Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (26 page)

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
North Hampton
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.”