Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (21 page)

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.”