We believe the hand of God is on our side—the side of justice, decency and humanity.
—COMMANDER RUSSELL IHRIG, APRIL 3, 1942
THE HORNET TOWERED OVER Pier One at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Alameda on the afternoon of April 1, 1942. The 19,800-ton carrier had departed Norfolk on March 4, transiting the Panama Canal en route to San Diego and then San Francisco, where it had arrived only the day before. Secured with its starboard side to the pier—by no fewer than a dozen manila lines and four wire hawsers—the $32 million Hornet made an impressive sight. Shipfitters, welders, and electricians at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company had labored for more than two years to hammer out the nation’s eighth aircraft carrier. Once completed, the Hornet stretched 809 feet, the length of more than two football fields. Nine Babcock and Wilcox boilers generated superheated steam to power the carrier’s four turbines at up to 120,000 horsepower. Four manganese bronze propellers—each weighing more than 27,000 pounds—drove the Hornet through the seas at thirty-three knots or about thirty-eight miles an hour.
The carrier functioned much like a small town for the complement of some 170 officers and 2,000 enlisted men who called the Hornet home. Sailors slept sixty or more in compartments with bunks stacked four high, while most of the officers bedded down in two- and four-person staterooms. A desalination plant made ocean water drinkable and provided fresh water for showers, galleys, and the boilers, while walk-in freezers, refrigerators, and pantries carried frozen steaks, chickens, and canned fruits and vegetables. Five doctors and a team of corpsmen stood ready to handle everything from a routine runny nose to an emergency appendectomy. The carrier featured laundry services, a barbershop, and even a small library. Sailors could pick up stamps and mail letters at the post office or buy cigarettes, razors, and toothpaste at the ship’s store. The 565-foot enclosed hangar bay—complete with steel doors that rolled open to allow planes to warm up without creating deadly gas—doubled as a perfect movie theater.
Three times a day hungry sailors queued up at the mess deck to eat at long tables and benches bolted down to weather rough seas while officers enjoyed white linens and monogrammed silver in the wardroom that stretched the breadth of the carrier and showcased an emblematic hornet’s nest that dangled from the overhead. Many marveled at the carrier’s so-called mechanical cow, which churned dehydrated milk into ice cream, the perfect treat on long cruises in tropical waters. Despite the advances in naval shipbuilding, technology could not remedy everything. “The food on carriers is generally quite good for the first month after stocking up and putting to sea,” remembered Frederick Mears, a pilot on board the Hornet. “Thereafter it begins to deteriorate. Fresh milk disappears almost immediately, and the next to go are fresh eggs, greens and fresh vegetables, and finally fresh meat. Officers and crew alike begin to live on powdered milk, powdered eggs, and canned fruit and vegetables and meat.”
Life aboard the carrier centered on the wooden flight deck, which sailors joked made the warship resemble a bathtub with a barn door on top. General quarters sounded each morning at daybreak as the first patrol planes roared into the air, a ritual that followed again at sunset, the two vulnerable times of day when a carrier is silhouetted against the sky, easy prey for enemy submarines. The Hornet’s island rose some forty feet above the teak deck, containing the navigation bridge, chart house, bridge, and admiral’s quarters. “There was always noise on the carrier deck—the ripping of the wind in the rigging on the island structure, the wash of water alongside, and the pounding of the great ship in the sea, if nothing else,” Mears later wrote, “but these sounds tended to create peace rather than confusion.” Captain Mitscher had ordered a special addition to the Hornet, a message painted in block letters on the ship’s stack that was symbolic of the mission at hand: “Remember Pearl Harbor.”
Doolittle arrived first at Alameda Naval Air Station and reported soon thereafter to the carrier’s chain-smoking skipper in his long-billed hat. Marine Corporal Larry Bogart, who served as Mitscher’s orderly, stood outside the skipper’s door. He heard someone state, “Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle, Captain.”
“I didn’t think much about it,” Bogart later admitted. “But after a while I heard our executive officer, Commander George Henderson, say, ‘Hello, Jimmy.’ Then it clicked. I knew who he was. Jimmy Doolittle! The guy who had all the flight records—speed, endurance, altitude, distance. He was going with us.”
Bogart knew enough of Doolittle’s reputation that he immediately upped his government insurance policy from a thousand to five thousand dollars.
Mitscher told Doolittle that he planned to turn his personal quarters over to him, a suite below the flight deck that included a large conference room, bedroom, and head, while he himself would relocate to a small room off the bridge.
“You’ll be holding meetings with your people and it will be more convenient for you to have a place where you can do that. My quarters makes that possible,” Mitscher said. “Besides, it’s the only place on the ship large enough for private meetings.”
Doolittle had originally planned to take eighteen bombers on board the Hornet, but only about fifteen B-25s would fit safely. With crews apprehensive about the carrier’s short flight deck, he remembered Miller’s suggestion to bring an extra bomber that the Navy lieutenant could use as demonstration. He ran the idea by Mitscher.
“All right with me, Jim,” the skipper told him. “It’s your show.”
By the afternoon of April 1 all of the aircrews had departed McClellan Field for Alameda, where Doolittle greeted them upon arrival. He had instructed his pilots to spend at least an hour in the skies to give each bomber a final test to check for any mechanical problems. Any pilot who reported a problem—regardless of how insignificant—Doolittle instructed, would have to park the bomber. Otherwise he directed pilots to taxi to a ramp by the wharf. Doolittle planned to take all twenty-two aircrews on the Hornet, not only as a backup in case anyone dropped out, but because he didn’t want to leave anyone behind who had gone through the extensive training. He couldn’t risk any possible leak.
The crews arrived one after the other on a beautiful sunny day where the high temperature reached fifty-eight degrees. As Ski York and his copilot, Robert Emmens, approached Alameda, the aviators spied the Bay Bridge, which connected San Francisco to Oakland, a tempting opportunity for a little fun.
“What do you think?” York asked.
“We are off to see the Wizard of Oz somewhere out there in the Pacific,” Emmens thought. “It will probably be the last chance we will ever have.”
“Let’s do it,” he said.
York nosed the plane down and roared underneath the bridge, the bomber’s belly just feet above the cool waters of San Francisco Bay. He landed soon afterward and introduced his new copilot to Doolittle, who stuck out his hand.
“How much time do you have in a B-25?” Doolittle asked Emmens.
“Sir, I have about 1,000 hours.”
“Do you want to go on this thing?” Doolittle pressed. “It is strictly volunteer.”
“Yes, sir,” Emmens answered. “I do.”
Doolittle turned back to York.
“All right,” he said. “You are the new crew.”
Emmens later reflected on his first impression of his new commander. “The moment York introduced me to Doolittle I knew why the mission was bound to be successful,” he later wrote. “It was at once easy to understand why a personality such as his was a tremendous factor in bringing about the highest degree of morale, discipline, and confidence among all the participants in the raid—confidence in their leader, their airplane, and, most important of all, in themselves.”
York and Emmens weren’t the only ones who opted for some final fun with the Bay Bridge. Navigator Charles McClure carried a movie camera loaded with color film as the Ruptured Duck approached Alameda.
“What about flying under the bridge?” asked copilot Second Lieutenant Dean Davenport, who had the controls. “The Pan American boys do it all the time in the Clippers. It would make a good shot for Mac.”
Pilot Ted Lawson didn’t object, though he fought the urge to pull the plane up at the last moment, afraid there might be cables underneath. Just as the bomber soared beneath, McClure howled—his camera wouldn’t work. He begged for a second pass, but Lawson objected, making his final approach to Alameda. “As I put the flaps down for the landing, we all let out a yell at the same time,” he later wrote. “I guess the others got the same empty feeling in the stomach that I did. An American aircraft carrier was underneath us. Three of our B-25’s were already on its deck.”
“Damn!” one of the airmen said into the interphone, summarizing the views of all on board. “Ain’t she small.”
The Ruptured Duck landed, and Lawson taxied over to Doolittle and York, rolling back his window.
“Is everything okay?” Doolittle asked.
Lawson considered telling him that the bomber’s interphone system didn’t work well, but opted instead to ignore the problem.
“Taxi off the field and park at the edge of the Hornet’s wharf,” Doolittle instructed. “They’ll take care of you there.”
Lawson did as ordered. Navy sailors drained all but a few gallons of the bomber’s gasoline; then the aircrew watched as a “donkey” towed the Ruptured Duck down the pier, where a crane hoisted the B-25 up to the carrier’s deck. The operation was so secretive that the Hornet’s deck log that day made no mention of loading the bombers.
“It was an eye-opener to me as I watched in wonderment and concern as my land-based bomber was being loaded aboard an aircraft carrier!” Jack Sims, a pilot, later wrote. “I suspect all the Raiders had similar feelings of apprehension as the lifting cables were connected to the aircraft hard-points followed by a Navy yard crane which lifted each aircraft aboard the carrier.”
“I don’t think any of us had ever been on board a carrier,” recalled pilot Bill Bower, “let alone a naval vessel.” The young lieutenant watched the cranes lift his bomber and felt the hackles rise on the back of his neck. Everything he had trained for had come down to this moment. “My heavens,” he thought. “This is it!”
Others marveled at America’s newest carrier. From the air the Hornet had, in the words of one pilot, resembled a “postage stamp,” but pier side the flattop rose up like a skyscraper. “We knew we were going to fly off an aircraft carrier, but this was the first time I had been up close to one. And, boy, it was a pretty awesome looking thing,” remembered pilot Travis Hoover. “I never saw anything so big in all my life.”
“She was a great sight,” recalled Lawson. “I can’t describe the feeling I got, standing there, looking up at her sides. Maybe the thing I felt was just plain patriotism.”
Lieutenant Henry Miller approached.
“Don’t tell the Navy boys anything,” he warned Lawson and his men. “They don’t know where you’re going.”
Doolittle ran into the Navy lieutenant.
“You know, I talked to them about your idea of taking an extra plane along and they go along with it,” Doolittle told him. “So we’ll take sixteen and launch you 100 miles out.”
“That’s great.”
The Army airmen filed aboard, each one saluting the American flag on the stern and the officer of the deck, just as Miller had taught them.
Curious Hornet aviators lined the decks, watching the Army fliers land at the nearby airfield. “My, don’t those fellows come in slow, they don’t come screaming in to the field, dive bombing in the average Army manner,” one flier remarked. “Looks as if they had had a little naval indoctrination.”
One of those watching was Hornet intelligence officer Lieutenant Stephen Jurika Jr., one of the few who knew the carrier’s mission. “I think our initial reaction, most of the officers on the ship and certainly the captain’s and mine, was that an all-volunteer crew like this had to be special in ability to fly and desire to do something as a group together,” he recalled. “But in looks, in appearance, and in demeanor, I would say that they appeared undisciplined. Typical of this was the open collars and short-sleeved shirts—the weather was quite cool in Alameda—grommets either crushed or none at all in their caps, worn-out, scuffed-type shoes. They were not in flight clothing.”
Jurika voiced his concerns to Miller. Were the Army aviators ready? Miller leveled with him. “I’ve done everything I can for them and there’s nothing they don’t know about short take-offs,” Miller confided in his colleague. “It’s just when that deck is moving and they’re taking off, will they go through with it?”
The Army airmen watched as sailors spotted the B-25s, parking the bombers prop to tail before chocking the wheels and tying them down. The tight squeeze left the tail of the sixteenth bomber dangling off the carrier’s fantail. While the Hornet may have inspired confidence, its short flight deck failed to impress, even though it had accommodated no fewer than four thousand people at the carrier’s commissioning. “I never saw such a small, insignificant thing to be a called a runway in all my life,” Hoover recalled. “And all my awe turned to goose pimples because it was a tiny thing.”
The Army’s enlisted men would dine and bunk with the Hornet’s chief petty officers, while many of the officers shared staterooms with Navy ensigns, often crashing on fold-up cots. “I was a First Lieutenant then and thus outranked the Ensigns, but that didn’t seem to impress them very much,” Lawson later wrote. “They crawled into their nice bunks and pointed to a cot for me.”
Other airmen piled onto cots in the skipper’s quarters, but pilots Richard Cole and Billy Farrow landed in the passageway outside. “You had to go down the hall to the head to brush your teeth and shower,” recalled Cole, who served as Doolittle’s copilot. “But outside of that, it was no problem.”
San Francisco Bay resembled a Navy parking lot. In addition to the Hornet, the battleships Maryland, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Tennessee, Idaho, New Mexico, and Mississippi joined the oiler Cimarron, the cruisers St. Louis, Nashville, and Vincennes, and the destroyers Cushing, Smith, Preston, Gwin, Meredith, Monssen, and Grayson, among other ships. A high-pressure area just off the West Coast on April 1 promised a dense fog the following morning, perfect to help disguise the task force’s departure.
With the bombers all lashed down on deck, the harbor pilot climbed aboard at 2:45 p.m. Thirty-one minutes later—and with the help of four tugboats—the Hornet departed the pier, anchoring that afternoon in Berth 9.
Doolittle assembled his men late that afternoon.
“All right, everyone is free. Boats will be running back and forth,” he told them. “Everyone go and have a good time. Secrecy above all, but go ahead and visit anyone you want and do whatever you want.”
Doolittle did the same, spending time with his wife, Joe, in a San Francisco hotel. He climbed into the elevator, where the operator spotted his uniform.
“Understand you’re moving out tomorrow,” the operator asked.
The comment shocked Doolittle, who wondered how much the operator actually knew. Doolittle didn’t answer him, but rode up in silence. “His remark proved to me that it is extremely difficult to keep military movements secret,” Doolittle wrote. “As anyone could plainly see, the Hornet was sitting in the middle of San Francisco Bay with 16 Army Air Forces B-25s aboard, obviously ready to go someplace.”
Many of the men gravitated that night to the Top of the Mark, a rooftop bar located on the Mark Hopkins Hotel on Nob Hill. The cocktails flowed freely as the airmen relaxed after weeks of training. Many would party up until the departure of the last tender; a few would even come close to missing it. “We had enough time,” remembered pilot Richard Knobloch, “to have a hell of a good time.”
The mission would demand the most of the men—and not all would come back alive, a fact not lost on some. “It was a beautiful night and as I looked out across the city, the thought crossed my mind that maybe we would never see this again,” remembered navigator Charles McClure. “So you had better stop and stare at it.”
The moon rose, and the men could see the Hornet at anchor, the bombers silhouetted against the night sky. The Navy had put out the story that the planes were being transported to Hawaii; still, seeing them made many people uneasy.
“Just putting the aircraft on the carrier in itself was not that revealing,” recalled Herb Macia. “But to trust a bunch of guys to be on the town getting drunk, talking to gals, that took a lot of courage.”
“We had some concerns,” admitted Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator. “But they soon vanished in the blessings of whiskey and soda.”
THE HORNET SWAYED at anchor in Berth 9 the brisk Thursday morning of April 2. The day had started early for the flattop’s officers and crew. The Navy oil barge no. 4 pulled alongside the port quarter at 3:40 a.m., topping the Hornet off with 153,329 gallons of oil, a process that took just two hours and forty minutes and brought the total on hand to more than 1.4 million gallons. In preparation for the morning’s departure sailors lit fires under boilers 2, 3, 6, 8, and 9 while the crew mustered at eight.
Doolittle had spent the night in San Francisco with Joe, rising early so that he could enjoy a farewell breakfast with her before packing his B-4 bag. He had not told his family a single word about the mission, though his weeks of shuttling between Washington, Florida, and Ohio had raised questions. “Hear sundry rumors as to your activities and am at present confused,” his eldest son, Jim, an Army Air Forces pilot, wrote in a letter. “Would like to hear what’s cooking.”
Doolittle was equally mum with his wife of twenty-four years.
“I’ll be out of the country for a while,” was all he told Joe this morning. “I’ll be in touch as soon as I can.”
“We had had many separations before in our lives together, but I had the feeling she knew this departure was different,” he later wrote. “I kissed her tenderly. She held back tears, but I’m sure she thought it was going to be a long time before she saw me again. I wondered if we would ever see each other again.”
Doolittle returned to the carrier and met with Mitscher to discuss the Hornet’s departure plan, when an officer interrupted to deliver several messages, including one that alerted him that the arrangements for oil, gas, and airport markings were underway in China. He thumbed through the others to find farewell notes from Generals Arnold and Marshall. “You will be constantly in my mind,” the Army chief of staff wrote. “May the good Lord watch over you.” Even the acerbic Admiral King wished Doolittle good luck in a handwritten memo. “When I learned that you were to lead the Army air contingent of the Hornet expedition, I knew that the degree of success had been greatly increased,” King wrote. “To you, your officers and men I extend heartfelt wishes for success in your job—and ‘happy landings’ and ‘good hunting.’”
Doolittle readied himself to depart when he received word to report ashore for an urgent phone call. With a heavy heart he climbed into the captain’s gig, suspecting that the call was from Arnold, a last-minute effort to yank him off the mission. Doolittle was surprised instead to find General Marshall on the phone.
“Doolittle?” the general asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“I just called to personally wish you the best of luck,” Marshall said. “Our thoughts and our prayers will be with you. Good-bye, good luck, and come home safely.”
The call stunned Doolittle. The Army’s top officer had personally phoned to wish him success, a gesture he felt communicated the importance of the mission to the nation’s beleaguered war effort. Doolittle felt at a loss for words.
“Thank you, sir,” he finally offered. “Thank you.”
The warships pulled anchor one by one as a heavy fog hung low over the bay, slashing visibility to barely a thousand yards. The light cruiser Nashville got underway at 7:42 a.m. for a final calibration of the ship’s radio direction finder, followed by Destroyer Division 22, consisting of the Gwin, Grayson, Monssen, and Meredith. The Hornet, with its guests of seventy Army officers and sixty-four enlisted men, departed at 10:18 a.m., followed a minute later by the cruiser Vincennes and then the oiler Cimarron. The ships steamed under the Bay Bridge at 10:33 a.m., sliding past Alcatraz Island less than half an hour later. In a single column separated by a thousand yards, the task force navigated through the gate of the antisubmarine net, then passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge at 11:13 a.m., the majestic red symbol of San Francisco that divided the bay from the Pacific. The mission had finally begun, and for the Hornet the departure would prove particularly ominous—the carrier would never again return to the United States.
Sailors lined the flight deck as the Hornet headed to sea, a scene captured in the diaries of several of the Army airmen. “It was quite a thrill to look back at the Golden Gate,” Bill Bower wrote. “The thoughts that ran through one’s mind, at least mine, were mixed, many of anticipation for what was in store and others of the awe inspiring sight made by a naval convoy.” “Our send off was the weary howling of light house warning horns,” noted Ken Reddy. “Soon after we got out to sea a prevalent question in my mind was answered, as massive as this ship is, it still is capable of being rocked by the sea.” Others couldn’t help contemplating the danger. “As we passed under the great Golden Gate Bridge,” George Larkin wrote, “we wondered if we would see it again.”
Doolittle gathered with his men in the wardroom as the California coast vanished in the Hornet’s frothy wake. After weeks of training, many of the airmen suspected the nature of the mission, but the time had arrived to eliminate any doubts.
“For the benefit of those of you who don’t already know, or who have been guessing, we are going straight to Japan,” Doolittle told them. “We’re going to bomb Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe and Nagoya. The Navy is going to take us in as close as is advisable, and, of course, we’re going to take off from the deck.”
Bombardier Horace Crouch no doubt summed up the feelings of many of his fellow fliers. “We all had a whoopee,” he recalled, “and a hard swallow at the same time.” For Ruptured Duck pilot Ted Lawson the news provided a concrete goal on which to focus. “I can’t tell you how much of a relief it was to hear these words,” he later wrote. “It took away the weeks of confused thinking and ended a period of hush that was gripping all of us. I could stand up and yell Japan at the top of my lungs now. I was no longer shooting in the dark. Here was a job, definite and tangible.”
“All of the training we had received at Eglin added up to a new purpose,” remembered Brick Holstrom, “to bomb Tokyo!” Bob Emmens was thrilled to realize that he had guessed wrong. “Douglas MacArthur was having a bad time in the Philippines at this time. We thought we were headed for Bataan to help him out someway,” he recalled. “We didn’t dream that it would be the capital of Japan itself.”
Doolittle continued his briefing, informing his men of the plan to land at Chinese airfields, refuel, and then push on to Chungking. “Now, we’re going to be on this carrier a long time, but there will be plenty of work for you to do before we take off.”
He ended as always with the offer for anyone to back out.
None did.
The shrill boatswain’s pipe reverberated throughout the Hornet late that afternoon before the executive officer’s voice crackled over the loudspeaker: “Now hear this.” Mitscher then took over. “This ship will carry the Army bombers to the coast of Japan,” he announced to the officers and crew, “for the bombing of Tokyo.”
“Cheers from every section of the ship greeted the announcement,” Mitscher wrote in his action report. “Morale reached a new high.”
“It was the biggest thrill of the war,” remembered Lieutenant John Lynch, a material officer on the Hornet. “We were going to bomb Tokyo!”
“I don’t know who was more excited,” recalled Army bombardier Robert Bourgeois, “we of the air force or the Navy personnel. It was a great thrill to know that at last we had a chance to strike back at the Japs.”
Signalmen broadcast the news via semaphore to the other task force warships. Life magazine editor John Field sat in the wardroom of one when the loudspeaker broadcast Mitscher’s announcement. “It froze everybody to his seat,” Field later wrote. “We knew now what the purpose of this secret trip was.”
“Carry me back to ol’ Virginny,” muttered one of the black stewards in the wardroom, while others soon sang a song set to the tune of Snow White. “Hi-ho, hi-ho, we’re off to Tokyo; we’ll bomb and blast and come back fast.”
War planners had mapped a course for the 5,223-mile journey to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor that closely paralleled the route Admiral Nagumo had taken only four months earlier. The task force would follow the fortieth parallel just south of a polar front that promised high winds, squalls, and rough seas. While the inhospitable weather would slash visibility and limit patrol flights, it also made it equally likely that Japanese naval and merchant ships would avoid this route as well, providing the American armada a back door to the empire’s waters. “We went north to the 40th parallel and stuck on it just like a highway all the way across the Pacific,” remembered John Sutherland, a Hornet fighter pilot. “It’s a nice parallel to be on, because it was a very rough road and a very secure road, the weather was bad, the fog was heavy, it rained intermittently. That was the one time when the bad weather and the rocking of the ship did not make anybody unhappy at all. All of us wanted to go sight unseen.”
Safety was paramount even as the warships cut through the swells just off the West Coast. Shore-based planes would guard the task force until nightfall. Then the ships would steam on alone in radio silence, zigzagging and darkened to avoid submarines. Its flight deck crowded with bombers, the Hornet was like a toothless tiger. Until the task force rendezvoused more than a week later with Halsey and the carrier Enterprise, Mitscher would have to depend on his escorts for protection. America’s newest carrier, two cruisers, and a loaded fleet oiler would make an inviting target, a fact hammered home by the Cimarron’s skipper, Commander Russell Ihrig, in a war message to his men. “Our new assignment will probably place us under fire, not only from submarines, but from aircraft and surface ships,” he warned. “Be fully prepared to go into action TO WIN. Knowledge of your job and careful performance of small duties become more important than ever. Remember, there is no second place in a sea-fight.”
To prepare for such threats—an attack on an oiler loaded with more than six million gallons of fuel could prove particularly dangerous—Ihrig issued battle instructions. “Don’t think of the Japs as faraway,” he cautioned his men. “Think of them as HERE!” Sailors dressed in full winter underwear to guard against possible flash burns and passed out steel helmets and gas masks. Others tossed flammable rubber mats overboard and removed non-watertight doors and even shower curtains; only those necessary for blackout protection could remain. Ihrig ordered the glass ports on the bridge replaced with metal plates and officer staterooms readied as battle dressing stations. The skipper knew that he could take no chances. “I have served six years in the Orient in close association with the Japs, including two years during the current war in China. I have seen their brutality, bestiality—and bravery. If you expect to survive, you will have to do your best,” Ihrig instructed his men. “This is a war to the death.”
The reality of the mission sank in as the Hornet steamed toward Japan, each hour taking the carrier and crews closer to the enemy’s homeland. Doolittle’s meeting had hammered home the gravity of the mission. Lawson passed out pads of paper to his crew that afternoon, demanding each one write down any idea on how to improve the plane. Other nervous airmen paced the flight deck, counting off each precious foot. The boundaries were no longer marked by flags and white lines but by cold blue ocean waves. A missed takeoff meant a plunge into the Pacific. Even Doolittle—the legendary pilot—felt edgy. The first full day at sea he, too, stared down the deck.
“Well, Hank,” he said to Miller. “How does it look to you?”
“This is a breeze.”
“Let’s get up in that airplane and look.”
Doolittle climbed into the cockpit, and Miller joined him in the copilot’s seat.
“This looks like a short distance,” Doolittle observed.
“You see where that tool kit is way up the deck by that island structure?” Miller said. “That’s where I used to take off in fighters on the Saratoga and the Lexington.”
“Henry, what name do they use in the Navy for ‘bullshit’?”
The men climbed down and Miller headed to lunch, while Doolittle rushed to find Mitscher. He told the skipper that he wanted to scrap Miller’s proposed takeoff demonstration and instead take the sixteenth plane on the mission, a move that would increase the operation’s firepower by four bombs.
Just as Miller shoveled down the last of his dessert, he heard his name broadcast over the loudspeaker, summoning him to the bridge. The young lieutenant arrived to find Mitscher. “Well, Miller,” the skipper leveled with him. “I don’t think I’ll be able to give you 40 knots of wind over the deck.”
“Captain, I don’t need that anyway, because we have 495 feet,” he replied. “I taught these guys how to take off from an aircraft carrier with 40 knots of wind and 250 feet. We have lots of room.”
Miller concluded by sharing his story of his conversation with Doolittle right before lunch.
“Well, Miller,” Mitscher replied. “Do you have an extra pair of pants with you?”
“Oh, yes, Sir,” he answered. “I brought all my baggage with me because I’m going to fly nonstop to Columbia, South Carolina.”
Mitscher leveled with him.
“We’ll take that extra plane.”
Miller, of course, was thrilled. He had wanted to go all along and now he would be trapped on board, able to watch all sixteen planes thunder down the deck and lift off, all airmen he had trained. Miller concluded with a dose of levity.
“Captain, will you drop me off at the next mail buoy, please,” he said. “I’m a Lieutenant now but by the time I get back to Pensacola, I will have travelled half way around the world on a telephone call so I’ll probably end up as an Ensign.”
“The hell with them,” Mitscher said. “I’ll see that you make it OK.”
ADMIRAL YAMAMOTO’S OBSESSION with preventing an attack on Tokyo had only grown as Japan’s victories mounted and senior leaders debated the future direction of the war. The lightning successes in the conflict’s opening weeks had caught many of the nation’s strategists flat-footed. The great risks coupled with the preparations for the ambitious assault on Pearl Harbor and the seizure of the oil-rich southern territories had prompted senior leaders to postpone planning the next phase of the war, an oversight that became clear before the first month of the battle drew to a close. Combined Fleet chief of staff Matome Ugaki, who ordered his staff to prepare a blueprint of future operations by the end of February, captured that surprise in his diary. “We shall be able to finish first-stage operations by the middle of March, as far as the invasion operation is concerned. What are we going to do after that?” he wrote on January 5. “Advance to Australia, to India, attack Hawaii, or destroy the Soviet Union?”
War planners debated several options, including ending offensive actions and preparing a defense, an idea few supported. Another option was to invade Australia, robbing America of a launch pad to push back against Japan. Alternatively forces could push into the Indian Ocean, seize Ceylon, and finish off the British fleet, a move that would allow Japan to link up with Germany in the Middle East. The final option was to advance across the central Pacific and seize Hawaii, guaranteeing a showdown with America. Bogged down in China—and afraid of overextension—the Army resisted such moves. “We want to invade Ceylon; we are not allowed to!” complained Captain Yoshitake Miwa, the Combined Fleet’s air officer. “We want to invade Australia; we cannot! We want to attack Hawaii; we cannot do that either! All because the army will not agree to release the necessary forces.” Ugaki agreed. “It’s annoying to be passive,” he wrote in his diary. “Warfare is easier, with less trouble, indeed, when we hold the initiative.”
Throughout this debate Yamamoto maintained a single-minded focus—annihilate America’s Pacific Fleet. Despite the celebration that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor, Yamamoto saw the strike largely as a Pyrrhic victory. Japan had anticipated the loss of as many as three of its six carriers, but the attack in the end had cost just twenty-nine planes, five midget submarines, and fewer than a hundred men. Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo should have capitalized on his unexpected success that Sunday morning and ordered his pilots to rearm and attack again, spreading the assault over several days if necessary. Yamamoto knew that the shortsighted focus only on the battleships and planes—leaving the submarine base, repair facilities, and aboveground tanks with 4.5 million barrels of precious fuel—would only help accelerate America’s rebound. Just two days after the attack—as the fires still smoldered at Pearl Harbor—Yamamoto ordered Ugaki to prepare a plan for the invasion of Hawaii. He had to clean up Nagumo’s mess.
Yamamoto believed that the destruction of America’s carriers—absent from Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning—coupled with the capture of Hawaii would give Japan the power to bargain a peace deal, one that would allow it to keep many of its conquests. Yamamoto’s concerns on the surface appeared unwarranted, considering Japan’s great successes, but the veteran admiral spied hints of trouble to come. That threat had first materialized in the form of an American carrier raid on the Marshall and the Gilbert Islands on February 1, just fifty-six days after the attack on Hawaii. The dawn strike had robbed Japan of a subchaser and the 6,500-ton transport Bordeaux Maru, as well as damaged eight other ships, including a light cruiser. The raiders had even managed to kill Marshall Islands commander Rear Admiral Yukicki Yashiro, a Naval Academy classmate of Ugaki’s and Japan’s first admiral killed in the war. “They have come after all,” Ugaki wrote in his diary with disbelief. “They are some guys!”
Although derided in the Japanese press as “guerrilla warfare,” the raid impressed senior leaders. “This attack was Heaven’s admonition for our shortcoming,” declared Miwa. “Our staff could only grit their teeth and jump up and down in frustration.” Few believed that the audacious assault would prove to be the last. Such a bold strike reflected America’s adventurous national personality, Ugaki noted, and would merely help make Japan’s leaders look “ridiculous.” “Pearl Harbor was a complete surprise, but we cannot say the same for this, which happened during the war,” Ugaki confided in his diary. “It was fortunate for us that the enemy only scratched us on this occasion and gave us a good lesson instead of directly attacking Tokyo.” Ugaki wasn’t alone in his fears. Japan’s lack of defenses would no doubt invite the Americans to attack again. “Whatever happens, we must absolutely prevent any air attack on Tokyo,” Miwa said. “Against enemy aircraft carriers, the defensive is bad strategy, and worse tactics.”
The United States followed up the raid on the Marshall and the Gilbert Islands with a February 20 strike against Rabaul, which the Japanese repelled but at a cost of nineteen planes. American carriers then hit Wake on February 24 and Marcus Island on March 4. Six days later carriers appeared off New Guinea, launching a strike of 104 fighters and bombers against Japanese forces at Lae and Salamaua. “The failure to destroy the U.S. carriers at Pearl Harbor haunted us like a ghost ever after,” wrote Minoru Genda, one of the chief planners of the attack on Hawaii. “We always worried about them and had to reckon with their potential presence in every operation we planned.” The raids convinced senior naval aviators that Japan wasted time with its own attacks against Australia and British forces in the Indian Ocean, particularly when America’s carriers remained the only formidable force left in the Pacific. Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the air attack against Pearl Harbor, even warned Admiral Nagumo, “Don’t swing such a long sword.”
America’s carrier raids did little damage, but the marauding flattops posed a much greater potential threat. As in a game of Russian roulette, it was only a matter of time before the barrel pointed at Tokyo, the seat of the emperor. Halsey’s attack on Marcus Island had stirred up considerable concern, given that less than a thousand miles separated that island from the nation’s capital. Senior naval officers sweated out America’s attacks even as the oblivious Japanese public enjoyed victory celebrations. “If real enemy planes raided amidst the festivities, the mere thought of the result makes me shudder,” Ugaki wrote in his diary on March 12. “A great air raid over the heads of the rejoicing multitude!” As American attacks grew more audacious, senior leaders began to contemplate what had long been considered unthinkable, a question Miwa raised in his diary. “How shall we defend our capital against an enemy air raid?” he wrote. “It is a big problem.”
Yamamoto knew the only way to protect Tokyo was to destroy America’s flattops. But that was no easy task. With its Pacific and Asiatic fleets wrecked, America treated its carriers like an endangered species, always retreating at the first sign of danger. Yamamoto’s forces had no way to predict where, in an ocean that spread across sixty-five million square miles, to find them. The admiral needed a plan to lure them into combat, an objective so precious that Admiral Chester Nimitz would have no option but to send his carriers into battle. Since the Army would never sign off on the invasion of Hawaii, Yamamoto needed a plan the Navy could tackle largely alone. He set his sights on Midway, the two-and-a-half-square-mile atoll between Tokyo and Hawaii, some thirteen hundred miles northwest of Oahu. This former stopover for the transpacific flights of Pan American Airways Clipper seaplanes had evolved into a vital American naval air and submarine base, whose proximity to Pearl Harbor led Admiral Nagumo to dub it “the sentry for Hawaii.”
Yamamoto saw in this wind-ravaged coral atoll not only the perfect launch pad for the eventual seizure of Hawaii but a priceless piece of Pacific real estate he knew America would never surrender. He green-lighted the plan to grab Midway, setting the stage for what he was sure would be a bitter fight with the Naval General Staff in Tokyo. Yamamoto sent Captain Kameto Kuroshima and Commander Yasuji Watanabe to Tokyo to press his case in a three-day session that began April 2, the same day the Hornet left California. Senior officers with the Naval General Staff believed America’s eventual offensive drive would not come across the central Pacific but up from Australia, where the United States and its allies could amass bombers, warships, and troops on Japan’s southern perimeter. Rather than risk resources on a quixotic hunt for a few flattops, officers favored seizing New Caledonia, Samoa, and the Fiji Islands, a move that would sever America’s vital communication lines with its ally down under.
Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka and Commander Tatsukichi Miyo spearheaded the Naval General Staff’s skillful attack on the Midway operation, an attack the men feared risked dangerous overextension in exchange for little strategic reward. Miyo argued tearfully at times that the United States had no doubt learned a valuable lesson on December 7. The Americans had likely reinforced Hawaii and now diligently tracked Japanese fleet movements, refusing to be caught off guard again. The atoll’s proximity to Hawaii furthermore gave the United States the clear tactical advantage. While Japan would have to fight more than two thousand miles east of Tokyo and depend largely on its exhausted carrier forces, the United States could flood the waters with submarines and the skies with Hawaii-based bombers. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that America would even risk its precious carriers to protect Midway. Why not let Japan capture the austere atoll, then strangle it by blockade, making it impossible to reinforce?
Even if Japan managed to capture Midway, Miyo argued, what strategic value did the tiny atoll really offer? An advancing American armada could easily bypass the limited range of Midway air patrols. Furthermore, the atoll was so far from the West Coast that its capture would have a negligible effect on the morale of the American public. As the debate dragged on over several days, it became clear that Yamamoto’s plan had less grounding in large-scale tactical goals and more in his fixation on destroying America’s carriers. “One wonders whether C. in C. Yamamoto appreciated just how ineffective aerial reconnaissance using Midway as a base would be,” Miyo wrote in an article published after the war. “Had he really taken into thorough account the enormous drain on resources and difficulty in maintaining supplies on such an isolated island, or the reduction in air strength necessary in other areas in order to keep it up, and the influence on the fleet’s operational activities?”
With both sides reluctant to budge, Watanabe phoned Yamamoto for instruction on April 5. The admiral made it clear he planned to dictate, not negotiate. Japan would either seize Midway, or he would resign. “The success or failure of our entire strategy in the Pacific will be determined by whether or not we succeed in destroying the United States Fleet,” he warned in a final statement. “We believe that by launching the proposed operations against Midway, we can succeed in drawing out the enemy’s carrier strength and destroying it in decisive battle.” Yamamoto had made a similar threat when faced with opposition over his plan to attack Pearl Harbor and the Naval General Staff had caved. Now this son of a former samurai warrior was more popular than ever. How could the Naval General Staff explain his sudden resignation? Rear Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, who headed the Naval General Staff’s plans division, knew Yamamoto had again won. “If the C. in C.’s so set on it,” he said, “shall we leave it to him?”
Miyo lowered his head and wept.