by Ian W. Toll
Admiral King described the concept to “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, who was willing and even eager to try it. General Arnold chose as mission commander Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, one of the most famous aviators in the country, a stunt flyer who had (among other feats) been the first aviator in history to fly an “outside loop.” Planning progressed behind a heavy veil of secrecy. Doolittle identified the B-25 Mitchell bomber as the airplane best suited to the job. With some ingenious modifications, the B-25 could be configured to carry a 1-ton bomb payload for an effective range of 2,400 nautical miles. Supplementary fuel tanks in the bomb compartment, crew corridor, and ventral turret would double the fuel capacity of a normally configured B-25. Weight would be saved by stripping the aircraft of all equipment that was not critical to the mission, including the radio, the bottom gun turret, and the Norden bombsight.
Doolittle recruited all-volunteer aircrews from the 17th Bombardment Group, USAAF. A navy flight instructor, Lieutenant Henry F. Miller, was assigned to train the B-25 crews in short-takeoff techniques at Eglin Field, Florida. Upon his arrival, Lieutenant Miller was asked if he had ever flown a B-25. “No,” he replied; “I’ve never even seen one.” The army pilots told him that the aircraft needed 110 miles per hour of airspeed to get off the ground, but on the first day of training Miller established that a B-25 could take off at just 65 to 70 miles per hour with full flaps, a speed that would easily be achieved on a carrier deck run.
Miller taught the army pilots to keep their feet mashed down on the brake pedals while the engines were throttled up to full bore. With the engines screaming, manifold pressure set properly, and the elevator back three fourths, they were to release the brakes abruptly and let the aircraft accelerate toward the (imaginary) edge of the flight deck. White flags planted along the edge of the runway marked the distances at 200, 300, and 500 feet. As the plane reached liftoff speed, the pilot eased back on the yoke, the nose went up, and the wheels left the deck.
It was a simple technique, really. The most difficult and dangerous aspect of carrier flight operations was not the takeoff but the landing. But these army pilots had never set foot on an aircraft carrier. How would their nerves hold up when they were staring down that short, wet, pitching deck into the oncoming seas? Even Colonel Doolittle, when he climbed into the cockpit of his B-25 after it had been parked on the Hornet, was surprised at how short the flight deck looked. Lieutenant Miller, who was sitting in the cockpit beside him, assured the colonel that he had taken off with much less deck to spare. “Henry,” Doolittle replied, “what name do they use in the Navy for bullshit?”
Eleven days out of San Francisco Bay, the Hornet was at latitude 38° north, longitude 180°—directly on top of the International Date Line, about 1,700 miles northeast of Oahu. Dawn broke over a green, rolling sea flecked with whitecaps. There was a low, thick cloud ceiling. The sixteen B-25s heaved and strained at their tie-downs, like butterflies clinging to a windblown leaf.
As the light came up, it revealed the presence of a second aircraft carrier on the Hornet’s port beam. She was the Enterprise. She had sailed from Pearl Harbor on April 8 with orders to rendezvous with the Hornet at these coordinates. Enterprise and her screening vessels (the heavy cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City, with four destroyers and a fuel tanker) were designated Task Force 16, under the command of Vice Admiral Bill Halsey. The Hornet’s Task Force 18 was now subsumed into Task Force 16, and Admiral Halsey assumed command of the combined force. The Enterprise air group would provide protection and reconnaissance, since the Hornet’s own planes were trapped in the hangar deck until the flight deck had been cleared of Doolittle’s bombers.
The crew of the Enterprise, who knew nothing of their mission, studied the Hornet with intense curiosity. The B-25, with its squarish nose and dual rudders, was an easily recognizable aircraft. Several Enterprise fighters had been launched at dawn and were orbiting overhead. “As I flew over the Hornet, I looked down and saw those B-25s packed on the flight deck,” recalled machinist Tom F. Cheek. “Needless to say, I spent the next three and a half hours wondering about our destination. Tokyo wasn’t even considered.” According to the most plausible scuttlebutt, they were to ferry the bombers to the Aleutian Islands, or possibly to a Russian base on the Kamchatka Peninsula.
Later that morning, Halsey authorized an electrifying public announcement, which was delivered over the Enterprise’s loudspeakers: “This force is bound for Tokyo.” The crew cheered, shouted, applauded, and backslapped their mates in exultation.
The now-enlarged Task Force 16 set a course of 265 degrees, almost due west, at speed 16 knots. For the next several days, the two carriers and their escorts forged across the same desolate ocean expanses that Nagumo’s carriers had traversed four months earlier, in the opposite direction, to attack Pearl Harbor. In those high latitudes, at that season of the year, the sea and sky were the same tint of gunmetal gray. From the Salt Lake City, war reporter Robert Casey looked out at a line of ships leading ahead. In the “misty grey” light, he wrote, they looked like “a procession of Gothic cathedrals.” A bitter cold wind sliced into the men stationed on deck. They wore their heavy winter uniforms with watch coats, wool gloves, and hats—any exposed skin quickly turned red and raw. “God damnest weather I’ve ever seen,” said Lieutenant Robin Lindsey, an Enterprise landing signal officer. “For three days the waves were so high the deck was pitching so much that I had to have a person stand behind me to hold me on the landing signal platform so I wouldn’t fall down. Several times I did, and you can imagine the amazement of the pilot’s face as he passed over with no signal officer there.”
On the Hornet, the B-25 airmen were briefed by Lieutenant Commander Jurika, who had once served as a naval attaché in Tokyo and knew the country well. They pored over maps and intelligence reports, identifying major landmarks that could be used in navigating to targets at low altitude. Jurika told them everything he knew about Japanese antiaircraft defenses. Colonel Doolittle was still refining his plans and assigning targets in Japan. The colonel’s plane would be the first to launch. He would lead the others to Japan, arriving at nightfall. There the sixteen B-25s would fan out and hit military and industrial targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka. They would continue over the Japanese islands and the South China Sea to newly constructed special airfields along the Chinese coast. There they would land, refuel laboriously from fuel drums rigged with hand pumps, and then take off again to fly to safer airfields deep in the interior of China. The B-25s would be turned over to Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces, and the aircrews would be smuggled back to the United States by other means. “If we all get to Chungking,” Doolittle told his aircrews, “I’ll throw us the biggest Goddamn party you ever saw.”
Jurika briefed the aircrews on how to avoid capture by the Japanese army once they had landed in China. If they were forced to crash-land or bail out, he said, they should seek help from Chinese civilians, who might contact local guerrillas who could smuggle them out of the country. They practiced the phrase Lusau hoo metwa fugi (“I am an American”). When it seemed to Jurika that the army airmen were not taking his advice seriously, he warned them that they were likely to be beheaded if taken prisoner. “This seemed to settle them down quite a bit.”
Four days later, when the task force was about 1,000 miles east of Tokyo, the weather turned. A gale-force wind blew out of the southwest, visibility fell to about one mile, and blasts of cold spray gusted over the flight decks of the Enterprise and Hornet. The Enterprise cancelled flight operations. One of the B-25 pilots noted that the rise and fall of the Hornet was causing his cockpit altimeter to fluctuate by as much as 200 feet. The two carriers and four cruisers refueled from the tankers, a difficult and dangerous procedure that saw two men swept overboard (both were rescued). The destroyers and tankers, which labored mightily in those heavy seas, were ordered to remain behind. The carriers and cruisers continued westward at a speed of 20–22 knots,
shuddering with the effort of their engines, climbing up the waves and plunging into the troughs, hurling enormous sheets of spray over their decks. In that violent manner they pushed another 400 miles into enemy waters.
On April 18, the day the Hornet was scheduled to launch Doolittle’s bombers, the task force breached Yamamoto’s small craft picket line. At 3:10 a.m., the Enterprise radar picked up two blips on the screen, about four miles away to the southwest. Halsey ordered a turn to the northwest to avoid the strange vessels. An hour later, the task force resumed its westerly course. Shortly after first light, the Enterprise launched a search flight and combat air patrol. At 7:15 a.m., when the sun was well above the horizon, one of the search planes, an SBD, returned to the carrier and dropped a beanbag message which was taken immediately to Halsey. “Enemy surface ship—latitude 36-04N, Long. L53-10E, bearing 276° true—42 miles. Believed seen by enemy.”
The task force continued west. Halsey wanted to get Doolittle as close to his target as possible. At 7:44 a.m., the Enterprise lookouts made direct visual contact with a small vessel, about two miles away to the southwest. From the carrier flight deck she seemed to vanish and then reappear as she rose and fell in the heavy seas. The sky was overcast, but below the cloud ceiling visibility was excellent. Halsey ordered the cruiser Nashville to destroy the vessel. But there was little hope of blowing her out of the water before she could radio a contact report back to the mainland.
She was the Nitta Maru—a steel-hull fishing sampan, about 90 feet long, taken into the Japanese navy to guard the sea approaches to Japan. A Japanese crewman told the skipper that there were “two beautiful Japanese carriers passing by.” The skipper, studying the strange ships on the horizon, replied: “Yes, they are beautiful, but they are not ours.” He radioed the contact report immediately. His transmission was intercepted by the American ships, and Halsey was notified that the contact report had gone out. Task Force 16’s cover was blown. He had hoped to take Doolittle 150 miles farther west, but now he believed he had no choice but to order an immediate launch. To the Hornet he flashed the order: “Launch planes. To Col. Doolittle and his gallant command, good luck and God bless you. Halsey.”
While the Hornet turned into the wind and made ready to get the B-25s aloft, the Nashville raced toward the Nitta Maru at 35 knots, made a smart turn to port, and opened fire with her main 6-inch battery. The shells fell all around the vessel, throwing up huge geysers on every side—but each time the curtain of spray was torn away to leeward, the little Nitta Maru remained afloat and unharmed. She was a daunting target, bobbing on the swells like a cork, and sliding entirely out of view every time she pitched into a trough. The Nashville gunners timed their salvos to coincide with the rise and fall of the sea, but try as they might they could not score a hit. “Shells are tossed like machine gun bullets,” wrote Casey, who watched from the deck of the Salt Lake City. “Flashes run around the ship like lights on a electric sign.” The plucky little sampan actually fired back at the Nashville with her small-caliber deck guns, but the rounds did not even reach half the distance to the cruiser.
The Enterprise VF-6 fighters, guided to the spot by the fall of the Nashville’s shells, tried to lend a hand. They flew low over the Nitta Maru, intending to strafe the vessel with their 50-caliber machine guns, but they also found it surprisingly tough to hit the little sea-tossed target, which was rising and falling, Warrant Officer Cheek recalled, “like a yoyo.” The columns of water thrown up by the Nashville’s shells actually rose above the height of the planes as they made their strafing runs. After several passes, the Wildcat pilots reported that the vessel was badly shot up and that it was doubtful any of her crew was still alive. Shortly thereafter she sank.
The entire engagement had been watched with great interest (and not without sarcastic commentary) by the crew of the Enterprise, who rarely had the opportunity to witness a naval surface action. Neither the Nashville nor the Enterprise air group could take much pride in the action. The Nashville had fired no fewer than 928 6-inch rounds at the little sampan, an expenditure of ammunition that her captain described as “ridiculous” and “excessive.” (It is possible that some of those shells struck the vessel but did not detonate, passing cleanly “through and through.”) One of the F4F Wildcats fired a full 1,200 rounds of .50-caliber ammunition at the vessel. In his after-action report to Nimitz, Halsey wrote that the performance of the planes had been “disappointing.” He added: “It is again indicated that more time must be available for training when air groups are at shore bases. This need is becoming more emphatic as time goes on.” The Nitta Maru’s small machine guns had even managed to take down an Enterprise SBD. The pilot was forced to ditch the aircraft in the sea; he and his backseat man got out before it sank and were safely recovered.
Meanwhile, the Hornet hurried to get Doolittle’s bombers aloft. As the big loudspeakers on the island (superstructure) blared commands, deck crews respotted the B-25s to their launch positions. “In about half an hour,” Lieutenant Ted W. Lawson recalled, “the Navy had us crisscrossed along the back end of the flight deck, two abreast, the big double-rudder tail assemblies of the sixteen planes sticking out of the edges of the rear of the ship at an angle.” The main 500-gallon wing tanks had previously been filled, but now they were topped off to restore the few pints that had evaporated. The deck crews rocked the planes to break any fuel bubbles that may have formed in the lines or tanks. The jury-rigged reserve tanks, including the bulletproof tank installed in the bottom turret and a metal tank in the top of the bomb bay, were filled to capacity. The ordnance crews brought the bomb carts up in the forward elevator and rolled them back along the heaving deck to the underside of the planes. Into the bay of each airplane were lifted three 500-pound conventional bombs and one 500-pound incendiary bomb. Some were affixed with medals that had been bestowed upon American officers by the Japanese government before the war; others were scrawled with messages such as “I don’t want to set the world on fire, just Tokyo,” and “You’ll get a bang out of this.”
The Hornet’s captain, Marc Mitscher, descended to the flight deck to see his guests off. He and Doolittle shook hands as a photographer snapped a photo. Then the colonel poked his head into the Hornet’s ready room, where his aircrews were assembled, and said, “Come on, fellas. Let’s go.” The loudspeaker blared: “Army pilots, man your planes!” The aviators weaved through the parked planes, each to his own, and climbed aboard.
The engines fired to life and began warming at low rpm. The deck crews circled each plane and began removing the tie-downs, one by one. Other navy crewmen walked across the flight deck with large white boards held over their heads, so that they could be read in the cockpits—they were marked with compass readings and notations on the strength and direction of the wind. Fuel hoses continued to feed the tanks, topping off the small quantities consumed as the engines were warmed. At the last minute before the doors were sealed, several additional 5-gallon fuel cans were handed up to the crew, who stowed them at their feet. No B-25 had ever flown a mission with even half the amount of fuel that Doolittle’s bombers would carry that day.
The voice on the loudspeaker cried, “Prepare to launch aircraft.” The Hornet turned into the wind and throttled up to nearly 30 knots. The apparent wind over the deck now rose to some 75 knots, and the deck crews had to drop to their bellies and hang on to the tie-down fittings to avoid being blown into the blurred disks of the propellers. Ordnanceman Alvin Kernan, watching the scene from the nearby Enterprise, recalled “high green foam-flecked waves and the taste and smell of the northern ocean.” The Hornet’s bow climbed and then plunged; climbed and then plunged again. Heavy spray was thrown into the faces of the men stationed on the flight deck. “As the old salts would say,” SBD pilot Clayton Fisher recalled, “we took some ‘green water’ over the flight deck when the bow pitched down. I was watching from the forward starboard catwalk along the flight deck and got rather wet from the spray.”
The B-25 pilots
had trained for a carrier takeoff, and they had been briefed exhaustively in the theory and practice of a carrier takeoff—but none had ever attempted such a thing even in calm conditions, and these were not calm conditions. As Lawson looked down from his cockpit at the “wet, rolling deck,” his heart sank into his stomach. It was a harrowing sight. “The Hornet bit into the rough-house waves, dipping and rising until the flat deck was a crazy seesaw,” he wrote later. “Some of the waves actually were breaking over the deck. The deck seemed to grow smaller by the minute, and I had a brief fear of being hit by a wave on the take-off and of crashing at the end of the deck and falling off into the path of the careening carrier.” The violent pitching of the Hornet would require flawless timing. The flight deck control officer would have to give the “Go” signal to each aircraft while the bow was falling, Lieutenant Commander Jurika observed, so that “you would actually launch them into the air at least horizontal but on the upswing, in fact, giving them a boost up into the air.” Each heavily laden B-25 would have to begin its full-throttle run “downhill,” apparently rushing headlong into the next oncoming wave. That was old hat to the carrier pilots, but it would be a harrowing experience for any aviator who had never done it before. He would have to repress his instinct to pull back too soon, which might stall his airplane at the moment of liftoff.