If you have one plane available use it to bomb Tokio.
—ALLAN JOHNSON, CONSTITUENT TELEGRAM TO ROOSEVELT
DOOLITTLE IMMEDIATELY STARTED to plan what he dubbed “Special Aviation Project No. 1.” To meet the tentative April departure date, he knew he would have to hustle to map out logistics, modify bombers, and pick and train his aircrews. But Arnold had given him what he needed most: top priority. If anyone gives you flak, Arnold instructed Doolittle, tell him to call the general. That fear would motivate others. “Anything that I wanted I got,” Doolittle recalled, “ahead of every one else.” The first task was to map out basic logistics of the operation. The veteran aviator envisioned that his bombers would take off as much as 500 miles east of Tokyo. The flight to China would add at least another 1,200 miles. Doolittle estimated that the greatest nonstop flight would be 2,000 miles, though to be safe he set a necessary cruising range of 2,400 miles with a bomb load of 2,000 pounds. He knew those demands would require engineers to modify the twin-engine B-25s, whose maximum range topped out at just 1,300 miles.
Named for airpower pioneer General William “Billy” Mitchell, the B-25 was one of the newest planes in America’s arsenal. It was developed by the North American Aviation Company in 1939 in response to the needs in Europe. The initial design proposal took just forty days. The Mitchell bomber made its first test flight in August 1940, forgoing the luxury of prototypes or even wind tunnel tests. The 53-foot-long bomber consisted of no fewer than 165,000 parts, excluding the engines, instrumentation, and some 150,000 rivets. Powered by twin 1,700-horsepower Wright Cyclone engines, the B-25 could fly at 300 miles per hour and up to 23,500 feet. The Army’s initial order of 184 bombers—made just nineteen days after Hitler’s forces marched into Poland—would prove only a fraction of the 9,816 planes workers would manufacture over the course of the war, hitting a peak rate of almost 10 a day. “It is a good, stable ship,” proclaimed the New York Times in 1941, “not spectacular but reliable.”
The $180,031 bomber was far from perfect. It lacked the power and speed of Martin’s rival B-26 Marauder, and its three machine guns fell short of the thirteen that guarded Boeing’s larger, four-engine B-17 Flying Fortress. The B-25’s 3,500-pound payload likewise could not compete with the ten tons that Boeing’s B-29 Superfortress would deliver later in the war. But the Mitchell bomber was chosen for the Tokyo raid for one reason—its sixty-seven-foot wingspan would clear the superstructure of an aircraft carrier. The size and versatility that made the B-25 a natural fit for Doolittle’s mission would propel the rugged bomber into combat in every major theater of the war, from Europe and North Africa to the remote islands of the Pacific. Engineers along the way would improve the bomber’s firepower and armor, increase the fuel capacity, and add torpedo and wing bomb racks, allowing this aerial workhorse to tackle missions ranging from reconnaissance to antisubmarine patrols.
Another feature that made the B-25 an optimal plane for Doolittle’s mission was that it required a small crew of just five airmen to operate, half of those needed to fly a B-17. The pilot and copilot sat shoulder to shoulder in the tight cockpit, while the navigator occupied a tiny compartment just behind the flight deck. The bombardier reached the bubbled nose via a crawlway beneath the navigator’s compartment. A similar passage above the bomb bay connected the fore and aft sections where the gunner sat. The austere aircraft offered few frills, though regulations at least allowed airmen to smoke above one thousand feet. “The B-26 was a Lincoln Town Car,” joked one former navigator. “The B-25 was a Model-A Ford.” What the Mitchell bomber lacked in comfort, it made up for in ease of flying, a fact aircrews loved. “It is so much more than an inanimate mass of material, intricately geared and wired and riveted into a tight package,” recalled Ted Lawson, one of the mission’s pilots. “It’s a good, trustworthy friend.”
To help modify the B-25s for the mission, Doolittle turned to the engineers at Ohio’s Wright Field, the main experimental and development center for the U.S. Army Air Forces. Opened in 1927 on more than five thousand acres near Dayton, Wright Field held a special significance for Doolittle, who performed in the aerial circus before fifteen thousand awed spectators at the center’s dedication that October. Wright Field had since developed into one of the world’s top aeronautical research hubs, with a staggering $150 million in laboratories and scientific equipment. Engineers labored each day in various workshops, wind tunnels, and pressure chambers designed to simulate high altitudes and subzero temperatures. Others tested new parachutes and body armor and pushed airplanes to the breaking point to determine structural strength. A reporter with the Milwaukee Sentinel described it all best: “Wright Field is the place where miracles are performed so that American airmen can kill their enemies and stay alive themselves.”
Those miracle workers drew up the necessary plans as Doolittle hurried to round up the planes. The size of the Hornet’s flight deck would limit how many bombers he could take on the mission, but until Captain Duncan could put a few B-25s aboard a flattop to conduct test trials, Doolittle would not have a precise number. Regardless, he did not have time to wait. “It is requested that one B-25B airplane be made available to the Mid-Continent Airlines at Minneapolis, Minnesota on January 23, 1942, or at the earliest possible moment thereafter,” Doolittle wrote to the chief of the air staff. “It is further requested that 17 more B-25B’s be diverted to the Mid-Continent Airlines for alteration as required.” Doolittle upped his request a week later to twenty-four planes, a move designed to guarantee that he would have at least eighteen bombers in excellent shape for the mission. Orders called for the bombers to arrive on a staggered schedule every four days throughout the first half of February.
The most critical modification centered on fuel. The B-25 boasted two wing tanks that held a total of 646 gallons. Adding another thousand miles to the bomber’s range meant Doolittle would need to almost double the B-25’s fuel capacity, increasing the bomber’s weight six pounds per gallon and therefore the distance needed to take off. The aircraft’s tight space meant a single added fuel tank was not an option. Creative engineers instead would have to develop several tanks of various capacities that could be shoehorned into unused compartments. Workers with the McQuay Company initially constructed a 265-gallon steel tank, but Doolittle later ordered it replaced with a smaller yet malleable 225-gallon bulletproof bladder made by the United States Rubber Company out of Mishawaka, Indiana. Engineers planned to squeeze the rubber bladder into the top of the bomb bay, though allowing enough room for the plane to still carry up to four 500-pound demolition bombs or four 500-pound incendiary clusters.
The rubber tank, however, proved problematic, often developing leaks in the connections. After constructing a single satisfactory tank, engineers reduced the size of the outer cover to facilitate installation but failed to shrink the inner container, causing the tank to develop wrinkles that reduced capacity and increased the likelihood of leaks or even failure. Time would prohibit workers from making new covers for all the tanks, but putting air pressure on them increased the capacity by as much as 15 gallons. Engineers meanwhile devised a 160-gallon rubber bladder that would fit in the crawlway above the bomb bay. Once the fuel was used, a crew member could flatten the empty bladder to allow the engineer-gunner to crawl forward. A third 60-gallon leakproof tank would replace the bomber’s faulty lower gun turret. Lastly, each plane would carry ten 5-gallon cans of gasoline in the radio operator’s rear compartment, giving the bombers a total of 1,141 gallons, of which 1,100 were available.
Doolittle needed more than gas tanks. He ordered the pyrotechnics removed from the bombers to reduce the fire hazard and free up weight, while workers installed two conventional landing flares just forward of the rear-armored bulkhead to protect against enemy fire. Doolittle demanded the installation of deicers and anti-icers, reducing the cruising speed, though a necessary precaution in the off chance that the Russians allowed the bombers to land in Vladivostok. To document the mission workers installed automatic cameras in the tail of the lead ship and each flight leader’s plane. Capable of snapping sixty pictures at half-second intervals, the cameras were designed to start filming automatically when the first bomb dropped. Doolittle likewise requested that technicians install 16-millimeter movie cameras in the other ten bombers. Since he planned to maintain radio silence throughout the flight, Doolittle ordered the 230-pound liaison radios removed to free up weight. To further guard against unintentional broadcasts with the interphone, crews later plucked out the coils from the command transmitters.
Doolittle began to outline the actual raid, drafting a handwritten memo on lined notebook paper. “The purpose of this special project is to bomb and fire the industrial center of Japan,” he wrote. “It is anticipated that this will not only cause confusion and impede production but will undoubtedly facilitate operation against Japan in other theaters due to their probable withdrawal of troops for the purpose of defending the home country. An action of this kind is most desirable now due to the psychological effect on the American public, our allies, and our enemies.” The plan called for the bombers to concentrate on Tokyo, though a few would hit the cities of Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. Doolittle ordered target maps of the area’s iron, steel, and aluminum industries as well as aircraft plants, shipyards, and oil refineries, while the Chemical Warfare Services began preparing forty-eight special incendiary bomb clusters ready for shipment from Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland no later than March 15.
Arnold helped shoulder some of the burden, reaching out to Brigadier General Carl Spaatz, the chief of the air staff. “It is desired that you select for me the objectives in Japan you consider most desirable to be attacked in case we find it possible to send bombardment airplanes over Japan sometime in the near future,” Arnold wrote in a January 22 memo. “The bombing mission should be able to cover any part of Japan from Tokyo south.” Spaatz’s office sent a detailed three-page analysis back just nine days later, citing Nakajima’s and Tokyo Gas’ aircraft and engine plants in the nation’s capital, along with Kawasaki’s factories in Kobe and Mitsubishi’s and Aichi’s plants in Nagoya. “The above aircraft factories represent approximately 75% of the aircraft productive capacity of Japan,” the memo stated. “These are considered vital targets because Japan is dependent alone upon what they can manufacture.”
The report further identified important targets in the iron, steel, aluminum, and magnesium industries as well as in critical petroleum refineries. The study concluded with a calculation of the total volume of potential targets for each major city. Tokyo and its suburbs of Kawasaki and Tsurumi contained thirteen power plants, six oil refineries, four aircraft factories, two steel plants, and an arsenal. One of the principal cities of Japan’s aircraft industry, Nagoya was home to four such factories, including one of the largest airframe plants in the world, a more than four-million-square-foot facility owned by Mitsubishi. Kobe offered up another four aircraft factories, plus two steel plants, two dockyards, and two power plants. “Many of these objectives,” the January 31 report noted, “are concentrated in fairly small areas so that by careful selection several individual objectives might well be grouped into excellent area targets.”
Doolittle envisioned that his bombers would take off at night and arrive over Japan at dawn. An attack at first light would guarantee greater accuracy as well as allow crews time to fly to China, refuel at airfields near the coast, and push another eight hundred miles inland to Chungking and beyond the reach of Japanese forces fighting on the mainland, all before nightfall. If enemy forces discovered the task force or if intelligence for any reason demanded that his bombers attack at night, Doolittle believed it would need to be a moonlit night in case Japanese cities observed blackout restrictions. Otherwise a moonless evening would be best. Doolittle studied up on the weather, hoping to avoid morning fog over Tokyo, low overcast skies over China, strong westerly winds, and icing. He suggested daily weather updates from China be sent in special code. “An initial study of meteorological conditions indicates that the sooner the raid is made the better,” he wrote. “The weather will become increasingly unfavorable after the end of April.”
China remained one of Doolittle’s biggest logistical challenges, because Japanese forces occupied strategic positions along the coast. He selected several airfields around Chuchow—seventy miles inland and some two hundred miles south of Shanghai—and estimated that crews would need at least 20,000 gallons of 100-octane aviation fuel and another 600 gallons of lubricating oil. Doolittle recommended that First Lieutenant Harry Howze with the Air Service Command, formerly with Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, help make arrangements in China. Colonel Claire Chennault, aviation adviser to the Chinese, should then assign a responsible American or English-speaking native to physically check that supplies were in place. Doolittle suggested that work start at once and cautioned that secrecy was vital. Even the Chinese should not be informed until the planes were airborne, for fear that news of the operation would leak to the Japanese. “Premature notification,” Doolittle warned, “would be fatal to the project.”
ON THE FRIGID SUNDAY afternoon of February 1, 1942, Captain Duncan reported to the aircraft carrier Hornet, moored alongside Pier 7 at Norfolk Naval Operating Base. The $32 million flattop had returned to Virginia just forty-eight hours earlier, concluding a thirty-five-day shakedown cruise in the Gulf of Mexico. Duncan had raced in recent weeks to map out the Navy’s preliminary plan for the mission to bomb Tokyo, an operation that until now had been largely theoretical, involving an analysis of aircraft wingspans, takeoff speeds, and carrier deck space. The time to test the ambitious plan had finally arrived. If Duncan had erred in his calculations, or if the bombers for any reason proved unable to take off from the carrier’s short flight deck, the mission in all likelihood was dead in the water. These concerns hung over Duncan as he climbed the carrier’s gangway at 4:50 p.m. and hurried to the in-port cabin of Captain Marc Mitscher, the Hornet’s fifty-five-year-old skipper.
Mitscher was one of the Navy’s more colorful captains, an officer whose undisciplined youth hardly foreshadowed that he might one day earn the prized command of America’s newest carrier. The wiry officer who stood barely five feet six and weighed 135 pounds grew up in Oklahoma during the land rush, a time when Indian raid alarms still terrified residents. He learned to count by playing cards and once watched a deputy marshal dump a dead outlaw on the street. Mitscher’s feral manner clashed with the rigidity of the Naval Academy, where he struggled in the classroom, racked up 280 demerits—30 more than the maximum allowed—and was caught up in a hazing scandal after the death of a classmate. The academy finally kicked him out in his second year. Though his politically connected father secured him reappointment, Mitscher had to start over. Even then he continued to struggle, but managed to graduate in 1910. “I was a 2.5 man,” he later joked. “That was good enough for me.”
This unlikely leader found his passion in the skies, earning his wings in June 1916 to become naval aviator no. 33. Mitscher received the Navy Cross three years later for his participation in the service’s first transatlantic flight, from Newfoundland to Portugal. He later served as the executive officer of the carriers Langley and Saratoga and skippered the seaplane tender Wright before the Navy offered him command of the Hornet, commissioned in October. The humble skipper still sewed his own buttons on his shirt and loved trout fishing, though his lack of time off forced him to derive most of his pleasure swapping fish tales on the bridge, dressed as always with an open collar and a long-billed cap to protect his bald head from the tropical sun that scorched his hands and freckled his nose and cheeks. Long cruises would dry his skin like parchment, forcing him to scratch incessantly as he perched in his swivel chair, always facing aft. “I’m an old man now,” he liked to say. “I spent my youth looking ahead.”
Those closest to Mitscher marveled at his modesty. When he learned of his recent selection for rear admiral, he worried about his fellow officers who had been passed over. “In being selected for promotion over so many of my classmates and others whom I consider good friends and much better Naval officers than myself,” he wrote a colleague, “I have a feeling of regret about the whole business.” Not only did Mitscher shun self-promotion, but he proved a surprisingly reserved and quiet leader in a military filled with oversize personalities. “He wasted no words,” recalled George Murray, skipper of the Enterprise. “One short little expression or the lifting of an eyebrow or just a word conveyed more meaning in so far as he was concerned than somebody else talking for fifteen minutes.” The few words he spoke came out like a whisper. “Even when he shakes with laughter, he somehow manages to do it silently,” observed the Saturday Evening Post. “And when he swears, he does it as softly as most men pray.”
Though Mitscher did not yet know it, Duncan had him and his carrier in mind to transport Doolittle to Japan—if the test proved successful.
“Can you put a loaded B-25 in the air on a normal deck run?” Duncan asked when he met Mitscher that afternoon.
“How many B-25’s on deck?”
“Fifteen.”
Mitscher consulted a scale replica of the Hornet’s flight deck known as the spotting board. “Yes,” he finally answered, “it can be done.”
“Good,” Duncan answered, “I’m putting two aboard for a test launching tomorrow.”
Arnold’s staff had ordered three B-25s with the “best combat crews available” to report to Norfolk no later than January 20: “Airplanes will have combat equipment installed, less bombs.” The plan called for the first B-25 to take off carrying only a full load of gas. The second bomber would then roar down the flight deck with a medium load, followed lastly by a fully loaded plane: “Successive take-offs will, of course, be gauged by the preceding ones.” A burned-out engine on the eve of the test had sidelined one of the bombers. The carrier’s boat- and airplane-hoisting crane lifted the other two aboard, using a special sling manufactured for the operation by the Norfolk Naval Air Station. Mitscher ordered one bomber spotted forward where the first of fifteen B-25s would go; he ordered the other aft. In following Admiral King’s strict order for secrecy, the Hornet’s deck log contains no record of the bombers.
Sailors lit a fire under boiler no. 6 at 5:30 a.m. on February 2, followed forty-five minutes later by boilers no. 3 and no. 5. A harbor pilot climbed aboard at 9:15 a.m., and the Hornet got underway seventeen minutes later. Winds blew out of the northwest at four miles per hour this winter morning as temperatures hovered around freezing. A light snow began to fall. Sailors lit fires under five more boilers moments before Mitscher took the conn at 9:52 a.m. An hour and a half later the 809-foot flattop glided past the floating lighthouse Chesapeake. The destroyers Ludlow and Hilary P. Jones patrolled ahead as the Hornet increased speed to twenty-two knots.
The zero hour finally arrived. The deck log shows that the Hornet went to flight quarters at 12:55 p.m. and turned into the wind twenty-three minutes later. First up was Lieutenant John Fitzgerald Jr., who had earned his wings in 1940. The Army aviator had so far logged some fifteen hundred hours in the skies with more than four hundred of those in B-25s. Fitzgerald’s current assignment as a B-25 test officer at Ohio’s Wright Field made him a perfect candidate for the afternoon’s test. “Since flying a B-25 off a carrier simply had never been done there was no kind of previous instruction available,” he recalled. “All we could do was practice extremely short takeoffs on land.”
That uncertainty was evident in the response one of the bomber pilots gave communication officer Lieutenant Commander Oscar Dodson when he wished the airman good luck. “If we go into the water, don’t run over us.”
Duncan dressed in foul-weather gear and stood on the port wing of the bridge alongside Mitscher. One deck down below, Fitzgerald throttled up his B-25. His cockpit windshield revealed five hundred feet of deck space. During the more than two dozen short-field takeoffs he had practiced, Fitzgerald had managed to get his bomber up in as little as three hundred feet. The plane’s air speed indicator revealed that the carrier’s speed combined with the wind across the deck gave him forty-five miles per hour before he even released the brakes. He needed to accelerate only twenty-three miles per hour more and he would be airborne. Fitzgerald’s biggest concern centered on the proximity of the carrier’s island as the B-25’s 67-foot wingspan left him perilously little room for error.
The launching officer flashed Fitzgerald the signal at 1:27 p.m., and he released the brakes. The bomber charged down the flight deck. Duncan watched as the B-25 stubbornly remained on deck. Just a few feet before the edge of the deck the bomber climbed into the skies. The experience felt much different for Fitzgerald in the cockpit. “When I got the signal to go, I let the brakes off and was airborne almost immediately,” Fitzgerald later recalled. “The wing of my plane rose so fast I was afraid I’d strike the ship’s ‘island’ over the flight deck. But I missed it.”
Mitscher flashed a smile at Duncan.
Lieutenant James McCarthy went next. The Army aviator throttled up the B-25’s engines, released the brakes, and the second bomber roared into the skies, this time in just 275 feet. The Hornet’s deck log shows the carrier completed the launches at 1:47 p.m. The two bombers, unable to land back on the Hornet, returned to the airfield.
Duncan had little time to celebrate. The ship’s general quarters alarm sounded at 2 p.m. The Hornet’s air patrol reported a submarine periscope. The destroyers charged through the waves, dropping depth charges as the air patrol zeroed in on the target. The Hornet changed course as the carrier’s five-inch batteries opened fire. Mitscher watched the action unfold. “Frank, it’s a nice oil slick,” he said to Commander Frank Akers, the ship’s navigator. “But I can still see a foot or so of what appears to be a periscope sticking up. This is the first blasted submarine that I’ve ever seen like that.”
The Ludlow made a closer inspection and reported the alleged submarine periscope was actually the mast of a sunken ship, news that drew a laugh from Mitscher. “Very realistic drill,” he said to Akers. “Send them a ‘well done.’”
The Hornet returned to port, anchoring at 5:27 p.m. in Berth 27 at Hampton Roads. Duncan hurried back to Washington, thrilled his calculations were correct. “There was a six foot clearance between the wing tip and the island,” he wrote in a two-page memo to Admiral King. “This did not seem to bother the pilots as both airplanes maintained perfectly straight courses on the take-off run and appeared to be under excellent control.” Duncan reported that the Hornet could carry between fifteen and twenty bombers, depending on whether the Navy wanted to leave enough deck space to operate a possible squadron of fighters. King reviewed the memo, scrawling a single word of approval across the bottom in pencil: “Excellent.”
Mitscher gathered that evening with his executive officer, air officer, and navigator to discuss the operation. Duncan had told Mitscher only that the afternoon’s operation was designed to test the B-25’s takeoff capabilities, tests the skipper knew could just as easily be performed at an airfield on shore. He likewise knew that if the Navy planned to use the Hornet to transport Army bombers to a remote base a crane would more easily facilitate the off-loading of the planes. Mitscher could draw only one conclusion: his flattop was about to go into battle, but he felt miffed that his old friend Duncan had not told him about the mission. So did his men, but the skipper counseled them to remain patient. “The less you know,” he cautioned, “the better.”
DOOLITTLE STILL NEEDED AIRCREWS—enough pilots, bombardiers, and gunners to operate two dozen planes. The B-25 was such a new bomber that only a few outfits in the country flew them. Doolittle had asked for bombers and learned that the Air Forces could spare planes most easily from the Seventeenth Bombardment Group, comprising the Thirty-Fourth, Thirty-Seventh, and Ninety-Fifth Squadrons and the associated Eighty-Ninth Reconnaissance Squadron, all based in Pendleton, Oregon. Rather than leave aircrews idle without planes, Doolittle decided to recruit his fliers from the same group. Given the danger of the mission, he wanted only volunteers. Not a single airman in Seventeenth Bombardment Group had flown in combat, and few if any of the gunners had ever fired a machine gun from a plane. The navigators likewise had little practical experience, particularly over open water. Orders rolled off the Teletype on February 3, transferring all planes, aircrews, and ground personnel to the Columbia Army Air Base in South Carolina.
The first outfit in the nation to receive the B-25, the Seventeenth’s crews had marveled at the twin-tail bomber with a tricycle landing gear. “When I saw it for the first time, I was in awe. It looked so huge. It was so sleek and powerful,” remembered pilot Edgar McElroy. “Reminded me of a big old scorpion, just ready to sting!” “I couldn’t eat until I had a crack at mine,” noted Ted Lawson, another pilot. “You just had to stand there and look at them, and breathe heavily.” Compared with the lumbering Douglas B-18s the crews had flown, the Mitchell bombers felt like a real upgrade, earning the nickname “rocket plane.” New bombers arrived every few days throughout the spring of 1941 as pilots pilgrimaged down to North American’s Los Angeles headquarters to retrieve the planes right off the line, spending several days test-flying them. “Not only did we have a good time in that area down there for a week, but it was all at North American’s expense,” recalled fellow pilot Bob Emmens. “We signed chits for everything—the bar, the dining room—and then flew our airplane back to the unit.”
The bombardment group had served as aerial guinea pigs, testing the B-25’s speed, firepower, and gas consumption, even flying the planes cross-country to Virginia’s Langley Field. Many participated that summer and fall in Army training maneuvers across the Southeast. “It was the first time that I got a good, close look at tanks, fighters and other Army bombers,” recalled pilot Jack Sims. “I’m sure that ground personnel got their first view of our B-25s.” The bomber crews simulated combat, practicing night formation flying as well as targeting infantry forces and fending off fighter attacks. Even on the ground the men slept in steel helmets. “The maneuvers were close to the real McCoy,” remembered Lawson. “We were on alert twenty-four hours a day. Other bombing squadrons would come over, night or day, and litter our hangars with sacks of flour, while our fighting planes buzzed around them. We tried to bomb Shreveport before the P-38’s and P-39’s could intercept us.”
The men of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group represented a cross section of American life. The airmen had come from big cities and small towns, from frigid Alaska in the north to the dusty southern plains of Texas. Some had grown up the sons of white-collar workers—doctors, dentists, engineers, and accountants—while others shared Doolittle’s blue-collar roots, the offspring of farmers and ranchers, grocers and oil field workers. A few of the men, like Captain Edward “Ski” York and Second Lieutenant Charles Ozuk Jr., came from new immigrant families, while First Lieutenant Harry McCool’s father was born on a wagon train rolling west from Missouri to California. Despite the varied backgrounds, the crews had all jelled. “It was the greatest, wildest bunch of men that I have ever been associated with. There was just something about that 17th Group, about the collection of people that were in it, that I have never experienced since,” remembered pilot Bill Bower. “We played hard, we worked hard.”
The attack on Pearl Harbor had brought the airmen back to the Pacific Northwest to fly antisubmarine patrols off the Oregon and Washington coasts, but the missions proved anticlimactic compared with the stories out of the Pacific. America was a long way from the fight, and many of the airmen felt restless and frustrated. “There was no tangible enemy. It was like being slugged with a single punch in a dark room, and having no way of knowing where to slug back,” Lawson later wrote. “There was a helpless, filled-up, want-to-do-something feeling that they weren’t coming—that we’d have to go all the way over there to punch back and get even.” That was fine by most. “Everybody was interested in getting to the scene of the action,” recalled Bower, “going to war, volunteering for some mission.” Furious over the attack on Pearl Harbor, bombardier Sergeant Robert Bourgeois captured the feelings of his fellow fliers with his daily mantra: “I sure would give anything to drop a bomb on Tokyo.”
Doolittle planned to offer the men that chance.
The pilots flew the B-25s cross-country, with some directed to divert to Minneapolis for fuel tank modifications. Others in the bomb group took the train from Oregon to South Carolina, a roughly five-day journey east through Denver. “We played poker all day and in the evening,” Sergeant Joseph Manske, an engineer-gunner, wrote in his diary. “We got some whiskey and I got sick on it.” The airmen arrived that February at the Columbia Army Air Base, camping outdoors as the winter rains soon turned the fields to mud. “We lived in tents on the field—ours leaked like a sieve,” Second Lieutenant Billy Farrow, a South Carolina native and pilot, wrote to his mother. “Sure took a ragging about the ‘sunny South’—we nearly froze getting up in the mornings. Sometimes, the temperature was below freezing. You know how that temperature numbs you down there. Oregon weather is a summer zephyr in comparison.”
Many assumed that the transfer to South Carolina meant the group would fly similar missions off the East Coast, hunting German submarines that menaced American convoys. Others speculated that the planes might soon deploy to England and execute bomber missions over Europe. Doolittle flew to Columbia soon thereafter to help organize the crews. Captain Ross Greening and Major Jack Hilger watched his bomber circle down with the nimble air of a fighter plane.
“Damn it,” Hilger exclaimed. “With all our experience none of us can fly a B-25 like that.”
The men watched the bomber taxi to the control tower and stop before the pilot climbed down.
“For God’s sake,” exclaimed Greening. “It’s Doolittle.”
“What in hell is The Little Man doing here?” Hilger asked.
Doolittle assembled group commander Lieutenant Colonel William Mills and squadron leaders Hilger and Captains Ski York, Al Rutherford, and Karl Baumeister. He told the men that he was in charge of a dangerous mission, one that would require the bombers to take off in just five hundred feet.
The officers blinked.
“That’s about all I can tell you,” Doolittle concluded. “It’s strictly a volunteer operation. And the men must volunteer in the dark. It’ll take us away about six weeks, but that’s all you can tell your men.”
Doolittle trusted Mills and his squadron leaders to select the two dozen crews. The only person Doolittle was certain he didn’t want was Mills, who would soon swap his oak leaf insignia for the silver eagle of a full-bird colonel, outranking Doolittle. “The group commander was a colonel. I was a light colonel,” he recalled. “He was the last guy I wanted because I had not yet been given permission to lead the flight.”
Doolittle would have to divide his time between Washington and Minneapolis. He asked Mills to recommend an experienced deputy, who could oversee mission training at Eglin Field, a secluded airbase Doolittle arranged in Florida, where crews could practice short-field takeoffs, gunnery, and open-ocean navigation. Mills recommended Hilger. The three captains all volunteered, but Mills would only permit York to go.
The squadron leaders put the word out, but not everyone jumped at the opportunity. “Some of you fellows are going to get killed,” one of the captains warned his men. “How many of you will volunteer?”
“Boy,” thought Corporal Jacob DeShazer, a bombardier from Oregon, “I don’t want to do that.”
“Would you go?” the captain asked the first man in the line.
“Yes.”
He moved on to the next airman.
“Would you go?”
Affirmative.
“Would you go?”
“Yes.”
The captain reached the end of the line and stood before DeShazer. He heard his fellow fliers answer affirmative. When it came to him, he muttered the same: “I was too big a coward,” he recalled, “to say no.”
For many others, there was no hesitation when asked for a show of hands.
“The entire group stood,” remembered Bob Emmens of Oregon. “Every man in every squadron volunteered for this mission.”
“Hands just kept going up,” added Charles Ozuk Jr., a Pennsylvania native. “There was no time to think about it. No second thoughts.”
Few dared miss out on the chance to fly with legendary stunt and racing pilot Jimmy Doolittle, who had inspired many to join the Army Air Forces. “The name ‘Doolittle’ meant so much to aviators that man, we just volunteered like crazy,” remembered Bobby Hite, a pilot. “He was a real leader. The men loved him and respected him.”
Edgar McElroy’s copilot was shocked to see his hand in the air. “You can’t volunteer, Mac!” he exclaimed. “You’re married, and you and Aggie are expecting a baby soon. Don’t do it!”
“I got into the Air Force to do what I can,” McElroy answered. “Aggie understands how I feel. The war won’t be easy for any of us.”
Oklahoma native Corporal Bert Jordan had been on guard duty all night. He arrived late to morning formation and found his fellow fliers with hands raised.
“What are you holding your hand up for?” he asked.
“Well,” one answered, “they want somebody to go someplace.”
Jordan was already tired of South Carolina, living in tents in the cold and mud. His feet itched; he felt eager to travel.
“I just wanted to get out of Columbia so I held up my hand,” he recalled. “I was one of the fortunate or unfortunate, whichever the case may be, to be selected.”
Bill Birch felt the same way. “It was disgusting,” he recalled of the rain and mud. “So I figured whatever came up, I’d volunteer for it.”
Herb Macia knew for sure he wanted to go when he knocked on the door of Jack Hilger’s office, unaware that the major already had plans for him.
“Herb, what do you want?” he asked.
“I’m ready to volunteer for that mission.”
“You are already a volunteer,” Hilger informed him. “You are on my mission and you are on my crew and you are going to be a navigator and bombardier.”
Most of the officers in York’s squadron were in Minneapolis for fuel tank installation. He phoned his deputy Captain Davy Jones, directing him to meet him at Wright Field, where the aviators climbed up into the catwalk of a hanger.
“Doolittle has been here looking for volunteers. It’s a dangerous mission,” York told him. “You go back and tell the troops that much.”
Jones returned to Minneapolis and summoned his fellow airmen to his hotel suite. Two dozen men crammed inside, some stretched out on the beds, others in chairs. Cigarette smoke clouded the air.
“There’s been a change,” Jones told them. “We’re not going to work out of Columbia. Captain York wanted me to talk to you and see how many of you would volunteer for a special mission. It’s dangerous, important and interesting.”
“Well,” one of the others prodded. “What is it?”
“I can’t tell you. I don’t even know myself,” Jones said. “All I can tell you is that it’s dangerous and that it’ll take you out of the country for maybe two or three months.”
“Where?” someone asked.
“I’m sorry I can’t tell you any more,” Jones said. “You’ve heard all the particulars I can give you. Now, who’ll volunteer?”
All did.
Not everyone would be so lucky.
“Don’t go denuding the outfit because I have to go to Europe,” Mills warned York. “I need some good people, too.”
The flood of volunteers exceeded the two dozen crews Doolittle needed. “We had so many,” remembered York. “We had to pick and choose.”
One of those unable to go was Robert Emmens.
“You have to stay behind—you are the oldest guy in the squadron now—and run the squadron,” Hilger told him.
Richard Knobloch returned to base after visiting his girlfriend to learn the news of the mission. “Knobby, you should have been here,” one of his friends told him. “They want volunteers to fly with Jimmy Doolittle.”
The opportunity to fly with such a famous aviator thrilled Knobloch. “Boy, here’s a chance for a great adventure,” the pilot thought. “I’m going to be a hero.”
“How about me?” Knobloch asked. “Didn’t anybody put my name in?”
“No,” someone told him. “Too late now.”
Knobloch went to his boss, the squadron ops officer, and begged to go.
“It’s too late,” he told him.
So Knobloch hurried to see Captain Baumeister, the squadron commander. “Sir,” he pleaded. “I want to go on this operation.”
“It’s too late,” Baumeister said.
Knobloch pleaded his case all the way up to group commander Mills, who only echoed the others.
“Will you at least put me on the alternate list? I want to go,” he begged. “Here’s an opportunity to fly with a great aviator, Doolittle.”
JAPAN’S RAMPAGE ACROSS ASIA and the Pacific had left Roosevelt exhausted and irritable with Congress, the media, and even the American public. The news had grown so bad in recent weeks that Secretary of State Hull had begun cleaning out his desk and the perennially sick Hopkins landed in the hospital. Isolationist newspapers, from the New York Daily News and the Washington Times Herald to the Chicago Tribune, once critical of the president’s foreign policy now targeted his handling of the war. Editorials argued that Japan was the real menace and that America should concentrate its strength in the Pacific, not in Europe, while others even criticized military sales and loans to Allies as weakening American power. “There is a prevailing desire in the press for offensive warfare,” noted one White House analysis of the editorial opinion. “It appears to be motivated, not merely by an eagerness for revenge against the Japanese, but also by a recognition that only offensive strategy can bring the war to a successful conclusion.”
America’s efforts to rebuff the Japanese had met disaster in December when the Navy attempted to relieve Wake, a remote outpost built on the 2.5-square-mile rim of a submerged volcano. More than five hundred marines and sailors—aided by about twelve hundred civilian construction workers—repelled the Japanese for fifteen days, a story that gripped the American public. The carriers Saratoga and Lexington rushed toward Wake as the Japanese charged ashore. “The enemy is on the island,” Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the garrison’s senior officer, signaled on December 23. “The issue is in doubt.” With the Saratoga just 425 miles away, the Navy aborted the operation, afraid to risk the loss of a carrier or trigger another attack on Hawaii. Wake fell that afternoon. Some on board the Saratoga wept, while Enterprise aviators vented in an unofficial log: “Everyone seems to feel that it’s the war between the two yellow races.” Even Roosevelt felt Wake’s loss “a worse blow than Pearl Harbor.”
The British had proven equally impotent seven weeks later to stop the fall of Singapore, a far greater strategic loss than Wake. Constructed atop a mangrove swamp over some two decades—and at a price of some $400,000,000—the equatorial fortress had served to check Japanese expansion into the Indian Ocean. Singapore’s fall opened the doors for the Japanese to cut off lifelines to Russia and China, target India, and possibly link up with German forces in the Middle East. The loss put the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and even Australia in the Japanese crosshairs. Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, whom Roosevelt tapped to serve as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China, captured his shock over Singapore’s loss in his diary. “Christ,” he wrote. “What the hell is the matter?” For the first time the press speculated that the United States might lose the war. “There can now be no doubt,” observed a reporter in the New York Times, “that we are facing perhaps the blackest period in our history.”
Attention next focused on the Philippines, where some 110,000 American and Filipino troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur had retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island of Corregidor. The Japanese had entered Manila on January 2 and cut off any hope of reinforcement. Despite the media’s lionized coverage of the gallant stand, Roosevelt knew MacArthur’s forces were doomed. During a February news conference, when pressed about America’s inability to supply more planes, Roosevelt barked at a reporter, “If you will tell me how to get a bomber in there, they can have a bomber.” The Germans and Japanese mocked MacArthur in shortwave broadcasts, paying tribute to his struggle as a way to embarrass the United States. “In the name of fair play and chivalry,” one broadcast trumpeted, “the Japanese nation demands that the United States give General MacArthur the reinforcements he needs, so he will be able to wage a war that would be to his satisfaction, win or lose.”
The unity that had enveloped the nation in the wake of Pearl Harbor had now vanished, replaced by fear, hostility, and racism directed at many of Japanese descent. Long-simmering jealousy along the West Coast over the economic success of many immigrants fueled public pressure to relocate families to internment camps in the nation’s interior; the proponents of such action ranged from the governor of California to the entire West Coast congressional delegation. “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched,” declared an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room of the badlands,” wrote syndicated columnist Henry McLemore. “Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.” Some senior military leaders also championed the idea. “A Jap’s a Jap—it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not,” announced Lieutenant General John DeWitt, head of the Army’s Western Defense Force. “I don’t want any of them.”
Roosevelt felt pressure even from members of his own cabinet. “It looks to me like it will explode any day now,” warned Assistant to the Attorney General James Rowe Jr. in early February, one of the few who argued against such a move. “If it happens, it will be one of the great mass exoduses of history.” Roosevelt viewed the issue as one of military necessity, a step that had to be taken to protect the country. He signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, relocating more than 100,000 citizens and aliens to internment camps. “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” Attorney General Francis Biddle later wrote. “Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him—the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president.” But the decision bothered Eleanor. “These people were not convicted of any crime, but emotions ran too high,” she wrote in Collier’s in 1943. “Too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental-looking people.”
Social tensions spread beyond those of Japanese descent. A White House public opinion analysis revealed how in the black community the war had triggered a “deep undercurrent of bitterness and resentment.” Many begrudged the Marine Corps’ refusal to admit blacks and the Army’s policy of segregation. Others complained that the Navy accepted blacks only for menial jobs, such as that of mess attendants. “The Navy has a woeful need of men, but it doesn’t need us,” wrote Pittsburgh Courier columnist Marjorie McKenzie. “Can we honestly feel like strong, courageous, loyal Americans in the face of that?” Another flashpoint of tension centered on the refusal of the American Red Cross at the war’s outbreak to accept blood from blacks. The organization agreed under pressure to reverse the policy, though it still segregated blood by race. “It is a matter of the deepest resentment,” noted an administration report, “that White men who ask Negroes to sacrifice their lives refuse to have Negro blood mingled with their own.”
Roosevelt understood that the continued defeats and the growing social tensions threatened the war effort. As the news deteriorated, his demands for an attack on Japan increased. Roosevelt hammered that point home in a January 28 White House conference, questioning whether the United States could even set up bomber bases in Mongolia, a discussion Arnold captured in his notes: “The president stated that, from a psychological standpoint, both of Japan and the United States, it was most important to bomb Japan as soon as possible.” Arnold cautioned Roosevelt afterward in a memo that Mongolia—far outside the control of the Chinese government—was not a safe option. Roosevelt needed to be patient. “For this reason I feel that the plan, which is now in progress, for carrying out an attack upon the Japanese enemy’s center of gravity, by making use of facilities for which the Chinese Government can guarantee us a reasonable degree of security on the Eastern Asiatic mainland, is the logical and most effective plan.”
The president in the short term would have to look elsewhere for ways to distract the American public. Eleanor used her daily newspaper column to try to buoy public morale after the fall of Singapore. “Perhaps it is good for us to have to face disaster, because we have been so optimistic and almost arrogant in our expectation of constant success,” she wrote. “Now we shall have to find within us the courage to meet defeat and fight right on to victory.” The president took to the airwaves in a fireside chat on February 23, echoing his wife in an effort to dispel growing public apathy. What America needed, he knew, was a victory. “Let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it,” Roosevelt told an estimated audience of sixty-two million. “We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.”