6
The wild card in America’s carrier force was the USS Hornet, a sister ship of the Yorktown and Enterprise with essentially the same characteristics and capacity. Commissioned in October, six weeks before Pearl Harbor, she remained in Norfolk over the winter as she fitted out, and it was not until March of 1942 that she was ready for sea with a crew, an air group, and a commanding officer. That commanding officer was Captain Marc A. Mitscher, whose Academy nickname was “Pete.” The nickname came about because Mitscher had arrived in Annapolis from Oklahoma in 1904 soon after another Oklahoma native named Pete Cade had “bilged out.” Cade had been a popular mid, and his classmates were unsure that trading him for the short, skinny, and taciturn Mitscher was a good bargain. They ordered the new plebe to call out the name of the departed Cade every time an upperclassman required it. On those occasions, Mitscher would brace up and shout out: “Peter Cassius Marcellus Cade, Jr.” His classmates took to calling him “Oklahoma Pete,” and Pete he remained for the rest of his life.1
For some time it looked as if the new Pete would follow the same course as the old one at Annapolis. Mitscher got bad grades and lots of demerits. For two years, he was constantly on the brink of being kicked out. And then he was; in 1906, at the end of his second year, he was ordered to resign. In an act of defiance, he wrote out his resignation on a piece of toilet paper. In spite of that, and perhaps as a sop to the congressman who had appointed him (a friend of Mitscher’s father), he was allowed to reenter the Academy, but only if he started over as a plebe. Out of either stubbornness or determination, or perhaps both, Mitscher reentered the Academy as a member of the class of 1910. Though he was repeating classes he had already taken, his grades remained poor, and his conduct worse. Nor was he especially popular. He seldom laughed or even smiled, and his natural quietness was interpreted by some as sullenness. His odd looks did not help. Short and slight, he had milk-white skin that burned easily, and white, wispy hair that was already thinning noticeably, which he combed over the top of his balding head. The 1910 Lucky Bag profiled him in verse:
Pete dislikes all allusions or mirth
On the hue of his hair or its dearth
It gives him much pain
When he has to explain
That he’s not an albino by birth.
He spent a lot of his time smoking and card playing, and several times came close to being expelled again. He graduated third from the bottom of his class in 1910, after six years at Annapolis.2
Mitscher’s early career as a surface officer was as undistinguished as his record at the Academy. Despite his diminutive size, he was stubborn, argumentative, and short-tempered, and he managed to get into a surprising number of fights. Then in 1915 his career changed dramatically when as a lieutenant junior grade he was accepted into the new Bureau of Aeronautics. Mitscher decided it was an activity that was worth his time and effort—for one thing, his diminutive stature was actually an asset in an airplane’s cockpit. The card-playing slacker became a hard worker and an enthusiastic devotee of aviation. Moreover, as one of the first students to show up at Pensacola in the Navy’s infant flying corps, Mitscher got in on the ground floor of a new service that was soon to expand rapidly. In June of1916, at the age of 29, Pete Mitscher became Naval Aviator Number 33.3
At that time, of course, there were as yet no aircraft carriers in the U.S. Navy (the Jupiter would not be converted into the Langley until 1920). For four years, Mitscher flew fabric-covered seaplanes resembling box kites from shore bases; only occasionally were they propelled off the back of cruisers. Breakdowns were frequent, and the pilots patched up their own cloth-and-string “aeroplanes” after each crash, of which there were many. One authority estimates that for every fifteen minutes of flying time, the pilots spent four hours making repairs. The newly promoted Lieutenant Mitscher described what may have been a typical day in a letter home to his wife, Frances: “We transferred ten wrecks to the yard, and repaired two. The other day Donohue smashed one of the remaining ten and we worked night and day to get it ready. Stone fired off with it today and smashed it again, so we now have to repair some more.”4
Lieutenant “Pete” Mitscher at the controls of an early seaplane in Pensacola, Florida. Becoming a pilot completely changed the trajectory of Mitscher’s naval career. (U.S. Naval Institute)
To his great disgust, Mitscher did not see any action during World War I. Instead, his big break came after the war, in 1919, when he was assigned to join the Navy team that attempted the first transatlantic crossing by air. Rather than make the flight in a single hop, the plan was to fly huge seaplanes—essentially flying boats, designed by Glenn Curtiss—from the American east coast to the Azores and then on to Europe. Mitscher was a backup pilot on the NC-1 (N for Navy; C for Curtiss). Though only one of the three planes (not Mitscher’s) managed to complete the trip, the exploit brought the Navy plenty of positive publicity, and Mitscher and everyone else involved received the Navy Cross.5
Mitscher’s early involvement in naval aviation proved the making of him. In 1925, President Coolidge asked his friend Dwight Morrow to head a board to evaluate the potential of aviation for the services.* Called to testify before the Morrow Board, Mitscher declared that it was entirely inappropriate for black shoe officers to have management of pilots and airplanes. He asserted that only “experienced aviation men should have administration of the training of aviation personnel and the detail of aviation personnel.” While this was entirely logical and genuinely reflected Mitscher’s views, it also helped ensure that those who had managed to get into the game early would have the first claim on supervisory positions when naval aviation became a major component of the fleet.6
Mitscher wrote privately that it was “the great ambition of [his] life” to get on board “an aviation ship,” which he finally did in 1926. A year later he was the air boss on the new Saratoga. Two years after that he was the exec on the Lexington. He was not interested in grand strategy and never attended a war college. A fellow officer described him as “a person who did not enjoy the long process of planning, of thinking too much about logistics.” He just wanted to fly, and he was good at it. One problem was that his fair skin made the outdoors into a hostile environment. He burned so easily that despite wearing a specially designed long-billed baseball cap, his nose was always peeling. Eventually his sun-ravaged skin gave him the look of a withered gnome. He remained both stubborn and temperamental, though he no longer got into fistfights. He also remained taciturn, and when he did speak it was in a voice so low that others were compelled to lean in close to hear him. A fellow officer recalled that he was “very, very quiet and seldom said much,” and another that “he never used five words if one would do.” Despite his low voice, he disliked having to repeat things and fired a staff officer who asked him to repeat himself once too often. By 1938 Mitscher had become a Navy captain and the assistant chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics. Then in May of 1941 he was selected as the prospective commanding officer of the new-construction Hornet. Many of his Academy classmates were astonished.7
As captain of the Hornet, Mitscher no longer flew airplanes, and he missed it. He remained reticent, seldom telling jokes or engaging in light banter. He spent hours in his cabin chain-smoking and reading paperback detective novels. “He would go through a novel in nothing flat,” a shipmate recalled. Despite that, Mitscher exuded an air of confidence and authority, especially when it came to air operations. He realized that he had a green crew—fully 75 percent of the men on board the Hornet were fresh from boot camp or cadet training—and he patiently tried to bring them up to the mark. The 18-year-old helmsman on the Hornet thought the soft-spoken skipper “gave the impression of being a kind, gentle, and highly intelligent person.” But Mitscher’s patience was often tested, especially when it came to air operations, and he showed occasional flashes of anger, particularly toward his young pilots. During the Hornet’s shakedown cruise, while watching flight operations from the open bridge wing, he saw the landing signal officer wave off Ensign Roy Gee during his first approach. Gee came around again and worked his way back into the pattern, but as he made his approach the LSO waved him off again. It took Gee ten tries before the LSO finally gave him the cut sign and Gee landed safely. When he climbed out of his airplane, he was ordered to report at once to the bridge. There he was confronted by an irate Mitscher.
“Can’t you fly?” Mitscher asked.
“I won’t do it again, Captain,” the humiliated ensign replied.
“You’re damned right you won’t,” Mitscher told him. “You’re not ever going to fly off this ship again.” Mitscher ordered that Gee’s name be struck from the flight roster. But if Mitscher was quick to anger, he also relented quickly. Five days later he ordered Gee restored to flight status.8
On the last day of January 1942, the Hornet was anchored off Norfolk when Captain Donald “Wu” Duncan, Ernie King’s air officer, came on board. Once he was alone with Mitscher, Duncan asked him a question: “Can you put a loaded B-25 in the air on a normal deck run?” That depended, of course, on how many planes crowded the flight deck. Mitscher thought a moment. “How many B-25s?” he asked. “Fifteen,” Duncan told him. Mitscher bent over the spotting board, a wooden template of the Hornet’s flight deck that showed where each plane was placed at any given moment. He calculated how much space a B-25 with its 67-foot wingspan would take up on the Hornet’s deck. Finally he answered that it could be done. “Good,” Duncan replied. “I’m putting two aboard for a test launching tomorrow.”9
The big land-based, two-engine Mitchell bombers had been named for Billy Mitchell, the interwar U.S. Army general who had been court-martialed for accusing Army and Navy leaders of “criminal negligence” for not making a greater commitment to air power. The Mitchell bombers were about the size of a Japanese Nell and, in conformance with Mitchell’s vision, had been designed for coastal defense. They were too big to land on a carrier and had to be hoisted aboard the Hornet by crane at the Norfolk docks. On February 2 (two days after Fletcher and Halsey struck at the Marshalls in the Pacific), the Hornet went out into the Atlantic with two Mitchell B-25s lashed to her flight deck. At 53 feet long and with that 67-foot wingspan, the two planes looked out of place even on the broad deck of the Hornet. The weather was less than ideal—a light snow was falling—and the test was interrupted when one of the escort vessels reported what was believed to be the periscope of a submarine, which proved instead to be the tip of a mast on an uncharted wreck. In the end both planes took off safely and without incident, flown by young Army pilots with no previous training in carrier operations. Duncan was satisfied. He left the next day to take the news back to Washington, where several very senior officers were waiting.10*
From the very day of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt had envisioned conducting a retaliatory strike on Japan’s home islands. He urged such a raid not as part of a grand strategy but to give the American public something to cheer. To conduct a carrier raid against Japan, however, would subject the Navy’s scarce and valuable carriers to unacceptable danger. They would have to steam to within two hundred miles of the enemy coast and then wait there for the strike planes to return. It was simply too risky. American land-based bombers, with their greater range, could reach Japan from China. However, getting them to the airfields in China “over the hump” of the Himalayas from India would take months, and FDR was eager to strike while the pain of Pearl Harbor was still palpable. The notion that it might be possible to fly long-range, land-based bombers off a carrier deck originated with Navy captain Seth Low, Ernie King’s operations officer, who thought it up while watching them lift off from airfields in Florida on which the outline of a carrier deck had been painted for practice landings. He pitched the idea to King, who told him to talk to Duncan, and soon afterward, Duncan went out to the Hornet to conduct the test that proved it could be done.11
The problem was that while B-25s might take off from the Hornet, they could not land there. They would have to fly off the carrier some five hundred miles out from Japan, drop their bombs, then find someplace else to land. One option was to land them at Russian airfields near Vladivostok. But Stalin, who had his hands full with the Germans, did not want to add the Japanese to his list of enemies and refused permission. The other option was China, though to make it all the way to airfields in the part of China that had not yet been overrun by the Japanese meant that the B-25s would have to be significantly modified to carry extra fuel, which would limit their bomb load. Another problem was that because the B-25s were much too large to fit on the carrier’s elevators, they would have to remain on the flight deck throughout the Pacific crossing, which meant the carrier could not conduct normal air operations. In other words, the Hornet would be unable to defend herself. In consequence of that, a second carrier would have to be assigned to accompany her. Indeed, King even wondered if it might not require three carriers—two for the heavy bombers and one to defend the task force.12
Many wondered whether it was an intelligent use of rare American carriers to use most or all of them simply to conduct an air raid whose purpose was mainly to boost morale. In any event, the plan required cooperation from what in 1942 was still called the Army Air Forces, and in March of 1942 the U.S. Army and Navy were very much at odds about future strategy. It was not the kind of dysfunctional hostility that characterized relations between the Japanese Army and Navy but a far more subtle competition over resources and priorities. The U.S. Army continued to adhere to the Germany First strategy that had been laid down in ABC-1 and Rainbow 5 in November 1941, whereas King was already pushing hard for an early Pacific offensive. After the collapse of the ABDA coalition, the British agreed to allow the United States to assume full responsibility for the conduct of the war in the Pacific, and at a March 5 strategy meeting in the White House, King presented a memorandum he had prepared for the president that emphasized the importance of holding Hawaii and defending the lines of communication to Australia, but which also called for a “drive northward from the New Hebrides into the Solomons and the Bismarck archipelago,” which meant attacking Rabaul. To make sure that a busy FDR didn’t miss the central point of his argument, King summed it up in three bulleted items at the end: “Hold Hawaii, Support Australasia, Drive northwestward from New Hebrides.”13
The problem was that, as King readily admitted, “Such a line of operations will be offensive rather than passive,” and this ran up against the Army’s determination to remain strictly on the defensive in the Pacific until Germany was beaten. George Marshall, the soft-spoken but strong-minded Army chief of staff, noted that the strategic principle of Germany First was still in place, and that even though an invasion of occupied Europe now seemed unlikely for 1942, it was essential to continue the buildup of forces for the invasion when it did come, presumably in 1943. Marshall was backed up by the head of the Army Air Forces, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, who had earned his nickname for his perennially cheerful expression. Despite these basic disagreements about strategy, however, when Low and Duncan went to see Arnold to propose a raid on Tokyo that combined Army bombers with Navy carriers, Arnold was immediately enthusiastic. In fact, Arnold had been thinking about how to hit back at Japan with his bombers, and only weeks before had confided in his diary, “We will have to try bomber take-offs from carriers.” He told Low and Duncan to go down the hall to talk to his plans officer, Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle.14
Jimmy Doolittle was already something of a national celebrity in 1942. During the 1930s he had earned a reputation within the flying community by winning virtually every speed racing trophy there was. He shared a number of personal qualities with Pete Mitscher. Born in Alameda, California, Doolittle had grown up in Nome, Alaska. Like Mitscher, he had been the smallest boy in his class at school and the object of bullying. (Even as an adult he stood only five foot four.) He was regularly involved in fights, many of which he started. He even boxed professionally as a bantamweight, mauling enough of his opponents to earn a modest reputation and some spending money. He was an indifferent student, earning mostly C’s until he entered junior college, where his grades improved. He attended the California School of Mines, but he did not graduate because he enlisted in the Signal Corps when America went to war in 1917. The Army taught him to fly. He discovered that he was a natural pilot and was soon made an instructor. Like many pilots of his era (including Pete Mitscher), he was also a daredevil and was regularly grounded for dangerous stunts such as buzzing civilians or flying under bridges, wrecking several airplanes in the process.15
Like Mitscher, Doolittle missed seeing active service in World War I because the Army kept him stateside as an instructor. But in 1922, three years after Mitscher won the Navy Cross for participating in the world’s first transatlantic flight, Doolittle won the Distinguished Flying Cross for setting a transcontinental speed record, crossing the country (with one stop) in less than twenty-four hours. A few years later he broke his own record, crossing the country (with no stops) in twelve hours. Though officially a test pilot, Doolittle was in effect a public relations exhibit for the Army, part of a team that put on flight demonstrations in order to enhance the Army’s image. He was being paid to perform the kind of stunts that had got him grounded ten years earlier, and his utter fearlessness encouraged him to take personal risks. Like Yamamoto, he was willing to perform dangerous feats on a bet, and he once broke both of his ankles after falling from a second-story balcony, trying to perform a handstand on the railing while drunk. Despite the broken ankles, he flew in an air show the next day with his feet in heavy casts, strapped to the pedals. But he was more than a daredevil. The California School of Mines decided to give him academic credit for his flight time and awarded him a degree, and that allowed him to apply to graduate school. He went to MIT, where in two years he earned both a master’s and a Ph.D. in aeronautical science. Doolittle left the Army and spent the 1930s as a stunt pilot for the Shell Oil Company demonstration team, earning three times the money the Army had paid him for doing essentially the same job. In the process he won a reputation as the country’s fastest pilot, winning race after race and becoming nearly as well known as NASCAR drivers such Jeff Gordon or Dale Earnhardt, Jr. became several generations later. Doolittle reentered the Army in 1940 as war loomed and by 1942 was on the staff of General Hap Arnold. His office was just down the hall from Arnold’s, and he was there in February 1942 when Low and Duncan came to see him with their idea of flying B-25s off Navy carriers. He of course loved the idea.16
Initially, Doolittle was supposed to be the administrator of the program, coordinating the logistics from the Army side. But from the beginning he worked to ensure that he would lead the flight personally, though he had never flown a B-25. He first checked to see which B-25 squadron had the most experience, found that it was the 17th Bomb Group at Pendleton Field near Columbia, South Carolina, and ordered the planes of that squadron to fly to Eglin Field in Florida. Then he flew down to Florida himself to address the pilots and their crews. He told them he was looking for men for an important mission—volunteers only. He couldn’t tell them what the mission was, he said, only that it was important, and probably dangerous. Everyone volunteered. Doolittle picked out twenty-four crews—in case of accidents or washouts—and began training.17
For this training, he called on the Navy at Pensacola, asking for a flight instructor who was familiar with carrier operations. The Navy sent him Lieutenant Henry Miller. Miller flew to Eglin Field with no idea why. When he presented his orders to the commanding officer there, Miller asked him why he had been summoned. Saying nothing in reply, the CO drove him over to the isolated hangar Doolittle was using as a temporary headquarters. Doolittle and Miller hit it off immediately. Both were from Alaska, both loved to fly, and both had been boxers.18
At Eglin Field, Miller showed the Army pilots how to lift off with only about 65 to 70 knots of airspeed. They understood the concept, though it violated everything they had learned in flight school, where the rule was to build up to about 110 knots before attempting to lift off. Taking off from a carrier would mean getting off the deck at near stalling speed and building up speed only after they were in the air. The Army pilots had to fight their instincts at every step. Nonetheless Miller soon had them lifting off within as little as 250 feet of runway.19
Doolittle trained with them, delighted to be flying again. He called the other pilots by their first names and joked around with them between flights. “He was very congenial,” one of the other pilots recalled. The experience confirmed his determination to lead the flight personally, a notion he put to Hap Arnold. Arnold replied that he needed Doolittle in Washington to plan future operations. Doolittle protested vociferously, claiming that he had been in charge of the training, and that “the boys” deserved to have their leader with them. Eventually Arnold relented, though he told Doolittle that he would need approval from Millard F. Harmon, Arnold’s chief of staff.20
Doolittle saluted and sprinted down the hall to Harmon’s office. “Miff, I’ve just been to see Hap about that project I’ve been working on and said I wanted to lead the mission. Hap said it was okay with him if it’s okay with you.” Harmon replied that as long as Arnold approved, it was all right with him. As Doolittle was leaving, he heard Harmon’s intercom buzz and then, after a moment, Harmon’s voice. “But Hap, I just told him he could go.”21
As the pilots trained in Florida and the Hornet proceeded from Norfolk to San Diego via the Panama Canal, Wu Duncan was putting together the other pieces of the puzzle. He flew to Pearl Harbor to brief Nimitz on the project. Nimitz was dubious. To him, the commitment of two carriers to what amounted to a public relations stunt was a misuse of scarce resources. The Lexington was in dry dock, which meant that if both the Enterprise and Hornet were sent off to Tokyo, the Yorktown would be the only available carrier left. On the other hand, Nimitz knew better than to get in the way of a project that emanated from Washington, especially since he suspected that he was no longer held in great favor there. To his wife, Nimitz wrote, “Am afraid he [Knox] is not so keen for me now as he was when I left,” and speculated that he would be “lucky to last six months.” He called Halsey into the meeting. After Duncan again explained the objective, Nimitz turned to Halsey, asking him if thought it would work. Halsey replied that it would take considerable luck. Nimitz then asked if he would be willing to take them there. He was. “Good,” Nimitz responded. “It’s all yours!”22
Halsey expressed a desire to talk to Doolittle face to face and arranged to fly to San Francisco. There he and his chief of staff Miles Browning met with Doolittle and Wu Duncan in a downtown restaurant. All four wore civilian clothes and took a table toward the back. Leaning forward and keeping their voices low, they discussed the forthcoming raid, later moving to Halsey’s hotel room for greater privacy. They agreed that the carriers would try to get the bombers to within five hundred miles of Japan—four hundred if possible. If they were discovered while still within range of Midway, the B-25s would take off and fly there so that the Hornet could bring up its air wing to defend herself. If they were already within range of Japan—even extreme range—the bombers would take off and conduct the raid, flying back out over the Pacific afterward to ditch in the water where there was at least a chance (albeit a slight one) that an American sub might rescue them. If they were discovered in that long stretch of ocean that was out of range of both friendly fields and enemy targets, the ship’s crew would simply push the bombers over the side. In any event, the Hornet must not be caught by enemy planes with the B-25s still lashed to her deck.23
Prior to that, Duncan had flown to San Diego to inform Mitscher of the mission. On this, his second visit to the Hornet, Duncan told Mitscher that he was going to be taking Jimmy Doolittle and fifteen Army bombers “to hit Tokyo,” to which the laconic Mitscher replied, “That’s fine.” Soon afterward, the Hornet proceeded north to San Francisco Bay, tying up at the pier in Alameda on March 20. Doolittle’s bombers flew cross-country from Florida to Sacramento, and then to Alameda, where they taxied from the runway right down onto the pier. There, fifteen of them were hoisted one by one onto the deck of the Hornet. By now, most of the pilots had figured out why they had been practicing short takeoffs.24
To make room for the B-25s on the flight deck, the planes of the Hornet’s air group had to be lowered into the hangar deck. Those with folding wings were squeezed into the available space. The crew removed the wings of the big Devastator torpedo bombers; the lighter Wildcat fighters were actually suspended from the overhead. It was the only way that the entire air group could be placed inside the hangar deck at one time.25
Lieutenant Miller had accompanied Doolittle’s squadron out to California and was loath to say good-bye. As he and Doolittle discussed which of the crews should be used in the operation, Miller suggested that he might perform one more service by flying an extra B-25, a sixteenth, off the Hornet as a demonstration to the Army pilots that it could be done. He would take off one hundred miles out of San Francisco and fly back to South Carolina, then return to his duty post at Pensacola. Doolittle approved the idea immediately. Once all sixteen planes were on board, however, they seemed to fit without any difficulty. Doolittle then suggested to Mitscher that perhaps they could use all sixteen planes in the bombing mission, since there were several extra crews available. Mitscher concluded, “The advantage of having an extra plane for attack outweighed the desirability of demonstrating a proper take-off.” Of course, it also meant that Miller lost his chance to fly a B-25 off a carrier.26
Lieutenant Miller had instructed the Army pilots about Navy protocol, and he watched with pride as they marched up the gangway of the Hornet one by one, saluted the flag on the fantail as well as the officer of the deck, and requested permission to come aboard. Despite that, there was a palpable coolness between the Army men and the crew of the Hornet. Much of it derived from the fact that the Army flyers, who had been constantly enjoined to keep quiet about their mission, were not particularly communicative. They had a “defensive aloofness,” in the words of one Navy officer. They kept to themselves, messing together privately, and deflecting all of the crew’s questions about them and their mission. Beyond that, however, some on the Hornet thought they were “undisciplined.” Unlike the Navy pilots, who routinely wore neckties with their long-sleeved khaki shirts, the Army pilots wore open collars, short-sleeved shirts, and scuffed shoes. They were casual not only about their appearance but also about shipboard routine. “A briefing would be set for 8:30,” one Navy pilot recalled, and “they would saunter in” around 9:00 or 9:15, and sometimes the meeting couldn’t start until 9:30. Even then, “their attention span was very short, half an hour at the most.” Matters improved after the Hornet passed under the Golden Gate Bridge and Mitscher got on the 1MC. the loudspeaker system. Though many on board had suspected what was coming, the announcement that they were off to bomb Tokyo warmed up relations between the two services. “From then on there was complete rapport,” Doolittle reported.27
The Hornet and her escorts left San Francisco just after 10:00 a.m. on April 2. It was a foggy day, with visibility limited to one thousand yards, but anyone who cared to look could see the Hornet steaming under the Golden Gate Bridge with sixteen Army bombers strapped to her flight deck in a herringbone pattern. Most of those who thought about it, if anyone thought about it at all, probably assumed that she was on her way to deliver those planes to Hawaii or some other American outpost. The Hornet had an escort of one heavy and one light cruiser, four destroyers, and the essential oiler. It was designated as Task Force 16.2, because as soon as it rendezvoused with Halsey’s Enterprise group it would become part of Task Force 16. That same day, 5,133 miles to the west, Commander Watanabe was traveling by seaplane to Tokyo to present Yamamoto’s Midway plan to the Naval General Staff.28
Halsey was among those who watched the Hornet depart. He was to fly from San Francisco to Honolulu in a few days to reboard the Enterprise and take her out to the predetermined rendezvous point northwest of Hawaii. He almost didn’t make it. Struck down by the flu, he was woozy from medication as he finally boarded the plane on April 6. Nonetheless, he arrived in time to take the Enterprise group out of Pearl Harbor on April 8. Four days later, the two American carrier groups were approaching the rendezvous coordinates along the international date line. Halsey informed his pilots that there was another American carrier in the vicinity to ensure that they did not bomb her. One of the pilots flying CAP that day was Lieutenant Richard Best. He spotted the approaching Hornet, and it seemed to him as if there was something wrong with her. Her deck was encumbered by what looked like “construction equipment … odd shapes, maybe tractors.” As he got closer he was astonished to see that “she had two-engine bombers on board.”
The now united Task Force 16 steamed westward for four more days without incident. On April 17 (Tokyo time)—the day after Nagano presented the Midway plan to Emperor Hirohito—the two carriers and four cruisers of the united Task Force 16 topped off their fuel tanks and, leaving the slower oilers and fuel-guzzling destroyers behind, began a high-speed run in toward the launch point.29
That night, at ten minutes past 3:00 a.m., the radar on the Enterprise picked up a surface contact. In these waters it could only be hostile. The task force maneuvered to avoid it, and the contact soon faded from the screen of the CXAM radar set. The radar could be temperamental, and as soon as there was enough light Halsey ordered an air search, sending out three scout bombers and eight Wildcats from the Enterprise. Rain squalls and wind gusts made the launch more precarious than usual, but all eleven planes got off safely. Less than an hour later, at two minutes before 6:00 a.m., Lieutenant Junior Grade Osbourne B. Wiseman flew over the Enterprise and dropped a beanbag onto the deck—this was how pilots sent messages back to the ship when the need to maintain radio silence was imperative. The beanbag was rushed up to the bridge, and Halsey read the attached note: “Enemy surface ship—latitude 36–04 N, Long. 153–10 E, bearing 276 [degrees] true—42 miles. Believed seen by enemy.” Should the observers on the contact recognize a carrier plane, they would know an American carrier was nearby. Halsey sent the cruiser Nashville to sink the surface craft, which proved to be the Nitto Maru, one of the picket boats Yamamoto had ordered out to provide early warning. It took the Nashville almost a full hour and nearly a thousand rounds of 6-inch ammunition to send it and another small picket boat to the bottom. By that time, radio operators on the Enterprise had intercepted several radio messages coming from them. A Japanese-speaking officer on board had been able to translate the unencrypted message: “Three enemy aircraft carriers sighted at our position, 650 nautical miles east of Inubo Saki at 0630.” On board the Hornet, Mitscher turned to Doolittle and said: “They know we’re here.”30
Brigadier General James Doolitt le (left) and Pete Mitscher with the Army pilots and crews on board the USS Hornet in April, 1942. Several American officers had medals they had been given by the Japanese government before the war, and this photo depicts them att aching those medals to the bombs to “return” them. (U.S. Naval Institute)
Doolittle and Halsey had discussed this possibility during their restaurant dinner in San Francisco; both knew what to do. Halsey blinkered a message from the Enterprise: “Launch planes. To Col. Doolittle and his gallant command, good luck and God bless you.” On board the Hornet, the klaxon sounded and a voice called out: “Army pilots man your planes.”31
The seas were rough. The assistant signal officer on the Enterprise, Robin Lindsey, called it the “God damnest weather [he’d] ever seen.” Green water broke over the bow of the Hornet, and everyone on deck had to wear a lifeline to avoid being swept over the side. The wind gusted up to 27 knots, and with the Hornet making 30 knots, the relative wind speed over the deck was 50 knots or more. Despite the choppy seas, that wind was a blessing, for it would aid in getting the 31,000-pound bombers into the air. Navy Lieutenant Edgar Osborne stood near the bow with a safety line around his waist and a checkered flag in his hand. Sea spray soaked him each time the big carrier plunged into another wave. He watched the majestic rise and fall of the Hornet, waving the black-and-white checkered flag over his head in a circle as a signal for Doolittle to rev his engines. Then, just as the Hornet reached the nadir of its plunge, Osborne slashed the flag downward. Doolittle released the brake, and his B-25 surged forward. He kept the nose wheel on the white line painted on the Hornet’s flight deck. If he kept it steady, his right wing tip should clear the superstructure of the ship’s island by six feet. The plane raced downhill at first, and then, as the Hornets bow rose up again, his plane rose up with it and was boosted into the sky with plenty of flight deck to spare. It was exactly 8:20 a.m.32
Doolittle made one pass over the ship, then flew off on the coordinates he had calculated. He did not circle to wait for the rest of the planes to join him. To do so would waste precious fuel, especially since they were launching nearly a hundred miles beyond optimum range. Flying in formation used up additional fuel, since every pilot except the leader had to make constant tiny adjustments to hold his position. Instead, each plane would make its way to the target independently.33
The rest of the planes took off at intervals of several minutes. The second one almost didn’t make it. Lieutenant Travis Hoover’s plane dropped off the end of the deck and disappeared. After a few harrowing seconds, it appeared again, struggling up into the sky. The rest of the launchings were mostly routine—as routine as launching two-engine land bombers off a carrier could be. Until the last one. The tail of the sixteenth plane extended out over the back of the Hornet’s fantail, and the plane had to be wrestled forward to the launching spot by the deck crew. The wind continued to gust unpredictably. One particularly severe gust caught Seaman Robert W. Wall and threw him into the left wing propeller. His arm was badly mangled and later had to be amputated. But the plane left on time.34
Doolitt le’s B-25 Mitchell bomber takes off from the deck of the Hornet on April 18, 1942. Note the white line painted on the flight deck to help the pilots avoid hitting the ship’s island superstructure. (U.S. Naval Institute)
As soon as the last plane was airborne, Halsey ordered the carriers and cruisers to reverse course and steam east, away from Japan, at 25 knots while the crew turned its attention to bringing up the planes from the hangar deck so that the Hornet could function as a real carrier again. As Doolittle and his bombers flew westward, Halsey and Task Force 16 sped away eastward.
The Army pilots, accustomed to navigating over land by following railroads or highways, were now flying over 650 miles of open ocean toward a target none of them had ever seen. They had practiced for the mission by flying out over the Gulf of Mexico, learning to fly by compass bearing alone. To conserve fuel, they flew at 165 knots, replenishing the tanks by hand from gas cans stored on board, saving the cans to throw over the side all at once, so that they didn’t form a trail on the surface of the sea for the Japanese to follow. About a half hour into the flight, Taylor’s Number Two plane caught up to Doolittle and settled in on his wing, though the rest headed for Japan independently. They flew low, about 200 feet, and passed over some small ships, mostly fishing vessels, though Doolittle thought he saw a light cruiser. Doolittle made landfall well north of Tokyo—navigating by dead reckoning was always a bit dicey. Instead of following the coast southward, as some did, he decided to fly inland and approach the target from the north. He was still flying low, the shadow of his plane jumping around on the ground as it conformed to the topography. He passed some small biplanes—perhaps army trainers—but there was no reaction from them. Other pilots recalled flying over groups of civilians who looked up and waved, assuming, not unreasonably, that these were Japanese planes on a training mission. One plane flew over a baseball field with a game in progress, and the crowd stood up to wave. The pilots waved back.35
Ten miles north of Tokyo, Doolittle encountered nine Japanese fighter planes flying in three tight V formations. They ignored him. At the outskirts of the city, Doolittle pulled up to 1200 feet, turned southwest, and dropped his first bomb at 1:30 p.m. (ship time). He had been flying for five hours. After dropping his four 500-pound bombs, Doolittle took his plane back down to 500 feet. There was a lot of antiaircraft fire now, though it was inaccurate; at 500 feet his plane was a difficult target. He passed over an aircraft factory where new planes were lined up in rows outside, but he had no bombs left, and he continued southwestward out over the Sea of Japan and on toward the China coast.36
He made landfall at dusk; soon it was full dark. He was now flying over unknown terrain with no certain objective. Doolittle pulled up to 8,000 feet to avoid running into a mountain and flew on. At 9:00 p.m., after covering 2,250 miles in thirteen hours, he was running out of gas. He got no response on the radio frequency he had been given for the Chinese airfields. He did not know that news of his mission had never made it to the Chinese. At 9:30, he ordered his crew to prepare to jump. He ensured that they went first, and then, setting the autopilot for level flight, he followed them out into the night.37
He landed in a rice paddy that had recently been fertilized with human excrement. After slogging his way to solid ground, he knocked on the door of a small house where a light was showing, and tried out the phrase that the Chinese-speaking Lieutenant Stephen Jurika had taught all of them during the Pacific crossing: Lushu hoo megwa fugi: “I am an American.” The only response he got was the dousing of the light and the bolting of the door. He walked on. The next day, after a night trying to stay warm, he encountered three Chinese soldiers. He drew them a picture of an airplane with parachutes coming out of it. They were skeptical at first but relaxed when they found his parachute, which the unwelcoming farmer had secreted in his house. After several days, they got him to Hang Yang Airfield, and from there he, and eventually most of the others, were flown to the Nationalist Chinese headquarters at Chungking. There they were presented with presidential congratulations and notification that each of them would be awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Three weeks later, in a small and secret ceremony in the White House, President Roosevelt awarded Doolittle the Medal of Honor.38
All sixteen American bombers had successfully found their targets, hitting Yokohama, Nagoya, and Kobe as well as Tokyo, but none of them had landed safely on Chinese airfields. One landed in southern Russia after its skipper, Captain Edward York, discovered that he did not have enough fuel to make it to China.* The rest crash-landed somewhere in China or along the Chinese coast. Of the eighty Doolittle raiders (five men per plane), seventy-three eventually made it back to the United States—though it took a while for some of them. Two died when their plane crashed, and another was killed bailing out. Eight were captured by the Japanese. Of those, three were executed, one died in prison, and the others survived the war in a POW camp. The crew of Captain York’s plane was interned in Russia. Just over a year later, those five escaped from the Soviet Union into Iran and eventually made it back to the States.
For their part, the Japanese made light of the Doolittle raid, punning on his name to claim that his handful of bombers had done little to hurt the great empire, which was true enough. The American pilots had hit an oil tank farm, a steel mill, and power plants; one bomb slightly damaged a brand-new carrier—the Ryūhō—still in the shipyard. But they also hit several schools and an army hospital. Naturally, Japanese newspapers declared that the bombers had targeted schools and hospitals to “kill helpless children,” the usual wartime propaganda. Despite their defiant pronouncements, however, the Japanese high command was humiliated; the ability of the Imperial Army and Navy to protect the life of the emperor had been called into question. The Doolittle raid did not trigger the Midway expedition—that decision had already been made. It did, however, remove any doubts the Army had about backing the operation. According to Watanabe, “With the Doolittle raid the Japanese Army changed its strategy and not only agreed to the Midway plan of the Navy but agreed to furnish the troops to occupy the island.”39
In the United States, news of the raid was received jubilantly. Americans thought of it as payback for Pearl Harbor. One might note that the Americans had lost all sixteen bombers, one more plane than the Japanese had lost in the American air victory off Rabaul on February 20. Still, there had been so little good news in the war so far that the Doolittle raid inspired both celebration and speculation about how those planes had managed to cross the Pacific. Though the Japanese learned from the captives that the bombers had been launched from a carrier, that fact remained an official secret for more than a year, and when asked where the planes had taken off, Roosevelt answered puckishly that they had flown from “Shangri-La,” the mythical and mystical city of James Hilton’s popular novel Lost Horizon. In homage to that, one of the new Essex-class carriers then under construction would be christened Shangri-La.
Halsey’s Task Force 16 arrived back in Pearl Harbor on April 25. Mitscher had hoped to grant liberty to the crew of the Hornet; its men had been at sea almost continuously since leaving Norfolk. But with only four American carriers in the Pacific, there was no time for that. The men of the Hornet and Enterprise, as well as their escorts, had to forego leave in Hawaii, just as the men of the Shōkaku and Zuikaku had to forego leave in Japan. The Japanese sailors on their two carriers were bound on a special mission. And thanks to a handful of men working secretly in the basement of the Fourteenth Naval District headquarters building in Pearl Harbor, the Americans knew what that mission was.
* Dwight Morrow, a former Republican senator from Ohio, had a special interest in aviation. (His daughter Anne would later marry the famed aviator Charles Lindbergh.) It was the Morrow Board that recommended the creation of a separate Air Corps within the U.S. Army.
* The Army pilots were Lieutenants John Fitzgerald and James McCarthy, the first men to fly land-based bombers off a carrier deck, and they did so with no special training and very little advance notice.
* Very likely, Captain York’s plane burned fuel faster than the others because the mechanics at McClellan Field near Sacramento, unaware that the carburetors on the Mitchell bombers had been specially recalibrated for fuel economy, reset them to normal.