Immortality will always be theirs.
—HOWARD PYLE, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO DWIGHT EISENHOWER, 1955
ON THE EVE OF the Tokyo raid, as his seventy-nine men crowded around him on board the Hornet, Doolittle had made a promise. “When we get to Chungking,” he told them, “I’m going to give you all a party that you won’t forget.”
But the airmen had trickled into Chungking in waves, and the party never materialized. Doolittle held a reunion in 1943 in North Africa for about two dozen of the fliers, but that was not the party he wanted to have, not the party he had promised.
So with the war over—and the last of his airmen home—Doolittle sent a letter to his raiders. “Now seems to be the right time to have our get-together and I, for one, would appreciate nothing more than a chance to swap handshakes, yarns and toasts with the old, original gang,” he wrote in November 1945. “I plan to throw a dinner with all the food you can eat and whatever liquid you choose to float the food on.”
The first reunion in Miami the weekend of December 15, 1945, started a tradition that would carry on for nearly seven decades. The responses were overwhelming as telegrams and letters clogged Doolittle’s in-box.
“I will be there with bells on,” Davy Jones wrote. “In fact, I’m going in training this week so that I will be in good drinking shape by the time the 15th rolls around.”
“General, I want to see those men and be at that party so badly that I can taste it,” replied Shorty Manch.
“You may count on me,” wrote Ross Greening, “unless the Empire State Building falls on me.”
The prospective party gave pause to Chase Nielsen, still adjusting to his new life as a free man. “When I realize that I am the only one left of the crew on my ship,” he wrote, “I feel almost alone, but exceedingly lucky.”
Of the eighty men who roared off the Hornet’s deck, sixty-one had survived the war. The raid had claimed the lives of Leland Faktor, Bill Dieter, and Don Fitzmaurice. The Japanese had executed Billy Farrow, Dean Hallmark, and Harold Spatz, and Bob Meder had starved to death in prison. Twelve others had died in the war: Bob Clever, Bob Gray, Denver Truelove, Donald Smith, Richard Miller, Ken Reddy, Edwin Bain, George Larkin, Eugene McGurl, Omer Duquette, Melvin Gardner, and Paul Leonard. The last was Doolittle’s trusted crew chief, who the day after the Tokyo raid had stood amid the B-25’s wreckage on the Chinese mountainside and assured his commander he would not only make general but receive the Medal of Honor.
Doolittle was with Leonard when he was killed in 1943 in Algeria, hit by a bomb in a German attack on the airfield. “The softening point of this tragedy is that he never knew that it was coming and never knew that it hit him,” Doolittle explained to Leonard’s widow in Denver in what he later described as “the saddest letter I ever wrote.” “If he had to go it was the way he would have preferred, quick, clean and painless.” Doolittle spared her the awful reality of what the bomb did to her husband, though the horrible scene would haunt the general for decades. “I found what was left of Paul. It was his left hand off at the wrist, with a wristwatch still in place. This was all that remained of the wonderful boy who had tried to cheer me up in China in my saddest moment,” he wrote. “Paul’s loss was my greatest personal tragedy of the war.”
That April 1942 Doolittle and his raiders had accomplished the impossible, taking off at such a great distance that most knew the chance of survival was slim at best, yet the airmen still managed to bomb Japan and escape. That more were not captured or killed is miraculous, saved only by a tailwind that pilot Harold Watson later described as the “hand of heaven.” The Tokyo raid had not only buoyed the morale of a wounded nation, but postwar records and interviews with senior Japanese leaders would reveal the raid’s effect on the plans to capture Midway, an unintended consequence that would yield the mission’s greatest success. The June 1942 battle, which cost Japan four aircraft carriers, shifted the balance of power in the Pacific, setting the stage for America’s offensive drive across the Pacific. “The carrier action at Midway,” concluded the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, “was perhaps the decisive battle of the war.”
But the raid came at great expense. Claire Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers, later complained that the intense secrecy cost the mission all the bombers. Had he been informed of the operation, Chennault wrote, radiomen could have talked Doolittle’s men down to friendly airfields. “My bitterness over that bit of bungling,” he wrote, “has not eased with the passing years.” That in part led to the government’s deception, keeping secret the loss of the bombers and the capture of two of the crews. But the greatest toll, of course, came in the human and property losses suffered by the Chinese, a consequence of the raid that American leaders knew was a possibility yet decided was worth the risk. The estimated 250,000 Chinese killed was a by-product of the raid that drew far too little notice by the American public at the time and in the years since. “The invaders made of a rich, flourishing country a human hell,” wrote one Chinese journalist, “a gruesome graveyard, where the only living thing we saw for miles was a skeleton-like dog, who fled in terror before our approach.”
At that first reunion in Miami, the raiders swam, drank, and enjoyed the camaraderie of old friends. They returned to Miami in 1947 for a second reunion. Nielsen asked Doolittle whether he might invite the prosecutors from the war crimes trials, which had recently wrapped up in China. The party proved a raucous good time, as evidenced by the memo the following morning from the hotel’s night attendant:
The Doolittle boys added some gray hairs to my head. This has been the worst night since I worked here. They were completely out of my control.
I let them make a lot of noise in 211 but when about 15 of them with girls went in the pool at 1:00 A.M. (including Doolittle) I told them (no swimming allowed at night) Doolittle told me that he did not want to make trouble and that they were going to make one more dive and would leave. But they were in the pool until 2:30 A.M.
I went up twice more without results. They were running around in the halls in their bathing suits and were noisy up until 5:00 A.M.
Yes, it was a rough night.
More than two dozen raiders would autograph that complaint, which is now preserved in the archives of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. They had such a great time that they would continue to gather yearly until 2013, skipping only 1951 and 1966 because of the Korean and Vietnam wars. At each reunion they would reach out to the families of the men killed, reminding them that their sons were not forgotten. “Bill is here with us in spirit just as he is with you today,” they wrote to Farrow’s mother during the first reunion in Miami. “He will ever be with us through the years to come.”
Ski York and Bob Emmens maintained a decades-long debate over whether the Russians had moved them south in order to allow them to escape. York later said he always believed the Russians had; Emmens disagreed. Neither airman would live long enough to learn the truth. A formerly top-secret cable from October 1944 contains an important clue that indicates York’s hunch was likely true. The American ambassador to Russia, working with that nation’s foreign minster, had arranged for twenty-eight internees to be sent from Siberia to Tashkent, on the Iranian border, to join sixty-two others, most of them Navy airmen. “When this is done,” the cable stated, “an escape will be arranged for these prisoners similar to the one that took place last February.”
The war receded into the background as the raiders moved on with their lives, found jobs, married, and raised children. Jacob DeShazer followed through with his vow to return to Japan as a missionary; there he was stunned to discover that the Japanese had created a park in Doolittle’s honor. Over more than three decades, he would go on to start twenty-three churches, including one in Nagoya, the city he had first seen through a bombardier’s sight. In an unlikely twist of fate, DeShazer’s powerful tale of forgiveness helped persuade Mitsuo Fuchida to convert to Christianity, the famed pilot who had led the attack on Pearl Harbor. Fuchida was baptized in DeShazer’s church. “I was very lost,” he later said, “but his story inspired me to get the Bible.”
DeShazer’s fellow prisoners of war would wrestle for years with the pains of that traumatic experience. George Barr, with the help of Doolittle, finally began to heal. “He appears to have complete faith in his full recovery,” Eleanor Towns wrote the general in February 1946. “For the first time since his capture I feel he now has a sense of security.” Barr recounted his own battles in an article published two months later by International News. “The nightmares are less frequent now,” he wrote. “I’m back to 170 pounds. I feel good. I want to forgot those three years as fast as I can.”
A heart attack would claim Barr in 1967, at the age of fifty. Doolittle rallied to help his fallen raider’s family after the Veterans Administration denied benefits to Barr’s widow and four children, arguing that his death was not related to his time in the service. Doolittle disagreed, offering to go to court as a witness. Under pressure, the agency backed down. “I do not believe that anyone could have been in such bad physical shape as George was at the end of the war without having some permanent deleterious organic effect,” Doolittle wrote, “in this case on his heart.”
The other former prisoners likewise suffered long-term problems. Bobby Hite’s wife in 1971—more than a quarter century after his release from prison—outlined her husband’s daily struggles in a statement to the Veterans Administration, ranging from chronic stomach pains to a half dozen bowel movements per day. Nightmares had long haunted him. “He would awake screaming, still talking in his sleep, gritting his teeth and flinging his arms as if to ward off the enemy,” she wrote. “I really don’t believe that he has had one sound night’s sleep in the nearly 25 years we have been married.”
The men put aside these battles to celebrate with one another each year. At the center of it all was Doolittle. Over the course of the war the general had commanded many airmen, but he never denied he had favorites. “It’s not that I love any of them the less,” he said at a reunion in 1955, “but only that I love these boys the more.”
“Young guys like us would go to hell and back for him,” remembered navigator Nolan Herndon. “And we did.”
The raiders were family. “It wasn’t only teamwork,” recalled pilot Harold Watson. “It was brotherhood.”
“I flew 40 missions during World War II, but there was nothing to pass that mission,” added bombardier Robert Bourgeois. “That Tokyo raid, that was the daddy of them all.”
But the raiders long dismissed the idea that they were heroes, a sentiment captured best by engineer Douglas Radney: “I think we’re all average American citizens who were afraid when we took off but more afraid not to.”
At the raiders’ seventeenth reunion, in Tucson in 1959, civic leaders presented the airmen with eighty silver goblets, beginning a storied tradition. Each goblet was engraved twice with the name of an airman. Doolittle’s copilot Dick Cole built a velvet-lined mahogany traveling case to allow the airmen to transport the goblets to reunions.
At each gathering the raiders would hold a private ceremony and toast their fellow fliers who had passed away, turning the deceased airmen’s goblets upside down. The second engraving allowed the name to be read. Doolittle presented his men with a bottle of Hennessy cognac from 1896, the year he was born. Tradition demanded the last two surviving raiders would open this special bottle and toast the others.
Over the years the raiders slowly passed away. Jimmy Doolittle, the legendary racing and stunt pilot, seemed to defy the odds of a man with his adventurous nature and lived to the age of ninety-six. In 2013 with just four of the raiders remaining—and all in their nineties—the men decided to amend tradition and hold the final toast on November 9 at the National Museum of the Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.
The airmen opened this final toast to family members, friends, and dignitaries, who sat on folding chairs in one of the museum’s sprawling hangars. Dick Cole was joined on stage by Edward Saylor and Dave Thatcher, the latter the then twenty-year-old corporal who had managed to save the lives of Ted Lawson and the badly injured crew of the Ruptured Duck. Former prisoner of war Bobby Hite, unable to attend because of his health, held his own celebration at his home in Tennessee.
Official raid historian Carroll Glines read aloud the names of the eighty volunteers, who on that stormy morning seventy-one years earlier had without question climbed into sixteen bombers crowded on the deck of the Hornet. The ninety-eight-year-old Cole, who sat right next to Doolittle at the controls on that legendary flight over Tokyo, then rose. “Gentleman, I propose a toast to those we lost on the mission and those who have passed away since,” Cole said. “May they rest in peace.”
The three raiders raised their glasses and drank.
And then taps began to play.