese diplomats in the United States. They heard the explosions but were uncertain if it was an actual attack. Some of them went out on the roof and discovered it was in fact a U.S. raid, prompting Grew to report that “we were all very happy and proud in the embassy and the British told us that they drank toasts all day to the American fliers.” When the wife of the American military attaché saw one of the planes she said, “Those planes are American bombers and I bet you that Lieutenant Jurika is in one of them.” She was wrong by just a hair. Jurika, who until recently had been assistant naval attaché in the Tokyo embassy, was, of course, now Lieutenant Commander Jurika who had briefed the American fliers aboard the Hornet.9