OPPOSITE: Bill Bower (second from left) and his B-25 crew pose on the deck of the USS Hornet, spring 1942.
Our outfit had been flying the new B-25 bomber for a whole year, so we were a pretty hot bunch. We got the first ones right off the manufacturing lines.
They had asked for volunteers, and of course we volunteered, but we didn’t know what we were volunteering for. We just knew that we wanted to get out of that seedy base in Oregon and go do something else.
We didn’t know where we were going, but it was somewhere special— we knew that. Since they had selected the top crews in the squadron, we knew something rather interesting was in the works, and we wanted to be in on it. We had known something was up, because we’d flown to Minneapolis to have the planes modified, adding extra tanks and stripping them of all the extra gear.
We didn’t know for sure, but our mission pretty much had to be in the Pacific, since we needed to use long-range tanks, but I don’t recall that we ever spent much time worrying about where we were going. At that stage of life, I was in my early twenties, things were pretty much day to day.
We didn’t find out officially where we were going, for sure, until we got onboard the carrier Hornet, but they couldn’t really have kept that type of secret from us, couldn’t have kept us in the dark totally. So we each had a pretty good idea where we were off to. But we didn’t sit around the bar and talk about it. We had other things to talk about.
I didn’t much enjoy being on the Hornet. It was pretty dull business. They spread us Air Corps guys out all over the ship. I was given a berth right up in the prow, right by the anchor chains. There were four of us assigned to this one cabin, to divvy up the three bunks in there. When I got there, one of the Navy guys found other accommodations and slept on the floor somewhere, so I could sleep in his bunk. He didn’t have to do that, but they were good to us.
There wasn’t much humor onboard. It was a pretty tight ship. The farther we went west, the more tense it became. We all realized that this was the real thing. We were tense in that we’d been told that if we were discovered in Japanese waters and couldn’t take off as scheduled, they’d dump the airplanes over the side and make a run for it. But it was obvious they weren’t going to dump them. We were going to go no matter what.
We studied a lot, and we had a guy on the ship who had been a Navy attache in Tokyo just before the war. We’d have classroom sessions, and he lectured us each day. We’d ask questions, and he’d answer questions about the Japanese and Japan, about what the place looked like and what he’d seen. I have a clear memory of that, of asking questions about places in Japan. One day they presented a list of targets, and we got to choose what we wanted to bomb. I ended up picking a factory near Yokohama. Somebody said it belonged to Ford Motor Company. I thought that was a pretty good deal, because I drove Fords!
So the day for launching the mission was fast approaching, but the morning before we were scheduled to lift off they spotted a Japanese picket boat, and the jig was up—they knew where we were. So we had to leave a day early or not at all. I was lying around in my bunk and didn’t hear the call to quarters up where I was. All of a sudden Jack Hilger came in and got me up. I think he did so because my plane was ahead of his on the deck and he wanted to make sure I showed up. By the time Jack got to me, they had all the hatches secured for battle stations, and we had to go back through all those hatches, one after another, about 400 feet back from the bow before we could get up on deck. I didn’t have time to put on my flight suit—I just ran out of there in what I had on. We got up on deck, and there was no doubt or hesitation about going, no one thought it was a suicide mission.
The original plan was that we would take off and bomb Japan late in the day, fly all night, and land at dawn the next morning at a temporary field they’d built in China, in an area occupied by the Japanese. As far as I can remember, we had no knowledge of any other friendly fields in that whole area of China. Where they built this air strip just happened to be isolated from where the Japanese operated. So they had this temporary field where they positioned enough fuel to give each one of us enough to get out and fly down to Kunming, which still was not occupied by the Japanese, and that was the plan. We’d just land, fuel up right away, and get out of there.
But there we were firing up our planes in the morning a day early and more than 400 miles farther away from Japan than our fuel supposedly allowed to get to China safely, and thinking we’d get to Japan in the middle of the day. I didn’t reflect much about how it would work out. We had to go, and quitting was not an option. I knew I was going to go. There wasn’t any doubt about that, no hesitation. But in terms of people thinking of it as a suicide mission, I don’t believe any of us ever felt that’s what it was. We were competent and pretty highly trained. If you understand how to fly an airplane, there was no doubt that we could go ahead and handle any conditions or weather they could put us through.
There was a submarine right in the middle of Tokyo Bay that was giving us a weather report, so we knew going in pretty much what our winds were going to be. Bill Pound, my navigator, had that information, and we discussed it en route. But we didn’t talk much about anything initially. We just loaded up and went.
My plane was named “Werewolf,” but I didn’t have anything painted on it. I was the twelfth plane off the Hornet. There were two lines painted on the deck for us, because our wingspan was seventy-seven feet and the deck was only seventy-five feet wide. One line was the nose wheel line, and I had to keep the nose wheel right on it so the wing wouldn’t hit the control island of the carrier. There was a swell running, and a guy gave us a signal to go when the deck was just starting to come up, so that when we were lifting off the deck we were high on the wave. I didn’t have any problems at all taking off. There was a thirty-knot head wind, plus the carrier was going twenty, so all you needed was another thirty knots or so on the takeoff roll. I watched the eleven planes in front of me take off with no problem, so by the time I got up there I was confident I could do it. We’d been trained to do short take-offs, but doing it for the first time on an aircraft carrier was interesting! I got into position, locked the brakes, gunned the engines, and waited for the guy to give me the signal to go. It turned out the takeoff was easy.
After takeoff, I circled around and came back over the ship to get the exact heading and check the compass. Since we were taking off one after another and heading out right after takeoff, we were pretty much in single file. I flew all the way to Japan right down on the deck to avoid detection, and we were all by ourselves. I never saw another B-25 on the way. We were right above the ocean. And it was a nice day. Beautiful weather!
Evidently we were north of our course when we got to the Japanese coast, so we turned south and came down the coast, still right down on the deck. We could see people on the ground very clearly, and I was impressed with the countryside. It was a beautiful country, green, well manicured, and neat. There didn’t seem to be any clutter anywhere. We started climbing a little bit, to about 700 feet, and all of a sudden we flew right over an airfield. We went right over it at the same altitude as the planes in the traffic pattern. They didn’t seem to notice us, and we flew on.
As we got close to Yokohama, things looked exactly like what the briefings on the Hornet said they would look like, though all we had gotten was a verbal description. The barrage balloons were there, and we flew right through them. So once we got over the target about noon, it was like, “Well, there it is and it looks just like they said it would.” We had climbed a bit by then so we were at about 1,500 feet when we released the bombs. Then we had only one thought: get out of there!
We went right back out over the ocean, so we didn’t see land again until we touched it after we bailed out in China, and then we didn’t really see it before we got down because it was dark. It was just pitch dark. We couldn’t tell if we were over land or anything. No lights. We were in the clouds, and it was dark. Our navigator had some good fixes, but for the last three or four hours we were in solid weather. We were climbing gradually, trying to get above it, but it was real deep. Once it got dark, we were at about 10,000 or 11,000 feet, and we decided we’d just fly straight ahead by dead reckoning, since we knew we were going to be over land. We flew toward the area where the airstrip we were supposed to land on was. We didn’t really know how far we had flown, but we figured that when the red lights came on indicating we were out of gas, we’d jump. When we were getting ready to bail out, the bombardier popped his chute somehow, so we had to repack it, which was difficult under those conditions. He had caught it on something when coming out of the nose. So I bailed out last, and floated down in the dark— couldn’t see a thing. I took with me my pistol and a pack of cigarettes, and I still have that pistol. When the parachute jerked open, that pistol slid down my leg and cut my toe. I pulled it back up and strapped it back on. My father carried that pistol in World War I.
All of a sudden I was on the ground. I landed right by a tree, but missed it okay. I remember it was wet and I was within fifty or seventy-five feet of a sharp cliff. It was near midnight, eleven o’clock or so, and we ended up being close to the temporary field we were supposed to land on. A lot of the planes had made it to that area, including Doolittle’s. In fact we went down right near Doolittle. But some of the fellows had decided they couldn’t wait, and they put down on the beach right when they got to the coast of China, which was sort of a silly thing to do. Lawson and Hoover tried to go in near shore. But one of our guys, Farrell, he got a lot farther into China than any of the rest of us did. How he got clear into there, damned if I know, and he was the last man off the Hornet! It turned out that a tailwind pushed us farther into China than we would have been otherwise.
I got out of my parachute, and it was rough country. Everyone on my crew survived the landing, and we quickly got together. It was hard walking for a couple of days, but we finally got to where people started to help us, and they assembled us in a cave. That was within a week, I think. We were all back in that cave area. From then on we were in the hands of friendly Chinese. We went out as a group, went on a train, and then we commandeered a bus. A Dutch priest knew the way and could speak the language and got us food. We went from warlord to warlord, I guess. It was well coordinated. We finally got to Chungking, and they served us a dinner with Madame Chiang-kai Shek. Then they put us up in her compound before they flew us out all the way back to the States. All this time I was wearing the same clothes I had on when I took off from the Hornet. They got pretty rank! We went a long way to get out of China, 1,500 miles.
People ask me about what we thought of Doolittle. Of course he was a hero to all of us because of his reputation as an air racer in the 1930s. But when we met him we just immediately got the feeling that here was a real competent and capable individual. So there wasn’t a blind response to Doolittle that we’d do what he ordered. He never took away your power of reason. He’d just set the example, and it wasn’t difficult to follow that example. So, we knew if he was going to go we were going to go, and we could make it. And he conditioned us to the point that we knew we were capable of operating as well as he could operate. He instilled in us the sense that at least we had that competence.
After I got back to the States, I was sent out to Europe flying B-25s. For about a year and a half, we were 300 miles behind the enemy lines in Italy, on the island of Corsica. The Germans were to the south of us in Italy, down at the Rapido River, Monte Cassino, and Naples, and we were above Rome. In fact, our organization in Corsica is the story of Catch-22. The bomb wing there included the 340th Bomb Group, and that was Joseph Heller’s group. He was a crew member on a B-25. Our leader, General Bob Matt, was really a flamboyant character, a wonderful person and a great leader, and I think he’s incorrectly and cynically depicted in this book. He really was a helluva leader. But I can pick out some of the people I knew in that book. Actually, you can find them in any organization.
On the Doolittle Raid, out of eighty crewmen on the sixteen planes, one died on the parachute jump into China, four either drowned or died in landing accidents, and eight were captured in Japanese-occupied China. Two of those were executed, one died during captivity, and four were released at the end of the war. The crew that landed in Russia didn’t get out of there until a year later, when they managed to escape. Most of us ended up doing much more dangerous flying in Italy, and a number of our group were either killed or captured over there. At the time the raid seemed exciting to us, but we didn’t think it was too big a deal. We didn’t concentrate too much on what they ended up calling the Doolittle Raid. It was only in later years that there was a lot of interest built up. We have been getting together for years now. It’s influenced our whole lives. We are a pretty tight family.
I think that the war treated me fairly kindly. I went from a second lieutenant to colonel in less than four years. That was just four years and two months from the time I was commissioned. I was flying the whole time. So things kind of went my way. I stayed in the Air Force after the war and retired in the late sixties. Some of the guys I knew got out right after the war and flew for the airlines, but I stayed in, and I don’t regret it.