Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor

by Scott, James M.

  The Chilean pilots cheered his feat, which only encouraged the intoxicated airman. Someone volunteered that Fairbanks could do a handstand on a window ledge. Not to be outdone Doolittle climbed out an open window onto a two-foot ledge. He rose up on his hands to the eager applause of his audience. The ledge crumbled seconds later, and Doolittle plunged fifteen feet to the walkway below. The excruciating pain that shot through his legs when he hit alerted him that he was in serious trouble. X-rays revealed that Doolittle had broken both of his ankles. The injured aviator spent fifteen days in bed at San Vincente de Paul Hospital, followed by another forty-five days on his back at the Union Club of Santiago. Doolittle sank into despair. His recklessness meant Curtis had no one to demonstrate the company’s prized fighter. “Embarrassment overcame pain,” Doolittle later wrote. “There was no way I was going to stay in that hospital while my competitors were touting their wares at El Bosque.”

  Doolittle summoned Curtis mechanic Boyd Sherman and instructed him to bring a hacksaw. Sherman cut his casts down below the knee and made clips to attach Doolittle’s flying boots to the pedals. The first time he went up he put so much pressure on his right leg in a snap roll that he cracked the cast. Doolittle’s furious doctors refused to treat him again, so Sherman helped him remove the casts. He then hired a German prostheses maker to fashion special casts reinforced with flexible metal corset stays. Doolittle took to the skies, buzzing his competition and dazzling the crowd on the ground below with his aerial acrobatics. His tenaciousness not only helped Curtis score its biggest military contract since World War I but wowed the military attaché, who sent a report to General Patrick, informing him that Doolittle left his room a total of four times to make aerial demonstrations. “These flights,” Colonel James Hanson wrote, “were made with legs in plaster casts, and he was carried to and from the aeroplane.”

  Doolittle returned home to the United States at the completion of the trip and checked into Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. Four months had passed since his fall, yet Doolittle still required crutches to walk. He had grown alarmed while still in Chile over his slow recovery and had a second set of x-rays taken, only to learn that the treating doctors had mistakenly reversed his casts, causing his ankles to heal improperly. By the time Doolittle reached Walter Reed, his prognosis did not look good, as revealed by the chief of the orthopedic service’s testimony before a board of medical officers. “His injury may result in a permanent disability,” the doctor told the board, “which will unfit him for the duties of an officer.” Rather than rebreak Doolittle’s ankles, doctors chose instead to set them in new casts and ordered him back to bed. This time he stayed put. When his treatment finally ended, in April 1927, Doolittle was relieved that a medical board found him fit for duty.

  The restless Doolittle was itching to return to flying. He and other pilots at Walter Reed had discussed the challenge of flying an outside loop, a never-before-accomplished feat. Unlike a common aerial loop in which a pilot flies up and over backward, the outside loop required a pilot to fly first down and then loop underneath. Many aviators wondered whether the reverse forces would prove too much for the plane and the pilot. Doolittle decided to find out. He practiced the stunt until he felt confident he could pull it off. He summoned half a dozen fellow fliers to serve as witnesses and took off in a Curtis Hawk on May 25, 1927. He climbed up to eight thousand feet then turned the plane over and dove. From 150 miles per hour, his speed shot up to 280 as he turned the Hawk over on its back, remembering despite his disorientation to keep the stick pressed forward. He shot out of the loop and landed in the nation’s headlines. “Nothing to it,” Doolittle later told the press. “Why, it’s just an uncomfortable feeling that’s all.”

  The famed aviator returned to South America in 1928 to demonstrate airplanes for Curtis, this time with a stern warning from Joe to avoid officers clubs that served pisco sours. Doolittle’s voyage home that summer by ship offered the thirty-one-year-old a chance to consider his future. With a wife and two growing boys to support, he started to contemplate a career outside the Army. “What would I do?” he wondered. “Who would want me? If I got a nonflying civilian job, would I miss flying and regret my decision to resign my regular commission?” Doolittle reached McCook Field without any resolution on his future, when an offer arrived from the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, one that would allow him to remain in the Army yet tackle an important new project that promised once again to push the limits of aviation. Doolittle would head up a laboratory at Mitchel Field, overseeing a one-year experiment on blind flight. The analytical airman jumped at the opportunity.

  Aviation had greatly evolved over the years, but foul weather still handicapped even the most experienced pilots. “Fog is one of the greatest enemies of modern transportation,” famed pilot Charles Lindbergh wrote in a January 1929 editorial. “It often brings shipping to a standstill and seriously delays ground travel, but the greatest effect of low visibility and bad weather is in aviation.” Blind flight presented three major challenges: takeoff, navigation, and landing, the last the most difficult. Overcoming those challenges called for new instrumentation to help orient a blind pilot. Doolittle recruited inventor Paul Kollsman, who had just devised a new barometric altimeter accurate to within a few feet. He worked with engineer Elmer Sperry and his son to simulate an artificial horizon that revealed the bank and pitch of a plane as well as a directional gyroscope that would provide a pilot with a more accurate heading than a compass. A radio beacon would help a flier navigate.

  For more than ten months the team worked to develop the necessary equipment as well as devise proper flying techniques to master blind flight. Doolittle had personally made hundreds of blind and simulated blind landings. The time to finally test those strategies arrived on the morning of September 24, 1929. A heavy fog blanketed Mitchel Field. The impatient Doolittle had made an unofficial test flight shortly past daybreak as he waited on his team to assemble. That flight had revealed a dense fog up to five hundred feet, perfect conditions for the feat. Harry Guggenheim, the fund’s president, arrived to witness the official test. Even Joe turned out to watch. Doolittle climbed inside the rear cockpit of a Consolidated NY-2 Husky, zipping a canvas hood over the top. His only view would be the lighted dials that lined his instrument panel. Guggenheim insisted pilot Ben Kelsey accompany Doolittle as a precaution, though he would keep his hands above his head so ground observers could see he was not flying.

  Doolittle throttled up his plane and took off into the morning wind, leveling off at about a thousand feet. He flew five miles west of the airfield before he banked and circled back. The radio beacon that consisted of two reeds that vibrated as he neared the signal alerted him as he passed directly over the airfield. Doolittle shot a glance at his air speed indicator as he clicked his stopwatch. He flew another two miles east before he turned back and began a gradual descent. Anxious witnesses on the ground watched as Doolittle cleared the edge of the field by fifty feet. The plane slowed to a glide, then dropped down to fifteen feet above the runway, when Doolittle pulled the nose up, touching down just a few feet from where he had lifted off only fifteen minutes earlier. “This entire flight was made under the hood in a completely covered cockpit which had been carefully sealed to keep out all light,” Doolittle later said. “It was the first time an airplane had been taken off, flown over a set course and landed by instruments alone.”

  News of Doolittle’s achievement landed him again on the nation’s front pages and would forever change aviation. “On Tuesday a brilliant victory was recorded,” heralded the New York Times. “No more versatile aviator than Lieutenant James H. Doolittle of the army could have been chosen.” One of those most impressed was Hap Arnold, who a decade earlier had grounded Doolittle over his flying antics at Ream Field. “That took real courage,” Arnold would write in a 1941 letter. “There was no cheering crowd. No Audience. Just Jim Doolittle, risking one life that many others might live.” Doolitt
le celebrated with his team that night over dinner, each member autographing Joe’s white damask tablecloth. She later embroidered each signature with black thread to preserve them in what would become a Doolittle family tradition. “Over the years, everyone who broke bread at our table was asked to do the same,” he later wrote. “Joe painstakingly stitched over 500 signatures on the tablecloth.”

  Doolittle’s concerns over his future returned after he completed his tenure with the blind-flight laboratory; this time he made the difficult decision to jump to the Shell Petroleum Corporation as head of the aviation department. “I left the Air Force in 1930 for one reason and one reason only and that was because my wife’s mother was ill, my mother was ill, her father was gone, my father was gone, it had come upon us to take care of them,” Doolittle later said. “We couldn’t do it properly on my military pay. When I went to the Shell Oil Company my pay was triple.” For Shell that was a bargain. The famed aviator, who remained in the Army as reservist, continued to race. He won the Bendix Trophy in 1931, setting a new transcontinental record of just eleven hours and fifteen minutes. The next year he cinched the Thompson Trophy. Doolittle had not only won three of air racing’s leading prizes but managed at 293 miles per hour to unofficially best the world’s land plane speed record by 15 miles per hour.

  Doolittle had in the past promised to give up racing, but kept returning to the sport. “Air racing is like hay fever,” he liked to say. “It crops up when the season is ripe.” When Doolittle learned that newspaper photographers had shadowed Joe and his two sons during the Thompson race, hoping to record their horror if he was killed, he finally decided to quit. A wiser Doolittle acknowledged the danger in a speech the next year: “I have yet to hear of the first case of anyone engaged in this work dying of old age.” Racing had helped advance aviation, arousing public interest, sparking new ideas for wing and fuselage designs as well as increased engine power and improved fuels, but it had come at a great cost in the lives of pilots. Doolittle went on to shock many in aviation circles when he emerged as a vocal critic of the sport. “Aviation has become a necessity in our daily lives,” he told reporters in 1934. “It has long since passed the point where it can, or should be, used as a spectacle or as an entertaining medium.”

  Doolittle instead focused his energy again on how best to advance aviation. He had grown alarmed as the air forces of other nations surpassed that of America, his beloved Army air service reduced to flying the mail. To remain strong, Doolittle believed, the United States needed to develop more powerful engines so that future warplanes could carry heavier loads. The only way to build a more powerful engine, he knew, was to develop a better fuel—and he worked for a fuel company. Aviation gas at the time varied widely, with some eighteen different leaded and unleaded fuels. Those ranged from the 65-octane gasoline used by the Army up to the 95-octane needed for special test work by the Wright Corporation. Doolittle felt the time had arrived to standardize and reduce fuel specifications. He pitched the idea to Shell to develop a 100-octane fuel, persuading the company to invest millions in a product that at that time had no market. Many of his colleagues dubbed the venture “Doolittle’s folly.”

  But Doolittle had to do more than persuade just Shell; he had to convince the Army. He knew from his contacts in the military that the future fighters and bombers then on the design boards would never fly without stronger engines, but he was up against a reluctant brass that failed to grasp that motorcycles and fighters demanded different fuels. Shell delivered the first 1,000 gallons of the new fuel to the Army in 1934. Tests immediately confirmed Doolittle’s predictions, showing that even existing engines could produce as much as 30 percent more power with it than with regular fuel. Officials at Wright Field leaked the test results to the press, triggering a wave of interest from engine manufacturers. The Army held hearings and eventually ordered all planes manufactured to use 100-octane fuel after January 1, 1938. “Shell had taken a big commercial gamble,” Doolittle later wrote. “The venture paid off handsomely when the company was later asked to supply 20 million gallons of 100-octane fuel to the military services daily.”

  Doolittle traveled extensively with Shell over the years and grew alarmed at the increased militarization he found in the Far East and Germany. He had developed a close friendship with German World War I flying ace Ernst Udet, visiting his home, where the two men drank French champagne and shot pistols into a steel box filled with sand atop the fireplace mantel. Doolittle’s friendship with the German aviator served as a barometer for the worsening relations between the two countries. As Germany marched down the path to war, Doolittle noted that Udet grew increasingly distant, even though he abhorred Adolf Hitler. Doolittle returned to Germany in 1939. This time his old friend seemed embarrassed to be seen with Doolittle. War was coming. Doolittle spotted great piles of wood and timber, which he recognized as potential fortifications, despite German protestations that the materials were bound for pulp mills. “On the streets, uniforms were everywhere,” he observed. “People went about their daily business with a grimness that was distressing.”

  Doolittle returned home and sought out General Arnold. The two men had grown close over the years; Doolittle even asked Arnold in 1941 to write a recommendation letter for his youngest son to attend West Point. “This thing is very close to my heart,” Doolittle wrote, “or I should not take the liberty of inviting it to your attention.” Arnold was glad to help—and his muscle worked. “Don’t think for a moment that your commendation of John Doolittle wasn’t a real factor,” Senator Prentiss Brown of Michigan wrote Arnold. “While I cannot always oblige, the views of the Service officers on these appointments mean much to me.” Even though many in the air service felt Arnold favored Doolittle, the latter said he never sensed any special treatment. “General Arnold supported me in everything I did where he felt I was right,” Doolittle once said. “And he chewed my ears off whenever he felt I was wrong. The thought that personal friendship entered into his military decisions is contrary to his nature.”

  Doolittle relayed to Arnold what he had seen in Germany, warning his boss that war was inevitable and that the United States would no doubt have to fight. Doolittle still felt bitter at having had to sit out World War I. He didn’t plan to let that happen again. He told Arnold he wanted to go back on active duty. “I am entirely and immediately at the disposal of the Air Corps for whatever use they care to make of me,” he wrote in 1940. “The only suggestion that I would like to make is to recommend that I be given such duty or duties as will best take advantage of my particular experience, associations and abilities.” Shell granted Doolittle indefinite leave, and Arnold was thrilled to see him again in uniform. “When he resigned from the Air Corps in 1931 to become aviation director of the Shell Petroleum Corporation, the Air Corps lost a real pilot and a real man. But not for long, because we have him back now,” Arnold wrote in a 1941 letter. “Jim Doolittle is a spectacular person, without meaning to be one.”

  Arnold dispatched Doolittle to Indianapolis and later Detroit to help prep American businesses for the increased demands of war. “My job was to marry the aviation industry and the automobile industry,” Doolittle later said, “neither of whom wanted to get married.” He suffered a restless night after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. As long as the United States had remained on the war’s sidelines, he had felt content to solve the problems of production. Not anymore. He fired off a one-page letter to Arnold, noting that he had 7,730 hours of flying time, much of it in fighters. “I respectfully request that I be relieved of my present duties and re-assigned to a tactical unit,” Doolittle wrote on December 8. “The reason for making this request is a sincere belief that, due to recent developments, production problems will in future be simplified and operational problems aggravated. I consequently feel that my training and experience will be of greater value in operations than production.”

  Arnold read the letter and picked up the phone.

  “How quickly can you be here?�
� he asked. “I want you on my immediate staff.”

  “Will tomorrow be all right?” Doolittle answered.

  Doolittle landed in Washington with a promotion to lieutenant colonel. His unique background as an aeronautical engineer, stunt pilot, and businessman made him a perfect candidate to serve as Arnold’s troubleshooter. His first job was to examine the Martin B-26, an unforgiving medium bomber involved in a series of fatal training flights. Pilots quipped that the plane’s name Marauder should be changed to Murderer. Arnold wanted Doolittle to investigate the problem and determine whether the Army Air Forces should cancel contracts for future B-26s. He visited the factory near Baltimore and spent hours in the skies testing the bomber, even demonstrating it before skeptical pilots. Doolittle realized that the problem was not the bomber but inadequate pilot training. He recommended continued production and devised an amended training program. “The B-26 was a good airplane, but it had some tricks,” Doolittle later said. “There wasn’t anything about its flying characteristics that good piloting skill couldn’t overcome.”

  Doolittle was ready in late January for his next project.

  That’s when Arnold summoned him for what Doolittle later described as “the most important military assignment of my life thus far.”

  CHAPTER 4

  If you have one plane available use it to bomb Tokio.