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

by Scott, James M.

  Each combat crew member received a pistol, a parachute knife, an extra clip of ammunition, one day’s type C field ration, a flashlight, a full canteen of water, a Navy gas mask, and a hand ax. Not all of the gear passed muster. “I went through that box of 1911 pistols,” remembered pilot Edgar McElroy of his .45. “They were in such bad condition that I took several of them apart, using the good parts from several useless guns until I built a serviceable weapon. Several other pilots did the same.”

  The airmen sat through myriad other classes and lectures. Jurika drilled into them the important Chinese phrase “Lusau hoo metwa fugi,” or “I’m American.” He furthermore taught them that the easiest way to distinguish a Japanese soldier from a Chinese one was to look at the toes. “The Japanese wore tabi, which separates the big toe from the other four toes,” he recalled. “The Chinese have all their toes together.”

  Greening continued to hammer the airmen on gunnery, firing on kites from the stern of the Hornet. One of the airmen who worked the hardest was Staff Sergeant Edwin Bain, tapped to join Jack Hilger’s crew just before the Hornet left port after the original gunner was hospitalized.

  “Know anything about a tail gun?” Doolittle asked him.

  “Nossir,” Bain replied. “I’m a radioman.”

  “That’s what you were!” Doolittle told him. “You’re a tail-gunner now.”

  Other times the fliers studied meteorology and practiced celestial navigation with the help of Hornet navigator Commander Frank Akers by shooting star shots with a sextant from the deck and from the bomber’s navigator compartment. Mission adjutant Major Harry Johnson was impressed by the diligence of the aircrews, as evidenced by his report: “Pilots plotted and replotted courses with their navigators until I feel most of them could have almost discarded their maps.”

  Along those lines Doolittle cautioned crews on how best to dump the extra fuel tins. “I don’t want you to throw them out as they’re used,” he instructed. “If you do, it will leave a perfect trail for the Japanese to follow back to the carrier. Use up the stuff in the cans first, of course, but save them and dump them all together. The Navy has been great to us. Let’s show our appreciation in whatever way we can.”

  Mission doctor Thomas White administered the final vaccinations against the plague, weathering another round of teasing from the airmen. “One chap swore he’d bleed serum if he were ever wounded, since he was certain there was no room for blood in his veins. Another wanted to know when I was going to give him his latex shots,” White wrote. “He wanted to be self-sealing like the gas tanks!” White reviewed sanitation dangers the crew would face in China, hammering into them the importance of avoiding cuts and of drinking only boiled water and eating cooked foods. “The way the Doc talked,” Joseph Manske noted in his diary, “all disease must of started in China.”

  With the help of the Hornet’s medical department, White even rustled up a pint of whiskey for each member of the crew, ostensibly for snakebites.

  “Are there snakes in China?” Knobloch asked.

  “I don’t know,” the doctor replied. “But if there are, this’ll sure help you.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Four months today since Pearl Harbor—and the situation has deteriorated every minute since.

  —BRECKINRIDGE LONG, APRIL 7, 1942, DIARY ENTRY

  ROOSEVELT WATCHED THE NEWS in the Pacific worsen as winter gave way to spring. Japan had seized the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, captured Rangoon, and severed the Burma Road, the vital lifeline of aid into China. Japanese forces reached as far south as Australia, pummeling the coastal city of Darwin in a raid that put every ship in the harbor on the bottom. Powerless to stop Japan’s advance, Roosevelt commiserated with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sulked for weeks over the loss of Singapore. “I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball,” Churchill confessed, later adding, “The weight of the war is very heavy now and I must expect it to get steadily worse for some time to come.”

  The pragmatic president urged Churchill to focus on the future. “No matter how serious our setbacks have been, and I do not for a moment underrate them, we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.” Roosevelt pressed that theme again in other correspondence. “There is no use giving a single further thought to Singapore or the Dutch Indies,” he advised. “They are gone.” In a softer exchange he encouraged Churchill to find a way to relax. “Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me,” he wrote. “I am called on the telephone only if something of really great importance occurs. I wish you would try it, and I wish you would lay a few bricks or paint another picture.”

  Roosevelt struggled at times to take his own advice, letting the war’s setbacks and continued attacks by isolationist rivals upset him. That was evident when he lashed out in a March 6 letter to prominent New York banker Fred Kent. “You wax positively gruesome when you declare solemnly that had it not been for the thirty million man-days lost by strikes since the defense program began, the Philippines, the Dutch Indies and Singapore would all have been saved. You sound like Alice in Wonderland,” the president wrote. “Let me tell you something more fantastic than that. If, since the defense program started, we in the United States had not lost sixty million man-days through that scourge of Satan, called the common cold, we could undoubtedly have had enough planes and guns and tanks to overrun Europe, Africa and the whole of Asia.”

  The pressures on the president only increased as the struggle for the Philippines neared its tragic end. Under orders from Roosevelt, MacArthur had escaped in March, leaving Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright in command of 110,000 American and Filipino forces on the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island of Corregidor. Cut off from reinforcements by a Japanese blockade, Wainwright’s troops battled malaria and starvation, forced to slaughter and eat the cavalry’s horses. “Our troops have been subsisted [sic] on one half to one third ration for so long a period,” Wainwright radioed on April 8, “that they do not possess the physical strength to endure the strain placed upon the individual in an attack.” MacArthur warned General Marshall to prepare for the worst. “In view of my intimate knowledge of the situation there, I regard the situation as extremely critical and feel you should anticipate the possibility of disaster.”

  The situation was hopeless. Roosevelt instructed Wainwright to do what he felt best. “I have nothing but admiration for your soldierly conduct and your performance of your most difficult mission,” he messaged. “You should be assured of complete freedom of action and of my full confidence in the wisdom of whatever decision you may be forced to make.” The Japanese overran Bataan on April 9—one week after the Hornet left San Francisco—setting the stage for the infamous Death March that would kill thousands. Holed up on Corregidor with the last of the Philippines’ fourteen thousand defenders, Wainwright listened that night as a “terrible silence” settled over Bataan. “If there is anything worse than a battlefield that shakes with explosions and the cries of men,” he later wrote, “it is one that becomes mute and dead.” He tried to sound optimistic in a message to the president. “Our flag still flies on this island fortress.”

  But it would not for long.

  Wainwright knew it; so did the Japanese.

  And so did Roosevelt.

  The fall of Bataan exacerbated the pressure on Roosevelt. Americans had grown tired of retreat and defeat. “Bataan is a bugle call to tell us that only attack will win,” argued the San Francisco Chronicle. “Attack is not only suited to our temperament,” echoed the New York Times. “It is also the life-sparing road to a victorious peace.” The Doolittle mission promised a potent tonic to the frustration brought on by Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam, and now Bataan. But the recent disaster in the Philippines only magnified the enormous political risk of a mission grounded in the promise not of tactical gains but of positive headlines. How would the country react if
Japan destroyed America’s precious few carriers, cruisers, and destroyers? Was Roosevelt in his quest to boost the nation’s morale pushing his Navy to commit suicide? That question would be answered soon enough.

  THE ARMY AVIATORS SETTLED into life on board the Hornet as the task force cut through the swells west toward Japan. In addition to attending classes and lectures, the men worried about the bombers, which were exposed to everything from corrosive salt air and sea spray to gale-force winds and pounding rains. Crews paid careful attention to the auxiliary gas tanks, which were prone to leak. “Deck lashings had to be inspected and secured daily,” wrote pilot Jack Sims. “Batteries ran down requiring regular recharging, spark plugs fouled, brakes failed, hydraulic component and system leaks occurred and generators sometimes broke down. It was a constant, never-ending battle against the elements.”

  On one of those inspections, Edward Saylor discovered a problem. He drained the oil sump on the right engine and pulled out the magnetic plug, which is designed to pick up any metal shavings or particles that might have come loose. Attached to the plug he found two horseshoe-shaped keys that held the engine’s five planetary reduction gears in place on the shaft. The loss of those two keys signaled the breakdown of the engine’s gear system, a catastrophic failure. Saylor reported the news to Doolittle.

  “Can you fix it?” Doolittle asked.

  Saylor knew this was no easy job; it would require the removal and disassembly of the engine—on an aircraft carrier at sea.

  “Probably,” Saylor replied. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  Doolittle was blunt.

  “You’ve either got to fix it or push it over the side.”

  Saylor set to work. The bomber with its tail dangling over the carrier’s stern could not be transported below, forcing Saylor to remove the engine on the flight deck even as the winds at times reached thirty-five miles per hour. Navy sailors helped, constructing a tripod over the plane complete with a chain hoist to support the more than 2,000-pound Wright Cyclone engine. As he unfastened the bomber’s engine, Saylor carefully packed each nut and bolt inside the aircraft so as not to lose them overboard.

  The men transported the engine down to the Hornet’s hangar deck, where Saylor disassembled the back half of the engine, working amid a sea of parts. He directed the machine shop to make replacement keys and then carefully installed them. “There was nobody around that had ever done it before, none of the other mechanics,” he recalled. “It was just a matter of using your head, taking it apart and putting it back together again, getting everything just right.” Crews transported the rebuilt engine back up the elevators, and Saylor reinstalled it on the bomber. “Ran it up and it ran fine,” Saylor said. “Normally we would have test flown the aircraft to see if everything was really working out okay on it after such a major rebuild, but of course we didn’t have a chance to do that so we just had to make sure that everything was just right on it. “

  The airmen took care of other issues, big and small.

  Ted Lawson continued to order gunner Dave Thatcher to stop calling him “sir.”

  “All right, sir,” Thatcher answered. “I won’t.”

  Bobby Hite had come on board as the pilot of one of the backup crews. He hungered to go on the mission, complaining to his friend and fellow pilot Billy Farrow.

  “I’ve been training my own crew and everything,” Hite griped. “I want to go.”

  Farrow wasn’t wild about his copilot and asked Hite whether he wanted to come along in his place, even though it meant a demotion in status from aircraft commander to copilot. Hite jumped at the opportunity. “I would have gone as bombardier, rear gunner, nose gunner,” he recalled. “I would have gone in any position to be on that raid.”

  The airmen used the limited free time to take tours of the Hornet, visiting the hangar deck and the torpedo rooms. With a background in engineering, Hilger marveled at the boiler and engine rooms. As the mission’s second-in-command, he enjoyed a stateroom to himself and caught up with an old high school friend, now an officer on the Hornet. Doolittle’s navigator, Hank Potter, realized that, in his rush not to miss the last tender back to the carrier the morning the task force left San Francisco, he had left his dog tags in his hotel room. He persuaded technicians in the carrier’s medical department to fashion him new ones. Richard Cole likewise spent a day in the optical repair shop, making a new screw for his sunglasses to replace one he had lost. Joseph Manske visited the ship’s dentist and barber, while Herb Macia refereed an ongoing chess match between the two naval roommates, who seldom played face-to-face.

  “Hey, has Bill been here?” one of the sailors would invariably ask Macia.

  “No.”

  “I’m going to move that one back.”

  Chow time became a daily highlight for the airmen, as captured by Ken Reddy in his diary. “The meals in the Navy were not good, but excellent,” he wrote. “The most elaborate meals to be consistent I have ever seen. Fresh fruit, vegetables and milk.” Ted Lawson echoed him. “The Navy fattened us up like condemned men,” he later wrote. “We even had chicken.” As the Hornet steamed farther west—and fresh stores began to run low—the airmen got a taste of a Navy culinary tradition. “I had never eaten beans for breakfast,” confessed bombardier Robert Bourgeois. “Later in China those beans would have looked like ice cream.”

  When the novelty of the new surroundings faded, many of the airmen settled down to games of poker and craps, surprised to discover that the crew shared quarters with a billiard table. “What in the world would you ever do with a billiard table on the ship? Because even anchored, even at the dock, I don’t know how you would use it,” Davy Jones later said. “But at any rate, it was there and it made a helluva crap table. When we weren’t studying, there was a crap game.”

  And what a game it was.

  “I fear the dice games were the biggest and best ever held on the Hornet,” recalled Charles McClure, Lawson’s navigator. “All of the bomber officers had money and adopted the theory that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what became of it. We didn’t have premonitions of disaster, but we realized that we were off on one of the most dangerous attempts to harm an enemy that had ever been conceived; money just didn’t seem to mean much under the circumstances. There was solid logic behind this thought. Only by a miracle could all of us have escaped whole.”

  Even Ken Reddy, who swore off gambling after he lost $40 back at Pendleton, picked up the dice and cards again. “Since I’ve been aboard I have gone back on my better judgment,” he confided in his diary. “I took a $5.00 bill earned in a crap game and ran it up to $104.00 playing poker for 4 days. One day I fell off $19.00 but out of the four I earned $104.00.”

  Not all of the raiders came out ahead.

  Davy Jones shared a stateroom with Lieutenant William “Gus” Widhelm, the executive officer of Scouting Squadron Eight. Widhelm had not only one of the best record collections but a sizable appetite for cards as well—and an ego to match. “When you brag as much as I do,” he often quipped, “you gotta live up to your words!”

  That he did, wiping out the shipboard savings of many of the raiders, who would then gather in the passageways and mournfully sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “He forgot one thing, however,” Ross Greening later noted. “There were still some Army crew who didn’t go on the raid that were still aboard. By the time the task force reached Pearl Harbor revenge had been won—the Army cleaned Gus for 1100 dollars and cleaned every other Navy poker player of every cent they started to sea with!”

  The Navy’s senior officers ignored the illegal shipboard gambling, even though a deck court on board the task force’s destroyer Balch found more than a dozen sailors guilty of the same offense, levying fines of as much as forty dollars.

  Mitscher at one point even walked in on one of the Hornet’s games, looking over the shoulder of a young second lieutenant.

  “How are you doing?” the skipper asked.

 
The Army airman with a cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth glanced up but failed to recognize Mitscher.

  “OK, Joe,” he answered, much to the embarrassment of Mitscher’s marine orderly. “Want to take a hand?”

  Though the skipper shrugged off such illegal games, other officers on board took offense at the airmen’s lax behavior, including Jurika. “Most of them slept in. Few of them came down to breakfast,” the lieutenant later griped. “Poker games were going, sometimes on a twenty-four-hour basis. I know there were games that went for two or three days. Somebody would go to the wardroom during a meal and bring back enough to keep them from starving. I know that there was also some booze on board.” The airmen’s winning irked the Navy in other ways. “Being so flush we bought enormously in their ship store,” recalled McClure. “We bore down heavily on cigarets [sic] by the carton and candy bars by the dozens; we almost drained their supplies.”

  Not everyone gambled. “If you didn’t play poker,” recalled Cole, Doolittle’s copilot, “you more or less had to generate your own amusement.” The airmen spied whales one day near the ship. Another time a school of tuna jumped. Jacob DeShazer found himself drawn to the albatross that trailed the task force. One night on guard duty, he wrestled with loneliness and fear. He comforted himself by considering the statistics of World War I. Of all the soldiers who fought, only a fraction had died. Surely he, too, would be one of the lucky ones and survive. “I began to wonder how many more days I was to spend in this world. Maybe I wasn’t so fortunate after all to get to go on this trip,” DeShazer mused. “I shuddered to think where I would go if I was to die.”