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

by Scott, James M.

  DeShazer wasn’t alone. Others wrestled with the same fears, as evidenced by the crowded Easter service the Sunday morning of April 5. Those who couldn’t find a seat inside the carrier’s mess deck stood in the aisles. Others jammed the doorways. Lieutenant Commander Edward Harp Jr., the Hornet’s chaplain, counted no fewer than thirty of Doolittle’s men sitting shoulder to shoulder in the first two rows. “Looking down at those youngsters, I wondered what I could say to them. I knew that some of them would not get back,” he later wrote. “However, men going into danger do not like to hear about it.” Harp chose not to focus his sermon on the perilous mission ahead or even suggest that the men make peace with God. “I spoke, instead, of immortality. I told them that there were certain realms over which death had no control. The human personality was one of them,” he wrote. “Death could not destroy them.”

  Harp led the men in singing hymns as he played the hand organ, performing songs the fliers had requested, mostly old Sunday-school psalms remembered from childhood; seven of the airmen would later ask him as well for copies of the New Testament to take on the mission over Tokyo. One of the fliers who listened that morning was Ken Reddy, homesick for his church back home in Texas. “The service was nice, but my mind was wandering over the benches in the Church at Bowie. Mr. Bellah on the front row; Mrs. Heard doing her best on the pianos; Bob Spain leading the singing, Dad standing respectfully while Mama did her bit to help the dragging music,” he wrote in his diary. “Today, however, when the services were over, there was no argument as to where I would eat dinner. There was no after Church parley with Dorothy and Geo., Son, or Ed and Margaret. I just made my way to the wardroom and ate.”

  Fellow airman Joseph Manske captured a similar sentiment in his diary that day. “Easter Sunday on board ship was just another day,” he wrote. “We had beans for breakfast and chicken for dinner. Nothing extra.”

  VICE ADMIRAL HALSEY HAD concluded his meeting in San Francisco with Doolittle and prepared to return to Pearl Harbor by April 2. The three-star admiral needed time to make final preparations for the mission. Strong westerly winds, however, stymied his plan, forcing the cancellation of all Hawaii-bound flights. The winds failed to die down the next day or the day after. By April 5, much to Halsey’s frustration, he had no choice but to alert the Hornet to postpone the scheduled rendezvous by a day. Halsey’s luck continued to deteriorate. The next day, as he prepared to return to Pearl Harbor, he was hit with a self-diagnosed case of the flu. “When I boarded the plane, I was so full of pills that I rattled, but I slept until a nosebleed woke me as we lost altitude for our landing,” Halsey later wrote. “I stepped off at Honolulu with the flu licked.”

  Halsey spent April 7 meeting with Chester Nimitz and his planning staff, finalizing Operation Plan No. 20-42, which the laconic Pacific Fleet commander signed that afternoon. As part of his plan Halsey requested that two submarines patrol off Japan, tasked to monitor enemy forces that might jeopardize the mission. The Navy would divert all other subs south of the equator. That would allow Halsey to conclude that any ships sighted west of the rendezvous were hostile. The Enterprise sortied the next day at 12:32 p.m., accompanied by the cruisers North Hampton and Salt Lake City, the destroyers Balch, Benham, Ellet, and Fanning, and the oiler Sabine.

  Journalist Robert Casey of the Chicago Daily News, who was on board the Salt Lake City, surveyed the scene as the ships departed. He had hopes of accompanying a massive task force of several carriers, battleships, and cruisers, but the eight ships that slipped out to sea appeared to be the “same old Punch and Judy show.” “Maybe things are going to be different,” Casey wrote in his diary that day. “But on the surface this looks like another assault on the outhouses of Wake.”

  Unlike the Hornet’s Mitscher, who shared the task force’s destination with the crew soon after departure, Halsey sat on the news as hours turned into days, much to the frustration of many. The resourceful journalist Casey pressed everyone on board the Salt Lake City for details, including Commander John Ford, the Academy Award–winning director of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, a naval reservist called to active duty. “All we know,” Ford told him, “is that it’s some sort of suicide.”

  Casey wasn’t the only one to gripe about Halsey’s secrecy, particularly as the warm Hawaiian days gave way to bitter nights as the carrier steamed north.

  “Cold as all Alaska,” one of the Enterprise aviators noted in his journal on April 12. “Only God and the admiral know what we are up here for. We’re probably going to bomb Japan itself.”

  The frustrated journalist found he could do little more than take solace in the beauty of the vast and empty ocean. “The ships ahead of us in line on a glowing blue sea were misty gray like a procession of Gothic cathedrals,” Casey wrote in his diary. “I stood for a time freezing and drinking in the terrific beauty of it all.”

  The Hornet had received news on April 9 of Halsey’s delay and reversed course and slowed. The two task forces closed in on each other at 4:30 p.m. on April 12, when the Hornet detected radar transmissions 130 miles southwest. Lookouts on the Hornet spotted Enterprise search planes at 5:28 a.m. the next morning. Thirty-seven minutes later the masts of Halsey’s force came into focus at a distance of 20 miles.

  Enterprise pilot Tom Cheek towed a target for gunnery practice that morning. “As I flew over the Hornet, I looked down and saw those B-25s packed on the flight deck,” he recalled. “Needless to say, I spent the next three and a half hours wondering about our destination. Tokyo wasn’t even considered.”

  Cheek’s surprise mirrored that of the sailors who crowded the deck of the Enterprise, peering through binoculars at the Hornet.

  “They’re B-25s!” announced one sailor.

  “You’re crazy, sailor,” snorted one of the carrier’s aviators. “A B-25 could never take off with a load—and if it did, it could never land aboard again.”

  “They won’t have to carry a load, you dope, and they won’t have to land. They’re reinforcing some land base.”

  “Out here? Which land base?”

  “I’ll bet we’re going through the Aleutians and deliver them to a secret Siberian base.”

  “Are they using army pilots on carriers? If so, our careers are over. Let’s join the marines.”

  The two task forces merged. The Hornet took over as the guide and fleet center, with the oilers Sabine and Cimarron a thousand yards astern followed by the Enterprise. The cruisers North Hampton and Vincennes steamed in one column and the Nashville and Salt Lake City in another. The eight destroyers formed an inner and outer antisubmarine screen with a circular spacing of one mile as the force steamed due west. Weather permitting, pilots flew continuous daylight air patrols coupled with dawn and dusk search flights out to two hundred miles, sixty degrees off each bow.

  On April 13 the Enterprise’s loudspeaker crackled as Halsey prepared to alert his men of the mission. “This force,” he announced, “is bound for Tokyo.”

  “Never have I heard such a shout as burst from the Enterprise’s company!” the admiral later wrote. “Part of their eagerness came, I think, from the fact that Bataan had fallen four days earlier.”

  The admiral then messaged to the other ships in his task force details of the plan. “Intention fuel heavy ships about one thousand miles to westward,” Halsey instructed. “Thence carriers cruisers to point five hundred miles east of Tokyo then launch army bombers on Hornet for attack. DDS and tankers remain vicinity fueling rejoin on retirement. Further operations as developments dictate.”

  Casey heard the news of the mission directly from the Salt Lake City’s skipper. This was no attack on Wake or Marcus Island, but an assault on the enemy’s homeland. Casey surveyed the muscular task force of carriers, cruisers, and destroyers that cut through the swells. His earlier disappointment vanished. “This is a big force now,” he wrote in his diary, “a force that the Japs would hardly dare take on without twice the number of ships and at least an even break of ai
rplanes.”

  The skipper of the Salt Lake City came over the loudspeaker at 11 a.m. to warn his men to remain vigilant against enemy submarines.

  “You are about to take part in a very historic event,” he announced. “For the first time in the history of Japan, the home territory is about to be attacked. This attack will be in force and will undoubtedly have great effect.”

  The same day the task force crossed the 180th meridian, which serves as the international date line, skipping ahead one day to April 15. Casey noted the day’s demise in his diary with a tombstone inscription:

  Here lies

  April 14, a Tuesday,

  sacrificed to the west-bound crossing of the

  international date line.

  Each new day carried the task force another four hundred miles closer to Japan and at a cost to the Hornet of as much as fifty thousand gallons of fuel. Radiomen hunched over receivers twenty-four hours a day, monitoring Tokyo’s commercial stations to decipher news and broadcast routines, while officers and crew manned battle stations at dawn and dusk. Mitscher ran his sailors through countless drills to prepare them for combat, from gunnery and damage control to abandon-ship exercises. The Navy’s rigorous practice at times irked some of Doolittle’s men. “It seemed to me,” griped Robert Bourgeois, “that every time I started to sleep or eat that damn General Quarters would sound off.”

  The danger was reflected in Cimarron skipper Russell Ihrig’s battle instructions, demanding that sailors toss all magazines overboard and use wet rags to wipe down bulkheads, light fixtures, furniture, overhead pipes, and wiring to eliminate flammable dust. He ordered officer staterooms readied as battle dressing stations—complete with scissors or knives to cut off clothes—and instructed sailors to shave off beards and cut their hair to no longer than two inches. “Throw overboard tonight all shoe polish, hair oils and hair tonic. Wash your head and do not put on any hair-tonic or oils of any kind,” he ordered. “Keep all unnecessary lights turned off throughout the ships at all times. Light takes electricity, electricity takes steam and steam takes oil. We need that oil!”

  Bad weather continued to plague the mission, forcing the Cimarron to slow amid forty-two-knot winds to prevent structural damage. The Vincennes lost a man overboard on April 6—he was recovered from the fifty-one-degree seas by the destroyer Meredith—and the Cimarron lost another a few days later trying to refuel the Hornet, forcing a second rescue by the destroyer. Heavy seas one night cost the Vincennes a paravane along with a sixty-man lifeboat, including two oars and five gallons of water, while Hornet sailors had to rescue the raider Joseph Manske, trapped topside in a storm as he checked to make sure that his bomber was secure.

  The hellacious seas, which caused the Ruptured Duck’s altimeter to vary by as much as two hundred feet, amazed even veteran sailors. “We ran into the God damnedest weather I’ve ever seen,” recalled Lieutenant j.g. Robin Lindsey, a landing signal officer on the Enterprise. “For three days the waves were so high the deck was pitching so much that I had to have a person stand behind me to hold me on the landing signal platform so that I wouldn’t fall down. Several times I did, and you can imagine the amazement on the pilot’s face as he passed over with no signal officer there.”

  Tension mounted on board the ships as the task force closed in on Japan. “You could feel it in the wardroom, in the crew’s mess, in the lookouts, and on the bridge,” Life magazine editor John Field wrote. “How close to Tokyo could we get without being spotted? Nobody knew for certain.”

  Anxious for distractions, sailors listened over a shortwave radio to a San Francisco dance band. Others swapped jokes in the wardroom.

  “Anybody seen the Staten Island ferry go by?” someone quipped.

  The joke broke the tension, but all eyes soon drifted to the map that adorned the wardroom bulkhead, confirming what each sailor knew.

  The task force was now on the enemy’s home turf.

  Even the Hornet’s chaplain, Edward Harp, harbored doubts.

  “How are we going to make out on this deal?” he asked Mitscher.

  “The mission has to be successful,” the skipper replied. “The whole war does.”

  No one knew that more than Doolittle, whom Harp encountered one night after dinner up on deck near the bridge. “In the dusk I saw a lone figure there,” the chaplain later wrote. “I stopped and watched a minute. It was Doolittle, walking up and down, his head bent characteristically. I could almost see him thinking, as he moved slowly from one rail to the other. In that moment I glimpsed the enormous responsibility resting on him. I left him there without speaking and retraced my steps.”

  Doolittle held a final inspection of each bomber several days before the mission’s scheduled takeoff, passing out to every pilot a twenty-four-point checklist that included items ranging from guaranteeing that guns and bombs were properly loaded to stowing maps, charts, and first aid kits along with thermoses of fresh water and bagged lunches. Doolittle hoped the Hornet would deliver the raiders to within 450 miles of Japan. Even if crews had to launch from a distance of 550 miles, he predicted, the mission would in all likelihood prove successful. Doolittle set an outside limit of 650 miles. Beyond that, and he doubted his crews would have the fuel to reach China. Some of the raiders found the news unsettling. “It sure didn’t sound very inviting,” Joseph Manske wrote in his diary, “but it’s too late now to start worrying about anything.”

  The Army airmen made personal preparations for the mission. Shorty Manch packed his portable phonograph, while Ken Reddy used his poker earnings to pay his mess bill, lending ten dollars apiece to William Birch, James Parker, and Harold Watson before packing up and mailing his watch home, careful to insure it for fifty dollars. Robert Emmens penned a final letter to his mother on Hornet stationery. “It may be quite some time before any of us can send anyone any word,” he wrote, “so just don’t worry, and feel that I’m doing something at last to help in this damnable mess.”

  The airmen received a shock a few days before takeoff when operators picked up an English propaganda broadcast from Radio Tokyo. “Reuters, British news agency, has announced that three American bombers have dropped bombs on Tokyo,” the broadcast stated. “This is a most laughable story. They know it is absolutely impossible for enemy bombers to get within 500 miles of Tokyo. Instead of worrying about such foolish things, the Japanese people are enjoying the fine spring sunshine and the fragrance of cherry blossoms.” The news alarmed Halsey and sickened the raiders, who had hoped to be the first to attack the enemy’s capital. Doolittle in contrast doubted the report’s veracity, which proved so fantastic that it made headlines in the United States. “The Japanese radio strangely denied today that three American planes had bombed Tokyo,” the New York Times reported. “It was strange, because the Tokyo radio went to great lengths to deny something that apparently nobody reported.”

  The Cimarron came along the port side of the Hornet at 6:20 a.m. on April 17, topping the carrier off with 200,634 gallons. The oiler next refueled the Northampton and then the Salt Lake City, while the Sabine topped off the Nashville, Enterprise, and Vincennes. The seas crashed over the bows as gale-force winds blew out of the southeast at forty-one knots. A thousand miles east of Tokyo, visibility dropped to as little as one mile.

  At 2:44 p.m. the Hornet and Enterprise accompanied by the four cruisers pulled ahead of the oilers and destroyers for the final run toward Tokyo. The Hornet guided the reduced force at twenty-five knots, trailed by the Enterprise at a distance of just fifteen hundred yards. The Northampton and Vincennes formed a column off the Hornet’s starboard bow, while the Nashville and Salt Lake City took up a similar position off the carrier’s port bow. “I had left the destroyers behind so we wouldn’t be hampered if we had to get out of there in a hurry as we approached Japan,” Halsey recalled. “I was like the country soldier who wanted no part of the cavalry because he didn’t want to be bothered with a horse in case of retreat. We didn’t know what might happen.”
>
  Sailors brought the incendiary bombs up to the flight deck via the no. 3 elevator, while the demolition bombs rode up in the regular elevators. Others helped load the ammunition for the nose and turret guns, a mixture of armor-piercing, incendiary, and tracer rounds. Two freshly painted white lines on the flight deck served as guides—one for the nosewheel, the other for the left wheel—promising pilots six feet of clearance with the carrier’s island. Airplane handlers spotted the bombers for takeoff half an hour before sunset. Even with the sixteenth bomber’s tail dangling precariously over the carrier’s stern, Doolittle in the lead plane would have just 467 feet to take off.

  Mitscher summoned Doolittle to the bridge.

  “Jim, we’re in the enemy’s backyard now,” the skipper told him. “Anything could happen from here on in. I think it’s time for that little ceremony we talked about.”

  The airmen assembled on the flight deck, joined by a Navy photographer. The U.S. Battle Fleet had in October 1908 visited Yokohama, where commemoration medals were presented by a representative of the emperor. Two Brooklyn Navy Yard employees, master rigger Henry Vormstein and shipwright John Laurey, who had received such medals as seamen on the battleship Connecticut, returned them to Navy Secretary Frank Knox after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “May we request,” Vormstein wrote, “you to attach it to a bomb and return it to Japan in that manner.”

  Daniel Quigley, a former sailor on the battleship Kearsarge who now lived in Pennsylvania, wrote a similar letter to Knox, enclosing his medal. “Following the lead of my former Fleet mates,” he wrote, “I herewith enclose the one issued to me and trust that it will eventually find its way back in company with a bomb that will rock the throne of the ‘Son of Heaven’ in the Kojimachi Ku district of Tokyo.”

  Jurika contributed his own medal, one he had received in the name of the emperor from his time as an attaché.

  The reserved Mitscher gave a brief speech to the airmen and read aloud the messages from Admiral King, General Marshall, and General Arnold. Doolittle and his men then tied the medals to the bombs. Thatcher grinned as he attached one.