Measures now in hand by Pacific Fleet have not been conveyed to you in detail because of secrecy requirements but we hope you will find them effective when they can be made known to you shortly.
—FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT TO WINSTON CHURCHILL, APRIL 16, 1942
THE DARKENED TASK FORCE cut through the swells at twenty knots in the predawn hours of April 18, 1942, more than eight hundred miles from Tokyo. The Hornet led the armada on a course almost due west at 267 degrees trailed by the carrier Enterprise. The cruisers Northampton and Vincennes steamed off the Hornet’s starboard bow while the Nashville and Salt Lake City covered the port. At 3:10 a.m. Enterprise radar operators reported two surface craft off the port bow at a range of 21,000 yards, or twelve miles. Two minutes later a distant light appeared on approximately the same bearing. General quarters immediately sounded, and throughout the carrier sailors sprang from bunks and darted to battle stations, readying ammunition and yanking off gun covers. The news broadcast to the crew was short: “Two enemy surface craft reported.”
Though Halsey’s four cruisers and two carriers far outgunned the enemy vessels, the veteran admiral knew better than to engage and ruin the element of surprise, if radar had not already alerted the enemy. The overcast skies void of moon and stars shrouded his force in darkness at a time when he needed to push on as far as possible, even if that was only until dawn. Every hour—every mile—now mattered. Halsey ordered the task force via a high-frequency, short-range radio to come right ninety degrees. The contacts faded from the Enterprise’s radar at 3:41 a.m. at a range of fifteen miles. The ship relaxed from general quarters, resuming a westerly course at 4:15 a.m. At first light three scout bombers roared off the Enterprise’s flight deck to patrol two hundred miles west while three more bombers and eight fighters took off for combat and inner air patrols.
Dawn revealed how much the weather had continued to deteriorate as the task force closed in on the enemy’s homeland. Low broken clouds swept across the empty horizon, peppered by frequent rainsqualls. Winds of as much as thirty knots whipped up white caps that broke across the bows of Halsey’s force. Journalist Robert Casey on board the Salt Lake City captured the scene best in his diary. “Went on deck at 5 o’clock to face a howling wind. Sky gray. Sea pitching,” the Chicago Daily News reporter wrote. “Water is rolling down the decks, sometimes a couple of feet deep. It’s hard keeping upright.” Doolittle raider Ken Reddy ventured up top of the Hornet, recording a similar scene that morning in his diary. “The sea was rough and the airplanes were pulling against their ropes like circus elephants against their chains.”
Lieutenant j.g. Osborne Wiseman was patrolling the skies ahead of the task force at 5:58 a.m., when he spotted a small fishing boat bobbing atop the dark waters. The naval aviator, following orders, did not attack, but attempted to avoid detection. He circled back and buzzed the carrier, alerting Halsey via message drop of the boat forty-two miles ahead. Wiseman noted that he believed enemy lookouts had spotted him. Halsey again chose not to engage, but ordered the task force to swing southwest, a move that gave him only a brief reprieve as Hornet lookouts spotted another patrol at 7:38 a.m. at a range of more than eight miles. Radio operators on the ninety-ton Nitto Maru No. 23, part of Admiral Yamamoto’s defensive net, fired off a message to Tokyo: “Three enemy carriers sighted. Position, 600 nautical miles east of Inubosaki.”
The time to fight had arrived.
The Nashville sounded general quarters and via flag hoist requested permission to fire. Halsey gave the order at 7:52 a.m. The cruiser opened fire one minute later with its main battery at a range of nine thousand yards, or about five miles. The fifteen six-inch guns—mounted three to a turret—thundered across the open sea, each capable of hurling a 130-pound projectile almost fifteen miles. The guns barked again and again. Armor-piercing projectiles pounded into the waves around the target at 2,500-feet per second, throwing up so much spray that the Nitto Maru appeared to vanish.
The Nashville ceased fire at 7:55 a.m. to allow the spray to settle and then resumed the assault one minute later. Even firing at a rate of almost 150 rounds per minute, the hail of projectiles continued to miss. Heavy swells with a height from crest to trough of twenty feet obscured the trawler, leaving only the mast tops visible. Furthermore, many of the wave tops shielded the Nitto Maru, intercepting the cruiser’s fire. The Nashville increased speed to twenty-five knots and closed to 4,500 yards, swinging to port in order to shoot straight down the wave troughs.
The cruiser’s heavy gunfire sparked excitement throughout the task force as anxious sailors, airmen, and journalists all struggled for a glimpse of the battle. “Terrific barrage with 15 six-inch guns. Shells are tossed like machine-gun bullets—eight salvos in the air at once,” Casey wrote in his diary. “Flashes run around ship like lights on an electric sign.” The scene likewise amazed Life magazine editor John Field. “Her guns blazed big and red,” he wrote, “and rolled like thunder.”
Hornet fighter pilot John Sutherland found the experience surreal. “I remember thinking that it was a very curious way to watch my first active engagement,” he recalled. “We stood out on the flight deck watching the fire between our ships and the meager return from the Japanese, much in the manner of tennis players that you see in the newsreels with their heads going back and forth watching the action.”
“Well, if it’s all like this,” Sutherland thought to himself, “this will be fine.”
Jurika climbed from the flight deck up to the bridge for a better view. “I could see the salvos from the Nashville,” he remembered. “There were heavy swells and the picket boat was going up, it would be on top of a swell and then it would be seen, then it would be down, and you couldn’t see a thing except perhaps the top of its mast. The splashes were all around it, but it was still there.”
The gunfire startled many of Doolittle’s men.
Brick Holstrom grabbed a Navy ensign in one of the Hornet’s passageways. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” the officer replied. “I think they’re firing at a submarine.”
The Nashville’s thunderclap nearly took the hat off mission doctor Thomas White, while bombardier Jacob DeShazer stood in awe on the carrier’s deck. “The whole side of that Navy ship looked like it was on fire,” he recalled, “booming away.”
Eight Enterprise fighters circled five thousand feet overhead as the Nashville blasted the Nitto Maru. The aviators dove to attack, only to spot a second patrol, the eighty-eight-ton Nanshin Maru No. 21. The pilots diverted to strafe the smaller boat, raking the tiny trawler from stem to stern with .50-caliber machine-gun fire. One of the pilots made eleven passes, burning through at least twelve hundred rounds. The obliterated boat began to settle, prompting the pilots to join the attack on the Nitto Maru.
Enterprise bomber pilot Ensign John Roberts hungered for action. He pushed his bomber over at 7,500 feet and dove on the Nitto Maru, but pulled out of the attack at 3,500 feet to avoid one of the fighters. Roberts returned with a glide-bomb attack, dropping one 500-pound bomb, which missed by about 100 feet. He joined the fighters to strafe the dogged Nitto Maru until most ran out of ammunition. Lieutenant Roger Mehle summed up the attack in his report: “Liquidation of enemy personnel. Vessel placed out of operation. When left it was wallowing in a trough of the waves.” Another pilot was more succinct, describing his fellow fliers as “a bloodthirsty bunch of bastards.”
The Nitto Maru erupted in flames at 8:21 a.m. and finally slipped beneath the waves two minutes later, exactly half an hour after the assault began. Two survivors bobbed in the water, neither of whom could be recovered; the skipper watched one of the injured sailors drown. The Nashville had hoped to silence the Nitto Maru, but radiomen picked up continual transmissions for twenty-seven minutes after the cruiser fired the first shot. There was no doubt Japan now knew of the approaching armada.
The ninety-ton fishing boat had robbed the Nashville of 928 rounds of six-inch ammunition, including 13 rounds needed to clear the guns after the battle ended. The skipper was mortified, blaming the poor shooting on his inexperienced gun crews and the churning seas that helped shield the Nitto Maru. “Expenditure of 915 rounds to sink a sampan appears ridiculous, and obviously was excessive,” he wrote in his report, “but in this instance was not wholly inexcusable.”
DOOLITTLE HAD WATCHED the battle alongside Mitscher on the Hornet’s bridge.
“It looks like you’re going to have to be on your way soon,” the skipper told him. “They know we’re here.”
Halsey flashed a message about that time to the Hornet. “Launch planes,” the admiral ordered. “To Col. Doolittle and gallant command, good luck and God bless you.”
Doolittle shook hands with Mitscher and then darted below to his cabin to grab his bag, yelling at his men he encountered to load up. Many of the raiders had just sat down to breakfast in the wardroom when the carrier’s loudspeaker crackled to life. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Army pilots, man your planes!”
Others proved equally ill prepared. Ross Greening had just finished a letter to his wife, while Edgar McElroy relaxed with a copy of the Hornet’s Plan of the Day. News of the aircrew’s imminent departure caught Jack Sims in the most precarious position. “I happened to be in the ‘head’ when I heard the order,” the pilot recalled. “Believe me; that was the best catharsis one could ever ask for!”
Doolittle ran into Miller.
“Would you help get the pilots in the airplanes?”
Miller agreed.
Sailors darted across the wet decks to help the Army airmen yank off engine and gun turret covers. Others topped off fuel tanks, rocking the bombers back and forth to get air bubbles out. Crews handed five-gallon gasoline cans up through the rear hatches to the gunners, as others untied ropes and removed wheel chocks so Navy handlers could position the bombers for takeoff. Airmen armed the ordnance already loaded in the bomb bays, as crews brought up the last of the incendiaries from below deck. “We had spent months preparing for this first bombing of Japan,” navigator Chase Nielsen recalled, “and we were keyed up like a football team going into the big game.”
Problems soon arose.
Davy Jones had suffered a leak in his bomb bay tank only the day before, forcing technicians to patch the bladder and then leave it empty overnight to dry. As crews now rushed to fill the 225-gallon rubber sac and top off the wing tanks, they discovered that the Navy had shut off gas lines, a common procedure in the event of a surprise attack. Ross Greening ordered his crew chief to haul his extra tins over to Jones, optimistic that the Navy would turn the lines back on in time to allow him to finish fueling.
Harold Watson had green-lighted the replacement of his bomber’s fouled spark plugs that morning before general quarters. “When the alarm sounded, I found all the cowling off the left engine and all the plugs out!” he recalled. “The last piece of cowling was snapped in place as the ship ahead started its engines.”
Shorty Manch appeared alongside Ted Lawson’s Ruptured Duck with a fruitcake tin in hand. “Hey,” he shouted up to bombardier Bob Clever. “Will you-all do a fellow a big favor and carry my phonograph records under your seat? I’ll take my record-player along in my plane and we’ll meet in Chungking and have us some razz-ma-tazz.”
Miller stopped by as well, extending his hand for a farewell shake. “I wish to hell I could go with you.”
Airmen checked in with the Hornet’s navigation room for the latest weather reports, wind information, and the ship’s location. Crews knew that the magnetic compasses, after more than two weeks aboard the steel carrier, were far out of calibration. Furthermore, the squalls would prevent navigators from using a sextant to shoot sun or star shots. Pilots would have to fly dead reckoning to Japan. Compounding the challenge was a twenty-four-knot headwind they would have to battle. The biggest concern, however, came down to distance. The Hornet remained 824 statute miles east of Tokyo, almost twice as far as Doolittle had originally planned.
Ross Greening was inspecting each plane, making sure the bombs were all armed, when navigator Frank Kappeler approached.
“Captain Greening, we are over 800 miles from Tokyo,” Kappeler exclaimed. “I didn’t know we were going to be this far away.”
Greening chased down and informed Doolittle, who merely nodded and did not utter a word.
He already knew.
News of the Hornet’s distance from Japan soon spread throughout the crews. “I wasn’t concerned about it,” recalled Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator. “We had full confidence in our pilot. We had full confidence in our airplane; we had full confidence in ourselves, and we had this to do.”
Others didn’t share Potter’s confidence.
The likelihood of running out of fuel loomed large. “The way things are now, we have about enough to get us within 200 miles of the China coast, and that’s all,” Jack Hilger leveled with his crew. “If anyone wants to withdraw, he can do it now. We can replace him from the men who are going to be left aboard. Nothing will ever be said about it, and it won’t be held against you. It’s your right. It’s up to you.”
Hilger’s men absorbed the news.
Bombardier Herb Macia remembered his parents and his wife, Mary Alice, pregnant with the couple’s son. He thought of everything he wished he had told them before he left, drawing comfort in the idea that his death would at least be honorable. “This couldn’t have happened to me, but it’s happening to me, so I’m going to go in and really do it right,” he concluded. “That’s all I care about!”
Others in the crew shared Macia’s determination.
“Not a man withdrew,” Jacob Eierman, Hilger’s engineer, later wrote. “Although I don’t suppose any of them felt any better than I did.”
Brick Holstrom warmed up the engines; then his navigator climbed in and delivered the bad news. “What the hell do we do now?” he thought.
Pilot Billy Farrow asked bombardier Jacob DeShazer whether he knew how to row a boat, while a sergeant shouted to DeShazer as he climbed in the back, “We just got one chance in a thousand of making it.”
It wasn’t just the airmen who were worried.
“We knew that the pilots really didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting to China with those airplanes,” Miller recalled. “It was just too far.”
Despite the poor prospects posed by the added distance, aircrews still hurried to prepare for takeoff, stowing gear, warming up engines, and going over checklists. Carl Wildner did so even as his stomach churned. “I was scared,” the navigator on the second bomber later wrote. “We knew the odds were against us and it seemed to me we were doing things without thinking—like automatons. I guess we were and maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be.”
The Hornet swung into the wind at 8:03 a.m. and increased speed to twenty-two knots. The seas crashed against the flattop’s bow, alarming even the most veteran sailors. “It’s the only time in my life,” Halsey recalled, “I ever saw green water come over the bow and right onto the flight deck of a carrier.”
Navy handlers positioned the bombers as far back on the flight deck as possible, two abreast and crisscrossed. The near-gale-force winds coupled with the revving engines made it difficult for the flight deck crew to maneuver, each of whom wore a safety line to keep from getting blown into the whirling props. “It sure was windy!” recalled George Bernstein, a flight deck crewman. “We had to literally drop to the deck and hang on with our fingers in the tie-down fittings when the B-25s revved up.”
Over this roar Miller shouted instructions to the pilots: keep the trim tabs in neutral and the flaps down. Any changes he would display on a blackboard. “Look at me,” Miller demanded, “before you let your brakes off!”
Doolittle climbed into the lead bomber alongside his copilot, Second Lieutenant Dick Cole. Throughout the plane sat the navigator, Second Lieutenant Hank Potter, the bombardier, Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer, and the gunner and crew chief, Staff Sergeant Paul Leonard. Rain beat down on the cockpit windshield as Doolittle stared down the 467-foot flight deck. The days of practice and the nights of worry had come down to this moment—not just for Doolittle but for all sixteen aircrews. “We all stood around, watching and sweating it out,” recalled Eierman. “We had done plenty of practicing—on land—but this was going to be the first real take-off from a carrier with one of our big bombers.”
The loudspeakers crackled on board the other ships in the task force: “Hornet preparing to launch bombers for attack on Tokyo.”
Troops ranging from cooks and quartermasters to engineers and gunners crowded rain-soaked decks for a chance to witness the historic event—a few even saw an opportunity to profit. “Sailors, like stockbrokers, work everything out by betting, and there was soon heavy money down on both sides: would they make it, would they not?” recalled Alvin Kernan, an Enterprise plane handler. “The odds were that the B-25s wouldn’t have been on the Hornet if there had not been successful tests somewhere, but with all the skepticism of an old salt about anything the services did, I put down ten dollars at even money that less than half of them would get into the air.”
Doolittle revved up the bomber’s twin engines and checked the magnetos. The carrier’s speed and the furious storm combined to create as much as fifty miles per hour of wind across the Hornet’s deck, perfect conditions for takeoff. He flashed the thumbs up sign to Lieutenant Edgar Osborne, the signal officer who clutched a checkered flag. Sailors pulled the wheel chocks out as Osborne waved his flag in circles, signaling Doolittle to push the throttle all the way forward.
“Everything all right, Paul?” Doolittle asked his crew chief.
“Everything okay, Colonel.”
Osborne watched the Hornet’s bow so as to release Doolittle just as the carrier began to dive down the face of a wave. The time required for a B-25 to traverse the flight deck meant that the bomber would reach the bow on the upswing, catapulting the plane into the air. Osborne dropped the flag and Doolittle released the brakes. The bomber roared down the flight deck at 8:20 a.m. “The scream of those two engines, the excitement and urgency, made an incredible sight. I was lying face down on the wet deck, clutching tiedown plates to keep from being blown back by the terrific wind. When Doolittle’s B-25 began to move, it seemed unreal,” Greening later wrote. “I had chills running up and down my spine from excitement.”
Doolittle’s left wheels hugged the white line that ran down the deck. He passed fifty feet, then one hundred.
Then two hundred.
“He’ll never make it,” someone shouted.
The bomber charged toward the end of the flight deck and then appeared to vanish.
“Doolittle’s gone,” McClure thought to himself. “We’ll have to make it without him.”
The plane then roared up and into the gray skies over the bow.
“Yes!” Knobloch shouted. “Yes!”
Sailors crowded along the flight deck and carrier’s island erupted in cheers. “The shout that went up should have been heard in Tokyo,” Thomas White, the mission’s doctor, remembered. “We were all yelling and pounding each other on the back. I don’t think there was a sound pair of vocal cords in the flotilla.”
On board the cruiser Salt Lake City journalist Robert Casey captured the moment in his diary. “First bomber off the Hornet. Miraculous,” he wrote. “The carrier is diving, deluging deck with white water. The big plane is just about catapulted as the ship lifts out of the sea.”
In the skies overhead Doolittle instructed Cole to raise the wheels as he circled over the Hornet, where the carrier’s course was displayed in large figures from the gun turret abaft the island. Doolittle paralleled the flight deck, allowing Potter to calculate any error with his magnetic compass before he pressed on toward Tokyo.
On deck below First Lieutenant Travis Hoover throttled up his bomber. The aircraft shook and shuddered. Hoover’s mouth was dry as he stared down the flight deck at the bow, now buried in a wave. Osborne dropped the flag and Hoover released the brakes, charging down the runway just five minutes after Doolittle. “I was running out of deck,” he recalled. “I came back on the yoke and she stood up like a bucking bronco.”
The bow wash pushed the bomber’s nose even higher. Sailors and airmen alike looked on with horror, convinced the aircraft would stall and crash. Hoover and copilot Bill Fitzhugh stiff-armed the controls to wrestle the bomber’s nose back down as the plane appeared to dive toward the waves.
“Up! Up!” airmen on deck shouted. “Pull it up!”
Hoover did and soon regained control; a sense of relief washed over him. “I felt wonderful, almost euphoric,” he recalled. “We’re airborne.”
The graceless takeoff failed to impress some of the naval aviators, one of whom compared his vacillating takeoff to that of a “kangaroo.”
The third pilot in the queue, Bob Gray, stunned his fellow fliers when he roared down the flight deck at 8:30 a.m., trading brown lace-ups for cowboy boots. “They are the most comfortable shoes in the world,” he professed. “Just the thing for walking.”
Miller watched Gray climb into the skies, then scrawled a note on his blackboard, reminding pilots to keep the stabilizer in neutral. The fourth, fifth, and six bombers took off successfully over the next ten minutes.
Ted Lawson had tested the Ruptured Duck’s flaps during the engine run-up, but in the excitement failed to lower them again before he released the brakes at 8:43 a.m. “We watched his plane disappear before the bow of the ship,” Greening recalled, “then come waddling back up like some big bullfrog, right on the water ahead of the carrier.”
In his report Miller reflected on Lawson’s near disaster with a bit of humor, noting the most important fact: “He got away with it.”
York shot down the flight deck next, at 8:46 a.m.
“Nice take-off, Ski,” Emmens said. “How did it seem compared to the practice take-offs you’ve been making on the ground back at Eglin?”
“How the hell should I know?” York answered. “I never made one.”
The pilots now settled into a rhythm, as bombers nine through thirteen followed one another at just three-minute intervals. Each plane that took off safely not only added a few extra feet of deck space for the next pilot but also helped boost the confidence of all the others. That was certainly the case for pilot Bill Bower. “It seemed like he was as unconcerned about this raid as he could possibly be,” recalled his navigator, Bill Pound. “My impression was that it was just another cross-country trip to him. Only difference was that the take-off strip was a little shorter than usual.”
Greening didn’t quite share the sureness of his colleague. “I could see many faces peering down from the bridge and navigation rail on the carrier’s island. All of the crewmen whose aircraft hadn’t been brought aboard were there,” he later wrote. “I wondered how many still were willing to change places with us now.”
By 9:15 a.m. all but one of the bombers had safely lifted off; the earlier thrill now waned. The tail of the Bat out of Hell, the final plane, dangled over the carrier’s stern just as a strong wind swept across the deck at 9:19 a.m., lifting the B-25’s nose and threatening to topple the bomber into the ocean. “Sailors, slipping on the wet decks and fighting the wind, swarmed around our plane,” recalled copilot Bobby Hite, “every available man grabbing a handhold on the nose and front wheel.”
Seaman First Class Robert Wall, amid the struggle, tumbled into the Bat out of Hell’s left prop, gouging his back and cutting his left arm at the shoulder.
DeShazer was on the deck to pull the wheel chocks when the accident occurred. He surveyed the bloody scene with horror.
“Give them hell for me,” Wall muttered, a message DeShazer couldn’t hear over the roar of the engines, but could read on the seaman’s lips.
“Help me get him to one side,” DeShazer barked at one of the other sailors. The two men pulled the injured the seaman to safety.
“The seaman’s arm was practically cut off,” navigator George Barr recalled. “This accident unnerved me and it was all I could think about as we lined up for our takeoff. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a taste of worse to come.”
DeShazer climbed up into the bomber, only to discover more problems. The tail of the previous plane had punctured a hole in the Plexiglas nose.
“Should I tell the pilot,” he wondered.
Doolittle had warned that crews would push any defective plane over the Hornet’s side. DeShazer had worked too hard to let a busted nose stop him. He would tell Farrow about the hole—after the bomber was airborne. Farrow released the brakes seconds later and the Bat out of Hell shot down the flight deck.
Across the task force sailors watched Farrow’s bomber climb into the gray morning skies. “When the last plane had left there was a physical let down all over the ship,” remembered Ensign Robert Noone, a signal officer. “Everyone was exhausted from the nervous tension of watching them take off. We mentally pushed every plane off the deck.” Exhaustion soon turned to euphoria. “We all cheered loudly and choked down a few patriotic tears,” added Kernan, the Enterprise plane handler who had bet on the loss of at least half the planes. “I thought my ten dollars well lost in a good cause, as if I had actually contributed the money to success in the war.”
One sailor clasped his hands above his head; another blessed himself. “For a few minutes the sky was full of them,” Life magazine’s John Field wrote. “With the deep-throated roar of their twin motors, their beautiful lines, and their American insignia painted boldly on their wings and fuselages, they made us all feel proud.” Fellow journalist Robert Casey recorded the scene in his diary. “Quiet on the horizon,” he wrote. “There hasn’t been a hitch. All have shot straight up in the teeth of the hurricane.”
Mitscher had watched the takeoffs with a mix of disbelief and shock. The veteran aviator had tensed up each time one of the bombers roared down the deck, his arms instinctively moving as though he sat before the controls. “With only one exception, take-offs were dangerous and improperly executed,” he complained in his report. “Apparently, full back stabilizer was used by the first few pilots. As each plane neared the bow, with more than required speed, the pilot would pull up and climb in a dangerous near-stall, struggle wildly to nose down, then fight the controls for several miles trying to gain real flying speed and more than a hundred feet of altitude.”
Other senior naval officers were more forgiving. “The job that was done in launching those planes was to me a miracle,” recalled Captain Frederick Riefkohl, the skipper of the Vincennes, who watched the takeoffs from astern of the Enterprise. “I expected at any time that those big planes would crash into the sea, but the timing was perfect.” No one was more pleased than Lieutenant Hank Miller, who had trained all eighty of the airmen. “Without a doubt every officer and man aboard the Hornet would have pinned every medal in the world on those people who went off that deck in those airplanes,” he later said. “They really had what it took.”
DOOLITTLE SETTLED IN FOR the long flight to Tokyo, pleased to have successfully answered the question of whether a loaded B-25 could lift off from a carrier. “Take-off was easy,” he later boasted in his report. “Night take-off would have been possible and practicable.”
The wind blew out of the northwest as Doolittle guided the bomber down to wave-top level, skimming just two hundred feet above the dark waters. He reviewed plans for the arrival that night in China, hoping that Lieutenant General Stilwell had made the necessary arrangements at the airfields.
In the seat next to him copilot Dick Cole also wondered what China would be like, confident that despite the added distance his crew would make it: “It never once occurred to me that there was a possibility that we would never get there.” Cole instead hummed the folk tune “Wabash Cannonball,” failing to notice that he had attracted the attention of others: “One time I was singing and stomping my foot with such gusto that the boss looked at me in a very questioning manner like he thought I was going batty.”
Half an hour into the flight First Lieutenant Travis Hoover’s bomber closed in on Doolittle, who soon banked to give wide berth to what appeared to be a camouflaged naval vessel. Hoover spotted patches of white smoke around the ship, indicating possible gunfire. Carl Wildner felt the tightness return to his stomach. “Why am I here,” he thought, “when it would have been so easy to be somewhere else?”
All sixteen bombers had successfully lifted off from the Hornet with an average interval of less than four minutes, forming a loose string some 150 miles long. Most flew due west, aiming to cross the Japanese coast at Inubo Saki, a rocky cape topped with a lighthouse east of Tokyo. “There was no rendezvous planned, except at the end of the mission,” Lawson recalled. “Those who took off early could not hover over the ship until a formation was formed because that would have burned too much gas in the first planes. This was to be a single file, hit-and-run raid—each plane for itself.”
Airmen emptied the five-gallon gas cans, hacked holes in them, and tossed them into the seas as the pilots hedgehopped across the blue waves, some buzzing so low that salt water occasionally sprayed the windshield—Bat out of Hell’s props even nicked a wave once and sent a shudder through the bomber.
Soon after takeoff pilot Davy Jones asked engineer Joseph Manske for an update on the bomber’s total fuel, which the young airman provided.
“Well, boys,” Jones announced over the interphone. “We don’t have enough gas to make our destination, but we’ll go as far as we can.”
A hush fell over the bomber.
“What in the world have I gotten myself into?” Manske thought, realizing there was only one thing to do. “Being brought up in a good Christian home,” he later wrote, “I got down on my knees and prayed.”
The harried takeoff had left Corporal Bert Jordan frazzled. Once in the air he organized his space and tested the .50-caliber machine guns, only to discover that the turret didn’t work; the electrical lead was not connected, a fact he would not learn, however, until after the mission. The frozen turret rendered the guns worthless. Jordan, meanwhile, noticed that the left wing tank leaked. He tried to alert pilot Brick Holstrom, but couldn’t communicate with him over the roar of the engines. When the crawlway tank was finally empty, Jordan climbed forward to the cockpit to deliver the bad news.
Other planes suffered similar problems. Davy Jones realized his bomber was short thirty gallons in its left rear tank, and the Whirling Dervish’s turret tank started to leak at the corner seams about fourteen inches from the top. Technical Sergeant Eldred Scott alerted pilot Harold Watson over the interphone and hurried to transfer the fuel as fast as he could. Scott likewise found that the left gun hydraulic charger failed, forcing him to charge the .50-caliber machine guns by hand.
With the bomber en route, DeShazer got on the phone to Farrow, informing him of the busted nose. “We’ve got a hole in this thing about a foot in diameter.”
“What did you say?” Farrow replied, struggling to hear over the roar of the engines.
DeShazer repeated the news.
Copilot Bobby Hite climbed down to examine the damage. “Take your coat off,” he instructed DeShazer.” We’ll see if we can stuff our coats in that hole.”
At 160 miles per hour, the coats blew out.
A few Japanese civilian and naval vessels plowed the seas below; their numbers would only multiply as the bombers closed in on Japan.
“We’re entering the danger zone, now,” pilot Donald Smith warned his crew over interphone. “Keep on the alert. Surface vessel on our right-hand side.”
“I see it, sir,” Edward Saylor replied, manning the gun turret.
A few of the bomber pilots, including Doolittle, spotted enemy patrol planes in the skies as well. “A twin-engined land plane came out of a cloud ahead of us and passed us on the right,” Jones recorded in his report. “I maintained course while it turned to avoid us. The Japanese markings were plainly visibly on it.”
Joyce also encountered a twin-engine patrol just an hour and a half into the flight. “It immediately dove out of the clouds and pursued me,” he noted in his report. “I increased power and was able to out distance the patrol plane which did not fire on me but I think recognized that I was the enemy.”
These brushes foreshadowed the danger ahead, prompting many of the crews to fire a few test rounds, including Ruptured Duck gunner Dave Thatcher.
“Damn, boy,” copilot Dean Davenport announced over the interphone when the .50 calibers started to rattle. “This is serious.”
The Ruptured Duck buzzed a merchant ship.
“Let’s drop one on it,” Davenport joked.
Lawson let them joke.
“Okay,” navigator McClure finally said, giving up the idea, “but I bet that guy is radioing plenty to Tokyo about us.”
Pilot Donald Smith in the TNT killed time tuning radio stations, picking up a Japanese broadcast several hundred miles out. “A normal program seemed to be in progress,” he logged in his report. “I listened to it at intervals for over an hour.”
Smith wasn’t the only one who tuned into Tokyo radio station JOAK, the same station Lieutenant Jurika had monitored over the past week for any news of the task force’s detection as the Hornet closed in on Japan. “That’s what you’ve got to follow,” Chase Nielsen, the navigator of the Green Hornet, instructed pilot Dean Hallmark. “Just keep that needle centered and you’ll split Tokyo right in the middle.”
The early flow of adrenaline that had propelled the airmen off the Hornet’s flight deck waned as the bombers droned on toward Tokyo, the cold blue swells of the Pacific tumbling below as the minutes turned to hours. “We kept going in and, after two or three hours, it got tiring,” Lawson recalled. “I was keyed up enough, but at our low level and sluggish speed it was a job to fly the ship.”
The crew of the Green Hornet rode in silence. “We were too busy thinking, and our nerves were kind of taut,” Nielsen wrote. “I got to thinking about my wife, Thora. She and I were married December 8, 1941, the day after war was declared. We had 40 happy days together before I volunteered for the Doolittle flight.”
“Conversations were short and to the point,” recalled Emmens. “Every man was going over again in his mind each item for which he knew he was responsible. Of course, little black thoughts like an engine going out over that expanse of salt water, and the possibility of a reception committee of Jap Zeros, crept forward often enough to keep our minds well occupied with imaginary forced landings and combat tactics.”
Emmens distracted himself with a mental inventory of all his purchases from the Hornet’s store. “I thought about the stack of razor blades, candy, and cartons of cigarettes,” he recalled. “I then laughed at myself for buying such things as if I would be gone a year, when actually here we were on our final mission, and it would be over that same day. And we would be starting back home, probably, in a few days.”
The sun burned away the morning clouds as the planes pressed on toward the enemy’s homeland. Pilots kept close watch on the fuel consumption. Lawson smarted over the fact that the morning’s warm-up on board the Hornet had forced him to burn through the equivalent of eight of his five-gallon tins. “Forty precious gallons,” he later wrote, “gone before we were on our way!”
Jones had an almost fatalistic acceptance of the challenge he would face, estimating that he needed an extra 150 gallons of gas to make up for the added distance. “Navy got jittery and booted us off 10 hours too early,” he griped in his diary. “810 miles to Tokio—guys all knew they couldn’t make it. Oh well.”
Ski York busied himself with calculations of the bomber’s fuel consumption.
“Hey, Bob, take a look at this,” he said around 11 a.m., more than two hours into the flight. “Am I screwy or are we burning this much gas?”
Emmens reviewed the numbers. Was the gas gauge inaccurate, he wondered, or had the plane developed a leak.
“Hell, Ski,” he replied, “if that’s right we’re not going to get near the Chinese coast.”
Navigator Nolan Herndon dropped his charts and inspected the bomb bay fuel tank. The lieutenant reported the bad news: the gas gauge was correct.
“Great,” David Pohl, the gunner, said it himself. “Mrs. Pohl’s young hero is headed for a ditching somewhere in the China Sea—provided we get through the flak and fighter screen over Tokyo. Here I am, a Boston boy of 20, the youngest of the 80 Doolittle raiders, a sergeant whose future just passed.”
The crew had few options, none of them good. The airmen could land in Japan, but after an attack a landing there would likely lead to the crew’s torture and possible execution. The fliers could attempt to reach China, ditch in the sea, and pray for a long-shot rescue by an American submarine before sharks ate them. The final option was to fly to Russia, a much shorter distance. Even then the crew faced the possibility the Russians would mistake them for an enemy and shoot them down.
“Have you got a course from Tokyo to Russia plotted, Herndon?” York asked.
“I’ve plotted all possibilities.”
“Russia’s neutral, isn’t she?” engineer Staff Sergeant Theodore Laban asked.
“Doolittle didn’t exactly issue a direct order not to go to Russia, but he made it plenty obvious that it wasn’t a good idea,” York added. “They’d probably give us gas and we’d be on our way across occupied Korea and China tomorrow morning.”
“We hope!” Emmens answered.
The debate was soon interrupted.
“There’s the coast,” someone shouted. “This is it!”
THE NITTO MARU ’S REPORT reached Admiral Yamamoto on board the Yamato, his flagship, just after breakfast at seven thirty on April 18. Efforts to follow up with the ill-fated picket boat had so far failed, but few doubted the report’s veracity. Increased American message traffic in recent days—coupled with radio intelligence developed on April 10—had led many to conclude that Yamamoto’s long-feared raid on the nation’s capital was imminent. Japan had mistakenly concluded that America had lost a carrier in a submarine attack near Hawaii in January, leaving the United States with only three flattops. According to Nitto Maru’s errant contact report, the entire Pacific Fleet carrier force now steamed straight toward Tokyo. Yamamoto’s worst nightmare had come true. He ordered Tactical Method No. 3, Japan’s plan for the defense of the homeland. “Enemy task force containing three aircraft carriers as main strength sighted 0630 this morning 730 miles east of Tokyo,” he flashed. “Operate against American fleet.”
Most inside the Naval General Staff believed Japan had at least a day to prepare. The short range of carrier fighters and bombers meant raiders would not strike in all likelihood until the morning of April 19, given that the flattops would have to steam within two hundred miles of Tokyo in order to launch and recover planes. That was the tactic the United States had taken on previous raids against the Marshall and the Marcus Islands, not to mention the one Japan had used for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Senior leaders in the meantime hurriedly cobbled together all available air and naval forces to repel the invaders. Many of Japan’s frontline forces were still at sea; others had just returned in need of rest. Resourceful leaders went so far as to pilfer fighters and bombers from the carrier Kaga, a Pearl Harbor veteran now in Sasebo for repairs after striking a reef. Within a few hours Japan amassed no fewer than ninety carrier fighters, eighty medium bombers, thirty-six carrier bombers, and two flying boats.
Rear Admiral Seigo Yamagata, commander of the Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla, which was tasked to perform defensive air patrols east of the home islands, alerted his attack and reconnaissance units of the impending strike. Four twin-engine medium bombers crewed by up to six airmen had lifted off from Kisarazu Air Base near Tokyo at 6:30 a.m. for a routine morning patrol flight that extended out 700 nautical miles. Three hours and fifteen minutes into the flight, pilots spotted two twin-engine enemy bombers at a range of 580 and 600 nautical miles and at a distance from the Japanese planes of just two miles, though surprisingly this unusual report failed to dissuade Japan’s leaders that the American attack would not come at least until the next morning. Anxious to go on the offensive, Japan launched three medium bombers at 11:30 a.m. Twenty-nine more, armed with aerial torpedoes, roared into the skies at 12:45 p.m. accompanied by two dozen carrier fighters equipped with extra fuel tanks.
Japanese warships likewise readied for battle. Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, the Second Fleet commander, who had just returned to Yokosuka from southern operations the day before, prepared to return to sea at once in charge of all available surface forces. That included the fleet’s Fourth Cruiser Division, made up of the Atago, Takao, and Maya, as well as the Fifth Cruiser Division’s Myoko and Haguro. Vice Admiral Shiro Takasu, commander of the First Fleet with its four battlewagons, would depart Hiroshima Bay to support him. Forces at sea likewise raced to intercept the Americans, including a submarine squadron of six boats some five hundred miles off Honshu. Another squadron of five submarines abandoned its mission to Truk to search north of the Bonin Islands. In the Bashi Strait, off the southern coast of Formosa, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo ordered his powerful carriers Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu east. Fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the Pearl Harbor attack, raced to the Akagi’s operations room.
“Well,” Commander Minoru Genda, the First Air Fleet’s operations officer, announced upon Fuchida’s arrival, “they’ve come at last!”
The Japanese public had long braced for the possibility of air raids, given the nation’s proximity to the Soviet Union and China. Throughout the 1930s Japan held annual air-raid drills for the six major cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Kobe, emphasizing first aid, blackouts, and poisonous gas defense. Department stores and public buildings often displayed exhibits of World War I–era German bombs as well as mock-ups of miniature cities, complete with planes, bombs, and underground shelters. No less than 70 percent of Tokyo adults had invested in inexpensive gas masks. The war with China had only increased the importance of such precautions, prompting Japanese leaders to enlist Tokyo’s 140,955 neighborhood groups, a communal system made up of ten to twenty families whose roots stretched back to the feudal era. Armed with hand pumps, buckets, and shovels, these groups served on the front line of civilian defense in the event of an air raid.
Though these precautions contrasted with the government’s boastful declarations that an enemy raid was impossible, Tokyo residents had learned to accept the drills as a normal inconvenience of wartime life, similar to rationing and the loss of imported foreign goods. Outside of these frustrations little else had changed for many residents. Just two weeks earlier several thousand people had turned out for the cherry blossom festival. Music lovers still chatted about the Wednesday and Thursday night performances of famed piano soloist Kazuko Kusama at the Hibiya Public Hall, while gadflies buzzed about the upcoming House elections in which a hundred candidates vied for just thirty-two Tokyo-area seats. No fewer than 230 campaign rallies had taken place the day before in the nation’s capital. The Tokyo university baseball spring league—made up of the teams of six rival schools—planned to kick off the new season at 1 p.m. with two games, Wasdea versus Tokyo Imperial and Keio versus Hosei.
News of the war filtered out to the public through the government-controlled media, which painted a jingoistic picture of Japanese forces as great liberators throughout Asia and the Pacific, casting off the imperial chains of Europe and America. Articles in the press just that week claimed that Japanese textbooks already were bestsellers in recently captured Hong Kong. Other accounts stated that residents on Sumatra celebrated the two-month anniversary of the day Japanese forces parachuted onto the tropical island and that schoolchildren in Singapore were thrilled to learn to sing the “Kimigayo,” Japan’s national anthem. Closer to home the first of more than 30,000 families of the nation’s war dead had begun to pour into the capital for the Yasukuni Shrine Festival set to begin April 24, a four-day celebration that would include the enshrinement of 15,017 service members killed in the war with China. “I am overwhelmed with awe,” one widow told reporters, “that the spirit of my husband is going to be deified.”
Editorials meanwhile gloated over the capture of Bataan. “With the imminent fall of Corregidor the entire waters of the Southwestern Pacific will become an exclusive lake for the Japanese Navy,” bragged an editorial that morning in the Japan Times & Advertiser. “Warships of the United States and Brittan have been made into inglorious, baseless vagabonds on high seas. But fortunately, the matter was much simplified inasmuch as most of them already have been sent down to the bottom by Japanese warships which have swept Anglo-American ships clean of these waters.” The editorial went on to ridicule rumors of a possible Allied offensive in the weeks ahead. “Without any base for their fleet to start out from, how can they carry out their plans?” the paper asked. “All their ballyhoo about a summer offensive is the wishful thinking of the desperate Allied leaders who hope to keep their people from dwelling upon the numerous disasters their army and navy have suffered at the hands of the Japanese.”
The war would make a brief intrusion this morning into the otherwise busy weekend lives of many Tokyo-area residents. Newspapers two days earlier had alerted residents of a practice air-raid drill scheduled for the morning of April 18, a fact local police communicated just the night before to the detained diplomats at the American and British embassies. About the same time the last B-25 roared off the deck of the Hornet, Tokyo responded to what officials referred to as the “first alarm.” No sirens sounded, nor did the government mandate that residents seek shelter. Only the city’s firefighting companies and air-raid wardens participated. Two firefighting squadrons appeared that morning outside the British embassy, while the detained American diplomats simply tugged shut the blackout curtains in the embassy and the chancery. The drill, however, soon ended. By 9:30 a.m. the air-raid wardens at the British embassy had stood down, and by 11 a.m. the one from the American embassy had teed off for a round of golf.
Air maneuvers over the capital were frequent, and this Saturday morning was no different. Tokyo residents enjoyed celebrations in advance of Emperor Hirohito’s forty-first birthday at the end of the month as well as the Yasukuni Shrine Festival, which would feature a flyover of five hundred Army airplanes. The press had announced the maneuvers several days earlier, and authorities had alerted diplomats at the American embassy that morning. Firefighters lingered on the streets to watch the maneuvers while detained diplomats with little else to do gazed skyward as Japanese fighters battled one another in mock dogfights. Troops along the city’s waterfront floated barrage balloons, large inflatables anchored with metal cables that proved hazardous to any low-flying enemy planes. These activities wound down around noon. One detained American official, who had received special permission to visit a doctor, caught a streetcar at 12:15 p.m. Others traded small talk. Across the sprawling city of Tokyo, life returned to normal, residents no doubt comforted that for 2,600 years no invader had ever touched Japan.