For a while we’ll have everything our own way, stretching out in every direction like an octopus spreading its tentacles. But it’ll last for a year and a half at the most.
—ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO, SEPTEMBER 1941
ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO STEWED aboard his flagship, the Yamato, safely anchored off the island of Hashirajima in Japan’s Inland Sea. The fifty-seven-year-old commander of the Combined Fleet—and architect of the surprise attack on Hawaii—understood the danger the United States still posed to Japan, even as much of the Pacific Fleet now rusted on the muddy bottom of Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto had long warned his superiors about the industrial power of the United States. The victories Japan now enjoyed, he knew, were merely the prelude to the war’s main act. “Britain and America may have underestimated Japan somewhat, but from their point of view it’s like having one’s hand bitten rather badly by a dog one was feeding. It seems that America in particular is determined before long to embark on full-scale operations against Japan,” he wrote a colleague. “The mindless rejoicing at home is really deplorable; it makes me fear that the first blow at Tokyo will make them wilt on the spot.”
Yamamoto was unique among the empire’s senior leaders. The son of a former samurai warrior, he stood just five feet three inches tall, one inch shorter than Jimmy Doolittle. A graduate of Japan’s renowned Eta Jima Naval Academy, he shunned alcohol even as he nursed a lifelong love of gambling. Yamamoto had fought as a young ensign in the Russo-Japanese War. A gun explosion aboard the armored cruiser Nisshin in the 1905 Battle of Tsushima Strait robbed him of the index and middle finger of his left hand, earning him the nickname “eighty sen” from the geishas in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district who charged one yen for a ten-finger manicure. The explosion had peppered Yamamoto’s lower body with more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel, leaving the paunchy admiral forever scarred and self-conscious. “Whenever I go into a public bath,” he used to quip, “people think I’m a gangster.”
Yamamoto twice lived in the United States, where he studied at Harvard and later served as naval attaché at the embassy in Washington. An avid admirer of Abraham Lincoln, he devoured biographies of America’s sixteenth president, demanding that his subordinates read them. Visits to the Detroit auto plants and the oil fields of Texas convinced him that the world was moving away from a dependency on iron and coal and more toward oil, gasoline, and light metals better suited for planes. When his superiors shot down his request for cash to tour Mexico, the dedicated officer opted to pay for the trip on his own meager salary, ultimately drawing the scrutiny of Mexican authorities. “A man who claims to be Yamamoto Isoroku, a commander in the Japanese navy, is traveling around the country inspecting oil fields. He stays in the meanest attics in third-rate hotels and never eats the hotel food, subsisting instead on bread, water, and bananas,” Mexican authorities cabled the embassy. “Please confirm his identity.”
These experiences had convinced Yamamoto of the United States’ raw industrial might, even as isolationist policies in the wake of World War I had stunted America’s military growth. Yamamoto opposed Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy and long resisted war with the United States, arguing that his nation’s limited resources would run out in eighteen months. His dissent had led some in Japan’s militaristic right wing to threaten to assassinate him, forcing the military police to guard him. One of Yamamoto’s top aides even slept each night with a sword. But the admiral refused to back down, voicing his concerns in 1940 to the then prime minister, Fumimaro Konoye, when pressed on Japan’s chances of success. “If we are ordered to do it,” Yamamoto had answered, “then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”
Despite Yamamoto’s protestations, Japan had continued the march toward war, leaving the admiral in the awkward position of planning an operation he opposed, a predicament he captured in an October 1941 letter to a friend. “My present situation is very strange. Because I have been assigned the mission, entirely against my private opinion, and also I am expected to do my best,” he wrote. “Alas, maybe, this is my fate.” In past war games the Japanese Navy had never won an overwhelming victory against the United States, leading to the maneuvers’ suspension for fear the Navy would be dragged into gradual defeat. The best way to improve Japan’s chances, Yamamoto realized, was a surprise strike against American forces in Hawaii. “The most important thing we have to do first of all in a war with the U.S., I firmly believe, is to fiercely attack and destroy the U.S. main fleet at the outset of the war,” he wrote. “Only then shall we be able to secure an invincible stand in key positions in East Asia.”
The success of the attack on Pearl Harbor had made Yamamoto a national celebrity, a status he despised even as a stack of new fan mail nearly a foot high landed daily on his desk. A request by famed painter Yasuda Yukihiko to paint his portrait only outraged the admiral, who remained troubled by Japan’s failure to sink any of America’s powerful aircraft carriers in the raid on Hawaii. “As I see it,” Yamamoto wrote a friend, “portraits are vulgarities to be shunned only less rigorously than bronze statues.” Likewise, he rejected an offer to write the original calligraphy for a new monument in central Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. When presented with two military decorations, he refused to accept them, burdened by a sense of guilt that, even though he commanded sailors, he had yet to see an enemy warship or plane. “I could never wear them,” Yamamoto said. “I’d be ashamed.” In a personal letter he was more blunt: “I wonder how the men who’ve seen action in the front line would feel about it?”
Underlying Yamamoto’s unease was his fear that Japan’s euphoria over the attack on Pearl Harbor was premature. After more than four years of war with China—and with Japan already devouring its stockpiles of raw materials—Yamamoto knew the nation now lived on borrowed time. In his first wartime State of the Union address only weeks earlier, President Roosevelt had demanded that America produce 60,000 bombers, fighters, and cargo planes, 45,000 tanks, and 20,000 antiaircraft guns that year, along with eight million tons of ships. The Pearl Harbor attack was only the opening salvo of what promised to be a long and hard war, a view Yamamoto captured best in a letter to a colleague. “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten,” he wrote. “I would rather you made your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”
Yamamoto’s fears ran counter to the views of his fellow military leaders, the press, and general public. In the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, newspapers printed photos and dramatic accounts of the raid, described by the Osaka Mainichi newspaper as “the brilliant curtain raiser for the destruction of the United States and Britain.” Other papers published poems celebrating the attack, while a motion picture compiled of edited assault footage played for packed theaters nationwide. With each passing day—and as Japan’s victories mounted—the national ego swelled. The press began to refer to Japanese forces as “superhuman” and even celebrated them as gods. One newspaper article went so far as to proclaim that Japan’s conquest of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies fulfilled a centuries-old prophecy of the deity Boyo Moyo. “As our country was founded by God,” declared planning board president Lieutenant General Teiichi Suzuki, “so our men in the fighting forces are God’s troops.”
Yamamoto watched as this national fervor reached a climax with the February fall of Singapore. Members of the House of Representatives erupted in shouts of “Banzai.” Schools suspended class, while newspapers published special “Victory Supplements.” Despite rationing, the government announced each family would be given two bottles of beer, rubber goods, and red beans; children under thirteen would receive caramel drops. Even Emperor Hirohito put in a special public appearance—dressed in his military uniform and mounted on his favorite horse, White Snow—to accept the banzais of the adoring crowd of thousands gathered in front of the Imperial Palace. “The downfall of Singapore,” the Osaka Mainichi wrote, “has definitely decided the history of the world.” The Japan Times & Advertiser compared the victory to Hannibal’s legendary crossing of the Alps and Genghis Khan’s passage through the Hindu Kush. “Our men,” the paper declared, “are now among the world’s immortals.”
The press went so far as to boast that it would be easy for Japanese soldiers to storm the beaches of California. “Once a landing is made on the American continent, it will be a simple matter for a well-trained, courageous army to sweep everything before it,” argued an editorial in the Japan Times & Advertiser. “The contention that the United States cannot be invaded is a myth.” At the same time the possibility that America might actually strike back at Japan was viewed as impossible, if not laughable. “Japan Raid by U.S. Is Out of Question,” declared one headline; another stated, “No Fear of America Attacking Empire.” Most pointed out that Japan, after seizing American bases across the Pacific, now controlled much of the seas and the skies. “As for aerial attacks from aircraft-carriers,” argued a correspondent for the Asahi newspaper, “any such attempt is believed suicidal because, unlike Hawaii, a very vigorous vigil is kept along the Japanese coasts and American raids will be nipped in the bud.”
Yamamoto wasn’t so cocky, particularly since he knew how few the resources were to protect Japan’s crowded cities from attack. Most of the nation’s fighters had deployed to the front lines, leaving behind just three hundred planes to safeguard the homeland—two hundred Navy and one hundred Army. Only fifty of those were dedicated to the defense of Tokyo and the industrial suburb of Yokohama. The Osaka and Kobe regions were equally ill equipped, with just twenty defensive fighters, while Nagoya counted only ten. Many of the planes were older Nakajima Type 97, code-named Nate by the Allies, a single-seat fighter with a fixed-landing gear. Yamamoto knew that antiaircraft defense was likewise inadequate. Tokyo had just 150 of the nation’s 700 antiaircraft guns—most 75 millimeter—while Kobe and Osaka had a combined 70 and Nagoya a mere 20. “Compared with the Japanese forces in the overseas areas,” one postwar Japanese report noted, “the air defense units in the home islands were poorly equipped and trained.”
Many of Japan’s senior leaders, however, did not share Yamamoto’s fears. During a meeting with his military councillors on November 4, 1941, Prime Minister Hideki Tojo dismissed the threat of an air raid against Japan, insisting that the nation dedicate its forces to overseas operations. “I do not think the enemy could raid Japan proper from the air immediately after the outbreak of hostilities,” Tojo said. “Some time would elapse before the enemy could attempt such raids.” That same confidence led him to reject the first comprehensive air defense measures proposed by the War Ministry in mid-January, which called for dispersing factories, protecting utilities, communication and transportation systems, and even evacuating major urban centers. Tojo likewise shot down a proposal in February to at least evacuate women and children, claiming that such action would merely threaten Japan’s important family structure. Only cowards, he argued, evacuated.
Yamamoto disagreed. The veteran admiral had set a precedent with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. He understood that America’s strong national character—coupled with Japan’s failure to sink the nation’s flattops at Pearl Harbor—would no doubt lead to a retaliatory carrier strike against the Japanese homeland. Yamamoto recalled that during the Russo-Japanese War when a Russian naval force arrived off Tokyo’s shores, many terrified residents fled to the mountains while others stoned the home of Vice Admiral Kamimura, the officer trusted to protect the homeland from attack. Yamamoto vowed never to let that happen again, and his determination to protect the seat of the emperor, aides remembered, grew into an obsession. “He never failed, before giving his attention to any thing else, to ask for the latest Tokyo weather report,” recalled Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who led the air attack on Pearl Harbor. “If the reports were bad, he felt relieved because they gave added assurance that the capital was safe.”
Yamamoto ordered daily long-range air patrols in the waters east of Japan, along with the creation of a fleet of picket boats, a force that would eventually count 171 such vessels, most small fishing boats requisitioned from private owners that ranged in size from 50 to 250 tons. Armed with radios to flash reports of any approaching enemy fleet, the boats operated anywhere from eighty to a thousand miles off shore, anchoring during the day and patrolling at night. Despite these precautions Yamamoto remained so concerned he even advised a geisha friend to move her property outside the city. “A lot of people are feeling relieved, or saying they’re ‘grateful to Admiral Yamamoto’ because there hasn’t been a single air raid,” he wrote. “They’re very wrong: the fact that the enemy hasn’t come is no thanks to Admiral Yamamoto, but to the enemy himself. So if they want to express gratitude to somebody, I wish they’d express it to America. If the latter really made up its mind to wade in on us, there’d be no way of defending a city like Tokyo.”
LIEUTENANT HENRY MILLER CLIMBED down from his Vought SBU Corsair biplane at Eglin Field on the Sunday morning of March 1, 1942. The twenty-nine-year-old Alaska native, who answered to the nickname Hank, clutched orders directing him to temporary duty at the Army airfield. A 1934 graduate of the Naval Academy, where he had boxed under famed coach Spike Webb, Miller had begun his career on the battleship Texas. He went on to earn his wings in June 1938 and later served on the carrier Saratoga. Since November 1940 he had worked as a flight instructor and personnel officer at the naval air station Ellyson Field, in the Florida Panhandle near Pensacola; a flight from there to Eglin he had made that morning in just fifty minutes. Miller’s orders made no mention of what he would do for the Army, though the assistant training officer at Pensacola told him that the assignment was to assist a Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle.
“Is that the Great Jimmy Doolittle?” Miller asked.
Doolittle had requested a secure place to train near the coast that would allow his crews to practice overwater navigation, an imperative skill the men would need for the raid. The Army Air Forces had assigned him Eglin Field. Though founded in 1933 near the town of Valparaiso in the panhandle, Eglin was still very much a work in progress. The year before had seen the completion of a 1,000-seat mess hall, and workers now hustled to complete the base chapel by May. The first on-base movie theater would open in July. The day Miller first stepped onto the tarmac, Eglin counted 1,526 airmen living in barracks, another 1,872 in tents, and 632 off base. It would soon become obvious to Doolittle’s fliers why the Army chose Eglin and its various satellite fields. “It was out in the boonies; there wasn’t anybody around,” recalled pilot Everett “Brick” Holstrom, then a young first lieutenant. “It was completely isolated.”
The Army had sent orders to Eglin’s commanding officer to be ready to house upwards of twenty combat crews as well as to service as many bombers as early as February 21. That included guaranteeing the base enough bombs in its arsenal, along with .50-caliber and .30-caliber machine-gun rounds to aid in the airmen’s training. “Inasmuch as this is an extremely confidential project,” orders stated, “it is directed that no information be permitted to get out regarding the arrival, departure or activities of these airplanes and crews.” In advance of the airmen’s transfer to Eglin, the Army had likewise reached out to the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics: “It is requested that a Naval aviator, experienced in the art of taking heavily loaded airplanes off from the deck of a carrier, be available at Eglin Field, Valparaiso, Florida, from March 1 to March 15, for the purpose of instructing Army pilots in this art.” The Navy had answered with Miller.
The young lieutenant reported to the base commander. “Do you know what I’m down here for?” Miller asked.
“No,” the colonel replied.
Miller explained he was a carrier pilot and instructor over at Pensacola and was supposed to teach some Army pilots how to take off from a flattop.
The colonel said he still had no idea.
Convinced his orders must be a mistake, Miller rose to leave when he happened to mention Doolittle’s detachment.
The colonel then closed the doors, his voice dropped to a whisper.
Miller had come to the right place.
The colonel drove the lieutenant over to the barracks and allowed him to drop off his gear before shuttling him over to the building where Doolittle’s detachment was set up. Neither Doolittle nor the squadron’s executive officer, Jack Hilger, was there, but Miller met Captains Ski York, Davy Jones, and Ross Greening. The aircrews had begun to arrive in the modified B-25s, though official training would not start for a few days. Miller introduced himself to the three pilots, informing them that he was there to teach them how to take off from a carrier.
“Have you ever flown a B-25?” one of the men asked.
Miller confessed he had never even seen one.
“Well, that’s all right,” the Army airmen assured him. “Because none of us know anything about the Navy either.”
The four men headed down to the line and climbed inside a B-25. With Jones as the pilot and Miller his copilot, the airmen throttled up the engines and flew over to the auxiliary runway set aside for the crews to train. The brief flight gave Miller a feel for the medium bomber, while the airmen explained that a typical takeoff required a speed of about 110 miles per hour, a figure Miller told them he could cut in half. The Navy lieutenant gave his first lesson: hold both feet on the brakes, put the stabilizer back three-fourths, and throttle up the engine. With the engine roaring at full throttle, release the brakes and pull back on the yoke until the plane lifts off. Miller demonstrated, charging into the skies with an air speed of around 65 miles per hour.
“That is impossible,” one of the airmen said. “You can’t do that.”
“Okay,” he answered. “Come on back and we’ll land and try it again.”
Miller charged into the skies again, this time at a speed of about seventy miles per hour. The three Army airmen were convinced.
THE TWO DOZEN AIRCREWS had all arrived by March 3, when Doolittle touched down at Eglin. He had mapped out a fifty-five-hour training program, the bare essentials of what it would take to get his men in shape for the mission. That regime included a six-hour preliminary period in which each aircraft commander would calibrate his airspeed indicators, compass, and automatic flight control equipment. Doolittle planned for his crews to then spend five hours each working with Lieutenant Miller on short-field takeoffs: four with an empty plane, four with a bomber weighing about 28,000 pounds, and finally two takeoffs with a fully loaded plane of 31,000 pounds. Crews would spend another fifteen hours practicing daytime and nighttime bombing on ground targets and oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico, followed by another fifteen hours of gunnery practice that included making dry practice runs against attacking pursuits.
Doolittle lastly wanted each crew to perform fourteen hours of overwater navigation. He planned for the airmen to fly from Eglin to Fort Meyer, Florida. From there, crews would fly across the gulf to Houston before returning to Eglin; the outgoing flight would be made during the day, the return at night. The training in the skies would be complemented by ground lectures on pursuit and antiaircraft evasion tactics. The airmen had come from four different squadrons, so Doolittle organized the fliers into a cohesive single unit, which he deemed important since he would be gone much of the time. In addition to his executive officer, Hilger, Doolittle picked York to serve as operations officer. Jones would handle navigation and intelligence, while Greening would serve as gunnery officer. He tapped Bill Bower as the squadron’s engineering officer and Travis Hoover to oversee supplies. Doolittle wanted Hoover, York, Jones, Greening, and Hilger also to serve as the mission’s five flight commanders.
With this in mind Doolittle summoned the roughly 140 officers and enlisted men to the Operations Office, where the fliers crowded onto benches and windowsills. This was the first time many had ever seen the famous flier in the flesh.
“I was a little awestruck,” remembered Bill Bower. “This was my idol.”
“He was a legend,” added navigator and bombardier Herb Macia. “He was a person that you never expected to see or have any personal contact with.”
A few were surprised by his small stature. “I’d built him up as quite a giant,” recalled Harry McCool, another navigator. “He was such a short little duck.”
Doolittle’s charisma overshadowed his size. “We were immediately captivated,” Jones said. “It didn’t take but two minutes and you were under his spell.”
More than anything else the famed aviator’s presence communicated the importance of the mission. “As soon as we heard his name we knew we could depend on real action,” remembered navigator Charles McClure. “Something really big was in prospect.”
“My name’s Doolittle,” he announced to the airmen, his voice calm and measured. “If you men have any idea that this isn’t the most dangerous thing you’ve ever been on, don’t even start this training period. You can drop out now. There isn’t much sense wasting time and money training men who aren’t going through with this thing. It’s perfectly all right for any of you to drop out.”
The room fell quiet, then several hands shot up.
“Sir,” a young officer asked, “can you give us any more information about the mission?”
“No, I can’t—just now,” Doolittle answered. “But you’ll begin to get an idea of what it’s all about the longer we’re down here training for it. Now, there’s one important thing I want to stress. This whole thing must be kept secret. I don’t even want you to tell your wives, no matter what you see, or are asked to do, down here. If you’ve guessed where we’re going, don’t even talk about your guess. That means every one of you. Don’t even talk among yourselves about this thing.”
Doolittle fell silent, letting his message register.
“The lives of many men are going to depend on how well you keep this project to yourselves,” he continued. “Not only your lives but the lives of hundreds of others.”
He warned the men to avoid rumors and report any curious strangers to him; he would contact the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
“Our training here will stress teamwork,” he said. “I want every man to do his assigned job. We’ve got a lot of work to do on those planes to get them in shape.”
Beyond the planes, every airman, from the bombardiers and navigators to the gunners and pilots, would have to train for the mission.
“We’ve got about three weeks—maybe less,” Doolittle concluded. “Remember, if anyone wants to drop out, he can. No questions asked.”
None did.
MILLER STARTED WORK IMMEDIATELY, formulating a takeoff procedure based on a study of the characteristics and performance data of the B-25 and its engines. He assumed that the maximum number of bombers would be placed aboard the carrier, slashing takeoff space to as little as 350 feet. The naval aviator calculated that the combined wind and carrier speed would create a forty-knot wind across the flight deck to help each fully loaded bomber lift off. Miller ordered crews to paint a yellow stripe down the runway so that pilots could practice holding the left wheel on the line, an imperative skill since pilots would have just 7 feet of clearance between the bomber’s wingtip and the carrier’s island. In addition, he requested flags planted at 250 feet and 400 feet and then every 50 feet after that, up to 700 feet, to help pilots mark takeoff distances.
Miller first trained Jones, who managed to lift off with an airspeed of just fifty-miles per hour, then recruited the captain to serve as his assistant. Each pilot reported to the runway in his bomber. Jones would make one takeoff in the pilot’s seat, explaining the procedure, while the aircraft commander flew as his copilot. Jones would then trade seats with the pilot, allowing the other flier a chance. Miller assigned an airman to time the plane when it reached the 250-foot mark as well as on takeoff. Another measured the plane’s distance when it left the runway. Miller stood behind the pilot and recorded the airspeed and offered advice. The concept proved alien to the Army pilots, who were accustomed to using every inch of a runway that stretched for thousands of feet. Travis Hoover’s response was typical of many after hearing Miller’s lesson.
“We can’t do that,” the pilot protested.
“Oh, yes,” Miller said, “you can.”
Most of the airmen proved fast learners. During preliminary training in a bomber weighing around 26,000 pounds, Harold Watson managed to get airborne at just sixty-two miles per hour, better even than Miller. Donald Smith topped everyone for the record for shortest distance, lifting off in as little as 294 feet. “Excellent,” Miller scribbled in his notes. “This pilot has the news!” Once the aviators mastered takeoffs with a lightly loaded plane, Miller ordered them to report with a full load of gas, ammunition, and equipment that brought the bomber’s weight up to around 29,000 pounds. Each pilot again made several takeoffs while Jones and Miller watched, the brakes at times heating up so much that pilots had to fly around with the landing gear down to cool them off. “After a little practice,” one report later noted, “the observers on the ground could tell almost exactly what the pilot was doing in the cockpit.”
For the final round crews loaded the B-25s with practice bombs and even stacked boxes of extra .50-caliber machine-gun rounds in the navigator’s compartment, upping the weight to 31,000 pounds. That was how much Doolittle predicted each plane would weigh as it charged down the Hornet’s flight deck filled with bombs and extra fuel needed to reach China. Watson again bested everyone for the low-speed record, lifting off at just fifty-five miles per hour. “It became an intense competition to see who could take off in the shortest distance with the greatest load,” Bower recalled. “The only weight we had for the airplane was .50 caliber ammunition in boxes, and people, so one man would make his attempt and record the distance, and then we’d all climb in the next airplane and load it up a little more, and see whether we could best that distance.”
Though most of the fliers had no trouble—Miller rated Doolittle, Jones, and Robert Gray the best—the naval aviator struggled with James Bates, a first lieutenant who had almost five hundred hours in the cockpit, including two hundred in a B-25. Those problems came to a head on the morning of March 23 in the final round of training.
“Bates, you have to try it again,” an exasperated Miller instructed him. “You fly the plane. Don’t let it fly you. Once more around.”
The lieutenant throttled up the engine and released the brakes at 10:03 a.m. To Miller’s horror the bomber lifted off in a skid. Bates pushed it harder and the right engine stalled out at about twenty-five feet. The bomber crashed to ground, crushing the landing gear and propellers and tearing up the fuselage. The other crew members, afraid the plane would explode, started to climb out the windows.
“Sit down and wait until those props stop,” Miller ordered. “Turn off all your switches.”
Miller reached into the back to grab his papers and notebook, only to turn around and find the others had all jumped out. “No one was hurt,” Bates would later tell investigators, “but the airplane was totally washed out.”
The loss of the bomber created a problem. York picked up the phone and called Columbia. His close friend and fellow pilot Bob Emmens answered. Ordered to remain behind in South Carolina by Hilger, Emmens had listened in awe to the stories that drifted back of short takeoffs and long overwater flights the crews practiced.
“We just lost an airplane,” York told him. “We need another airplane right away down here.”
“Ski,” he said, spotting his opportunity, “I will see you about 3:30 or 4:00.”
Emmens was thrilled. The pilot hurried back to his tent and grabbed a few uniforms, underwear, and toiletries. He packed the rest of his gear in his footlocker, ordering it sent to his home at 1443 East Main Street in Medford, Oregon. On heading out to his plane, he collided with Colonel Mills, the group commander.
“Emmens,” Mills said, “where are you off to?”
“Sir,” he said, “York just called from Eglin, and they had some bad luck with an airplane. They need another airplane down there. So I told him I would be down there about 3:30 or 4:00.”
“I don’t know whether I trust you or not. You had better find somebody else to take that airplane down. If you take it down there, I’m afraid you won’t come back.”
“Colonel, sir,” Emmens protested. “I promise I will be back this evening.”
Mills considered it. “Well, since you are all ready, okay,” he said, reluctantly. “But if you don’t come back, I am going to have your you know what.”
“Oh, sir,” he replied. “I will be back.”
MAINTENANCE PROBLEMS SOON CUT into the aircrew’s training time. The B-25’s meager armament consisted of twin .50-caliber machine guns mounted in top and bottom turrets along with a single .30-caliber machine gun in the nose, a setup the aviators described as “woefully deficient.” Exacerbating the airmen’s concerns, the few guns the bombers did have often failed to work. The blast from the machine-gun muzzle when fired close to the fuselage popped rivets and tore the plane’s thin skin, forcing workers to install steel blast plates. Neither the lower gun turret’s activating or extending and retracting mechanisms functioned properly, and the complicated gun sight proved impossible for the men to learn in the few weeks before the mission. “A man could learn to play the violin well enough for Carnegie Hall,” Doolittle griped, “before he could learn to fire that thing.”
Greening worked to remedy these problems. He recommended that workers remove the belly guns—the low-altitude mission made them worthless anyway—which would reduce weight and free up space for the extra sixty-gallon gas tank. To shore up the unprotected tail, Greening devised a ruse. Crews cut holes in the bomber’s tail and installed two black wooden poles reminiscent of broomsticks designed to resemble .50-caliber machine guns, exaggerating the barrel size to make them more visible to a pursuing fighter. Many of the real guns either failed to fire or easily jammed, forcing the gunner to waste valuable time stripping them. With the help of an armaments expert from Wright Field, crews either replaced defective guns or swapped out faulty parts. Though the men practiced with .50-caliber machine guns at a ground range, all this added work meant that none of the gunners ever fired on a moving target in the skies.
Greening zeroed in as well on the B-25’s classified Norden bombsight, a seventy-five-pound analog computer consisting of more than two thousand parts. The sophisticated instrument named for Dutch designer Carl Norden carried a hefty price tag of almost $10,000—enough cash to buy ten new Studebaker Commanders. Not only would the Japanese possibly capture the bombsight if a plane was shot down, but Greening knew the Norden worked best at altitudes of at least four thousand feet, a much higher bombing altitude than Doolittle had planned for the mission. Greening with the help of Staff Sergeant Edwin Bain fashioned a simplified replacement made from scrap Dural aluminum that he dubbed the Mark Twain in honor of the primitive lead-line depth finders once used along the Mississippi River. Tests would later show that Greening’s twenty-cent sight worked far better at the proposed bombing height of fifteen hundred feet than the more complicated and pricey Norden. “It was fine for the things we had in mind,” recalled pilot Ted Lawson. “It was as simple as pointing a rifle at the object to be bombed and letting the bomb go when you had a bead.”
Crews focused on more than just armament. The mission would require bombers to fly a minimum of 1,900 miles nonstop from the moment the wheels left the carrier’s flight deck until touchdown more than twelve hours later in eastern China. Even with the three added gasoline tanks, the distance demanded that crews maximize fuel efficiency. North American developed cruise control charts that demonstrated how pilots could increase manifold pressure and lower propeller rpm settings to squeeze more miles out of each gallon. Swapping out scratched props likewise allowed pilots without any added power to increase speed from 220 miles per hour to 275. Though these measures improved efficiency, tests revealed that no two bombers burned fuel at the same rate. Doolittle requested the help of a civilian carburetor expert from the Bendix factory. Much to his frustration, the company sent a cocky blowhard.
“I understand you want some carburetors pressure checked,” the factory representative told Doolittle. “I can tell you now they have been checked before they left the factory. As a matter of fact we just don’t send out equipment that is not in perfect condition. Furthermore—”
“Hold it, son,” Doolittle interrupted, clearly irritated. “What did the factory send? An expert or a salesman? If you’re a salesman, go home, we have plenty of carburetors. If you’re an expert, stick around, we need you.”
Pilots flew under simulated mission conditions to calculate fuel consumption, determining that the bombers burned on average sixty-five gallons per hour with a light load and up to seventy-eight gallons with a full one. Doolittle demanded his crews fly out over the Gulf of Mexico so pilots and navigators could learn to operate without landmarks or radio references. Greening’s copilot Second Lieutenant Ken Reddy of Texas described in his diary a near tragedy that occurred on one such flight over the gulf when the inside plate that covered the hole left by the lower turret started to jump up and down. The rattle irritated the crew’s engineer-gunner, Sergeant Melvin Gardner, who attempted to weight down the plate with two full toolboxes. “This did not do the trick,” Reddy wrote, “so he sat on the tool boxes.” Greening called Gardner, instructing him to take a headset to navigator Second Lieutenant Frank Kappeler. “It was while he was doing this that both plates and the boxes dropped out of the ship. They are all in Davey Jones’ Locker,” Reddy continued. “Gardner was wearing no chute so he was lucky.”
Doolittle likewise demanded that his crews drill on low-altitude target approaches followed by rapid bombing and evasive measures. Much of the training involved sand-loaded bombs, though each crew practiced once with a 100-pound live weapon. Sandbags weighted down the tails of parked bombers so machine gunners could fire the .50 calibers at temporary targets set up on Eglin’s auxiliary fields. Other times the gunners strafed sea slicks in the gulf or practiced tracking pursuit planes. Doolittle had hoped his crews might fire on towed targets, but time did not allow it. “Many Florida coast towns were subjected to vigorous low altitude dry run attacks,” noted one report. “The numerous complaining telephone calls to the commander at Eglin Field gave evidence to the enthusiasm displayed by the pilots during this particular practice.”
The aviators would have to look after not just the bombers but themselves as well, a job that fell to First Lieutenant Thomas White, the mission’s thirty-two-year-old flight surgeon, known simply as Doc. A Maui native and 1937 graduate of Harvard Medical School, White had volunteered for the mission, only to have Jack Hilger dash his hopes. There was no slot for a doctor. If White wanted to go, the major told him, he would have to learn how to shoot the .50-caliber machine guns. “To his great credit, he did,” Doolittle later wrote. “He scored second highest of all the gunners on the firing range with the twin .50s and thus earned his way onto a crew.”
Mindful of weight limits, White planned to pack only a medical officer’s field kit, plus a few added supplies, including a thousand sulfathiazole tablets, two metal catheters, and a pocket surgical kit. He overhauled the two first aid kits in each plane, checking to make sure each contained morphine syrettes and sulfanilamide tablets. “Difficulty was experienced in obtaining foot powder for the men,” White later noted. “The supposition being, apparently, that Air Corps troops never walk but always fly.” The doctor checked blood types and made sure the information was recorded on each airman’s dog tags. Only after Doolittle flew to Washington and intervened was White able to obtain the necessary vaccines. He administered updated shots for typhoid, tetanus, smallpox, and yellow fever and started the men on injections against pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and bubonic plague. “No marked reactions were observed,” White noted, “even to the plague vaccine, which enjoys a bad reputation.”
In addition to teaching carrier takeoffs, Miller gave the airmen a crash course on naval etiquette, instructing them when boarding a ship to salute the national ensign on the stern and the officer of the deck. He told them how to take a shower without wasting water and gave them a rundown of naval terminology, from the difference between port and starboard to floor versus deck. The rest of the time the airmen relaxed, taking in a performance of the Alabama College Glee Club and spending an afternoon deep-sea fishing in the gulf. “We caught a good mess of fish,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “I caught about six; one was a triggerfish. Most of them were red and white snappers.”
Others used the downtime to write letters home, including Richard Cole. “Our commanding officer is none other than ‘Jimmie Doolittle’ the famous speed demon—he flies a B-25 the same way,” he wrote to his parents in Ohio. “We have learned a lot of new data about our ships and from the looks of things we will be needing all of it.” Pilot Billy Farrow’s mother worked as a stenographer for the Board of Economic Warfare in Washington, where she battled long food lines and crowded buses. He implored her in a letter to remain strong. “You’re helping in national defense too, remember, so if things get tough, know that you’re doing it for your country, and there’s nothing too good to do for our country,” Farrow wrote. “Remember that—nothing!”
Lawson came out to his plane one morning to discover that someone had chalked the name Ruptured Duck on the fuselage. He liked the name so much he recruited a gunner to paint an accompanying caricature of Donald Duck, complete with his headphone cords twisted around his head and a set of crossed crutches. Other crews followed Lawson’s lead, and soon many of the B-25s had been christened with names such as Whiskey Pete, Whirling Dervish, Bat out of Hell, Avenger, Green Hornet, TNT, Fickle Finger of Fate, and, of course, Hari Kari-er.
Throughout the training the airmen respected Doolittle’s warning not to talk about the mission, though the secrecy at times proved fodder for humor.
“Doolittle has got some kind of horrible disease,” pilot Travis Hoover joked. “He’s going on a one-way mission and taking us with him.”
Miller’s lessons on Navy life alerted many that the mission would likely involve a carrier, though the airmen wondered whether that might mean a trip to Europe or Japan. “It was sort of obvious, but we weren’t permitted to talk about it,” Knobloch recalled. “We weren’t permitted to guess about it. If one of us would open his mouth and get out of line, the other guys would jump on him.” The final destination, the men realized, had little bearing on the training. “We could do what we had to do and have our fun,” Bower recalled, “without talking about what was going to come tomorrow.”
Fog and foul weather limited flying for days at a time, but Doolittle felt his crews had learned a lot, though he didn’t fool himself. Three weeks was not much time to prepare for a strike against the Japanese homeland. The more than four-year war with China had transformed the empire’s aviators into some of the world’s best. American pilots in contrast had no real combat experience. Operating a bomber was a team effort. It wasn’t enough to have a good pilot or gunner. Each man had to be the best. The weeks at Elgin had revealed to the pragmatic Doolittle the varying gaps in crew skills, though at this late stage there was little more he could do to remedy them. “The first pilots were all excellent,” he noted in his report. “The co-pilots were all good for co-pilots. The bombardiers were fair but needed brushing up. The navigators had had good training but very little practical experience. The gunners, almost without exception, had never fired a machine gun from an airplane at either a moving or stationary target.”
AS THE CREWS FINISHED training at Eglin, Doolittle returned to Washington to make a final pitch to Arnold. The veteran airman who had sat out World War I didn’t want to just plan and organize the mission. Doolittle wanted to lead it.
“General, it occurred to me that I’m the one guy on this project who knows more about it than anyone else,” he began. “You asked me to get the planes modified and the crews trained and this is being done. They’re the finest bunch of boys I’ve ever worked with. I’d like your authorization to lead this mission myself.”
Arnold’s trademark grin vanished. Though he appreciated Doolittle’s enthusiasm—and understood his desire to see combat—Arnold needed his troubleshooter in Washington. “I’m sorry, Jim,” the general answered. “I need you right here on my staff. I can’t afford to let you go on every mission you might help to plan.”
The calculating Doolittle had assumed Arnold would put up such resistance. He countered with a sales pitch, wearing the general down.
“All right, Jim,” Arnold finally answered. “It’s all right with me provided it’s all right with Miff Harmon.”
Arnold had referred to Brigadier General Millard Harmon Jr., his chief of staff. Doolittle suspected a ruse. He saluted and exited Arnold’s office, sprinting down the passageway to Harmon’s office. He knocked and entered.
“Miff,” a winded Doolittle began. “I’ve just been to see Hap about that project I’ve been working on and said I wanted to lead the mission. Hap said it was okay with him if it’s okay with you.”
“Well,” Harmon stammered, clearly blindsided, “whatever is all right with Hap is certainly all right with me.”
Doolittle thanked him and left. Just as he closed the door, he heard Arnold over the squawk box. He didn’t want to wait to be summoned back. As he disappeared, he heard Harmon protest, “But Hap, I told him he could go.”