Flyboys

by James Bradley

  Once Jimmy and a group of his buddies decided it would be a kick to “break in” to the office of a moving and storage company. “We didn’t want to steal or vandalize, just experience the thrill of being where we weren’t supposed to be,” Dave said. “We were in and out of there in ten minutes, more scared of our parents than the police. And I remember who was the first to climb in through the window—Jimmy.”

  In his 1943 high school yearbook, Jimmy’s classmates named him “Class Flirt . . . who seems to believe in ‘lovin’ and leavin’ them.” But Ethyl Jones dated Jimmy and remembered a tamer boy than the yearbook implies. “We never even kissed,” she said. Bernice Mawhiney recalled that Jimmy would “sit on my porch analyzing the girls he was trying to date. I remember he was in love with a cheerleader and she had no interest in him.”

  Jimmy was a good son and brother. Ronnie Dye was six years younger than his brother Jimmy. “Our mother,” Ronnie recalled, “would say to him, ‘You don’t have to take him along; he’s your kid brother.’ But Jimmy didn’t mind and he would take me with his friends to the high school football games.

  “Jimmy always had a scheme,” Ronnie remembered. “He would buy candy bars at the drugstore, three for ten cents. Then he would sell them back in the neighborhood for five cents each. He had a paper route, he ushered at a movie house, and he delivered telegrams for the post office before school. He made all his own spending money. He was very energetic, and Mom and Dad were real proud of him.”

  Ronnie told me that once Jimmy won a ticket to the Army-Navy football game by selling magazine subscriptions. But Jimmy wasn’t one to sit back and enjoy the game. “Once there, he sold programs,” Ronnie said. “He came home with money and a piece of the goalpost.”

  The Mount Ephraim Chamber of Commerce recognized Jimmy’s spunk with an award that read: “To the BOY of the Graduating Class who ranks highest in Preparation for Business based on Scholarship, Personality and Character.”

  The yearbook that celebrated Jimmy as a chamber awardee, Class Flirt, a contributor to the school paper (the Parrot), and an actor in the school play (You Can’t Take It With You) was infused with a patriotic military theme. On page 56 was a “GREETINGS TO THE CLASS OF 1943” from the Parent-Teacher Association. The second paragraph of the greeting read, “Yours is the privilege of serving your country in her hour of need, of repaying the gifts your country has given you. It is something to be able to say: ‘When my country was in danger, I helped defend it!’”

  Jimmy wanted to be the first in his class to say those words. And he wanted to soar. It already seemed clear that airplanes would win this war: Even the cover of Jimmy’s yearbook was dominated by a huge V for victory, set in front of billowing clouds, with a single airplane trailing a plume of exhaust racing across it.

  “He had a yearning to fly,” Dave Kershaw said. “In wood shop we made black wooden airplane models for the military, for their identification classes.” Whittling and painting airplanes day after day gave Jimmy an idea. After he convinced his parents to sign his enlistment papers, Jimmy uncharacteristically did not show up at school.

  “They took roll and he didn’t answer,” Kershaw remembered. “Jimmy just disappeared.”

  Seventeen-year-old James Dye—all five foot six inches and 120 pounds of him—enlisted in Philadelphia on February 17, 1943. And exactly two years later to the day, it would happen again.

  Jimmy just disappeared.

  Many Americans had viewed United States involvement in World War I as a mistake.Through the 1920s and 1930s, a majority wanted little spent on military preparedness and no further involvements overseas. America was a deeply isolationist country. On five separate occasions in the 1930s, the United States Congress had enacted formal neutrality laws to keep the country out of war.

  When Adolf Hitler heard of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he slapped his hands together in glee and exclaimed, “Now it is impossible to lose the war. We now have an ally, Japan, who has never been vanquished in three thousand years.”

  Germany and Japan were threatening the world with massive land armies. But Hitler and Hirohito had never taken the measure of the man in the White House. A former assistant secretary of the navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt had his own ideas about the shape and size of the military juggernaut he would wield.

  FDR’s military experts told him that only huge American ground forces could meet the threat. But Roosevelt turned aside their requests to conscript tens of millions of Americans to fight a traditional war. The Dutchman would have no part in the mass WWI-type carnage of American boys on European or Asian killing fields. Billy Mitchell was gone, but Roosevelt remembered his words. Now, as Japan and Germany invested in yesterday, FDR invested in tomorrow. He slashed his military planners’ dreams of a vast 35-million-man force by more than half. He shrunk the dollars available for battle in the first and second dimensions and put his money on the third.

  When the commander in chief called for the production of four thousand airplanes per month, his advisers wondered if he meant per year. After all, the U.S. had produced only eight hundred airplanes just two years earlier. FDR was quick to correct them. The contours of Franklin Roosevelt’s war would be determined by the Flyboys.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Doing the Impossible

  If there’s any of you who don’t want to go, just tell me. Because the chances of you making it back are pretty slim.

  — Jimmy Doolittle, quoted in the Los Angeles Times

  ON December 21, 1941, just two weeks almost to the hour after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt welcomed his military brain trust into his private study on the second floor of the White House. FDR’s “Big Three” consisted of General George Marshall, the starchy army chief of staff; General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the genial chief of staff of the army air forces; and Admiral Ernest King, the imperious chief of naval operations. These masters of the land, air, and sea were prepared to request troops and equipment. They came armed with maps and statistics. There were challenges everywhere for an America that had been caught off guard with the sixteenth largest military in the world, behind Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Romania.

  But Roosevelt was not interested in the myriad details, not just yet. His finger on America’s pulse, FDR knew the nation he led desperately needed a morale boost. Caught unawares at Pearl Harbor, with its back against the wall from Wake Island to the Philippines, America had endured a daily drumbeat of disheartening news. That had to change.

  Roosevelt asked his advisers to “out-Pearl Harbor” the enemy and send American Flyboys to bomb Japan. Marshall, King, and Arnold had given no thought to the possibility. There was no reason to even consider the question. They knew it was impossible.

  The U.S., like Japan, had two basic types of aircraft in its arsenal: land-based and carrier planes. Carrier planes were relatively small and light, so they could take off and land on short aircraft carrier runways. Their size made them useful as fighter planes and small bombers, but they could not match the bomb loads of their larger cousins. Bigger, heavier, and able to travel farther, land-based planes required longer airstrips to get lift. Also, if a heavy land bomber attempted to land on an aircraft carrier, it would crash through the wooden landing deck.

  Small carrier planes had much less range than their larger land-based cousins. Japan’s Pearl Harbor strike force had gotten away unscathed because of surprise. With Japan now on the alert, Yankee aircraft carriers would be detected and destroyed if they dared approach the Land of the Rising Sun. And while U.S. land-based planes could reach Japan from airfields in Far Eastern Russia, Joseph Stalin—fighting for his survival on his European border—had kept the USSR neutral in the fight with Japan and refused his American ally permission to originate from Russian territory. The coastal areas of China were all in Japanese hands.

  But FDR insisted that a way be found to bomb the empire. The president demanded a visible home run to invigorate his people. He knew that Prime Minister Tojo had into
ned in his declaration of war, “The key to victory lies in a ‘faith in victory.’” Americans were shaken and needed a shot of faith.

  Over the next few weeks, whenever he met with his military brain trust, Roosevelt argued that bombing Tokyo would be the perfect “tit” for the humiliating “tat” suffered at Pearl Harbor. But how could it be done? Nobody knew.

  Then one day, an assistant to Admiral King was examining the outline of a carrier deck that had been painted on a Norfolk, Virginia, airstrip. Navy fliers used it to practice carrier landings and takeoffs. Just then a squadron of “Billys”—twin-engined B-25 Mitchell army land-based bombers—flew overhead, and the navy officer noticed their shadows race along the carrier deck shape. It suddenly occurred to him: What if long-range army bombers could take off from an aircraft carrier? All military experts—Japanese and American—had simply assumed they could not, that the Billys were too big (50 feet long, with a 67-foot wingspan) and heavy (14 tons) to launch from an aircraft carrier. But if they could, this imaginative long-range punch combining land-based bombers with an aircraft carrier would catch the Japanese with their guard down.

  Such a complicated and dangerous mission called for a combat leader who was an inspiring commander, a methodical thinker who could anticipate and solve myriad problems, a scientific mind who could weigh the odds, and a strong personality who could bull his way through the layers of somnolent bureaucracy. Only one person came to mind. He was none other than the Babe Ruth of Flyboys, the irrepressible Jimmy Doolittle.

  At the age of forty-five, America’s preeminent Flyboy was as old as flying itself. Jimmy had “won nearly every aviation trophy there was.” A fearless daredevil, a crowd-pleasing barnstormer, Jimmy had been generating headlines and thrilling world audiences with his aeronautical aerobatics for twenty years. Jimmy regularly set and then broke international racing records. He had been the first to fly coast to coast in less than twenty-four hours and then first to do it in less than twelve. Kids who followed sports heroes like boxers Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey or baseball players like Ty Cobb also followed Flyboy Jimmy’s exploits.

  Jimmy was a short, muscular fireplug of a man with a confident grin above his cleft chin. His nose was a little crooked from having been broken on his road to becoming a boxing champion. He was just five feet four inches tall and never weighed more than 145 pounds, but he was a giant who reached the clouds, a king of the sky. Once Jimmy was at a party in Argentina, where he was in an air show. After a few too many tequilas, he was demonstrating handstands on a high balcony when the balcony gave way and Jimmy broke both his ankles. He still flew the next day. His doctors protested, but Jimmy strapped his aching cast-encased feet onto the rudders. “Even in casts, however, the work his feet had to do in piloting made him almost black out a number of times from the pain.” Jimmy looked at the bright side—since his feet were strapped in and he couldn’t get out in case of a crash, he could leave his bulky parachute behind.

  Jimmy was a military and commercial test pilot before wind tunnels enabled aeronautical engineers to predict how much an airplane could withstand before disintegrating. That meant he found out personally, by pushing himself and his flying machines to the limits of near destruction. He crashed on numerous occasions and parachuted three times to save himself. But it was not all spectacular feats of risk taking. Jimmy was the first to be awarded a Ph.D. in aeronautical science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was the brains behind the development of the high-octane gasoline that powers all planes today.

  Once Jimmy was on board FDR’s secret plan, a group of army Flyboys training in Oregon was given the opportunity to volunteer for a “dangerous mission that would require you to be outside of the United States for a few months.” All 140 signed up.

  In February of 1942, still unaware of their eventual mission, the Flyboys transferred to Eglin Air Force Base in Florida for training. Taking off on extremely short runways at bare minimum airspeed was the exact opposite of how they had previously flown. Their training had always been on long runways, and they had been taught to have plenty of airspeed before lifting off. Abruptly pulling up a heavy bomber with the tail almost dragging on the ground was unnatural to them, a harrowing experience. “We practiced, over and over, ramming the engines at full power,” said copilot Jack Sims, “taking off at sixty-five miles per hour in a five-hundred-foot run. It could be done, as long as an engine didn’t skip a beat.”

  On March 3, 1942, the Flyboys were ordered to assemble to meet their commander. Until now they had never even heard his name; his identity was top secret. In the large conference room the air was abuzz with the usual hanging-around talk when suddenly a door opened and in walked the great little man himself. There was a stunned silence. “Doolittle is my name,” he announced. His audience knew exactly who he was. It was as if Frank Sinatra had walked into a college band practice and said they would be accompanying him.

  “We’re in for something really big,” whispered twenty-five-year-old navigator Mac McClure to the men standing near him. “Of course he was a legend,” bombardier Herb Macia recalled. “Even then I would not have hesitated to call him America’s greatest aviator. One thing was clear: This mission was very important if he was involved in it.” Davey Jones recalled, “It didn’t take but two minutes, and you were under his spell. We were ready for anything.”

  Then and on a number of occasions over the next forty-five days, Jimmy reminded his young volunteers that this vital mission would be dangerous: “If anyone wants to drop out, he can. No questions asked.” Not one Flyboy ever accepted his kind offer.

  The sailing of a mighty aircraft carrier force is a major event. But when Doolittle’s Raiders and the sailors of the USS Hornet task force sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge headed for Tokyo, they still only knew they were headed for somewhere “outside the U.S.” When the ships were safely out into the Pacific, the loudspeakers boomed: “The target of this task force is Tokyo. The army is going to bomb Japan, and we’re going to get them as close to the enemy as we can. This is a chance for all of us to give the Japs a dose of their own medicine.”

  Cheers filled the air. “They told us over the loudspeaker and when they said it, it was like you were at a football game and somebody has just kicked a goal in the last second,” Bob Bourgeois remembered. “People went wild. I rejoiced just like everyone else. I was glad to see somebody was going to retaliate for Pearl Harbor.” Mac McClure said, “The sailors I saw were jumping up and down like small children.”

  The key to the mission was the innovative idea of combining an aircraft carrier with the Billys. Japan assumed itself safe from air threats because land-based U.S. Army aircraft couldn’t reach the homeland from Hawaii or Midway. And if the U.S. Navy was foolish enough to move an aircraft carrier within effective striking range of Japan, the American force would be obliterated. No one in Japan imagined that heavy land bombers could lift off from carrier decks—even some on the USS Hornet had their doubts.

  The plan was simple. The Hornet would sail within four to five hundred miles of Japan and the sixteen Billys would launch in the afternoon. The Hornet would then skedaddle back toward Pearl Harbor as the raiders dropped their bombs over the cities of Japan at sunset. Then they would fly on to China (the bombers were too heavy to land on the Hornet), where homing beacons would guide them safely to an airfield in Chuchow, beyond Japanese control.

  As the Hornet headed for history, Jimmy and his boys must have wondered if the kamikaze threat was more reality than myth. Dark clouds enveloped the task force as a typhoon-force wind buffeted the ships. Howling winds and sheeting sea spray had deckhands crawling across the deck on all fours to keep from being washed overboard.

  Then disaster struck early on the morning of April 18, 1942. Unknown to the Americans, the Japanese had stationed a string of fifty radio-equipped “picket boats” 650 miles out in the Pacific. These civilian-manned boats formed their early-warning surveillance network. Two Japanese ships observed t
he American fleet and radioed a warning to Tokyo.

  Even though the picket boats were full of civilian men, women, and children, U.S. destroyers were ordered to sink them. “That I will never forget or feel good about, until the day I die,” recalled sailor Rod Steiger. “I watched, I wasn’t shooting, but I watched as the 40 millimeters hit them, and the women screaming and the children running around and the men, until they were sunk. . . . They are shooting at these defenseless people, and inside of your mind you think what the hell happened to the Ten Commandments? You know what I mean? We’re not supposed to do this to one another.”

  “They know we’re here,” the Hornet’s captain told Jimmy. It was time to roll.

  Takeoff now, eight sailing hours and two hundred miles short of the intended launch point, suddenly transformed a dangerous mission into a suicidal one. With the element of surprise lost, it was a good bet Jimmy and his boys would be shredded by opposing fighter planes. And even if they survived Tokyo’s antiaircraft guns, the extra fuel expended to get that far ruled out reaching the do-or-die Chinese airfields. When Ross Greening realized he would launch hundreds of miles early, “Cold chills were running up and down my spine. . . . I don’t think there was a man leaving who really believed he would complete the flight safely.”

  “Doolittle called us all on the deck,” Sess Sessler remembered, “and said: ‘If there’s any of you who don’t want to go, just tell me. Because the chances of you making it back are pretty slim.’ And nobody batted an eye.”

  “I assumed quite early in the game that we would not survive the mission,” remembered Herb Macia. “First of all I thought if the Japanese had been tipped off that we were coming, and if they had the defense they were supposed to, and if we were going to strike right in the middle of the day, then we were going to encounter a swarm of fighters coming out after us. Second, if we got to the targets and got out, we could not make it past midpoint in the China Sea, we were going to have to ditch our planes in a Japanese-controlled area. I thought the only thing short of being destroyed over the target area would be to end up as a prisoner of war.”