These brutal and inexcusable attacks on civilian populations have created a hatred of the Japanese in China which it will take centuries to eradicate.
—OFFICE OF STRATEGIC SERVICES, FEBRUARY 3, 1942
DONALD DUNCAN STEPPED OFF the plane on Thursday, March 19, in Hawaii after two straight days of travel from Washington. The Navy captain was no doubt tired from the trip across five time zones, one made all the more stressful by a snafu in his orders that nearly left him stranded on the tarmac in New Mexico. Duncan had failed to make sure his orders stated that he had top priority, an error he didn’t realize until the stewardess woke him up in the middle of the night near Albuquerque. She informed him that Army pilots, traveling under top-priority orders, waited to board at the next stop, en route back to San Francisco after delivering airplanes. There wasn’t room on board the commercial flight for everyone. Duncan would have to get off.
The naval officer protested that he was under orders to connect in San Francisco for Hawaii and that he simply could not get off.
The stewardess protested.
“Well,” Duncan countered, “I’m not getting off.”
The commotion drew the attention of the pilot, who came back and told Duncan that he had to go along with established priority.
Duncan showed the pilot his orders, which, in an effort to maintain total secrecy, mentioned only that he had to attend a conference in Hawaii.
The pilot appeared sympathetic, but said someone would have to direct him to allow Duncan to remain on board.
Duncan suggested he call General Arnold in Washington.
The pilot said he would discuss the situation with the Army aviators about to board. If he couldn’t work something out, the pilot would call Washington.
“Well, that’s fine, but if I leave the airplane, you will have to carry me off,” Duncan told him. “I’m not going to get out of this bunk and off the airplane.”
The Navy captain went back to bed only to awake the next morning as his plane approached San Francisco.
Duncan put the experience behind him as he hastened to see Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Chester Nimitz. The wreckage of Japan’s December 7 surprise attack still crowded the cool waters of Pearl Harbor, the entire bay rimmed by a two-foot-thick film of oil. The burned-out battleship Arizona rested on the muddy bottom with eleven hundred sailors entombed inside while, as Time magazine noted, the Hawaiian sun reflected off the rusty keels of the capsized battleship Oklahoma and the former battleship turned target ship Utah. Thousands of divers, welders, and engineers now risked poison gas and unexploded ordnance to untangle the destruction even as grim reminders of the awful tragedy still surfaced. Workers only the month before had salvaged thousands of waterlogged and rust-stained Christmas cards from one vessel, while the marked-out dates on a calendar discovered in a storeroom of the sunken battleship West Virginia revealed that three men had survived until December 23 before the oxygen ran out.
A fifty-seven-year-old Texas native—and 1905 graduate of the Naval Academy—Nimitz had spent much of his career in the undersea service. The laconic four-star admiral had assumed command of the battered Pacific Fleet just three weeks after the Japanese attack. “May the good Lord help and advise me,” he had written to his wife that day, “and may I have all the support I can get for I will need it!” The deteriorating situation in the Pacific depressed Nimitz, who lay awake long hours each night. The Pacific Fleet had so far executed several carrier raids against outlying Japanese bases, hoping to relieve the pressure on forces fighting in the southwest Pacific, but without any real luck. “The Japs didn’t mind them,” one officer quipped, “any more than a dog minds fleas.” The lack of success made Nimitz doubt he would survive long in his new job. “I will be lucky to last six months,” he wrote to his wife that month. “The public may demand action and results faster than I can produce.”
Duncan only promised to increase Nimitz’s stress. The sole record of the captain’s secret visit was the terse notation in Nimitz’s unofficial war diary: “arrived for conference.” Nimitz summoned Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr. and his chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning. The audacious operation to raid the Japanese capital existed only in the form of a handwritten plan, one so secretive that Duncan refused to allow even his trusted secretary to type it. The roughly thirty-page outline boasted a weather annex, a breakdown of the proposed ships, and the route across the Pacific, all the logistical details Duncan believed he needed to share with Nimitz. “I had been told by Admiral King to tell Admiral Nimitz that this was not a proposal made for him to consider but a plan to be carried out by him,” Duncan recalled. “So that cleared up any matter of whether we should do it or not; it was on the books by then.”
Nimitz listened as Duncan outlined his proposal. The admiral was guarded in how he chose to commit his forces, a caution that had led him to clash with Admiral King after barely a month on the job. King had pressed Nimitz to execute aggressive carrier raids that would rattle the Japanese and inspire the American public. Nimitz had felt more reluctant, afraid to risk his precious carriers. “Pacific Fleet markedly inferior in all types to enemy,” Nimitz had cabled King in early February. “Cannot conduct aggressive action Pacific except raids of hit-and-run character.” Nimitz’s message had drawn a stern rebuke. “Pacific Fleet not repeat not markedly inferior in all types to forces enemy can bring to bear within operating radius of Hawaii,” King countered. “Your forces will however be markedly inferior from Australia to Alaska when the enemy has gained objectives in Southwest Pacific unless every effort is continuously made to damage his ships and bases.”
A raid against Tokyo certainly qualified as aggressive.
Nimitz’s orders were to guard Hawaii and Midway and protect the sea-lanes to Australia. The Pacific Fleet commander understood the incredible risk involved in a raid against Tokyo—his own staff had even proposed and then nixed just such an idea in February. The Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines had wrecked two of America’s three fleets. Even with the addition of the Hornet the backbone of America’s Pacific defense rested on just five aircraft carriers, half the number of flattops Japan counted. The cumbersome B-25s were too large to fit inside a carrier’s aircraft elevator, forcing the Navy to crowd the bombers on the deck of the Hornet, a move that would render the carrier unable to launch fighters in an emergency. To protect the Hornet from surprise attack Nimitz would have to dispatch the carrier Enterprise. Two of America’s five Pacific carriers—the flattops Yamamoto so hungered to destroy in his quest for Pacific dominance—would steam to within four hundred miles of the enemy’s homeland.
The opportunities for disaster were numerous. Not only would America risk two of its prized carriers, but fourteen support ships, including four cruisers, eight destroyers, and two oilers as well as the lives of some ten thousand sailors. This strike force would have to thread its ways across the Pacific in complete radio silence, avoiding the constellations of Japanese bases that stretched from the Marianas to New Guinea. Enemy fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance planes crowded the skies, while warships, patrol craft, and submarines plowed the Pacific waters, any one of which could jeopardize the mission. Beyond the operation’s logistics loomed the larger question of what the Japanese would do in retaliation. Would such a raid invite a second attack against Pearl Harbor or possibly Midway? What about the West Coast? Would an outraged Yamamoto order his forces to attack Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles?
But as Duncan had made clear, Nimitz had no choice.
The mission was a go.
Duncan fired off a prearranged dispatch to Captain Francis Low, directing him to alert Doolittle that it was time to move his men west from Eglin Field to California. The coded message simply read, “Tell Jimmy to get on his horse.”
Nimitz conferred with Halsey.
“Do you believe it would work, Bill?” he asked.
“They’ll need a lot of luck,” Halsey answered.
“Are you willing to take them out there?” Nimitz pressed.
“Yes, I am.”
“Good,” Nimitz replied. “It’s all yours!”
PLANS PROGRESSED IN CHINA to prepare for the raiders. Doolittle in his initial handwritten outline of the mission had suggested coordinating with Colonel Claire Chennault, aviation adviser to the Chinese government and the commander of the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers. Chennault, however, was widely disliked; Arnold deemed him a mercenary and a “crackpot.” The chief of the Army Air Forces instead turned to Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, whom Roosevelt had recently tapped to serve as commander of American Army Forces in China, Burma, and India as well as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Few military leaders had as much experience in China as the fifty-nine-year-old Stilwell, a Florida native and 1904 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. Able to speak Chinese as well as French and Spanish—he taught the latter two languages at West Point—Stilwell had served three tours in China between the wars, in posts ranging from language officer to military attaché.
Stilwell’s slender physique, gray hair, and wire-frame glasses—more befitting a college professor than a warrior—masked an acerbic personality that earned him the nickname Vinegar Joe. “Dour, belligerent, and weather beaten,” is how his colleague Lewis Brereton once characterized him in his diary. In an essay written for his own family even Stilwell described himself as “unreasonable, impatient, sour-balled, sullen, mad, hard, profane, vulgar.” The brilliant tactician had little use for social diplomacy. He referred to blacks as “niggers” or “coons,” Chinese as “chinks” or “chinos,” and the Germans as either “huns” or “squareheads.” Stilwell targeted the Japanese with special disdain. “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives,” he once wrote, “it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.” Stilwell even disparaged his commander in chief, whom he viewed as a “rank amateur in all military matters,” after a meeting on the eve of his February departure. “Very unimpressive,” he wrote in his diary. “Just a lot of wind.”
Stilwell had the unenviable job of fighting a war in what amounted to a political, military, and economic backwater made all the more challenging by years of conflict and bloodshed. Spread across more than 4.2 million square miles, China had a population of almost 500 million people, 80 percent of them rural farmers. In addition to Manchuria and portions of Mongolia, Japan had wrestled away another 800,000 square miles, including coastal ports, railways, and industrial and commercial centers, effectively cutting China off from the outside world. One of Stilwell’s top aides, Frank “Pinkie” Dorn, would later summarize it best. “Our ally, China, was a place rather than a nation; a makeshift affair whose economy was wrecked and whose currency was bolstered by the simple expedient of printing more unbacked paper money,” Dorn wrote. “Tens of millions of its people had died from bullet, disease, or starvation, been forced to flee their homes, or deserted to the ministrations of a ruthless enemy.”
Further complicating Stilwell’s job was his disgust with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the fifty-four-year-old head of the National People’s Party. The bespectacled Chinese leader spent most of his time battling the communists under Mao Zedong, while he populated his own government with cronies and family; his wife even served at one point as deputy chief of the air force. Stilwell viewed him as mentally unstable and arrogant. “He thinks he knows psychology,” he wrote in his diary. “In fact, he thinks he knows everything.” Stilwell often referred to the generalissimo by the diminutive name “Peanut” after an aide once described him as “a peanut perched on top of a dung heap.” Relations soured further because of Stilwell’s refusal to keep his views private. “The trouble in China is simple,” he once told a reporter for Time magazine. “We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch.” When Roosevelt asked for his views of the generalissimo, Stilwell was equally crass and impolitic: “He’s a vacillating, tricky, undependable old scoundrel, who never keeps his word.”
Stilwell’s views stood in contrast to those of most Americans, thanks in part to the herculean public relations efforts of Henry Luce, the Time and Life magazine publisher. Luce had been born in China to missionary parents and lionized Chiang Kai-shek, whose Christianity made him popular in the religious community. In 1937 Time named Chiang and his attractive spouse as the “Man & Wife of the Year.” The Chinese leader’s image over the years would appear on the cover of Time no fewer than ten times—two more than either Roosevelt or Winston Churchill and three more than Adolf Hitler. The press proved equally adoring of his wife, describing her as a cross between Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale, a carefully crafted image that infuriated Stilwell and his aides. Those views even percolated inside the White House, where presidential aide Laughlin Currie remarked after one visit, “Each night it was like being tucked into bed by an empress!” Such undeserving adoration only made Stilwell’s already tough task more unpalatable, a sentiment best captured by a reporter for Harper’s Magazine in 1944: “If St. Francis of Assisi were put in charge of the CBI theater, he would be known as ‘Vinegar Frank’ before his brass buttons had time to tarnish.”
American leaders had done little in recent years to earn Chinese goodwill, watching from the sidelines as Japan burned villages and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. The United States instead had focused on defeating Germany, directing nine-tenths of its $13 billion lend-lease program to Britain, while China’s share of American ordnance, aircraft, and tanks amounted to $618 million, just 4.6 percent. Leaders often claimed that the United States’ meager war production meant it had little to offer, but an American intelligence report more accurately fingered the cause. “The true explanation for our ironic failure to give China more extensive support against our present enemy, Japan, seems rather to lie in an American attitude of mind,” the report noted. “We have feared Germany and have been contemptuous of Japan. We have indulged the persistent hope that we could patch things up with Japan, a fallacy which has had its roots in our intellectual absorption in the familiar problems of Europe rather than in the exotic far-off conflicts of Eastern Asia.”
Chiang Kai-shek may have been the son of a merchant, but he was savvy enough to understand that the attack on Pearl Harbor had transformed China’s strategic value. With American bases in Guam and Wake gone and the Philippines under siege, the United States had no toehold in Asia from which to attack Japan. Furthermore, if Chinese forces could tie down the Japanese, it would slow the empire’s progress elsewhere. But Stilwell feared that Chiang Kai-shek was more concerned with his own political self-interest and the struggle against Mao Zedong. That left the Chinese leader all too eager to exploit America’s weakened position. “The probabilities are that the CKS regime is playing the USA for a sucker; that it will stall and promise, but not do anything; that it is looking for an allied victory without making any further effort on its part to secure it; and that it expects to have piled up at the end of the war a supply of munitions that will allow it to perpetuate itself indefinitely,” Stilwell wrote in a 1942 memo. “They think we are dumb, easily fooled, and gullible, and that all they have to do to bring us to heel is to threaten to make a separate peace.”
This was the contemptuous political backdrop Hap Arnold and Jimmy Doolittle faced in planning the raid’s terminus. The war may have elevated China’s importance, but it did not eradicate America’s focus on its own self-interest. Preservation of those interests demanded the mission remain a secret from Chiang Kai-shek. On one level American officials knew that the generalissimo’s staff could not be trusted. General Marshall reminded Arnold of that in a February memo. “With relation to the highly confidential project you and King have on,” he wrote, “please read Magruder’s telegram of yesterday regarding lack of secrecy in all discussions at Chungking.” Marshall referred to Brigadier General John Magruder, the outgoing chief of the American military mission to China, who had shared an alarming personal experience. “Despite my request for confidential treatment of matter at height of interview an unexpectedly drawn curtain disclosed four servants absorbing the facts,” he wrote. “This is characteristic and indicates futility of efforts to maintain secrecy regarding any military matters.”
Beyond the fear of leaks American leaders had other more important reasons for keeping the mission a secret from Chiang Kai-shek. A raid against Tokyo—home of the emperor and the nerve center of the Japanese empire—promised to invite retaliation against the Chinese. That probability would likely trigger Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal to allow the bombers to land at Chinese airfields. American leaders, of course, knew all of this. Japanese atrocities against the Chinese had grown so notorious throughout the years that the State Department dedicated an entire report to them in February 1942. “Inhuman acts have been committed by Japanese armies on the civilian populations in varying degrees in every city or town captured by them, from one end of China to the other,” the report stated. “The entry of Japanese troops has repeatedly been accompanied by wholesale robbing, raping and butchery of innocent civilians.”
The thirteen-page, single-spaced report—later circulated at the highest levels of the government and military—offered American policy makers a horrific window into what Japanese forces might do to any captured airmen or local villagers who assisted them. In previous campaigns Japanese troops had used prisoners for bayonet practice, buried others alive, and set some on fire, forcing villagers to watch as a means to extract information. Soldiers formed rings around entire villages, torched them, and then machine-gunned the residents who tried to escape. Following the fall of Shanghai in 1937, Japanese newspapers chronicled a “murder race” between two junior officers, competing to see who would be the first to kill 100 Chinese with a sword. “There came a day when each of the men passed the 100 mark, but as there was some dispute as to who had first reached the number, it was decided to extend the contest to a new goal, variously reported as 150 to 250,” the report stated. “One of the officers interviewed in the field by a Japanese correspondent declared that the contest had been ‘fun.’”
These atrocities reached a climax when troops entered the Chinese capital of Nanking in December 1937. The Japanese coaxed many of the Chinese soldiers into surrender, luring them outside the city and slaughtering them by the thousands. Inside the city’s walls gangs of soldiers brutalized civilians. So vast was the slaughter that dead bodies piled along the banks of the Yangtze turned the mighty river red. As many as one thousand rapes occurred each night, many of the women killed afterwards to cover up the crime. “Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman,” one soldier wrote after the war, “but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.” The war crimes tribunal would later estimate that the Rape of Nanking—as it became known—claimed more than 260,000 noncombatants, while some experts would later push the total as high 350,000, horrors America knew of long before the war’s end. “The actions of the Japanese soldiery,” the State Department report concluded, “constitute the blackest, most shameful page in the military annals of modern times.”
With the Navy’s task force slated for departure, Arnold demanded an update from Stilwell on the raid’s preparations in China. The general had briefed Stilwell shortly before he left the United States, informing him only of the operation’s basic logistics while omitting that the planes would in fact bomb Tokyo en route to China. The plan demanded the use of five airfields at Chuchow, Kweilin, Lishui, Kian, and Yushan. Signal flares and radio beacons would guide the bombers in to these primitive airfields, where the crews could then take on fuel and oil before pressing on to Chungking, the new capital of China, some eight hundred miles farther inland. There the bombers would form a new squadron to attack the Japanese in China. Arnold had heard nothing from Stilwell since his departure, and time now ran short. “What progress is being made on laying down gasoline supplies and bomb supplies on airports in eastern China?” Arnold’s staff messaged Stilwell on March 16. “What progress on airports?” Stilwell failed to respond, prompting a follow-up message two days later. “Time is getting short for spotting gas at agreed points.”
Stilwell had only recently arrived in China after a twenty-three-day voyage that covered some twenty thousand miles. His touchdown had coincided with the Japanese assault on southern Burma, a vital fulcrum on which the direction of the war balanced. The capital and principal seaport of Rangoon—the start of the Burma Road—had fallen to the Japanese in early March. This thin jungle membrane stood as a final barrier, blocking the Japanese from pushing through India and joining forces with the Germans in the Middle East. Much to Stilwell’s frustration Chinese forces proved far outmatched. Although China boasted almost three million uniformed men, a lack of resources forced most to bed down beneath shared blankets and to fight in straw sandals. Disease and malnutrition compounded China’s woes, robbing the nation of as much 40 percent of its forces each year. Officer desertions likewise were frequent. “You will know long before you get this what I’m up against,” Stilwell wrote to his wife. “It’s not a pretty picture.”
Because he was not briefed about the raid, Stilwell failed to appreciate Arnold’s urgency in finalizing the plans. He at last cabled Arnold on March 22 that Standard Oil of Calcutta had 30,000 gallons of 100-octane gasoline plus another 500 gallons of 120-oil in 5-gallon tins. “Please advise purpose for which it is being held,” Stilwell asked. “For use in American Army Aircraft, request authority to move this fuel to China.” Arnold ordered the fuel moved to Kweilin immediately; he would provide ten transports to help. He further ordered twelve men stationed at each airfield, including one who spoke English. All men and supplies had to be in place by midnight on April 9–10. To illuminate the runways, five flares would line either side, plus an additional five on the windward end of each runway. “The success of a vital project which I discussed with you prior to your departure depends upon this movement being accomplished by air without delay and in using every possible precaution to preserve its secrecy.”
Rather than import fuel from India, Stilwell in a March 29 message recommended using Chinese gasoline. Only the airfields at Chuchow and Kweilin, the Chinese advised, were safe for heavy bombers. If America wanted to use the others, a qualified officer would first have to inspect them. “Other than fuel, no ammunition, bombs, or supplies are required,” Arnold cabled. “To meet date of April 10, use Chinese 100 octane or any other gasoline available. One take-off and landing only by medium bombers contemplated by operation. Only those airdromes for this operation should be marked. To insure availability, oil and gasoline supplies at these airdromes must be checked, and as soon as possible this information forwarded here. Means for rapid servicing from drums must be furnished servicing details.” The date for the task force’s departure loomed: time was up. “On April 20th, special project will arrive destination. An attempt will be made to notify you should a change in arrival date arise,” Arnold cabled. “For variation without notice you must however be prepared.”
DOOLITTLE HAD GOTTEN the message from Arnold that the time had come to depart Eglin for the West Coast. He summoned his men at 3 a.m. on March 24. For Brick Holstrom the news arrived with a bang on his hotel wall from York in the next room. “Hey, come on,” York shouted. “We’ve got to go!”
Doolittle informed his men that twenty-two aircrews would fly cross-country to the air depot at McClellan Field in Sacramento for final modifications and tune-ups. From there crews would continue on to Alameda Naval Air Station and load the Hornet. Any extra aircrews would return to Columbia.
“Get your financial affairs in shape—all of you,” Doolittle warned. “And don’t, in your letters to the folks or to your wives, give any hint where you are going.”
The stress of the operation finally caught up with the pilot Vernon Stintzi, who developed severe gastric symptoms—an ulcer. Thomas White, the mission doctor, diagnosed the lieutenant with anxiety neurosis and relieved him from flying duty. Doolittle saw Stintzi’s departure as an opportunity. “Rather than bump somebody else out of a position,” he said, “I will take this crew that doesn’t have a pilot.”
The aircrews hustled that Tuesday morning to prepare to depart, a scene captured by Ken Reddy in his diary. “Operations was like a mad house,” he wrote, “everyone trying to get off on a very short notice.”
Miller watched the hurrying fliers with envy just as Doolittle approached. “I hear you had an accident,” Doolittle said, referring to Bates’s crash the day before.
“Yes, Sir,” the Navy lieutenant replied. “But there’s nothing wrong with the technique or anything else of the airplane. What was wrong was Bates. He just wasn’t flying the airplane. The airplane was flying him.”
Doolittle understood. He told Miller that the crews were headed to the West Coast and would finish up final instruction at a California airfield.
“Well, you know, Colonel,” Miller said, “it’s a matter of professional pride with me. I don’t want anybody on the West Coast telling you, ‘No, let’s start all over again with this technique.’ If it’s possible I’d like to go with you, if we’re going to have time to do more of this practice out there.”
“If it’s all right with Washington,” Doolittle answered, “you can fly out with me this afternoon.”
Doolittle wanted to keep York as well, who had been given permission by Colonel Mills to help train the fliers in Florida, but not actually go on the mission. He phoned Mills up in South Carolina.
“Newt, old boy,” Doolittle said, “I am going to need York out in Sacramento for a few days. You don’t mind if he comes out there and then he comes right back afterwards?”
Mills hesitated, no doubt suspicious, before he relented: “All right.”
When Robert Emmens landed that afternoon in Florida with the bomber to replace the one Bates had crashed, he discovered that most of the other aircrews had all cleared out, leaving York to sweep out the operations building.
“Where is everybody?” Emmens asked.
“They have all left for the West Coast,” York answered. “Do you want to go on this thing?”
“More than anything.”
“We could be that substitute crew,” York said. “They got pretty shook up in their accident, and they need another crew as well as the airplane.”
Doolittle wanted to use the cross-country flight as another training exercise, instructing his pilots to hedgehop west and test gas consumption, buzzing the rural countryside just as the men would Japan. The aircrews, who flew in formations of up to half a dozen bombers, decided to have some fun.
“We kept so low we could look up at the telegraph wires,” Lawson later wrote. “All of us seemed to figure we might not be around very long, so we might as well do things we always wanted to do. It was the craziest flying I had ever done, and I had done some kid-stuff tricks, like banking a B-25 through a low, open drawbridge.”
Lawson’s navigator Second Lieutenant Charles McClure described how the pilots terrorized some of the locals on the ground below. “When we departed Eglin, going across Alabama we were flying below many trees and in general, were chasing farmers, particularly Negroes, as they plowed. One old colored boy was dragged across the field by his scared mule because he had the reins wrapped under his arms,” McClure later wrote. “One Negro man grabbed two colored children and ran for a shack which I am sure would have blown over had the prop wash hit it.”
The pilots did more than scare the locals. “The trip to the West Coast was an enjoyable legal cross country buzz job which would probably give me a screaming class A nervous breakdown now,” recalled Aden Jones. “I pulled some sagebrush off of the bottom of that airplane,” remembered Jacob DeShazer. “I’d see the cattle stick their tails up in the air and run. We’d just go over their backs.”
Bad weather forced many of the crews to break up the trip in Texas, spending a night in San Antonio before flying on the next day to Phoenix, Riverside, and ultimately Sacramento. Doolittle, however, pushed onward, flying across the Rocky Mountains on instruments.
Navigator George Barr used his downtime in Texas to call the family he lived with after the death of his mother. “I am going on a special mission with Jimmy Doolittle,” Barr exclaimed. “Wish me luck.”
The airmen pressed on the next day. “We flew to Sacramento non-stop in the longest flight I have made, being nine hrs. and 25 minutes,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “I rode most of the way in the nose and I really got a good look at the country.”
Hilger flew across southern Arizona, following Highway 10 through the Dragoon Mountains and Texas Canyon.
“Can you see that little spot over there of a town?” Macia asked the major. “That is where I was raised.”
“What in the hell is the name of that place?” Hilger asked.
“Tombstone.”
Lawson and McClure’s mischief continued on the final day of the flight. “Over Texas, we chased cattle for hours. Near El Paso we were chasing automobiles off of the highways and at one point, a bus skidded to a stop and as we pulled up, we saw passengers heading for the open country,” McClure wrote. “Going up the valley to Sacramento, we were right on the deck and noticed when we passed over farmers, each of them waved to us which was not at all like the colored people in the South.”
Doolittle landed at McClellan and met with air depot commander Colonel John Clark and his senior engineering and maintenance personnel. Doolittle still had a list of modifications and equipment he needed before the task force’s April departure.
“I would like to have a complete inspection of each airplane including airplane engine, equipment, and accessories,” Doolittle began, according to a transcript of the meeting. “We don’t want the airplanes taken to pieces. Just inspected insofar as they can be inspected—cowling, doors opened, etc. Also a pair of propellers installed on each plane. Forty-four have been ordered.”
“We did not get any teletype on it,” one of the men protested.
“They were ordered three weeks ago.”
Doolittle felt the now familiar pushback to his demands, even though the depot’s instructions to cooperate were clear. “Services and supplies requested by Colonel Doolittle,” orders stated, “will be given the highest priority.”
He pressed on with the briefing, alerting the officers that the planes had been modified with several added gas tanks. The sixty-gallon rubber bag that would go in place of the lower gun turret would arrive in Sacramento either that day or the next along with new covers to replace the larger ones for the added bomb bay tanks.
“My ship is complete,” Doolittle told them. “Use it as a model.”
He instructed the officers to remove the liaison radio sets from each bomber and the tracing antenna and asked for parachutes.
“How many were you supposed to have, sir?”
“About 60 pack type and about 40 detachable. When they come in we want to have them fitted to the pilots and labeled,” Doolittle continued. “There will be a man here from Wright Field to install six still cameras in six of the airplanes and 16 movie cameras in the other airplanes.”
Doolittle again warned them not to tamper with the planes unless maintenance crews found a major issue. “If you find something definitely wrong, we want that fixed,” he said. “We are anxious to give them the last finishing touch and take them away.”
Since the plan was to turn the bombers over to China, Doolittle instructed them that the original Norden bombsights, radios, and instrument accessories would all be collected in Sacramento and then shipped to the final destination.
“I am particularly interested in propellers,” Doolittle said, returning to his earlier topic. “They should be painted. Don’t want shiny ones. They should have been here two weeks ago.”
“What about ammunition?”
“We’ll get that from Benicia Arsenal.”
Doolittle requested that any burned-out instrumentation lights be replaced. “Wherever there are places for spares I would like to have spares put in,” he added. “Also spare fuses. All we are going to have for these ships are what is on them.”
If any problems came up, Doolittle instructed the depot officials to contact Captain York.
“This project is a highly confidential one,” he concluded. “As a matter of fact, I am having to notify General Arnold in code that I arrived.”
Doolittle’s meeting translated into serious orders—at least on paper. “Under no circumstances is any equipment to be removed or tampered with on these airplanes,” orders stated. “This will be strictly complied with at all times on this Project. Inspectors or men working on the Airplane finding defective or damaged parts must notify the Project Officer or Project Supervisor of this condition before accomplishing any work.”
Doolittle’s fliers landed one after the other at McClellan.
“Stick close to the field,” Doolittle instructed his men. “I want every first pilot to make absolutely certain that his plane is in perfect shape.”
He warned his crews that mechanics planned to remove the radios: “You won’t need it where you’re going.”
Many now assumed that meant Japan.
The rubber gas tanks, cameras, and broomstick tail guns drew questions from the curious ground personnel, prompting a sharp retort: “Mind your own business.”
Despite strict orders, problems persisted, as described by Lawson. “I had to stand by and watch one of the mechanics rev my engines so fast that the new blades picked up dirt which pockmarked their tips,” he wrote. “I caught another one trying to sandpaper the imperfections away and yelled at him until he got out some oil and rubbed it on the places which he had sandpapered. I knew that salt air would make those prop tips pulpy where they have been scraped. The way they revved our engines made us wince. All of us were so afraid that they’d hurt the ships, the way they were handling them, yet we couldn’t tell them why we wanted them to be so careful. I guess we must have acted like the biggest bunch of soreheads those mechanics ever saw.”
Doolittle finally picked up the phone to Arnold.
“Things are going too slowly out here,” he told the general. “I’d appreciate it very much if you would personally build a fire under these people.”
Arnold obliged.
Another time Doolittle chatted with several pilots in base operations when he heard a bomber engine backfire. He looked over to see a B-25 cough black exhaust as a worker tried to start the engine. An expert had visited Eglin to tune all the carburetors, not to regulation but to help guarantee each plane could achieve the maximum range. Doolittle had specifically ordered that no worker touch any of the carburetor settings—and under no circumstances change them.
“What’s going on here?” Doolittle demanded.
“We’re just readjusting the carburetors,” the mechanic countered. “They’re all out of adjustment.”
“I was madder than a son of a bitch,” Doolittle later recalled. “I naturally blew my top.”
He cooled down and picked up the phone again to Arnold.
The crews ran into a similar headache with the arsenal, forcing yet another call to Washington. Even Doc White battled the post’s uncooperative medical supply officer. “In several instances he had the desired supplies on his shelves but apparently did not want to deplete his stores and by one excuse or another refused to fill most of my requisitions,” White griped in his report. “The Surgeon refused to override his decisions in spite of my explaining the urgency of my needs.”
As work progressed on the bombers, the men used the evenings to relax. Ken Reddy went bowling, danced at the Breakers, and even visited a honky-tonk with the daughter of a sheep rancher. Others hung out at the Senator Hotel, where some of the airmen stayed. One night a few of the fliers decided to drop dollar bills from the hotel window to see what kind of commotion might unfold on the street below, a plan that ran afoul after some of the bills landed on a ledge below. “We lowered Dean Hallmark head-first out of the window and held him by the ankles; he retrieved the bills and sent them down to the street,” Holstrom recalled. “About this time some of the senior guys told everybody to knock it off before someone called the cops.”
Greening, Jones, and York stumbled out of the hotel bar, only to find an elderly gentleman passed out in the lobby.
“Let’s give him a hot foot,” Jones suggested.
Jones stuck a lit match in the toe of the gentleman’s shoe while the airmen retreated to the far side of the lobby to watch. The match burned down and went out as the gentleman slept soundly. Jones did it again, this time using two matches, but once again the trick failed to waken the man. The third time he decided to use the entire matchbook to line the sole of the gentleman’s shoe.
“Shame on you boys!” a woman, who had watched the prank unfold, protested. “Why don’t you leave the poor man alone?”
The gentleman suddenly woke up. Rather than target Jones, he turned on the woman. “Go away y’ol’bat!” he barked. “Let ’em have their fun.”
He then promptly passed out again.
Other airmen used the downtime to write final letters home, including engineer Jacob Eierman. “This will be my last letter for sometime because we are on our way—I am not able to tell you where we are going, but you will read about us in the newspapers,” he wrote. “If the information leaked out as to where we are going, none of us would ever come back.” Engineer Melvin Gardner echoed him. “Please don’t worry mother,” he wrote. “Remember no news is good news.”
A classified message arrived from Arnold, directing Doolittle to travel to nearby San Francisco for a meeting with Admiral Halsey, his chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning, and Duncan. After his briefing with Duncan at Pearl Harbor, Halsey wanted a face-to-face with Doolittle—the man for whom he was about to risk the remnants of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz agreed, ordering him to fly to the West Coast. The officers met March 30 in the bar of the luxurious Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill, which afforded spectacular views of the bay. The men sat in the bar, but Halsey feared Doolittle had too many friends in the area who might recognize him, so the group moved up to Halsey’s room. “It immediately occurred to me that a personal contact with Jimmy Doolittle, whom I did not know at that time, was desirable,” Halsey later recalled. “First, so that we could size each other up, and secondly, to discuss way and means.”
During the three-hour conference Halsey and Duncan walked Doolittle through the Navy’s plan. The submarines Trout and Thresher would scout weather conditions and search out enemy naval forces the surface ships might encounter. The Hornet, two cruisers, four destroyers, and an oiler would depart Alameda on April 2 as Task Force 16.2 under the command of Marc Mitscher. After flying back to Pearl Harbor, Halsey would put to sea April 7 in command of Task Force 16.1, consisting of the carrier Enterprise, plus another two cruisers, four destroyers, and a second oiler. The two task forces would rendezvous at sea on Sunday, April 12, to create Task Force 16. These sixteen warships would then steam toward to Tokyo, refueling some eight hundred miles from Japan. At that point the oilers would remain behind while the carriers, cruisers, and destroyers steamed to within four hundred miles of the enemy’s capital.
“We discussed the operation from every point of view,” Doolittle recalled. “We tried to think of every contingency that might possibly arise and have an answer to that contingency.” If the task force was within range of Japan, the bombers would immediately take off, execute the mission, and hopefully reach China or get picked up by submarines. If the task force was within range of either Hawaii to Midway, the bombers would take off for those destinations. The worst-case scenario called for crews to push the B-25s overboard to clear the Hornet’s deck so the Navy could launch fighters. “This was understandable and I accepted this possibility,” Doolittle wrote. “After all, if the two carriers, the cruisers, and the destroyers were lost, it would mean the end of American naval strength in the Pacific for a long time. The Navy was, therefore, taking an extraordinary risk in our attempt to bring the war to the Japanese homeland.”
With the final modifications and tune-ups complete, aircrews prepared to fly to Alameda to board the Hornet. Only then did York learn that mechanics—in defiance of Doolittle’s orders—had swapped out the carburetors on his bomber. “We just happened to find out, by looking the engine over and checking the serial numbers, that they were different,” he recalled. “No mention was made, or notation made, to let us know that the carburetors had been changed. We accidentally found out about it.”
York summoned one of the mechanics.
“We had to change the carburetors,” he explained. “You had the wrong carburetors on this airplane.”
York pulled Doolittle aside and shared the news.
“Oh, Christ,” Doolittle said. “What do you want to do?”
Time was up—there was nothing he could do.
“I don’t think it makes any difference,” York answered. “A carburetor is a carburetor anyway you look at it.”
That statement would later haunt him.
“Well, if you think so,” Doolittle replied. “Come ahead.”
Miller had continued to practice short-field takeoffs with the crews at an airfield near Willows, just north of Sacramento.
“How do you think everybody’s doing?” Doolittle asked him.
“I think it’s no strain at all,” Miller replied. “Everybody’s doing great.”
Doolittle planned to take fifteen airplanes along with several extra aircrews aboard the Hornet. “Would you list the crews in order of take off expertise—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7?”
Miller did so, turning the list over to Doolittle and Hilger to review. Hilger objected to Miller’s exclusion of Bates.
“When you get on over enemy territory and you have some of those Japs chasing you, you’ve got to be really sharp and you’ve got to be thinking all the time,” Miller said. “If you panic, you’re lost. I wouldn’t take Bates.”
Bates would go aboard the carrier, but he would not fly the mission. Miller was reluctant to end his adventure, seizing an opportunity to make his case when Doolittle asked him again for his views on the readiness of the aircrews.
“You know, Colonel, if you want proof, I’ve had less time in the B-25 than anybody,” he said. “You can take an extra one along—a sixteenth airplane—and when we get 100 miles out of San Francisco, I’ll take it off, I’ll deliver it back to Columbia, South Carolina, back to the Army, and go back to Pensacola.”
Doolittle would think about it.
The veteran aviator prepared to depart when the operation’s officer handed him a detailed report to fill out on the quality of the work performed.
“I haven’t got time to read all this,” Doolittle barked.
“But it’s our standard procedure, Colonel,” the operations officer countered. “You must report on how the work was done.”
Doolittle snatched the form and scribbled one word diagonally across the page: “LOUSY.”
“Just a minute, Colonel, you will have to give us a detailed report,” the officer countered. “This will not do!”
Doolittle refused.
“If that’s the case,” the officer fired back, “I won’t sign your clearance—regulations you know!”
Doolittle ignored him. He walked out to his plane, climbed inside, and taxied out to the runway.
Jack Hilger, who had witnessed the exchange, flashed a grin.
“Who is that guy?” the operations officer complained to Hilger. “I can tell you he is heading for a lot of trouble!”
“He sure is,” Hilger agreed. “He sure is!”
Doolittle’s final outburst prompted depot commander Colonel Clark to fire off a preemptive report to his superiors, hoping to counter any complaint. Though he noted that the war had drained the depot of talented men, Clark couldn’t help blaming Doolittle and his men. “At less than 24 hours before scheduled completion the flight leader indicated sudden and complete disapproval and rumors became prevalent that pilots were doubtful of the condition of their respective airplanes. It has been this depot’s repeated experience to note a tendency for pilots to begin to worry as the departure date approached on several major projects completed,” Clark wrote. “In no instance have they been able to justify their fears by citing legitimate grounds.”