Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (7 page)

Other ideas emerged from discussions between senior British and American officers. In a Christmas Eve conference with chief of air staff Sir Charles Portal, the British officer outlined his vision for an attack. “In his opinion,” Arnold wrote, “attacking Japan was a Navy job, that the carriers, even at this early date, could sneak up to the vicinity of Japan and make the same kind of attack that the Japanese had made on Pearl Harbor.”
The mission would involve no more risk than the Japanese took at Hawaii, Portal argued, yet it would force the Japanese Navy to return to home island waters, relieving pressure on the Philippines and Singapore. Arnold dismissed the idea. He not only felt reluctant to risk the Navy’s few aircraft carriers but also questioned Portal’s motives, given the British hunger for American planes. “I always thought that Portal mixed wishful thinking in with his reasoning concerning the Pacific aerial strategy,” Arnold wrote. “I thought he was afraid if our Air Force planned to use heavy bombers against Japan it would cut down the number he would receive.”

In another conference that same day, Admiral Stark followed up on the possibility of launching attacks from Chinese airfields. Arnold pointed out that America did not yet have enough bombers in China and warned against launching a raid until the Air Forces could send enough planes to create significant damage. “The minimum number of bombers should be 50,” Arnold advised Stark. “Unsustained attacks would only tend to solidify the Japanese people.” With Russia out and China short on planes, America’s options appeared to dwindle, unless Arnold followed Portal’s advice and ceded the operation to the Navy. At a January 4 White House conference about the possible invasion of North Africa, Admiral King suggested shipping Army bombers aboard carriers. The idea piqued Arnold’s curiosity, as evidenced by the notes he scribbled. “By transporting these Army bombers on a carrier, it will be necessary for us to take off from the carrier,” he wrote. “We will have to try bomber takeoff from carriers. It has never been done before but we must try out and check on how long it takes.”

Arnold’s staff started to examine the idea immediately, though focusing on the limited concept of using Army cargo planes aboard a carrier to transport fuel for an expeditionary force of naval fighters. An informal agreement between Arnold and King—described in a January 5 memo—even proposed testing various transports off a flattop. In response, analysts pulled together data on planes with wingspans under ninety feet, including true air speed, flap settings, and ground run required for takeoff as well as the height of each plane and feasibility of removing the wings to allow storage in a hangar deck. Analysts ruled out the DC-3 and DC-2 because neither plane’s wingspan would clear a carrier’s superstructure and because the fuselages were too long to ride down the aircraft elevator. The C-63
was another option, but the Army simply didn’t have enough of them available yet. In a January 13 memo Arnold’s staff leveled with the general: cargo planes wouldn’t work. “It is not believed that any plane now available, which can operate from a carrier, would justify the test under consideration.”

About this time Low and Duncan appeared in the general’s office. Rather than launch cargo planes in support of the Navy, why not use B-25s and make them raiders? The greater range of the twin-engine Army bombers would mean the carriers would not have to approach so close to Japan. If the bombers flew on to China as proposed, then the carriers could immediately turn back, further limiting the risk to America’s precious flattops. Arnold enthusiastically embraced the concept, but he wanted to run it by his staff troubleshooter, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. The forty-five-year-old Doolittle had grabbed national headlines over the years as a stunt and racing pilot who Arnold knew also happened to boast master’s and doctoral degrees from the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. If anyone could evaluate this plan’s chance of success, Doolittle could. Arnold summoned him to his office.

“Jim, what airplane do we have that can take off in 500 feet, carry a 2,000-pound bomb load, and fly 2,000 miles with a full crew?”

Doolittle conducted a mental inventory of America’s arsenal, deducing that only a medium bomber would be able to lift off in that short distance. Of the four bombers he considered, three might be able to handle the job.

“General,” he answered, “give me a little time and I’ll give you an answer.”

Doolittle researched each plane’s performance data before reporting the next day that either the B-23 or the B-25 would work. Both would require extra fuel tanks.

Arnold added another demand: the plane must have a narrow enough wingspan to lift off in an area less than seventy-five feet wide.

“Then there’s only plane that can do it,” Doolittle replied. “The B-25 is the answer to your question.”

Arnold thanked Doolittle, who exited the office.

Doolittle had hit on the exact plane as Duncan. Arnold picked up the phone to Admiral King. The plan was a go. The
Hornet
would depart the West Coast around April
1, a date that would allow the carrier time to finish its shakedown and transit the Panama Canal. Duncan would handle logistics for the Navy. That would include overseeing trial takeoffs from the
Hornet
as well as a visit to Pearl Harbor to organize the task force. Arnold would need to pick someone on his side to direct the modification of the bombers and to train the aircrews. The general summoned Doolittle again the next day.

“Jim, I need someone take this job over—“

“And I know where you can get that someone,” Doolittle interrupted.

“Okay, it’s your baby,” Arnold told him. “You’ll have first priority on anything you need to get the job done. Get in touch with me directly if anybody gets in your way.”

CHAPTER 3

Doolittle is as gifted with brains as he is with courage.

—
NEW YORK TIMES
, SEPTEMBER 23, 1927

THE PLAN LAID OUT
by General Arnold was the perfect operation for Jimmy Doolittle, a man who on first glimpse did not appear to be such a formidable fighter. The gray-eyed Doolittle stood just five feet four—two inches shorter than Napoleon—though he frequently upped his height a couple of inches on official records. His short stature had shaped his personality from his childhood days along the Alaskan frontier, where his father, Frank Doolittle, had relocated the family from California during the gold rush at the turn of the twentieth century. The rugged town of Nome looked to Doolittle as he disembarked the ship like a sea of tents, shacks, and cabins. Mud paths served as roads, and public sanitation consisted of toilets built atop pilings along the waterfront to let the daily tides flush away the waste. Dysentery and typhoid fever flourished, as did crime in a town that boasted two dozen saloons and liquor stores. Doolittle even watched one day as half a dozen wild dogs tore apart his best friend in the streets.

Doolittle’s small size was a disadvantage among his peers. Students picked on him in school, and as punishment one time his teacher made him write twenty-five times on the chalkboard, “Jimmy Doolittle is the
smallest boy in the school.” Doolittle raised his fists for the first time at the age of five when he battled a native Alaskan child. “One of my punches caught him on the nose and blood spurted all over his parka. It scared us both,” Doolittle later recalled. “I ran home to my mother, certain that I had killed an Eskimo.” He soon proved he was a capable fighter despite his small size. Word spread, and bigger children lined up for the chance to battle the scrappy youth. Doolittle, in turn, found that he actually enjoyed the challenge of a good fight. “Since my size was against me, I decided my survival could be insured only by a speedy attack right from the start,” he later wrote. “I found it was easy to draw blood if you were nimble on your feet, aimed at a fellow’s nose, and got your licks in early.”

Doolittle’s father never found much gold, but instead worked mostly as a carpenter. Tools fascinated the younger Doolittle so much that his father gave him his own set and encouraged him to learn to work with his hands. Doolittle helped his father build furniture and even houses, developing important mechanical skills that would prove vital years later when he worked on engines and airplanes. Doolittle joined his father in the summer of 1904 on a six-week trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles that turned out to be transformative. “The sights and sounds in the three big cities were strange and exciting to me at age seven, since I had forgotten everything of what I had seen before we went to Nome,” Doolittle later wrote. “I saw my first automobile, train, and trolley car. There were modern houses and stores with paint on them. My values changed right then and there. I saw everything in a new perspective and I wanted very much to be a part of the exciting life I saw all too briefly during that trip.”

His mother, Rosa, agreed and packed up and returned to California in 1908 with her then eleven-year-old son, leaving his quixotic father behind in Alaska. Rather than return to Doolittle’s native Alameda, she settled near family in Los Angeles. The schoolyard brawls that had helped shape Doolittle’s time in Alaska continued. One such fight caught the attention of an English teacher and boxing instructor, Forest Bailey. “You’re going to get hurt badly fighting the way you do,” Bailey told Doolittle. “You get mad when you fight. If you lose your temper, you’re eventually going to lose a fight because you let your emotions instead of your head rule your body.” Bailey stripped Doolittle of his rough
street-fighting form and coached him instead on how to bob and weave as well as target his blows with greater power to compensate for his short arms. These skills helped the fifteen-year-old Doolittle, fighting as a 105-pound flyweight, win the Amateur Boxing Championship of the Pacific Coast in 1912.

But the teenage hothead continued to battle outside the ring as well, landing in jail one Saturday night on a charge of disturbing the peace. The police phoned Doolittle’s mother to come retrieve him. Never a fan of his boxing, she had finally had enough. “She wants you to stay here until Monday morning,” the officer told Doolittle. “She’ll drop by then and get you out in time for school.” The adolescent was stunned that his mother would leave him in jail for the weekend, but the experience taught him an invaluable lesson. “Being incarcerated in a cold, unheated cell for two nights and being totally deprived of the right to leave was a shocking experience for me,” Doolittle later wrote. “I vowed never again to let my emotions overcome reason.” His mother tried to bribe him with a motorcycle to quit boxing, but the crafty teen instead adopted the pseudonym Jim Pierce and used his new bike to motor up and down the West Coast, earning as much as thirty dollars a bout boxing professionally in various clubs.

Doolittle let his emotions overcome him again when he met Josephine Daniels, a classmate at Los Angeles Manual Arts High School who went by the nickname Joe. The pretty young woman with long dark hair rebuffed her cocky suitor for several years until, like a boxer, he finally wore her down. The two of them could not have been more different. “She was a very good little girl. I was a very naughty little boy,” Doolittle recalled. “She got all A’s; I had a hard time getting C’s.” Joe came from a cultured family, who had moved to California from Louisiana. Her parents frowned on Doolittle, a roughneck who cared little for academics and often sported bruises and a split lip from his battles in the ring. Even Doolittle’s own mother warned Joe that she could do better than her troublesome son. “There’s no doubt that Joe changed my life,” he later said. “I began to comb my hair, wear a tie, look after my clothes, and watch my language around her.” During his senior year of high school he asked her to marry him.

“You must think I am out of my mind,” she answered. “I could never marry a man who wants to fight all the time.”

“I’ll give up fighting,”
he argued, telling her of his plans to return to Alaska and hunt for gold. “As soon as I have some money, I’ll send for you.”

“My mother would never approve.”

“I am going to marry you,” he countered, “not your mother.”

When he graduated from high school in spring of 1914, Doolittle accepted his father’s invitation to return to Alaska. Doolittle and his father had never been close, and the reunion failed to remedy the pair’s strained relationship. The younger Doolittle soon set off on his own, living in a tent and eating nothing but salmon as he panned unsuccessfully for gold. Doolittle realized after several weeks that he had had enough. He hitchhiked back to the coastal town of Seward and bade his father farewell, not knowing that it would be the last time he ever saw him. Doolittle hired on as a steward aboard a Seattle-bound ship and then stowed away on a freighter to Los Angeles, his dream of striking it rich now over. He planned instead to enroll in college and earn a degree. “Alaska was not the land of opportunity I thought it might be,” he later wrote, adding, “It was a far wiser Jim Doolittle who entered college.”

Doolittle studied at Los Angeles Junior College for two years, then enrolled at the University of California School of Mines at Berkeley, where he boxed on the varsity team and professionally to help pay the bills. He resurrected the alias Jim Pierce to hide his bouts from his mother and Joe. He slugged his way through a string of weak opponents before he climbed into the ring with a nimble pro. Doolittle knew right away he was in trouble. “He made a monkey out of me,” he later recalled. “That was the end of my boxing career.” Doolittle decided instead to focus on his education, though his battles in the ring had taught him an invaluable lesson in life, one he would articulate years later in a letter to his wife after the couple’s youngest son lost a college boxing match. “Luckiest thing in the world that John was whipped by the Syracuse boy. Some time in life we have to learn how to lose and the sooner the better,” Doolittle wrote. “Every boy should learn how to win graciously and lose courageously.”