Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (30 page)

Over this roar Miller shouted instructions to the pilots: keep the trim tabs in neutral and the flaps down. Any changes he would display on a blackboard. “Look at me,” Miller demanded, “before you let your brakes off!”

Doolittle climbed into the lead bomber alongside his copilot, Second Lieutenant Dick Cole. Throughout the plane sat the navigator, Second Lieutenant Hank Potter, the bombardier, Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer, and the gunner and crew chief, Staff Sergeant Paul Leonard. Rain beat down on the cockpit windshield as Doolittle stared down the 467-foot flight deck. The days of practice and the nights of worry had come down to this moment—not just for Doolittle but for all sixteen aircrews. “We all stood around, watching and sweating it out,” recalled Eierman. “We had done plenty of practicing—on land—but this was going to be the first real take-off from a carrier with one of our big bombers.”

The loudspeakers crackled on board the other ships in the task force: “
Hornet
preparing to launch bombers for attack on Tokyo.”

Troops ranging from cooks and quartermasters to engineers and gunners crowded rain-soaked decks for a chance to witness the historic event—a few even saw an opportunity to profit. “Sailors, like stockbrokers, work everything out by betting, and there was soon heavy money down on both sides: would they make it, would they not?” recalled Alvin Kernan, an
Enterprise
plane handler. “The odds were that the B-25s wouldn’t have been on the
Hornet
if there had not been successful
tests somewhere, but with all the skepticism of an old salt about anything the services did, I put down ten dollars at even money that less than half of them would get into the air.”

Doolittle revved up the bomber’s twin engines and checked the magnetos. The carrier’s speed and the furious storm combined to create as much as fifty miles per hour of wind across the
Hornet
’s deck, perfect conditions for takeoff. He flashed the thumbs up sign to Lieutenant Edgar Osborne, the signal officer who clutched a checkered flag. Sailors pulled the wheel chocks out as Osborne waved his flag in circles, signaling Doolittle to push the throttle all the way forward.

“Everything all right, Paul?” Doolittle asked his crew chief.

“Everything okay, Colonel.”

Osborne watched the
Hornet
’s bow so as to release Doolittle just as the carrier began to dive down the face of a wave. The time required for a B-25 to traverse the flight deck meant that the bomber would reach the bow on the upswing, catapulting the plane into the air. Osborne dropped the flag and Doolittle released the brakes. The bomber roared down the flight deck at 8:20 a.m. “The scream of those two engines, the excitement and urgency, made an incredible sight. I was lying face down on the wet deck, clutching tiedown plates to keep from being blown back by the terrific wind. When Doolittle’s B-25 began to move, it seemed unreal,” Greening later wrote. “I had chills running up and down my spine from excitement.”

Doolittle’s left wheels hugged the white line that ran down the deck. He passed fifty feet, then one hundred.

Then two hundred.

“He’ll never make it,” someone shouted.

The bomber charged toward the end of the flight deck and then appeared to vanish.

“Doolittle’s gone,” McClure thought to himself. “We’ll have to make it without him.”

The plane then roared up and into the gray skies over the bow.

“Yes!” Knobloch shouted. “Yes!”

Sailors crowded along the flight deck and carrier’s island erupted in cheers. “The shout that went up should have been heard in Tokyo,” Thomas White, the mission’s doctor, remembered. “We were all yelling and pounding each other on the back
. I don’t think there was a sound pair of vocal cords in the flotilla.”

On board the cruiser
Salt Lake City
journalist Robert Casey captured the moment in his diary. “First bomber off the
Hornet
. Miraculous,” he wrote. “The carrier is diving, deluging deck with white water. The big plane is just about catapulted as the ship lifts out of the sea.”

In the skies overhead Doolittle instructed Cole to raise the wheels as he circled over the
Hornet
, where the carrier’s course was displayed in large figures from the gun turret abaft the island. Doolittle paralleled the flight deck, allowing Potter to calculate any error with his magnetic compass before he pressed on toward Tokyo.

On deck below First Lieutenant Travis Hoover throttled up his bomber. The aircraft shook and shuddered. Hoover’s mouth was dry as he stared down the flight deck at the bow, now buried in a wave. Osborne dropped the flag and Hoover released the brakes, charging down the runway just five minutes after Doolittle. “I was running out of deck,” he recalled. “I came back on the yoke and she stood up like a bucking bronco.”

The bow wash pushed the bomber’s nose even higher. Sailors and airmen alike looked on with horror, convinced the aircraft would stall and crash. Hoover and copilot Bill Fitzhugh stiff-armed the controls to wrestle the bomber’s nose back down as the plane appeared to dive toward the waves.

“Up! Up!” airmen on deck shouted. “Pull it up!”

Hoover did and soon regained control; a sense of relief washed over him. “I felt wonderful, almost euphoric,” he recalled. “We’re airborne.”

The graceless takeoff failed to impress some of the naval aviators, one of whom compared his vacillating takeoff to that of a “kangaroo.”

The third pilot in the queue, Bob Gray, stunned his fellow fliers when he roared down the flight deck at 8:30 a.m., trading brown lace-ups for cowboy boots. “They are the most comfortable shoes in the world,” he professed. “Just the thing for walking.”

Miller watched Gray climb into the skies, then scrawled a note on his blackboard, reminding pilots to keep the stabilizer in neutral. The fourth, fifth, and six bombers took off successfully over the next ten minutes.

Ted Lawson had tested the
Ruptured Duck
’s flaps during the engine run-up, but in the excitement failed to lower them again before he released the brakes at 8:43 a.m. “We watched his plane disappear before the bow of the ship,” Greening recalled
, “then come waddling back up like some big bullfrog, right on the water ahead of the carrier.”

In his report Miller reflected on Lawson’s near disaster with a bit of humor, noting the most important fact: “He got away with it.”

York shot down the flight deck next, at 8:46 a.m.

“Nice take-off, Ski,” Emmens said. “How did it seem compared to the practice take-offs you’ve been making on the ground back at Eglin?”

“How the hell should I know?” York answered. “I never made one.”

The pilots now settled into a rhythm, as bombers nine through thirteen followed one another at just three-minute intervals. Each plane that took off safely not only added a few extra feet of deck space for the next pilot but also helped boost the confidence of all the others. That was certainly the case for pilot Bill Bower. “It seemed like he was as unconcerned about this raid as he could possibly be,” recalled his navigator, Bill Pound. “My impression was that it was just another cross-country trip to him. Only difference was that the take-off strip was a little shorter than usual.”

Greening didn’t quite share the sureness of his colleague. “I could see many faces peering down from the bridge and navigation rail on the carrier’s island. All of the crewmen whose aircraft hadn’t been brought aboard were there,” he later wrote. “I wondered how many still were willing to change places with us now.”

By 9:15 a.m. all but one of the bombers had safely lifted off; the earlier thrill now waned. The tail of the
Bat out of Hell
, the final plane, dangled over the carrier’s stern just as a strong wind swept across the deck at 9:19 a.m., lifting the B-25’s nose and threatening to topple the bomber into the ocean. “Sailors, slipping on the wet decks and fighting the wind, swarmed around our plane,” recalled copilot Bobby Hite, “every available man grabbing a handhold on the nose and front wheel.”

Seaman First Class Robert Wall, amid the struggle, tumbled into the
Bat out of Hell
’s left prop, gouging his back and cutting his left arm at the shoulder.

DeShazer was on the deck to pull the wheel chocks when the accident occurred. He surveyed the bloody scene with horror.

“Give them hell for me,” Wall muttered, a message DeShazer couldn’t hear over the roar of the engines, but could read on the seaman’s lips.

“Help me get him to one side,” DeShazer barked at one of the other sailors. The two men pulled the injured the seaman to safety.

The tragedy shocked the crew.

“The seaman’s arm was practically cut off,” navigator George Barr recalled. “This accident unnerved me and it was all I could think about as we lined up for our takeoff. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a taste of worse to come.”

DeShazer climbed up into the bomber, only to discover more problems. The tail of the previous plane had punctured a hole in the Plexiglas nose.

“Should I tell the pilot,” he wondered.

Doolittle had warned that crews would push any defective plane over the
Hornet
’s side. DeShazer had worked too hard to let a busted nose stop him. He would tell Farrow about the hole—after the bomber was airborne. Farrow released the brakes seconds later and the
Bat out of Hell
shot down the flight deck.

Across the task force sailors watched Farrow’s bomber climb into the gray morning skies. “When the last plane had left there was a physical let down all over the ship,” remembered Ensign Robert Noone, a signal officer. “Everyone was exhausted from the nervous tension of watching them take off. We mentally pushed every plane off the deck.” Exhaustion soon turned to euphoria. “We all cheered loudly and choked down a few patriotic tears,” added Kernan, the
Enterprise
plane handler who had bet on the loss of at least half the planes. “I thought my ten dollars well lost in a good cause, as if I had actually contributed the money to success in the war.”

One sailor clasped his hands above his head; another blessed himself. “For a few minutes the sky was full of them,”
Life
magazine’s John Field wrote. “With the deep-throated roar of their twin motors, their beautiful lines, and their American insignia painted boldly on their wings and fuselages, they made us all feel proud.” Fellow journalist Robert Casey recorded the scene in his diary. “Quiet on the horizon,” he wrote. “There hasn’t been a hitch. All have shot straight up in the teeth of the hurricane.”

Mitscher had watched the takeoffs with a mix of disbelief and shock. The veteran aviator had tensed up each time one of the bombers roared down the deck, his arms instinctively moving as though he sat before the controls. “With only one exception, take-offs were dangerous and improperly executed,” he complained in his report. “Apparently, full back stabilizer was used by the first few pilots. As each plane neared the bow, with more than required speed, the
pilot would pull up and climb in a dangerous near-stall, struggle wildly to nose down, then fight the controls for several miles trying to gain real flying speed and more than a hundred feet of altitude.”

Other senior naval officers were more forgiving. “The job that was done in launching those planes was to me a miracle,” recalled Captain Frederick Riefkohl, the skipper of the
Vincennes
, who watched the takeoffs from astern of the
Enterprise
. “I expected at any time that those big planes would crash into the sea, but the timing was perfect.” No one was more pleased than Lieutenant Hank Miller, who had trained all eighty of the airmen. “Without a doubt every officer and man aboard the
Hornet
would have pinned every medal in the world on those people who went off that deck in those airplanes,” he later said. “They really had what it took.”

DOOLITTLE
SETTLED
IN
FOR
the long flight to Tokyo, pleased to have successfully answered the question of whether a loaded B-25 could lift off from a carrier. “Take-off was easy,” he later boasted in his report. “Night take-off would have been possible and practicable.”

The wind blew out of the northwest as Doolittle guided the bomber down to wave-top level, skimming just two hundred feet above the dark waters. He reviewed plans for the arrival that night in China, hoping that Lieutenant General Stilwell had made the necessary arrangements at the airfields.

In the seat next to him copilot Dick Cole also wondered what China would be like, confident that despite the added distance his crew would make it: “It never once occurred to me that there was a possibility that we would never get there.” Cole instead hummed the folk tune “Wabash Cannonball,” failing to notice that he had attracted the attention of others: “One time I was singing and stomping my foot with such gusto that the boss looked at me in a very questioning manner like he thought I was going batty.”

Half an hour into the flight First Lieutenant Travis Hoover’s bomber closed in on Doolittle, who soon banked to give wide berth to what appeared to be a camouflaged naval vessel. Hoover spotted patches of white smoke around the ship, indicating possible gunfire. Carl Wildner felt the tightness return to his stomach
. “Why am I here,” he thought, “when it would have been so easy to be somewhere else?”

All sixteen bombers had successfully lifted off from the
Hornet
with an average interval of less than four minutes, forming a loose string some 150 miles long. Most flew due west, aiming to cross the Japanese coast at Inubo Saki, a rocky cape topped with a lighthouse east of Tokyo. “There was no rendezvous planned, except at the end of the mission,” Lawson recalled. “Those who took off early could not hover over the ship until a formation was formed because that would have burned too much gas in the first planes. This was to be a single file, hit-and-run raid—each plane for itself.”

Airmen emptied the five-gallon gas cans, hacked holes in them, and tossed them into the seas as the pilots hedgehopped across the blue waves, some buzzing so low that salt water occasionally sprayed the windshield—
Bat out of Hell
’s props even nicked a wave once and sent a shudder through the bomber.