Four months today since Pearl Harbor—and the situation has deteriorated every minute since.
—BRECKINRIDGE LONG, APRIL 7, 1942, DIARY ENTRY
ROOSEVELT WATCHED THE NEWS in the Pacific worsen as winter gave way to spring. Japan had seized the oil-rich Dutch East Indies, captured Rangoon, and severed the Burma Road, the vital lifeline of aid into China. Japanese forces reached as far south as Australia, pummeling the coastal city of Darwin in a raid that put every ship in the harbor on the bottom. Powerless to stop Japan’s advance, Roosevelt commiserated with Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who sulked for weeks over the loss of Singapore. “I do not like these days of personal stress and I have found it difficult to keep my eye on the ball,” Churchill confessed, later adding, “The weight of the war is very heavy now and I must expect it to get steadily worse for some time to come.”
The pragmatic president urged Churchill to focus on the future. “No matter how serious our setbacks have been, and I do not for a moment underrate them, we must constantly look forward to the next moves that need to be made to hit the enemy.” Roosevelt pressed that theme again in other correspondence. “There is no use giving a single further thought to Singapore or the Dutch Indies,” he advised. “They are gone.” In a softer exchange he encouraged Churchill to find a way to relax. “Once a month I go to Hyde Park for four days, crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me,” he wrote. “I am called on the telephone only if something of really great importance occurs. I wish you would try it, and I wish you would lay a few bricks or paint another picture.”
Roosevelt struggled at times to take his own advice, letting the war’s setbacks and continued attacks by isolationist rivals upset him. That was evident when he lashed out in a March 6 letter to prominent New York banker Fred Kent. “You wax positively gruesome when you declare solemnly that had it not been for the thirty million man-days lost by strikes since the defense program began, the Philippines, the Dutch Indies and Singapore would all have been saved. You sound like Alice in Wonderland,” the president wrote. “Let me tell you something more fantastic than that. If, since the defense program started, we in the United States had not lost sixty million man-days through that scourge of Satan, called the common cold, we could undoubtedly have had enough planes and guns and tanks to overrun Europe, Africa and the whole of Asia.”
The pressures on the president only increased as the struggle for the Philippines neared its tragic end. Under orders from Roosevelt, MacArthur had escaped in March, leaving Lieutenant General Jonathan Wainwright in command of 110,000 American and Filipino forces on the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island of Corregidor. Cut off from reinforcements by a Japanese blockade, Wainwright’s troops battled malaria and starvation, forced to slaughter and eat the cavalry’s horses. “Our troops have been subsisted [sic] on one half to one third ration for so long a period,” Wainwright radioed on April 8, “that they do not possess the physical strength to endure the strain placed upon the individual in an attack.” MacArthur warned General Marshall to prepare for the worst. “In view of my intimate knowledge of the situation there, I regard the situation as extremely critical and feel you should anticipate the possibility of disaster.”
The situation was hopeless. Roosevelt instructed Wainwright to do what he felt best. “I have nothing but admiration for your soldierly conduct and your performance of your most difficult mission,” he messaged. “You should be assured of complete freedom of action and of my full confidence in the wisdom of whatever decision you may be forced to make.” The Japanese overran Bataan on April 9—one week after the Hornet left San Francisco—setting the stage for the infamous Death March that would kill thousands. Holed up on Corregidor with the last of the Philippines’ fourteen thousand defenders, Wainwright listened that night as a “terrible silence” settled over Bataan. “If there is anything worse than a battlefield that shakes with explosions and the cries of men,” he later wrote, “it is one that becomes mute and dead.” He tried to sound optimistic in a message to the president. “Our flag still flies on this island fortress.”
But it would not for long.
Wainwright knew it; so did the Japanese.
And so did Roosevelt.
The fall of Bataan exacerbated the pressure on Roosevelt. Americans had grown tired of retreat and defeat. “Bataan is a bugle call to tell us that only attack will win,” argued the San Francisco Chronicle. “Attack is not only suited to our temperament,” echoed the New York Times. “It is also the life-sparing road to a victorious peace.” The Doolittle mission promised a potent tonic to the frustration brought on by Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam, and now Bataan. But the recent disaster in the Philippines only magnified the enormous political risk of a mission grounded in the promise not of tactical gains but of positive headlines. How would the country react if Japan destroyed America’s precious few carriers, cruisers, and destroyers? Was Roosevelt in his quest to boost the nation’s morale pushing his Navy to commit suicide? That question would be answered soon enough.
THE ARMY AVIATORS SETTLED into life on board the Hornet as the task force cut through the swells west toward Japan. In addition to attending classes and lectures, the men worried about the bombers, which were exposed to everything from corrosive salt air and sea spray to gale-force winds and pounding rains. Crews paid careful attention to the auxiliary gas tanks, which were prone to leak. “Deck lashings had to be inspected and secured daily,” wrote pilot Jack Sims. “Batteries ran down requiring regular recharging, spark plugs fouled, brakes failed, hydraulic component and system leaks occurred and generators sometimes broke down. It was a constant, never-ending battle against the elements.”
On one of those inspections, Edward Saylor discovered a problem. He drained the oil sump on the right engine and pulled out the magnetic plug, which is designed to pick up any metal shavings or particles that might have come loose. Attached to the plug he found two horseshoe-shaped keys that held the engine’s five planetary reduction gears in place on the shaft. The loss of those two keys signaled the breakdown of the engine’s gear system, a catastrophic failure. Saylor reported the news to Doolittle.
“Can you fix it?” Doolittle asked.
Saylor knew this was no easy job; it would require the removal and disassembly of the engine—on an aircraft carrier at sea.
“Probably,” Saylor replied. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”
Doolittle was blunt.
“You’ve either got to fix it or push it over the side.”
Saylor set to work. The bomber with its tail dangling over the carrier’s stern could not be transported below, forcing Saylor to remove the engine on the flight deck even as the winds at times reached thirty-five miles per hour. Navy sailors helped, constructing a tripod over the plane complete with a chain hoist to support the more than 2,000-pound Wright Cyclone engine. As he unfastened the bomber’s engine, Saylor carefully packed each nut and bolt inside the aircraft so as not to lose them overboard.
The men transported the engine down to the Hornet’s hangar deck, where Saylor disassembled the back half of the engine, working amid a sea of parts. He directed the machine shop to make replacement keys and then carefully installed them. “There was nobody around that had ever done it before, none of the other mechanics,” he recalled. “It was just a matter of using your head, taking it apart and putting it back together again, getting everything just right.” Crews transported the rebuilt engine back up the elevators, and Saylor reinstalled it on the bomber. “Ran it up and it ran fine,” Saylor said. “Normally we would have test flown the aircraft to see if everything was really working out okay on it after such a major rebuild, but of course we didn’t have a chance to do that so we just had to make sure that everything was just right on it. “
The airmen took care of other issues, big and small.
Ted Lawson continued to order gunner Dave Thatcher to stop calling him “sir.”
“All right, sir,” Thatcher answered. “I won’t.”
Bobby Hite had come on board as the pilot of one of the backup crews. He hungered to go on the mission, complaining to his friend and fellow pilot Billy Farrow.
“I’ve been training my own crew and everything,” Hite griped. “I want to go.”
Farrow wasn’t wild about his copilot and asked Hite whether he wanted to come along in his place, even though it meant a demotion in status from aircraft commander to copilot. Hite jumped at the opportunity. “I would have gone as bombardier, rear gunner, nose gunner,” he recalled. “I would have gone in any position to be on that raid.”
The airmen used the limited free time to take tours of the Hornet, visiting the hangar deck and the torpedo rooms. With a background in engineering, Hilger marveled at the boiler and engine rooms. As the mission’s second-in-command, he enjoyed a stateroom to himself and caught up with an old high school friend, now an officer on the Hornet. Doolittle’s navigator, Hank Potter, realized that, in his rush not to miss the last tender back to the carrier the morning the task force left San Francisco, he had left his dog tags in his hotel room. He persuaded technicians in the carrier’s medical department to fashion him new ones. Richard Cole likewise spent a day in the optical repair shop, making a new screw for his sunglasses to replace one he had lost. Joseph Manske visited the ship’s dentist and barber, while Herb Macia refereed an ongoing chess match between the two naval roommates, who seldom played face-to-face.
“Hey, has Bill been here?” one of the sailors would invariably ask Macia.
“No.”
“I’m going to move that one back.”
Chow time became a daily highlight for the airmen, as captured by Ken Reddy in his diary. “The meals in the Navy were not good, but excellent,” he wrote. “The most elaborate meals to be consistent I have ever seen. Fresh fruit, vegetables and milk.” Ted Lawson echoed him. “The Navy fattened us up like condemned men,” he later wrote. “We even had chicken.” As the Hornet steamed farther west—and fresh stores began to run low—the airmen got a taste of a Navy culinary tradition. “I had never eaten beans for breakfast,” confessed bombardier Robert Bourgeois. “Later in China those beans would have looked like ice cream.”
When the novelty of the new surroundings faded, many of the airmen settled down to games of poker and craps, surprised to discover that the crew shared quarters with a billiard table. “What in the world would you ever do with a billiard table on the ship? Because even anchored, even at the dock, I don’t know how you would use it,” Davy Jones later said. “But at any rate, it was there and it made a helluva crap table. When we weren’t studying, there was a crap game.”
And what a game it was.
“I fear the dice games were the biggest and best ever held on the Hornet,” recalled Charles McClure, Lawson’s navigator. “All of the bomber officers had money and adopted the theory that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference what became of it. We didn’t have premonitions of disaster, but we realized that we were off on one of the most dangerous attempts to harm an enemy that had ever been conceived; money just didn’t seem to mean much under the circumstances. There was solid logic behind this thought. Only by a miracle could all of us have escaped whole.”
Even Ken Reddy, who swore off gambling after he lost $40 back at Pendleton, picked up the dice and cards again. “Since I’ve been aboard I have gone back on my better judgment,” he confided in his diary. “I took a $5.00 bill earned in a crap game and ran it up to $104.00 playing poker for 4 days. One day I fell off $19.00 but out of the four I earned $104.00.”
Not all of the raiders came out ahead.
Davy Jones shared a stateroom with Lieutenant William “Gus” Widhelm, the executive officer of Scouting Squadron Eight. Widhelm had not only one of the best record collections but a sizable appetite for cards as well—and an ego to match. “When you brag as much as I do,” he often quipped, “you gotta live up to your words!”
That he did, wiping out the shipboard savings of many of the raiders, who would then gather in the passageways and mournfully sing “Deep in the Heart of Texas.” “He forgot one thing, however,” Ross Greening later noted. “There were still some Army crew who didn’t go on the raid that were still aboard. By the time the task force reached Pearl Harbor revenge had been won—the Army cleaned Gus for 1100 dollars and cleaned every other Navy poker player of every cent they started to sea with!”
The Navy’s senior officers ignored the illegal shipboard gambling, even though a deck court on board the task force’s destroyer Balch found more than a dozen sailors guilty of the same offense, levying fines of as much as forty dollars.
Mitscher at one point even walked in on one of the Hornet’s games, looking over the shoulder of a young second lieutenant.
“How are you doing?” the skipper asked.
The Army airman with a cigar dangling from the corner of his mouth glanced up but failed to recognize Mitscher.
“OK, Joe,” he answered, much to the embarrassment of Mitscher’s marine orderly. “Want to take a hand?”
Though the skipper shrugged off such illegal games, other officers on board took offense at the airmen’s lax behavior, including Jurika. “Most of them slept in. Few of them came down to breakfast,” the lieutenant later griped. “Poker games were going, sometimes on a twenty-four-hour basis. I know there were games that went for two or three days. Somebody would go to the wardroom during a meal and bring back enough to keep them from starving. I know that there was also some booze on board.” The airmen’s winning irked the Navy in other ways. “Being so flush we bought enormously in their ship store,” recalled McClure. “We bore down heavily on cigarets [sic] by the carton and candy bars by the dozens; we almost drained their supplies.”
Not everyone gambled. “If you didn’t play poker,” recalled Cole, Doolittle’s copilot, “you more or less had to generate your own amusement.” The airmen spied whales one day near the ship. Another time a school of tuna jumped. Jacob DeShazer found himself drawn to the albatross that trailed the task force. One night on guard duty, he wrestled with loneliness and fear. He comforted himself by considering the statistics of World War I. Of all the soldiers who fought, only a fraction had died. Surely he, too, would be one of the lucky ones and survive. “I began to wonder how many more days I was to spend in this world. Maybe I wasn’t so fortunate after all to get to go on this trip,” DeShazer mused. “I shuddered to think where I would go if I was to die.”
DeShazer wasn’t alone. Others wrestled with the same fears, as evidenced by the crowded Easter service the Sunday morning of April 5. Those who couldn’t find a seat inside the carrier’s mess deck stood in the aisles. Others jammed the doorways. Lieutenant Commander Edward Harp Jr., the Hornet’s chaplain, counted no fewer than thirty of Doolittle’s men sitting shoulder to shoulder in the first two rows. “Looking down at those youngsters, I wondered what I could say to them. I knew that some of them would not get back,” he later wrote. “However, men going into danger do not like to hear about it.” Harp chose not to focus his sermon on the perilous mission ahead or even suggest that the men make peace with God. “I spoke, instead, of immortality. I told them that there were certain realms over which death had no control. The human personality was one of them,” he wrote. “Death could not destroy them.”
Harp led the men in singing hymns as he played the hand organ, performing songs the fliers had requested, mostly old Sunday-school psalms remembered from childhood; seven of the airmen would later ask him as well for copies of the New Testament to take on the mission over Tokyo. One of the fliers who listened that morning was Ken Reddy, homesick for his church back home in Texas. “The service was nice, but my mind was wandering over the benches in the Church at Bowie. Mr. Bellah on the front row; Mrs. Heard doing her best on the pianos; Bob Spain leading the singing, Dad standing respectfully while Mama did her bit to help the dragging music,” he wrote in his diary. “Today, however, when the services were over, there was no argument as to where I would eat dinner. There was no after Church parley with Dorothy and Geo., Son, or Ed and Margaret. I just made my way to the wardroom and ate.”
Fellow airman Joseph Manske captured a similar sentiment in his diary that day. “Easter Sunday on board ship was just another day,” he wrote. “We had beans for breakfast and chicken for dinner. Nothing extra.”
VICE ADMIRAL HALSEY HAD concluded his meeting in San Francisco with Doolittle and prepared to return to Pearl Harbor by April 2. The three-star admiral needed time to make final preparations for the mission. Strong westerly winds, however, stymied his plan, forcing the cancellation of all Hawaii-bound flights. The winds failed to die down the next day or the day after. By April 5, much to Halsey’s frustration, he had no choice but to alert the Hornet to postpone the scheduled rendezvous by a day. Halsey’s luck continued to deteriorate. The next day, as he prepared to return to Pearl Harbor, he was hit with a self-diagnosed case of the flu. “When I boarded the plane, I was so full of pills that I rattled, but I slept until a nosebleed woke me as we lost altitude for our landing,” Halsey later wrote. “I stepped off at Honolulu with the flu licked.”
Halsey spent April 7 meeting with Chester Nimitz and his planning staff, finalizing Operation Plan No. 20-42, which the laconic Pacific Fleet commander signed that afternoon. As part of his plan Halsey requested that two submarines patrol off Japan, tasked to monitor enemy forces that might jeopardize the mission. The Navy would divert all other subs south of the equator. That would allow Halsey to conclude that any ships sighted west of the rendezvous were hostile. The Enterprise sortied the next day at 12:32 p.m., accompanied by the cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City, the destroyers Balch, Benham, Ellet, and Fanning, and the oiler Sabine.
Journalist Robert Casey of the Chicago Daily News, who was on board the Salt Lake City, surveyed the scene as the ships departed. He had hopes of accompanying a massive task force of several carriers, battleships, and cruisers, but the eight ships that slipped out to sea appeared to be the “same old Punch and Judy show.” “Maybe things are going to be different,” Casey wrote in his diary that day. “But on the surface this looks like another assault on the outhouses of Wake.”
Unlike the Hornet’s Mitscher, who shared the task force’s destination with the crew soon after departure, Halsey sat on the news as hours turned into days, much to the frustration of many. The resourceful journalist Casey pressed everyone on board the Salt Lake City for details, including Commander John Ford, the Academy Award–winning director of The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley, a naval reservist called to active duty. “All we know,” Ford told him, “is that it’s some sort of suicide.”
Casey wasn’t the only one to gripe about Halsey’s secrecy, particularly as the warm Hawaiian days gave way to bitter nights as the carrier steamed north.
“Cold as all Alaska,” one of the Enterprise aviators noted in his journal on April 12. “Only God and the admiral know what we are up here for. We’re probably going to bomb Japan itself.”
The frustrated journalist found he could do little more than take solace in the beauty of the vast and empty ocean. “The ships ahead of us in line on a glowing blue sea were misty gray like a procession of Gothic cathedrals,” Casey wrote in his diary. “I stood for a time freezing and drinking in the terrific beauty of it all.”
The Hornet had received news on April 9 of Halsey’s delay and reversed course and slowed. The two task forces closed in on each other at 4:30 p.m. on April 12, when the Hornet detected radar transmissions 130 miles southwest. Lookouts on the Hornet spotted Enterprise search planes at 5:28 a.m. the next morning. Thirty-seven minutes later the masts of Halsey’s force came into focus at a distance of 20 miles.
Enterprise pilot Tom Cheek towed a target for gunnery practice that morning. “As I flew over the Hornet, I looked down and saw those B-25s packed on the flight deck,” he recalled. “Needless to say, I spent the next three and a half hours wondering about our destination. Tokyo wasn’t even considered.”
Cheek’s surprise mirrored that of the sailors who crowded the deck of the Enterprise, peering through binoculars at the Hornet.
“They’re B-25s!” announced one sailor.
“You’re crazy, sailor,” snorted one of the carrier’s aviators. “A B-25 could never take off with a load—and if it did, it could never land aboard again.”
“They won’t have to carry a load, you dope, and they won’t have to land. They’re reinforcing some land base.”
“Out here? Which land base?”
“I’ll bet we’re going through the Aleutians and deliver them to a secret Siberian base.”
“Are they using army pilots on carriers? If so, our careers are over. Let’s join the marines.”
The two task forces merged. The Hornet took over as the guide and fleet center, with the oilers Sabine and Cimarron a thousand yards astern followed by the Enterprise. The cruisers Northampton and Vincennes steamed in one column and the Nashville and Salt Lake City in another. The eight destroyers formed an inner and outer antisubmarine screen with a circular spacing of one mile as the force steamed due west. Weather permitting, pilots flew continuous daylight air patrols coupled with dawn and dusk search flights out to two hundred miles, sixty degrees off each bow.
On April 13 the Enterprise’s loudspeaker crackled as Halsey prepared to alert his men of the mission. “This force,” he announced, “is bound for Tokyo.”
“Never have I heard such a shout as burst from the Enterprise’s company!” the admiral later wrote. “Part of their eagerness came, I think, from the fact that Bataan had fallen four days earlier.”
The admiral then messaged to the other ships in his task force details of the plan. “Intention fuel heavy ships about one thousand miles to westward,” Halsey instructed. “Thence carriers cruisers to point five hundred miles east of Tokyo then launch army bombers on Hornet for attack. DDS and tankers remain vicinity fueling rejoin on retirement. Further operations as developments dictate.”
Casey heard the news of the mission directly from the Salt Lake City’s skipper. This was no attack on Wake or Marcus Island, but an assault on the enemy’s homeland. Casey surveyed the muscular task force of carriers, cruisers, and destroyers that cut through the swells. His earlier disappointment vanished. “This is a big force now,” he wrote in his diary, “a force that the Japs would hardly dare take on without twice the number of ships and at least an even break of airplanes.”
The skipper of the Salt Lake City came over the loudspeaker at 11 a.m. to warn his men to remain vigilant against enemy submarines.
“You are about to take part in a very historic event,” he announced. “For the first time in the history of Japan, the home territory is about to be attacked. This attack will be in force and will undoubtedly have great effect.”
The same day the task force crossed the 180th meridian, which serves as the international date line, skipping ahead one day to April 15. Casey noted the day’s demise in his diary with a tombstone inscription:
Here lies
April 14, a Tuesday,
sacrificed to the west-bound crossing of the
international date line.
Each new day carried the task force another four hundred miles closer to Japan and at a cost to the Hornet of as much as fifty thousand gallons of fuel. Radiomen hunched over receivers twenty-four hours a day, monitoring Tokyo’s commercial stations to decipher news and broadcast routines, while officers and crew manned battle stations at dawn and dusk. Mitscher ran his sailors through countless drills to prepare them for combat, from gunnery and damage control to abandon-ship exercises. The Navy’s rigorous practice at times irked some of Doolittle’s men. “It seemed to me,” griped Robert Bourgeois, “that every time I started to sleep or eat that damn General Quarters would sound off.”
The danger was reflected in Cimarron skipper Russell Ihrig’s battle instructions, demanding that sailors toss all magazines overboard and use wet rags to wipe down bulkheads, light fixtures, furniture, overhead pipes, and wiring to eliminate flammable dust. He ordered officer staterooms readied as battle dressing stations—complete with scissors or knives to cut off clothes—and instructed sailors to shave off beards and cut their hair to no longer than two inches. “Throw overboard tonight all shoe polish, hair oils and hair tonic. Wash your head and do not put on any hair-tonic or oils of any kind,” he ordered. “Keep all unnecessary lights turned off throughout the ships at all times. Light takes electricity, electricity takes steam and steam takes oil. We need that oil!”
Bad weather continued to plague the mission, forcing the Cimarron to slow amid forty-two-knot winds to prevent structural damage. The Vincennes lost a man overboard on April 6—he was recovered from the fifty-one-degree seas by the destroyer Meredith—and the Cimarron lost another a few days later trying to refuel the Hornet, forcing a second rescue by the destroyer. Heavy seas one night cost the Vincennes a paravane along with a sixty-man lifeboat, including two oars and five gallons of water, while Hornet sailors had to rescue the raider Joseph Manske, trapped topside in a storm as he checked to make sure that his bomber was secure.
The hellacious seas, which caused the Ruptured Duck’s altimeter to vary by as much as two hundred feet, amazed even veteran sailors. “We ran into the God damnedest weather I’ve ever seen,” recalled Lieutenant j.g. Robin Lindsey, a landing signal officer on the Enterprise. “For three days the waves were so high the deck was pitching so much that I had to have a person stand behind me to hold me on the landing signal platform so that I wouldn’t fall down. Several times I did, and you can imagine the amazement on the pilot’s face as he passed over with no signal officer there.”
Tension mounted on board the ships as the task force closed in on Japan. “You could feel it in the wardroom, in the crew’s mess, in the lookouts, and on the bridge,” Life magazine editor John Field wrote. “How close to Tokyo could we get without being spotted? Nobody knew for certain.”
Anxious for distractions, sailors listened over a shortwave radio to a San Francisco dance band. Others swapped jokes in the wardroom.
“Anybody seen the Staten Island ferry go by?” someone quipped.
The joke broke the tension, but all eyes soon drifted to the map that adorned the wardroom bulkhead, confirming what each sailor knew.
The task force was now on the enemy’s home turf.
Even the Hornet’s chaplain, Edward Harp, harbored doubts.
“How are we going to make out on this deal?” he asked Mitscher.
“The mission has to be successful,” the skipper replied. “The whole war does.”
No one knew that more than Doolittle, whom Harp encountered one night after dinner up on deck near the bridge. “In the dusk I saw a lone figure there,” the chaplain later wrote. “I stopped and watched a minute. It was Doolittle, walking up and down, his head bent characteristically. I could almost see him thinking, as he moved slowly from one rail to the other. In that moment I glimpsed the enormous responsibility resting on him. I left him there without speaking and retraced my steps.”
Doolittle held a final inspection of each bomber several days before the mission’s scheduled takeoff, passing out to every pilot a twenty-four-point checklist that included items ranging from guaranteeing that guns and bombs were properly loaded to stowing maps, charts, and first aid kits along with thermoses of fresh water and bagged lunches. Doolittle hoped the Hornet would deliver the raiders to within 450 miles of Japan. Even if crews had to launch from a distance of 550 miles, he predicted, the mission would in all likelihood prove successful. Doolittle set an outside limit of 650 miles. Beyond that, and he doubted his crews would have the fuel to reach China. Some of the raiders found the news unsettling. “It sure didn’t sound very inviting,” Joseph Manske wrote in his diary, “but it’s too late now to start worrying about anything.”
The Army airmen made personal preparations for the mission. Shorty Manch packed his portable phonograph, while Ken Reddy used his poker earnings to pay his mess bill, lending ten dollars apiece to William Birch, James Parker, and Harold Watson before packing up and mailing his watch home, careful to insure it for fifty dollars. Robert Emmens penned a final letter to his mother on Hornet stationery. “It may be quite some time before any of us can send anyone any word,” he wrote, “so just don’t worry, and feel that I’m doing something at last to help in this damnable mess.”
The airmen received a shock a few days before takeoff when operators picked up an English propaganda broadcast from Radio Tokyo. “Reuters, British news agency, has announced that three American bombers have dropped bombs on Tokyo,” the broadcast stated. “This is a most laughable story. They know it is absolutely impossible for enemy bombers to get within 500 miles of Tokyo. Instead of worrying about such foolish things, the Japanese people are enjoying the fine spring sunshine and the fragrance of cherry blossoms.” The news alarmed Halsey and sickened the raiders, who had hoped to be the first to attack the enemy’s capital. Doolittle in contrast doubted the report’s veracity, which proved so fantastic that it made headlines in the United States. “The Japanese radio strangely denied today that three American planes had bombed Tokyo,” the New York Times reported. “It was strange, because the Tokyo radio went to great lengths to deny something that apparently nobody reported.”
The Cimarron came along the port side of the Hornet at 6:20 a.m. on April 17, topping the carrier off with 200,634 gallons. The oiler next refueled the Northampton and then the Salt Lake City, while the Sabine topped off the Nashville, Enterprise, and Vincennes. The seas crashed over the bows as gale-force winds blew out of the southeast at forty-one knots. A thousand miles east of Tokyo, visibility dropped to as little as one mile.
At 2:44 p.m. the Hornet and Enterprise accompanied by the four cruisers pulled ahead of the oilers and destroyers for the final run toward Tokyo. The Hornet guided the reduced force at twenty-five knots, trailed by the Enterprise at a distance of just fifteen hundred yards. The Northampton and Vincennes formed a column off the Hornet’s starboard bow, while the Nashville and Salt Lake City took up a similar position off the carrier’s port bow. “I had left the destroyers behind so we wouldn’t be hampered if we had to get out of there in a hurry as we approached Japan,” Halsey recalled. “I was like the country soldier who wanted no part of the cavalry because he didn’t want to be bothered with a horse in case of retreat. We didn’t know what might happen.”
Sailors brought the incendiary bombs up to the flight deck via the no. 3 elevator, while the demolition bombs rode up in the regular elevators. Others helped load the ammunition for the nose and turret guns, a mixture of armor-piercing, incendiary, and tracer rounds. Two freshly painted white lines on the flight deck served as guides—one for the nosewheel, the other for the left wheel—promising pilots six feet of clearance with the carrier’s island. Airplane handlers spotted the bombers for takeoff half an hour before sunset. Even with the sixteenth bomber’s tail dangling precariously over the carrier’s stern, Doolittle in the lead plane would have just 467 feet to take off.
Mitscher summoned Doolittle to the bridge.
“Jim, we’re in the enemy’s backyard now,” the skipper told him. “Anything could happen from here on in. I think it’s time for that little ceremony we talked about.”
The airmen assembled on the flight deck, joined by a Navy photographer. The U.S. Battle Fleet had in October 1908 visited Yokohama, where commemoration medals were presented by a representative of the emperor. Two Brooklyn Navy Yard employees, master rigger Henry Vormstein and shipwright John Laurey, who had received such medals as seamen on the battleship Connecticut, returned them to Navy Secretary Frank Knox after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “May we request,” Vormstein wrote, “you to attach it to a bomb and return it to Japan in that manner.”
Daniel Quigley, a former sailor on the battleship Kearsarge who now lived in Pennsylvania, wrote a similar letter to Knox, enclosing his medal. “Following the lead of my former Fleet mates,” he wrote, “I herewith enclose the one issued to me and trust that it will eventually find its way back in company with a bomb that will rock the throne of the ‘Son of Heaven’ in the Kojimachi Ku district of Tokyo.”
Jurika contributed his own medal, one he had received in the name of the emperor from his time as an attaché.
The reserved Mitscher gave a brief speech to the airmen and read aloud the messages from Admiral King, General Marshall, and General Arnold. Doolittle and his men then tied the medals to the bombs. Thatcher grinned as he attached one.
“I don’t want to set the world on fire—just Tokyo,” someone scrawled in chalk on one bomb. Other inscriptions read, “You’ll get a BANG out of this!” and “Bombs Made in America and Laid in Japan.” Marine Corporal Larry Bogart, the skipper’s orderly, honored his girlfriend and his parents. “This one is from Peggy,” he wrote on one, and on another, “This is from Mom and Pop Bogart.” “We painted them all up with slogans and almost everybody autographed them,” recalled Robert Noone, a signal officer on the Hornet. “We were proud to take part in the venture.”
Men from the extra bomber crews pleaded to get on a flight, waving fistfuls of cash. “One of the most vivid memories I have of the Tokyo raid is of a group of men who were willing to pay $150 apiece to die,” Thad Blanton later wrote. “These men tried every way they knew how to beg, borrow or steal a seat on the raid.” None of the sixteen crews would give up a spot, a feeling well captured by Reddy in his diary. “It would take more than money could buy to secure my place on this trip.”
Doolittle held a final meeting with his men in the wardroom. He kept his instructions brief, warning that takeoff could happen at any moment. Under no circumstances were the men to fly to Vladivostok. He reiterated his demand that no one target the emperor’s palace or any other nonmilitary target. “If all goes well,” Doolittle told his men, “I’ll take off so as to arrive over Tokyo at dusk. The rest of you will take off two or three hours later and can use my fires as a homing beacon.”
He gave his men, as always, a final chance to bow out.
None did.
Doolittle concluded with a promise.
“When we get to Chungking,” he told them, “I’m going to give you all a party that you won’t forget.”
The men dispersed, and Lawson climbed into bed the night of the seventeenth. Across the task force others did the same; the risk of sudden danger prompted many to slip beneath the sheets still in uniform.
“Listen, you fellows, there’s going to be no card playing in here tonight,” one of Lawson’s naval roommates ordered the others. “Lawson’s got to get some sleep for a change. He might need it.”
LIEUTENANT COLONEL EDWARD ALEXANDER and Major Edward Backus lifted off on April 13 from Chungking in a twin-engine DC-3 cargo plane to make final preparations for the Chinese airfields to receive Doolittle and his men. The Army aviators planned to fly first to Chengtu and swap the lumbering American cargo plane for two Chinese fighters, before pressing on to Kweilin, Kian, Yushan, Chuchow, and Lishui. Special Aviation Project No. 1 remained a guarded secret. Rather than risk making arrangements via radio, the Army wanted Alexander to personally brief airfield commanders on the operation. Even the use of two Chinese fighters as opposed to a single cargo plane was designed to prevent any enemy spies from questioning why an American plane had visited such remote airfields. “My instructions were to maintain absolute secrecy,” Alexander wrote in his report. “Therefore this flight was undertaken without advising the Chinese Air Force or any one in China of the intended destination.”
Alexander’s orders were to make sure local airfield commanders assembled everything necessary to help the Tokyo raiders. The airfield at Kweilin would need 10,000 gallons of 100-octane fuel and 100 gallons of 120-grade lubricating oil; each of the other stations would require just 5,000 gallons of fuel and 100 gallons of lube oil. Alexander also would have to instruct local personnel on how to rapidly refuel the bombers, allowing Doolittle and his men to remain on the ground as little as possible in a region that straddled the front lines with Japanese forces. Furthermore, local commanders would need English-speaking personnel, landing flares, and radio transmitters to broadcast homing signals to help guide the raiders. “Signal transmitted will consist of figure 57, key held down 1 minute, figure 57, key held down 1 minute, figure 57, then off for 1 minute,” advised a cable from Chungking. “This signal will be repeated continuously for 2 hours before daylight on the date you specify.”
That date was April 20.
The message traffic that filled folders in Washington and Chungking indicated that preparations in China progressed smoothly. Stilwell had requested a range of details, from the size of bomber fuel openings down to whether the fliers would need food and water. But those messages proved little more than a bureaucratic veneer over the ragtag efforts to make arrangements in China, driven in part by Arnold’s refusal to brief Stilwell on the true nature of the operation. The forced secrecy, poor communication, and distrust of Chinese leaders and the remote and unsecure airfields at the mission’s terminus combined to create a possible disaster for Doolittle and his men, a likelihood that only increased as the Hornet steamed closer to Japan. As evidence of those challenges, Alexander’s mission to inspect the airfields was not the first such attempt. Stilwell’s air operations officer, Colonel Clayton Bissell, had ten days earlier dispatched a lieutenant in an aged C-39 cargo plane, instructing him to swallow his notes if captured. “Neither Lieut. Spurrier nor the C-39 are considered suitably equipped for the execution of the assigned mission,” Bissell confessed in his report, “but there is no alternative.”
Bissell’s assessment proved sadly accurate. Spurrier’s plane crashed before he could complete the mission, but Alexander drew an important lesson from Spurrier’s failure—he elected to use two fighters this time, in part to double the mission’s chances of success. Aside from logistical problems, other challenges arose that also threatened the operation. Japanese bombers accompanied by fighters twice blasted the two most eastern airfields on April 1, destroying 4,500 gallons of gasoline. Bombers returned the next day and targeted the three most eastern airfields, though this time inflicting negligible damage. The airfield at Lishui came under Japanese attack on April 3. Tokyo claimed in radio broadcasts to have launched the raids because America had lengthened the runways so as to be able to use them to bomb Japan. This struck Vinegar Joe as more than just a coincidence. “Three essential fields have all been bombed,” Stilwell confided in his diary. “Leak? Or just precaution by the Japs? Suspect talk in Washington.”
Alexander and Backus landed the DC-3 at Chengtu, departing again at 4 p.m. in two Curtis Hawk fighters. Weather reports predicted poor conditions around Kweilin. Alexander pressed on, only to find that the low-lying clouds over the mountains and valleys made it impossible to land. “The surface weather conditions at the place and time were approximately zero zero. The top of the overcast was at 12,000 feet,” he wrote in his report. “The pursuit aircraft are not equipped for night flying or with radios.” The pilots had no choice but to turn back toward Chungking. Arriving over the Chinese capital at 6:30 p.m., they found the area buried in clouds. Alexander dove through the clouds and managed to land his plane on a sandbar in the Chia-ling River, though his fighter struck river boulders and wrecked the landing gear. Backus refused to risk it and bailed out with his parachute. The men rushed by the fastest means possible to the nearest airfield, at Sui-ning, arriving there three days later.
Alexander and Backus set out again from Chengtu on April 17, this time in a DC-3 carrying four Chinese radio operators to be stationed at Kian, Yushan, Chuchow, and Lishui, each one conversant in English. Poor weather combined with radio failure, however, forced the plane to put down for the night at Kunming. The Army airmen refused to give up, taking off again the next morning. The urgency to complete the mission led Alexander to arrange through the Chinese air force for homing signals as well as radio assistance to help with the landing. Flying at times on instruments, the DC-3 finally reached Kweilin, circling for half an hour above cloud-covered peaks that reached up to fifteen thousand feet. Efforts to raise the ground by radio failed. Alexander had no choice yet again but to turn back. “It is to be particularly noted that concrete procedures and understandings had been arrived at with the Chinese as to radio assistance at Kweilin,” he stressed in his report. “Yet, none was available.”
Struggles continued to mount on the political front as well. Chiang Kai-shek had initially agreed to the use of the five airfields in late March, though he did not know the bombers would arrive after a raid on Tokyo. War conditions in China, however, continued to deteriorate, prompting Chiang to urge American leaders to postpone the operation until the end of May, a move he argued would give his ground forces time to protect Chuchow from possible Japanese occupation. The generalissimo further requested that the bombers be diverted to attack Japanese forces in Burma and in the Bay of Bengal. General Marshall fired off an urgent message on April 12 to Stilwell. Delay was not an option: a sixteen-ship task force and ten thousand sailors steamed toward Japan. “Execution of first special mission is so imminent that it is impossible to recall,” Marshall cabled. “Their arrival at field agreed upon should be immediately anticipated and all arrangements perfected.” Arnold followed up the next day. “First project cannot be stopped,” he cabled. “We are depending on your assistance as regards flares for landing and guidance and supplies for refueling.”
Stilwell met with Chiang on April 14, reporting that the generalissimo still pressed for a delay. The general followed up the next day with news that Chiang demanded that officials voice his concerns again to senior leaders in Washington. The generalissimo refused to allow the bombers to land at Chuchow, but reluctantly consented to the use of the other four airfields as well as one at Heng-yang. An astute politician as well as warrior, Marshall hastened to prevent any political fallout, directing Stilwell to explain America’s position to the generalissimo. “We regret the apparent misunderstanding concerning the timing of the first special mission,” Marshall instructed Stilwell to tell Chiang. “It appears that we must have failed to make our intentions sufficiently clear to the Generalissimo because we have understood for some weeks that the project was desired by him. The necessity for absolute secrecy did not permit reference to the matter except in the most guarded language.”
Marshall framed the operation as though it were motivated by American altruism to help the generalissimo, noting that airmen and bombers would remain in China afterward to fly other missions. American leaders therefore assumed Chiang would want the operation to take place as soon as possible. Absent from Marshall’s message was any mention of what the United States hoped to gain or of the horrific fallout everyone from Marshall down to Doolittle knew would soon befall the Chinese. “The project is now so far advanced that it is impossible to recall,” Marshall concluded. “Please inform the Generalissimo that I deeply regret the lack of a complete understanding with him on this point and sincerely hope that no embarrassment will be occasioned to him by the incident.” Marshall’s final words were for Stilwell. “Please report to the War Department promptly,” he ordered, “the first news you may have of the accomplishment of this special project with the strength of the detachment completing the task.”
Chiang’s repeated objections caused enough alarm that General Arnold ordered a one-page memo sent April 16 to Roosevelt. Marshall followed up the next day with a message to Chiang, directing Stilwell to present it personally. “I want personally to express to you my deep regret that this matter was not brought to your attention in detail, at its inception,” Marshall wrote. “The president is fully appreciative of your difficult situation and is particularly anxious that all our operations in your region be under your complete control and in conformity with your desires. Since he has learned that you consider the execution of this mission undesirable at this time he would be very glad to cancel it if this were possible and he regrets that he cannot now do so because of the imminence of execution. He is therefore especially grateful to you for the very effective measures you have directed to be taken to make the venture a success.”
Marshall messaged Stilwell on April 18. This time his concerns focused not on Chiang but on the actual operation. America wanted to keep the mission a secret. “Desire that there be no repeat no publicity of any kind connected with the special bombing mission,” Marshall ordered. “It is our purpose to maintain an atmosphere of complete mystery including origin, nationality, destination, and results of this type of effort. So far as public information is concerned you are directed to deny all knowledge of the incident and of any connection therewith. You are directed also to make earnest request upon the Generalissimo to observe this policy and to cooperate with you in the effort. As quickly as you obtain any definite information of this affair, either through survivors or otherwise, you are directed to render a report by urgent message to the War Department.”