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

by Scott, James M.

  Jurika voiced his concerns to Miller. Were the Army aviators ready? Miller leveled with him. “I’ve done everything I can for them and there’s nothing they don’t know about short take-offs,” Miller confided in his colleague. “It’s just when that deck is moving and they’re taking off, will they go through with it?”

  The Army airmen watched as sailors spotted the B-25s, parking the bombers prop to tail before chocking the wheels and tying them down. The tight squeeze left the tail of the sixteenth bomber dangling off the carrier’s fantail. While the Hornet may have inspired confidence, its short flight deck failed to impress, even though it had accommodated no fewer than four thousand people at the carrier’s commissioning. “I never saw such a small, insignificant thing to be a called a runway in all my life,” Hoover recalled. “And all my awe turned to goose pimples because it was a tiny thing.”

  The Army’s enlisted men would dine and bunk with the Hornet’s chief petty officers, while many of the officers shared staterooms with Navy ensigns, often crashing on fold-up cots. “I was a First Lieutenant then and thus outranked the Ensigns, but that didn’t seem to impress them very much,” Lawson later wrote. “They crawled into their nice bunks and pointed to a cot for me.”

  Other airmen piled onto cots in the skipper’s quarters, but pilots Richard Cole and Billy Farrow landed in the passageway outside. “You had to go down the hall to the head to brush your teeth and shower,” recalled Cole, who served as Doolittle’s copilot. “But outside of that, it was no problem.”

  San Francisco Bay resembled a Navy parking lot. In addition to the Hornet, the battleships Maryland, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Tennessee, Idaho, New Mexico, and Mississippi joined the oiler Cimarron, the cruisers St. Louis, Nashville, and Vincennes, and the destroyers Cushing, Smith, Preston, Gwin, Meredith, Monssen, and Grayson, among other ships. A high-pressure area just off the West Coast on April 1 promised a dense fog the following morning, perfect to help disguise the task force’s departure.

  With the bombers all lashed down on deck, the harbor pilot climbed aboard at 2:45 p.m. Thirty-one minutes later—and with the help of four tugboats—the Hornet departed the pier, anchoring that afternoon in Berth 9.

  Doolittle assembled his men late that afternoon.

  “All right, everyone is free. Boats will be running back and forth,” he told them. “Everyone go and have a good time. Secrecy above all, but go ahead and visit anyone you want and do whatever you want.”

  Doolittle did the same, spending time with his wife, Joe, in a San Francisco hotel. He climbed into the elevator, where the operator spotted his uniform.

  “Understand you’re moving out tomorrow,” the operator asked.

  The comment shocked Doolittle, who wondered how much the operator actually knew. Doolittle didn’t answer him, but rode up in silence. “His remark proved to me that it is extremely difficult to keep military movements secret,” Doolittle wrote. “As anyone could plainly see, the Hornet was sitting in the middle of San Francisco Bay with 16 Army Air Forces B-25s aboard, obviously ready to go someplace.”

  Many of the men gravitated that night to the Top of the Mark, a rooftop bar located on the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill. The cocktails flowed freely as the airmen relaxed after weeks of training. Many would party up until the departure of the last tender; a few would even come close to missing it. “We had enough time,” remembered pilot Richard Knobloch, “to have a hell of a good time.”

  The mission would demand the most of the men—and not all would come back alive, a fact not lost on some. “It was a beautiful night and as I looked out across the city, the thought crossed my mind that maybe we would never see this again,” remembered navigator Charles McClure. “So you had better stop and stare at it.”

  The moon rose, and the men could see the Hornet at anchor, the bombers silhouetted against the night sky. The Navy had put out the story that the planes were being transported to Hawaii; still, seeing them made many people uneasy.

  “Just putting the aircraft on the carrier in itself was not that revealing,” recalled Herb Macia. “But to trust a bunch of guys to be on the town getting drunk, talking to gals, that took a lot of courage.”

  “We had some concerns,” admitted Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator. “But they soon vanished in the blessings of whiskey and soda.”

  THE HORNET SWAYED at anchor in Berth 9 the brisk Thursday morning of April 2. The day had started early for the flattop’s officers and crew. The Navy oil barge no. 4 pulled alongside the port quarter at 3:40 a.m., topping the Hornet off with 153,329 gallons of oil, a process that took just two hours and forty minutes and brought the total on hand to more than 1.4 million gallons. In preparation for the morning’s departure sailors lit fires under boilers 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 while the crew mustered at eight.

  Doolittle had spent the night in San Francisco with Joe, rising early so that he could enjoy a farewell breakfast with her before packing his B-4 bag. He had not told his family a single word about the mission, though his weeks of shuttling between Washington, Florida, and Ohio had raised questions. “Hear sundry rumors as to your activities and am at present confused,” his eldest son, Jim, an Army Air Forces pilot, wrote in a letter. “Would like to hear what’s cooking.”

  Doolittle was equally mum with his wife of twenty-four years.

  “I’ll be out of the country for a while,” was all he told Joe this morning. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”

  “We had had many separations before in our lives together, but I had the feeling she knew this departure was different,” he later wrote. “I kissed her tenderly. She held back tears, but I’m sure she thought it was going to be a long time before she saw me again. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.”

  Doolittle returned to the carrier and met with Mitscher to discuss the Hornet’s departure plan, when an officer interrupted to deliver several messages, including one that alerted him that the arrangements for oil, gas, and airport markings were underway in China. He thumbed through the others to find farewell notes from Generals Arnold and Marshall. “You will be constantly in my mind,” the Army chief of staff wrote. “May the good Lord watch over you.” Even the acerbic Admiral King wished Doolittle good luck in a handwritten memo. “When I learned that you were to lead the Army air contingent of the Hornet expedition, I knew that the degree of success had been greatly increased,” King wrote. “To you, your officers and men I extend heartfelt wishes for success in your job—and ‘happy landings’ and ‘good hunting.’”

  Doolittle readied himself to depart when he received word to report ashore for an urgent phone call. With a heavy heart he climbed into the captain’s gig, suspecting that the call was from Arnold, a last-minute effort to yank him off the mission. Doolittle was surprised instead to find General Marshall on the phone.

  “Doolittle?” the general asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I just called to personally wish you the best of luck,” Marshall said. “Our thoughts and our prayers will be with you. Good-bye, good luck, and come home safely.”

  The call stunned Doolittle. The Army’s top officer had personally phoned to wish him success, a gesture he felt communicated the importance of the mission to the nation’s beleaguered war effort. Doolittle felt at a loss for words.

  “Thank you, sir,” he finally offered. “Thank you.”

  The warships pulled anchor one by one as a heavy fog hung low over the bay, slashing visibility to barely a thousand yards. The light cruiser Nashville got underway at 7:42 a.m. for a final calibration of the ship’s radio direction finder, followed by Destroyer Division 22, consisting of the Gwin, Grayson, Monssen, and Meredith. The Hornet, with its guests of seventy Army officers and sixty-four enlisted men, departed at 10:18 a.m., followed a minute later by the cruiser Vincennes and then the oiler Cimarron. The ships steamed under the Bay Bridge at 10:33 a.m., sliding past Alcatraz Island less than half an hour later. In a single column separated by a thousand yards, th
e task force navigated through the gate of the antisubmarine net, then passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge at 11:13 a.m., the majestic red symbol of San Francisco that divided the bay from the Pacific. The mission had finally begun, and for the Hornet the departure would prove particularly ominous—the carrier would never again return to the United States.

  Sailors lined the flight deck as the Hornet headed to sea, a scene captured in the diaries of several of the Army airmen. “It was quite a thrill to look back at the Golden Gate,” Bill Bower wrote. “The thoughts that ran through one’s mind, at least mine, were mixed, many of anticipation for what was in store and others of the awe inspiring sight made by a naval convoy.” “Our send off was the weary howling of light house warning horns,” noted Ken Reddy. “Soon after we got out to sea a prevalent question in my mind was answered, as massive as this ship is, it still is capable of being rocked by the sea.” Others couldn’t help contemplating the danger. “As we passed under the great Golden Gate Bridge,” George Larkin wrote, “we wondered if we would see it again.”

  Doolittle gathered with his men in the wardroom as the California coast vanished in the Hornet’s frothy wake. After weeks of training, many of the airmen suspected the nature of the mission, but the time had arrived to eliminate any doubts.

  “For the benefit of those of you who don’t already know, or who have been guessing, we are going straight to Japan,” Doolittle told them. “We’re going to bomb Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe and Nagoya. The Navy is going to take us in as close as is advisable, and, of course, we’re going to take off from the deck.”

  Bombardier Horace Crouch no doubt summed up the feelings of many of his fellow fliers. “We all had a whoopee,” he recalled, “and a hard swallow at the same time.” For Ruptured Duck pilot Ted Lawson the news provided a concrete goal on which to focus. “I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to hear these words,” he later wrote. “It took away the weeks of confused thinking and ended a period of hush that was gripping all of us. I could stand up and yell Japan at the top of my lungs now. I was no longer shooting in the dark. Here was a job, definite and tangible.”

  “All of the training we had received at Eglin added up to a new purpose,” remembered Brick Holstrom, “to bomb Tokyo!” Bob Emmens was thrilled to realize that he had guessed wrong. “Douglas MacArthur was having a bad time in the Philippines at this time. We thought we were headed for Bataan to help him out someway,” he recalled. “We didn’t dream that it would be the capital of Japan itself.”

  Doolittle continued his briefing, informing his men of the plan to land at Chinese airfields, refuel, and then push on to Chungking. “Now, we’re going to be on this carrier a long time, but there will be plenty of work for you to do before we take off.”

  He ended as always with the offer for anyone to back out.

  None did.

  The shrill boatswain’s pipe reverberated throughout the Hornet late that afternoon before the executive officer’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker: “Now hear this.” Mitscher then took over. “This ship will carry the Army bombers to the coast of Japan,” he announced to the officers and crew, “for the bombing of Tokyo.”

  “Cheers from every section of the ship greeted the announcement,” Mitscher wrote in his action report. “Morale reached a new high.”

  “It was the biggest thrill of the war,” remembered Lieutenant John Lynch, a material officer on the Hornet. “We were going to bomb Tokyo!”

  “I don’t know who was more excited,” recalled Army bombardier Robert Bourgeois, “we of the air force or the Navy personnel. It was a great thrill to know that at last we had a chance to strike back at the Japs.”

  Signalmen broadcast the news via semaphore to the other task force warships. Life magazine editor John Field sat in the wardroom of one when the loudspeaker broadcast Mitscher’s announcement. “It froze everybody to his seat,” Field later wrote. “We knew now what the purpose of this secret trip was.”

  “Carry me back to ol’ Virginny,” muttered one of the black stewards in the wardroom, while others soon sang a song set to the tune of Snow White. “Hi-ho, hi-ho, we’re off to Tokyo; we’ll bomb and blast and come back fast.”

  War planners had mapped a course for the 5,223-mile journey to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor that closely paralleled the route Admiral Nagumo had taken only four months earlier. The task force would follow the fortieth parallel just south of a polar front that promised high winds, squalls, and rough seas. While the inhospitable weather would slash visibility and limit patrol flights, it also made it equally likely that Japanese naval and merchant ships would avoid this route as well, providing the American armada a back door to the empire’s waters. “We went north to the 40th parallel and stuck on it just like a highway all the way across the Pacific,” remembered John Sutherland, a Hornet fighter pilot. “It’s a nice parallel to be on, because it was a very rough road and a very secure road, the weather was bad, the fog was heavy, it rained intermittently. That was the one time when the bad weather and the rocking of the ship did not make anybody unhappy at all. All of us wanted to go sight unseen.”

  Safety was paramount even as the warships cut through the swells just off the West Coast. Shore-based planes would guard the task force until nightfall. Then the ships would steam on alone in radio silence, zigzagging and darkened to avoid submarines. Its flight deck crowded with bombers, the Hornet was like a toothless tiger. Until the task force rendezvoused more than a week later with Halsey and the carrier Enterprise, Mitscher would have to depend on his escorts for protection. America’s newest carrier, two cruisers, and a loaded fleet oiler would make an inviting target, a fact hammered home by the Cimarron’s skipper, Commander Russell Ihrig, in a war message to his men. “Our new assignment will probably place us under fire, not only from submarines, but from aircraft and surface ships,” he warned. “Be fully prepared to go into action TO WIN. Knowledge of your job and careful performance of small duties become more important than ever. Remember, there is no second place in a sea-fight.”

  To prepare for such threats—an attack on an oiler loaded with more than six million gallons of fuel could prove particularly dangerous—Ihrig issued battle instructions. “Don’t think of the Japs as faraway,” he cautioned his men. “Think of them as HERE!” Sailors dressed in full winter underwear to guard against possible flash burns and passed out steel helmets and gas masks. Others tossed flammable rubber mats overboard and removed non-watertight doors and even shower curtains; only those necessary for blackout protection could remain. Ihrig ordered the glass ports on the bridge replaced with metal plates and officer staterooms readied as battle dressing stations. The skipper knew that he could take no chances. “I have served six years in the Orient in close association with the Japs, including two years during the current war in China. I have seen their brutality, bestiality—and bravery. If you expect to survive, you will have to do your best,” Ihrig instructed his men. “This is a war to the death.”

  The reality of the mission sank in as the Hornet steamed toward Japan, each hour taking the carrier and crews closer to the enemy’s homeland. Doolittle’s meeting had hammered home the gravity of the mission. Lawson passed out pads of paper to his crew that afternoon, demanding each one write down any idea on how to improve the plane. Other nervous airmen paced the flight deck, counting off each precious foot. The boundaries were no longer marked by flags and white lines but by cold blue ocean waves. A missed takeoff meant a plunge into the Pacific. Even Doolittle—the legendary pilot—felt edgy. The first full day at sea he, too, stared down the deck.

  “Well, Hank,” he said to Miller. “How does it look to you?”

  “This is a breeze.”

  “Let’s get up in that airplane and look.”

  Doolittle climbed into the cockpit, and Miller joined him in the copilot’s seat.

  “This looks like a short distance,” Doolittle observed.

  “You see where that tool kit is way up the deck
by that island structure?” Miller said. “That’s where I used to take off in fighters on the Saratoga and the Lexington.”

  “Henry, what name do they use in the Navy for ‘bullshit’?”

  The men climbed down and Miller headed to lunch, while Doolittle rushed to find Mitscher. He told the skipper that he wanted to scrap Miller’s proposed takeoff demonstration and instead take the sixteenth plane on the mission, a move that would increase the operation’s firepower by four bombs.

  Just as Miller shoveled down the last of his dessert, he heard his name broadcast over the loudspeaker, summoning him to the bridge. The young lieutenant arrived to find Mitscher. “Well, Miller,” the skipper leveled with him. “I don’t think I’ll be able to give you 40 knots of wind over the deck.”

  “Captain, I don’t need that anyway, because we have 495 feet,” he replied. “I taught these guys how to take off from an aircraft carrier with 40 knots of wind and 250 feet. We have lots of room.”

  Miller concluded by sharing his story of his conversation with Doolittle right before lunch.

  “Well, Miller,” Mitscher replied. “Do you have an extra pair of pants with you?”

  “Oh, yes, Sir,” he answered. “I brought all my baggage with me because I’m going to fly nonstop to Columbia, South Carolina.”

  Mitscher leveled with him.

  “We’ll take that extra plane.”

  Miller, of course, was thrilled. He had wanted to go all along and now he would be trapped on board, able to watch all sixteen planes thunder down the deck and lift off, all airmen he had trained. Miller concluded with a dose of levity.