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

by Scott, James M.

  During the three-hour conference Halsey and Duncan walked Doolittle through the Navy’s plan. The submarines Trout and Thresher would scout weather conditions and search out enemy naval forces the surface ships might encounter. The Hornet, two cruisers, four destroyers, and an oiler would depart Alameda on April 2 as Task Force 16.2 under the command of Marc Mitscher. After flying back to Pearl Harbor, Halsey would put to sea April 7 in command of Task Force 16.1, consisting of the carrier Enterprise, plus another two cruisers, four destroyers, and a second oiler. The two task forces would rendezvous at sea on Sunday, April 12, to create Task Force 16. These sixteen warships would then steam toward to Tokyo, refueling some eight hundred miles from Japan. At that point the oilers would remain behind while the carriers, cruisers, and destroyers steamed to within four hundred miles of the enemy’s capital.

  “We discussed the operation from every point of view,” Doolittle recalled. “We tried to think of every contingency that might possibly arise and have an answer to that contingency.” If the task force was within range of Japan, the bombers would immediately take off, execute the mission, and hopefully reach China or get picked up by submarines. If the task force was within range of either Hawaii to Midway, the bombers would take off for those destinations. The worst-case scenario called for crews to push the B-25s overboard to clear the Hornet’s deck so the Navy could launch fighters. “This was understandable and I accepted this possibility,” Doolittle wrote. “After all, if the two carriers, the cruisers, and the destroyers were lost, it would mean the end of American naval strength in the Pacific for a long time. The Navy was, therefore, taking an extraordinary risk in our attempt to bring the war to the Japanese homeland.”

  With the final modifications and tune-ups complete, aircrews prepared to fly to Alameda to board the Hornet. Only then did York learn that mechanics—in defiance of Doolittle’s orders—had swapped out the carburetors on his bomber. “We just happened to find out, by looking the engine over and checking the serial numbers, that they were different,” he recalled. “No mention was made, or notation made, to let us know that the carburetors had been changed. We accidentally found out about it.”

  York summoned one of the mechanics.

  “We had to change the carburetors,” he explained. “You had the wrong carburetors on this airplane.”

  York pulled Doolittle aside and shared the news.

  “Oh, Christ,” Doolittle said. “What do you want to do?”

  Time was up—there was nothing he could do.

  “I don’t think it makes any difference,” York answered. “A carburetor is a carburetor anyway you look at it.”

  That statement would later haunt him.

  “Well, if you think so,” Doolittle replied. “Come ahead.”

  Miller had continued to practice short-field takeoffs with the crews at an airfield near Willows, just north of Sacramento.

  “How do you think everybody’s doing?” Doolittle asked him.

  “I think it’s no strain at all,” Miller replied. “Everybody’s doing great.”

  Doolittle planned to take fifteen airplanes along with several extra aircrews aboard the Hornet. “Would you list the crews in order of take off expertise—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7?”

  Miller did so, turning the list over to Doolittle and Hilger to review. Hilger objected to Miller’s exclusion of Bates.

  “When you get on over enemy territory and you have some of those Japs chasing you, you’ve got to be really sharp and you’ve got to be thinking all the time,” Miller said. “If you panic, you’re lost. I wouldn’t take Bates.”

  Bates would go aboard the carrier, but he would not fly the mission. Miller was reluctant to end his adventure, seizing an opportunity to make his case when Doolittle asked him again for his views on the readiness of the aircrews.

  “You know, Colonel, if you want proof, I’ve had less time in the B-25 than anybody,” he said. “You can take an extra one along—a sixteenth airplane—and when we get 100 miles out of San Francisco, I’ll take it off, I’ll deliver it back to Columbia, South Carolina, back to the Army, and go back to Pensacola.”

  Doolittle would think about it.

  The veteran aviator prepared to depart when the operation’s officer handed him a detailed report to fill out on the quality of the work performed.

  “I haven’t got time to read all this,” Doolittle barked.

  “But it’s our standard procedure, Colonel,” the operations officer countered. “You must report on how the work was done.”

  Doolittle snatched the form and scribbled one word diagonally across the page: “LOUSY.”

  “Just a minute, Colonel, you will have to give us a detailed report,” the officer countered. “This will not do!”

  Doolittle refused.

  “If that’s the case,” the officer fired back, “I won’t sign your clearance—regulations you know!”

  Doolittle ignored him. He walked out to his plane, climbed inside, and taxied out to the runway.

  Jack Hilger, who had witnessed the exchange, flashed a grin.

  “Who is that guy?” the operations officer complained to Hilger. “I can tell you he is heading for a lot of trouble!”

  “He sure is,” Hilger agreed. “He sure is!”

  Doolittle’s final outburst prompted depot commander Colonel Clark to fire off a preemptive report to his superiors, hoping to counter any complaint. Though he noted that the war had drained the depot of talented men, Clark couldn’t help blaming Doolittle and his men. “At less than 24 hours before scheduled completion the flight leader indicated sudden and complete disapproval and rumors became prevalent that pilots were doubtful of the condition of their respective airplanes. It has been this depot’s repeated experience to note a tendency for pilots to begin to worry as the departure date approached on several major projects completed,” Clark wrote. “In no instance have they been able to justify their fears by citing legitimate grounds.”

  CHAPTER 7

  We believe the hand of God is on our side—the side of justice, decency and humanity.

  —COMMANDER RUSSELL IHRIG, APRIL 3, 1942

  THE HORNET TOWERED OVER Pier One at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Alameda on the afternoon of April 1, 1942. The 19,800-ton carrier had departed Norfolk on March 4, transiting the Panama Canal en route to San Diego and then San Francisco, where it had arrived only the day before. Secured with its starboard side to the pier—by no fewer than a dozen manila lines and four wire hawsers—the $32 million Hornet made an impressive sight. Shipfitters, welders, and electricians at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company had labored for more than two years to hammer out the nation’s eighth aircraft carrier. Once completed, the Hornet stretched 809 feet, the length of more than two football fields. Nine Babcock and Wilcox boilers generated superheated steam to power the carrier’s four turbines at up to 120,000 horsepower. Four manganese bronze propellers—each weighing more than 27,000 pounds—drove the Hornet through the seas at thirty-three knots or about thirty-eight miles an hour.

  The carrier functioned much like a small town for the complement of some 170 officers and 2,000 enlisted men who called the Hornet home. Sailors slept sixty or more in compartments with bunks stacked four high, while most of the officers bedded down in two- and four-person staterooms. A desalination plant made ocean water drinkable and provided fresh water for showers, galleys, and the boilers, while walk-in freezers, refrigerators, and pantries carried frozen steaks, chickens, and canned fruits and vegetables. Five doctors and a team of corpsmen stood ready to handle everything from a routine runny nose to an emergency appendectomy. The carrier featured laundry services, a barbershop, and even a small library. Sailors could pick up stamps and mail letters at the post office or buy cigarettes, razors, and toothpaste at the ship’s store. The 565-foot enclosed hangar bay—complete with steel doors that rolled open to allow planes to warm up without creating deadly gas—doubled as a perfect movie theater.

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p; Three times a day hungry sailors queued up at the mess deck to eat at long tables and benches bolted down to weather rough seas while officers enjoyed white linens and monogrammed silver in the wardroom that stretched the breadth of the carrier and showcased an emblematic hornet’s nest that dangled from the overhead. Many marveled at the carrier’s so-called mechanical cow, which churned dehydrated milk into ice cream, the perfect treat on long cruises in tropical waters. Despite the advances in naval shipbuilding, technology could not remedy everything. “The food on carriers is generally quite good for the first month after stocking up and putting to sea,” remembered Frederick Mears, a pilot on board the Hornet. “Thereafter it begins to deteriorate. Fresh milk disappears almost immediately, and the next to go are fresh eggs, greens and fresh vegetables, and finally fresh meat. Officers and crew alike begin to live on powdered milk, powdered eggs, and canned fruit and vegetables and meat.”

  Life aboard the carrier centered on the wooden flight deck, which sailors joked made the warship resemble a bathtub with a barn door on top. General quarters sounded each morning at daybreak as the first patrol planes roared into the air, a ritual that followed again at sunset, the two vulnerable times of day when a carrier is silhouetted against the sky, easy prey for enemy submarines. The Hornet’s island rose some forty feet above the teak deck, containing the navigation bridge, chart house, bridge, and admiral’s quarters. “There was always noise on the carrier deck—the ripping of the wind in the rigging on the island structure, the wash of water alongside, and the pounding of the great ship in the sea, if nothing else,” Mears later wrote, “but these sounds tended to create peace rather than confusion.” Captain Mitscher had ordered a special addition to the Hornet, a message painted in block letters on the ship’s stack that was symbolic of the mission at hand: “Remember Pearl Harbor.”

  Doolittle arrived first at Alameda Naval Air Station and reported soon thereafter to the carrier’s chain-smoking skipper in his long-billed hat. Marine Corporal Larry Bogart, who served as Mitscher’s orderly, stood outside the skipper’s door. He heard someone state, “Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle, Captain.”

  “I didn’t think much about it,” Bogart later admitted. “But after a while I heard our executive officer, Commander George Henderson, say, ‘Hello, Jimmy.’ Then it clicked. I knew who he was. Jimmy Doolittle! The guy who had all the flight records—speed, endurance, altitude, distance. He was going with us.”

  Bogart knew enough of Doolittle’s reputation that he immediately upped his government insurance policy from a thousand to five thousand dollars.

  Mitscher told Doolittle that he planned to turn his personal quarters over to him, a suite below the flight deck that included a large conference room, bedroom, and head, while he himself would relocate to a small room off the bridge.

  “You’ll be holding meetings with your people and it will be more convenient for you to have a place where you can do that. My quarters makes that possible,” Mitscher said. “Besides, it’s the only place on the ship large enough for private meetings.”

  Doolittle had originally planned to take eighteen bombers on board the Hornet, but only about fifteen B-25s would fit safely. With crews apprehensive about the carrier’s short flight deck, he remembered Miller’s suggestion to bring an extra bomber that the Navy lieutenant could use as demonstration. He ran the idea by Mitscher.

  “All right with me, Jim,” the skipper told him. “It’s your show.”

  By the afternoon of April 1 all of the aircrews had departed McClellan Field for Alameda, where Doolittle greeted them upon arrival. He had instructed his pilots to spend at least an hour in the skies to give each bomber a final test to check for any mechanical problems. Any pilot who reported a problem—regardless of how insignificant—Doolittle instructed, would have to park the bomber. Otherwise he directed pilots to taxi to a ramp by the wharf. Doolittle planned to take all twenty-two aircrews on the Hornet, not only as a backup in case anyone dropped out, but because he didn’t want to leave anyone behind who had gone through the extensive training. He couldn’t risk any possible leak.

  The crews arrived one after the other on a beautiful sunny day where the high temperature reached fifty-eight degrees. As Ski York and his copilot, Robert Emmens, approached Alameda, the aviators spied the Bay Bridge, which connected San Francisco to Oakland, a tempting opportunity for a little fun.

  “What do you think?” York asked.

  “We are off to see the Wizard of Oz somewhere out there in the Pacific,” Emmens thought. “It will probably be the last chance we will ever have.”

  “Let’s do it,” he said.

  York nosed the plane down and roared underneath the bridge, the bomber’s belly just feet above the cool waters of San Francisco Bay. He landed soon afterward and introduced his new copilot to Doolittle, who stuck out his hand.

  “How much time do you have in a B-25?” Doolittle asked Emmens.

  “Sir, I have about 1,000 hours.”

  “Do you want to go on this thing?” Doolittle pressed. “It is strictly volunteer.”

  “Yes, sir,” Emmens answered. “I do.”

  Doolittle turned back to York.

  “All right,” he said. “You are the new crew.”

  Emmens later reflected on his first impression of his new commander. “The moment York introduced me to Doolittle I knew why the mission was bound to be successful,” he later wrote. “It was at once easy to understand why a personality such as his was a tremendous factor in bringing about the highest degree of morale, discipline, and confidence among all the participants in the raid—confidence in their leader, their airplane, and, most important of all, in themselves.”

  York and Emmens weren’t the only ones who opted for some final fun with the Bay Bridge. Navigator Charles McClure carried a movie camera loaded with color film as the Ruptured Duck approached Alameda.

  “What about flying under the bridge?” asked copilot Second Lieutenant Dean Davenport, who had the controls. “The Pan American boys do it all the time in the Clippers. It would make a good shot for Mac.”

  Pilot Ted Lawson didn’t object, though he fought the urge to pull the plane up at the last moment, afraid there might be cables underneath. Just as the bomber soared beneath, McClure howled—his camera wouldn’t work. He begged for a second pass, but Lawson objected, making his final approach to Alameda. “As I put the flaps down for the landing, we all let out a yell at the same time,” he later wrote. “I guess the others got the same empty feeling in the stomach that I did. An American aircraft carrier was underneath us. Three of our B-25’s were already on its deck.”

  “Damn!” one of the airmen said into the interphone, summarizing the views of all on board. “Ain’t she small.”

  The Ruptured Duck landed, and Lawson taxied over to Doolittle and York, rolling back his window.

  “Is everything okay?” Doolittle asked.

  Lawson considered telling him that the bomber’s interphone system didn’t work well, but opted instead to ignore the problem.

  “Taxi off the field and park at the edge of the Hornet’s wharf,” Doolittle instructed. “They’ll take care of you there.”

  Lawson did as ordered. Navy sailors drained all but a few gallons of the bomber’s gasoline; then the aircrew watched as a “donkey” towed the Ruptured Duck down the pier, where a crane hoisted the B-25 up to the carrier’s deck. The operation was so secretive that the Hornet’s deck log that day made no mention of loading the bombers.

  “It was an eye-opener to me as I watched in wonderment and concern as my land-based bomber was being loaded aboard an aircraft carrier!” Jack Sims, a pilot, later wrote. “I suspect all the Raiders had similar feelings of apprehension as the lifting cables were connected to the aircraft hard-points followed by a Navy yard crane which lifted each aircraft aboard the carrier.”

  “I don’t think any of us had ever been on board a carrier,” recalled pilot Bill Bower, “let alone a naval vessel.” The young lieuten
ant watched the cranes lift his bomber and felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. Everything he had trained for had come down to this moment. “My heavens,” he thought. “This is it!”

  Others marveled at America’s newest carrier. From the air the Hornet had, in the words of one pilot, resembled a “postage stamp,” but pier side the flattop rose up like a skyscraper. “We knew we were going to fly off an aircraft carrier, but this was the first time I had been up close to one. And, boy, it was a pretty awesome looking thing,” remembered pilot Travis Hoover. “I never saw anything so big in all my life.”

  “She was a great sight,” recalled Lawson. “I can’t describe the feeling I got, standing there, looking up at her sides. Maybe the thing I felt was just plain patriotism.”

  Lieutenant Henry Miller approached.

  “Don’t tell the Navy boys anything,” he warned Lawson and his men. “They don’t know where you’re going.”

  Doolittle ran into the Navy lieutenant.

  “You know, I talked to them about your idea of taking an extra plane along and they go along with it,” Doolittle told him. “So we’ll take sixteen and launch you 100 miles out.”

  “That’s great.”

  The Army airmen filed aboard, each one saluting the American flag on the stern and the officer of the deck, just as Miller had taught them.

  Curious Hornet aviators lined the decks, watching the Army fliers land at the nearby airfield. “My, don’t those fellows come in slow, they don’t come screaming in to the field, dive bombing in the average Army manner,” one flier remarked. “Looks as if they had had a little naval indoctrination.”

  One of those watching was Hornet intelligence officer Lieutenant Stephen Jurika Jr., one of the few who knew the carrier’s mission. “I think our initial reaction, most of the officers on the ship and certainly the captain’s and mine, was that an all-volunteer crew like this had to be special in ability to fly and desire to do something as a group together,” he recalled. “But in looks, in appearance, and in demeanor, I would say that they appeared undisciplined. Typical of this was the open collars and short-sleeved shirts—the weather was quite cool in Alameda—grommets either crushed or none at all in their caps, worn-out, scuffed-type shoes. They were not in flight clothing.”