“We didn’t miss,” Deshazer and copilot Bobby Hite wrote. “We bombed from 500 feet with ack-ack bursting all around us, but we never got hit. We circled fast, took a look at the fires and then headed west and a little south for the China coast.”
CHAPTER 13
Saturday’s experience has shown that despite the series of crushing defeats which he has suffered so far, the enemy still has the spirit left to make air raids on this country.
—NICHI NICHI NEWSPAPER, APRIL 19, 1942
HALSEY DID NOT WAIT to see the bombers vanish over the horizon. Three minutes after Farrow’s B-25 roared off the Hornet’s deck, the admiral ordered his task force to turn back to Pearl Harbor. The Enterprise took over as guide, the force charging through the swells due east at twenty-five knots. Sailors hustled to ready the Hornet’s idle planes for action, bolting wings onto torpedo, bomber, and scout planes before sending them up the carrier’s three elevators to the flight deck. The Nitto Maru’s contact report would no doubt trigger a Japanese response, but the force remained far outside the range of enemy fighters and would soon slip beyond the reach of multiengine bombers. The only real threat came from enemy surface ships or submarines.
Sailors hurried to help Seaman First Class Robert Wall, chewed up by Farrow’s propeller, down to the carrier’s sprawling sick bay. Doctors and corpsmen stopped the bleeding, then x-rayed his mangled left arm. The prognosis was bad.
Real bad.
Lieutenant Commander Edwin Osterloh, an assistant medical officer, summoned Chaplain Harp. “It will have to come off,” he said. “See if you can console him.”
Harp approached the bunk, noting that Wall appeared pale and in shock. He wondered what to say, when the ship’s loudspeaker interrupted his thoughts: “The U.S.S. Hornet has reversed its course and is heading for Honolulu.”
Harp seized on the announcement as his segue. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”
Wall was silent for a moment before he answered, skipping the banter. “Please don’t let them cut it off,” he pleaded.
Harp pulled a chair alongside the bed. “There is only one thing I can tell you,” he said, noting that the injured seaman studied his face as he spoke. “Please listen.”
Wall turned away. Harp knew his tone had only confirmed the sailor’s fears. The chaplain pressed on with his impromptu speech, telling him that there wasn’t a man on board from the skipper on down who would not sacrifice an arm to help make the mission a success. “You gave yours in freeing one of his planes, possibly saving the life of its crew,” Harp said. “If that plane had crashed, it could never have flown over Tokyo, and the mission would have been weakened by just that much.”
Wall listened.
“The crew of that plane has a mighty slim chance of getting through alive. Compare yourself to them. There is a serious danger that they will be shot down or crash. They knew that; nevertheless, they went ahead. You have already made your sacrifice toward the success of that mission. May theirs be no more serious than yours.”
Harp watched as the sailor regained his composure then nodded. The doctor appeared moments later alongside the bed.
“All right, Sir,” Wall said. “Let’s get on with it.”
Officers would later take up a collection on behalf of the injured sailor, raising $2,700. Wall broke down in tears when presented the money.
The task force continued to battle rough seas, winds of up to thirty miles an hour, and low broken clouds. Halsey took no chances with the force’s security. The Enterprise turned into the wind and launched four scout bombers at 11:15 a.m. to search south, where radar had earlier indicated the presence of enemy vessels. Twelve minutes later a dozen more lifted off, tasked to search up to two hundred miles astern. Eight fighters roared into the skies for an inner air patrol joined by eight Hornet fighters.
The bombers soon went to work. At 11:50 a.m. Ensign Robert Campbell spotted a dark gray patrol boat that he estimated to be about 125 feet long. He charged in and dropped a 500-pound bomb at 1,200 feet, but missed by about 100 feet. Campbell circled back and dropped two 100-pound bombs, this time at an altitude of just 800 feet. Again he missed. The dogged naval aviator then circled back and strafed the picket boat with his .30- and .50-caliber machine guns, firing more than three hundred armor-piercing, tracer, and incendiary rounds. “The enemy maneuvered radically but did not return the fire,” he noted in his report. “Minor damage topside due to strafing was observed.”
Lieutenant Ralph Arndt led three planes in an attack on a seventy-five-foot motor patrol boat equipped with a radio mast at 12:26 p.m. In repeated bombing and strafing attacks, the aviators unleashed three 500-pound bombs and five 100-pounders, scoring only one near miss, which managed to knock out the patrol’s lone gun. Ensign John Butler picked up a third patrol at 12:45 p.m., this one towing a small white boat. He dropped two 100-pound bombs, both duds. He then released his 500-pound bomb, which appeared to strike the target’s port side. The patrol cut the smaller boat adrift and charged in circles, firing on Butler as he strafed the vessel. His plane took three minor hits, including a .25-caliber machine-gun bullet later recovered from the aircraft.
Radar at one point picked up an enemy patrol plane, passing north of the task force at a range of more than thirty-five miles, oblivious to the escaping armada. More patrol boats crowded the seas, giving the naval aviators a workout. Lookouts on the Enterprise sighted two such vessels at 2:01 p.m. Two minutes later carrier planes pounced, firing some 6,000 incendiary, tracer, and armor-piercing rounds. One of the patrols sank, and aviators damaged the other. The Nashville charged in for the kill, opening fire on the wooden patrol boat at a range of six thousand yards. The guns roared again and again, firing 102 six-inch rounds and another 63 five-inch rounds, reducing the patrol to little more than timbers. “Her whole starboard side,” the cruiser’s gunnery officer wrote in his report, “was riddled before she finally sank.”
Sailors threw lines in the water and lowered a makeshift sea ladder, fashioned from a cargo net. Five enemy prisoners, suffering from shock and immersion, climbed aboard, one with a bullet wound in the cheek. Through sign language Nashville sailors learned that six other Japanese crewmen had died. “One was wounded and another virtually exhausted,” the cruiser’s action report noted, “yet all were recovered without great difficulty although the ship was rolling heavily.”
Despite his wounded cheek the injured prisoner later recounted the attack. He had tried unsuccessfully to rouse his sleeping skipper when he first spied American planes at dawn. The sailor returned a few hours later when he spotted the task force.
“Two of our beautiful carriers ahead, sir!”
News of the carriers finally rallied the Japanese skipper, who climbed out of bed and marched up to the deck. He studied the American task force through binoculars. “They’re beautiful,” he admitted, “but they’re not ours.”
The Japanese skipper retreated below deck; this time he put a pistol to his head and squeezed the trigger.
The Nashville’s work was not over. One of the Enterprise’s bombers, hit in the engine by machine-gun fire while strafing the patrols, ditched at 3:03 p.m., some nine thousand yards astern of the carrier. The cruiser plucked the two airmen from the water, but the plane vanished beneath the swells.
The task force resumed its twenty-five-knot run east. Halsey’s forces in a matter of hours had ripped a gaping hole in Japan’s defensive net, destroying the Nitto Maru and Nagato Maru and so heavily damaging the No. 1 Iwate Maru and No. 26 Nanshin Maru that Japanese forces would later sink them. The Navy likewise damaged the merchant cruiser Awata Maru, along with the guardboats Chokyu Maru, No. 2 Asami Maru, Kaijin Maru, No. 3 Chinyo Maru, Eikichi Maru, and Kowa Maru. Enemy casualties totaled no fewer than thirty-three dead and another twenty-three wounded.
The Nashville’s guns drew much of the praise.
“She had a grand day,” recalled Robin Lindsey of the Enterprise. “She loved it, nothing to do but not get fired
at but to sink sampans. She chased all over the ocean after them as fast as our pilots would report them.”
Throughout the task force officers and crewmen alike crowded around radio receivers, anxiously awaiting news of the raid. The entire mission—the work of sixteen ships and ten thousand men—came down to this moment. Had Doolittle succeeded?
At Mitscher’s request Jurika settled in the Hornet’s flag plot, where he monitored Tokyo’s AM broadcast stations via headphones. Others scanned the airways with personal radios or crowded inside the carrier’s air plot, which was so jammed men could barely move. “All the ship’s radios that morning were tuned in on Japan, picking up the programs from Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama,” recalled Chaplain Harp. “Our public-address system in turn relayed the programs along to the ship’s personnel, so that from one end of the Hornet to the other there was the weird sound of Japanese broadcasters intoning their various versions of the day’s news in the Axis world.”
One broadcaster cited the Reuters report of an alleged American raid, assuring listeners such an attack was impossible. Jurika translated this morsel for the crew.
“Boy, oh boy, are they going to be surprised!” exclaimed one of the pharmacist’s mates in the sick bay. “Whoopee!”
Jurika calculated the expected time the bombers should appear in the skies over Tokyo. That time came and went. Fifteen more minutes passed. Then twenty. The Tokyo announcers rattled on unfazed. “There was nothing to indicate from the broadcasts that there was any unusual event taking place,” he recalled. “Nothing.”
Jurika wasn’t alone in his fears.
“We began to worry,” Harp wrote, “suspecting that the fliers had either become lost in the dreadful weather or that they had been intercepted somewhere along the way.”
Many of the sailors had taken to calling a female English announcer with JOAK “Lady Haw Haw,” the same name the British used to describe a female Atlanta native who made similar propaganda broadcasts from Germany. The announcer suddenly interrupted her afternoon broadcast with a shrill scream just as the radio went dead.
Sailors waited in anticipation.
“A moment before, the continued broadcasting had worried us,” Harp later wrote, “but now the silence was almost unbearable.”
The Hornet’s quartermaster recorded the first official news of the attack in the ship’s log at 2:45 p.m., when the broadcast resumed. “Enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo today shortly after noon for the first time in the current East Asia War,” the announcer stated in English. “Heavy and telling damage was inflicted on schools and hospitals, and the populace shows much indignation.”
The announcement was followed by another in Japanese, designed for domestic audiences. “A large fleet of enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo this noon and caused much damage to non military objectives and some damage to factories. The known death toll is between three and four thousand so far. No planes were reported shot down over Tokyo. Osaka was also bombed. Tokyo reports several large fires burning.”
Cheers erupted throughout the Hornet.
On board the Enterprise Halsey listened as the airwaves filled with sudden excitement, then fell silent.
“They made it,” the admiral said.
Others agreed.
“It doesn’t take much imagination to follow through as to what had happened,” observed Lieutenant Elias Mott, an assistant gunnery officer on the Enterprise.
Chicago Daily News reporter Robert Casey listened on board the Salt Lake City as afternoon turned into evening. One bulletin claimed Chinese, American, and Russian planes executed the attack, an identification the Japanese later abandoned, as military leaders struggled to determine who was actually responsible. The official Nazi news agency later reported that Yokohama had been bombed, while the British United Press announced carriers in Japanese waters had launched the raid.
The sailors bounced back and forth between the announcements intended for an international audience and the local broadcast bands designed for Japanese ears. Over one of the nation’s domestic frequencies the sailors listened as a female announcer shrieked hour after hour about the need for blood donors.
“Even if she had been talking of nothing more unusual than new ways to cook rice, you would know that terror had arrived in Tokio,” Casey noted in his diary. “It is her voice, rather than the subject, that gives you the notion.”
The Salt Lake City skipper, Captain Ellis Zacharias, who was in Japan when the 1923 earthquake struck, joined his men to listen.
“The woman’s had a shock,” he said, “a bad shock. Japanese women don’t get that way over nothing. Maybe this bombing amounts to something after all.”
The announcer continued.
“Give your blood as the men at the front are giving theirs,” she cried. “Give your blood. Your lives are in danger. Tomorrow—tonight—your children may be blown to bits. Give your blood. Save them—save Japan.”
“An interesting moment, gentleman,” Zacharias added.
Sailors listened as Japanese broadcasters depicted the American raiders as barbarians who targeted civilians.
“There has been no damage at all to military objectives, but several schools, hospitals and shrines have been destroyed,” a male broadcaster announced in English. “Thirty primary school children on their way home from morning classes were machine-gunned in the street.”
“You notice that nobody on the Jap radio yet knows whose planes they were. They give themselves away guessing,” one of the cruiser’s senior aviators noted. “On the face of the evidence it looks as if this bombing has been a great success.”
The broadcaster announced that nine unidentified planes had been shot down, drawing a laugh from the same flier. “More evidence the bombing was a success,” he added. “We shot down nine planes but we don’t know whose.”
On board the Hornet Chaplain Harp worked most nights from 7:30 until 11 p.m., typing up the news reports that came over the radio and mimeographing them into a makeshift daily paper for the officers and crew, the News Digest. Stenciled across the top of the edition that he prepared for April 19 was the same slogan that Mitscher had ordered painted on the carrier’s stack: “REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR!!” Just beneath that Harp ran a cartoon of Uncle Sam spitting a stream of bombs on an island emblazoned with the caption “Japan or where it used to be.”
A seaman contributed another cartoon, which Harp, though he felt it was “rowdy,” still chose to publish. The sketch showed several bombers targeting an outhouse, revealing a Japanese man squatting with his trousers around his knees. The caption read, “How does it feel to be caught with your pants down?”
Commander Stanhope Ring, the carrier’s air group commander, penned a four-stanza poem, the first of which read,
Twas the eighteenth of April in forty-two
When we waited to hear what Jimmy would do,
Little did Hiro think that that night
The skies above Tokio would be alight
With the fires Jimmy started in Tokio’s dives
To guide to their targets the B-25s.
Such humor wasn’t restricted to just the Hornet. An anonymous sailor on board the Enterprise wrote a mock business letter to Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo. “It gives me great pleasure to inform you, in case it has not been brought to your attention, that, in accordance with the terms of your contract, accepted by us on 7 December 1941, the first consignment of scrap metal has been delivered to your city. You understand, of course, that shipping conditions being what they are it is necessary for us to effect delivery via air,” the creative sailor wrote. “I wish to remind you that we are in a position to continue deliveries for years to come.”
That night the tired officers crowded into the Hornet’s wardroom, peppering Jurika with questions as the carrier steamed farther away from the enemy’s homeland, the mission now a clear success. America had struck its first blow in the war against Japan. “No one could get enough of talking and asking that night. We tried to eat
, but couldn’t taste our food,” Harp later wrote. “We talked for hours. When I finally went to my quarters and got to bed, I was too tense to sleep. I took sleeping powders, but they were useless. I lay awake until morning, thinking about the Doolittle fliers. I could almost hear ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ booming along my passageway.”
CHAPTER 14
There have been thousands and thousands of sorties in all these wars and what’s different about ours is only that we knew when we took off that we weren’t going to make it.
—DAVY JONES, PILOT OF PLANE NO. 5
DOOLITTLE SETTLED IN FOR the long flight to China, trailed by fourteen other bombers—all but that of York, who had diverted to Russia. The pilots had executed the attacks and returned to sea, vanishing over the same horizon where the B-25s had first appeared, a move designed to confuse the Japanese as to the mission’s true terminus. Once at sea the pilots turned south and paralleled the Japanese coast, buzzing the corner of Kyushu before banking west along the twenty-ninth parallel to cross the East China Sea.
Despite the Nitto Maru’s advance warning, the raid had so far proven a success. The Japanese failed to shoot down a single raider. Richard Joyce’s bomber was the only one of sixteen hit by antiaircraft fire, and his dogged aircrew managed to fend off more fighters than did the rest of the mission combined. All except one of the crews had bombed targets. That so many of the planes got lost en route to the targets helped spread the assault across an even wider front than Doolittle had initially planned, making it harder for Japanese forces to anticipate where to intercept the attackers.
That alone did not excuse Japan’s weak defense. Antiaircraft guns had roared and fighters had peppered the skies, but the flak proved wildly inaccurate and the pilots either blind or timid. Doolittle and his men had flown right underneath many of them, while those pilots who spotted the bombers often refused to engage or did not press home the attacks. “The sky was just purple with anti-aircraft but their aim was awful,” one flier later told the New York Times. “Had our plane been brought down, it would have been because we flew into the fire, not that they hit us.”
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 29
