Pearl Harbor: From Infamy To Greatness

by Craig Nelson

  Hornet turned into a twenty-seven-knot wind and chief engineer Pat Creehan pushed the turbines to their maximum. The seas continued rough. “This was zero weather conditions. Zero. Zero! That means you can’t see across the table,” recalled bombardier Bob Bourgeois. “Have you ever seen a thirty-foot sea? I never had. It’s seventy feet from the water to the top of the ship. And the bow of the ship was going down and picking up water and throwing it over the deck. I have never been in worse weather in my life. The rain! Oh, the rain! I’ve been in a bunch of hurricanes right here in Louisiana. And they were tame compared to this thing.”

  Airdales—sailors assigned to work with the carrier’s planes—unslipped the ropes holding the bombers down, yanked the chocks away, crewed a donkey to maneuver the Mitchells into position, and topped off their fuel tanks, rocking the planes wing by wing to shake out the air bubbles and load the maximum. As Doolittle’s men prepared, so did the crew of Commander John Ford. The Oscar-winning director would capture the moment for the nation’s movie-house newsreels. The men who would be known by history as the Doolittle Raiders were as ready as they could possibly be, which was hardly ready at all.

  At 0815, flight-deck signal officer Ozzie Osborne whirled a checkered flag in broader and broader, faster and faster eights over his head. First in line, Lieutenant Colonel James Harold Doolittle turned down his wing flaps and revved up his throttle. The heavy plane shook against the brakes. Jimmy had under five hundred feet of taxi before him and a mere six feet of clearance between his right wing and the tower. Even after their Eglin training, the runway looked awfully small to the army fliers, while the waves crashing over the deck seemed mountainous.

  Osborne felt in his bones the Hornet’s rise and fall, waiting for precisely the right moment. “You knew how long it would take them to run down the deck, and you wanted to start them as the bow started down because it would take them that length of time to get to within fifty or seventy-five feet of the bow, and then, as the deck started to come up, you’d actually launch them into the air, or at least horizontal but on the upswing, in fact giving them a boost,” said Steven Jurika. This meant that pilots spent most of taxi heading straight at the waves.

  Osborne’s flag shot down, Doolittle yanked his feet from the brakes, the carrier tilted, and the lead B-25, filled to the max with fuel and bombs, began its slow shuffle. “He won’t make it! He can’t make it!” one navy pilot shouted over the din, but when Doolittle was asked later how he felt at that moment, he said, “Confident.” The man flying number two to Doolittle, Dick Cole, remembered thinking: “It’d be a pretty bad feeling for everybody behind us if we took off and dropped into the water.”

  Ted Lawson saw it all: “We watched him like hawks, wondering what the wind would do to him, and whether he could take off in the little run toward the bow. If he couldn’t, we couldn’t. . . . Doolittle picked up more speed and held to his line, and just as the Hornet lifted itself up on the top of a wave and cut through it at full speed, Doolittle’s plane took off. He had yards to spare. He hung his ship almost straight up on its props until we could see the whole top of his B-25. Then he leveled off, and I watched him come around in a tight circle and shoot low over our heads—straight down the line painted on the deck.”

  The entire task force cheered in relief, a shout so loud that the Mitchell crews could hear it above their engines’ roar. Every four minutes, another B-25 nosed into position, gunned its engines, and wobbled from the runway. The sky now hummed with a black stream, a sixteen-plane, eighty-man squadron heading due west, the protection of the task force far behind them and their targets, their escape route, and their allied territory far, far ahead.

  April 18, 1942—four months and eleven days after December 7, 1941—was a bright, hot Saturday in central Honshu. Sunbathers on the beach were the first to see the solid, snub-nosed planes painted OD (olive drab), that soared just overhead. Everyone assumed they were Japan’s famous navy fighters and many, especially the children, looked up, and waved. Not until the squadron reached central Tokyo did the Japanese notice the gleaming red, white, and blue emblem of stars on their wings.

  Cruising at thirty feet, Doolittle pulled up to twelve hundred so bombardier Fred Braemer could get to work. At 1215, a red cockpit light blinked four times, confirming that all four bombs had left the bay. It was odd that North American Aviation had included this lamp as everyone aboard could feel each bomb snap from its shackles, the release leaving a B-25 two thousand to three thousand pounds lighter, the plane suddenly jumping in the air like a stallion.

  Decorated with such messages as I DON’T WANT TO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE—JUST TOKYO! and YOU’LL GET A BANG OUT OF THIS, the five-hundred-pound bombs and thousand-pound incendiaries struck. Explosion after explosion rang out; then after a brief silence came the unmistakable ack-ack of antiaircraft fire, and the wail of air-raid sirens.

  Back at Task Force 16, radio rooms intercepted Japan’s propaganda station, JOAK, announcing: “A large fleet of enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo this afternoon. . . . The known death toll is between three thousand and four thousand so far.” This news was loudspeakered and semaphored across the American ships; elated cheers and whoops roared from deck to deck. Pearl Harbor had been avenged, and the army and the navy had done it together.

  The only other time a foreign nation had attacked Japan was seven hundred years before, when Mongolia’s Kublai Khan sent an armada. The fleet was destroyed by a typhoon, and ever since the Japanese believed their homelands were safeguarded by a supernatural kamikaze—a “divine wind.” The endangered American airmen, however, would now get their own kamikaze—a thirty-mile-an-hour tailwind pushing them toward the safety of Nationalist China—providing an extra 250 miles or so of thrust. The change in the wind that eased their way, however, had at the same time undermined the work of those coordinating their ground support. The question that Wu Duncan and Frog Low had never answered—if the fliers couldn’t land on a carrier, where would they go?—was still, four months later, unresolved.

  On April 13, Major E. N. Backus and Lieutenant Colonel E. H. Alexander had flown from Chongqing to oversee thirty thousand gallons of avgas and five hundred gallons of oil arriving from India as well as to ensure that lights, landing flares, and DF (direction-finding) signals were in place for Special Aviation Project #1. Backus and Alexander, however, were prevented from flying in by the same kamikaze now giving the Doolittle volunteers a heaven-sent push. The airfields were never set up.

  Already flying on a prayer, the airmen would find that some prayers go unanswered. The navigators listened for their beacons, but heard nothing. As the gas needles knocked against “empty” pegs, most of the pilots yoked their Mitchells up so the crews could bail out, pulling rip cords into the unknown, falling at 180 miles an hour, in the dead of the night, through thunderstorm and fog, into enemy-held territory on the other side of the world.

  One pilot had decided to try for the Soviet Union instead of Nationalist China, and that plane would be the first to land. Doolittle had ordered them not to go to Russia, but Ski York felt he had no choice. Navigator Nolan Herndon determined their course from his vague maps that didn’t really match what he saw out the window and dead-reckoning guesses. Praying they hadn’t ended up in Japanese-run Korea, the Mitchell set down in Kamchatka. “At last,” thought Bob Emmens, “dry, good ground. It was a wonderful feeling.”

  Over a dozen Russians came over to have a look at the B-25. One of them started talking in rapid Russian and the fliers picked up a word: Americanski. The crew immediately replied “Americanski!” again and again, and the Russians laughed. After a nap, the men were brusquely awakened and told to hurry; the plane was ready and waiting. They rushed out to discover that it wasn’t their Mitchell, but a DC-3, which flew them to meet General Stern of the Far Eastern Red Army. After they were interrogated, Stern’s translator announced, “The general has asked me to tell you that according to a decision reached between our two governments and by direc
tion of orders from Moscow, you will be interned in the Soviet Union until such a time as further decisions are made in your case. Do you have any requests to make at the present time?”

  • • •

  Instead of bailing out into the unknown, Ted Lawson tried to land Ruptured Duck, but the engine conked out as he was coming in and the struts hit a wave at 100 mph. Gunner David Thatcher was knocked out, then came to. Water was pouring in. He put on his Mae West and started to climb out the hatch, but couldn’t fit. Dave then realized that the plane, filling with water and sinking, was upside down; he had been trying to squeeze through the turret blister.

  He got out to find Bob Clever seriously gashed up and bleeding out in buckets. Mac McClure had tried to help, but Mac’s shoulders were wrenched out of their sockets. Ted Lawson was severely injured and seemed unlikely to survive.

  Eight Chinese farmers came down to the beach where they washed up. The peasants took the men to a shack about half a mile away. Morning came, wet and gray. Dave Thatcher could hear a motor. He saw an idling patrol boat. From its stern waved the blood red flag of Japan.

  But as they had promised, the Chinese arrived with bamboo poles, ropes, and strips of palm that they used to make litters to carry the injured men to safe territory. “I swung between them,” Lawson said, “like a butchered hog.” The men were taken by boat to a town where the entire crew of plane fifteen, including gunner Doc White, appeared. They’d ended up in the water and their raft had sunk, but Doc salvaged two tubes of morphine, which he would use to save Lawson’s life.

  Ted Lawson: “Doc stepped away and walked back quickly with a silver saw. It made a strange, faraway soggy sound as he sawed through the bone. Except for the tugging fear that I was coming back too soon, the actual amputation was almost as impersonal to me as watching a log being sawed.”

  • • •

  All night long as the other Americans bailed out across the southeastern provinces, the Chinese heard the explosions of crashing planes, saw the rising plumes of smoke, and watched the broad white-circle ghosts descend through the clouds.

  In the morning the raiders discovered that they had fallen into a rugged terrain similar to the foothills of the American West, but with valleys of rice paddies and citrus groves. Though few in that part of China had telephones or radios, news of the big-nosed men who had bombed Japan and had fallen from the sky traveled across the territory with remarkable speed. Almost every American would be amazed at how soon the Chinese learned the news and by how well they were treated.

  Dick Knobloch and Mac McElroy were following a river. A young boy ran out, shook his head no, made a gun with his hand, shouted, “Bang! Bang!,” and pretended to die. Japanese troops were just minutes away. The boy took them to a Chinese squadron whose Captain Wong could speak some English. Soon the whole crew was reunited and brought to the outskirts of a town in Nationalist-held territory. Wong told them to wait, and for over an hour they sat there, with no explanation. It was mysterious, and unsettling. Were the Chinese going to turn them in to the Japanese? The Americans were so tired and so dirty and so hungry. Should they try to run away? No one could figure out what to do. Then, from far off in the distance, came a noise, which grew louder, and closer, until the Americans found themselves in the middle of a glorious and enthusiastic parade, led by an eight-piece marching band.

  “There was this Chinese band who’d stayed up all night long, learning to play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ ” said Bob Bourgeois. “There was an American flag, and I tell you, there were five guys from crew thirteen, listening to them play ‘The Star-Spangled Banner,’ well, we had tears running down our faces.” The city of three hundred thousand was festooned with banners: WELCOME BRAVE AMERICAN FLIERS. FIRST TO BOMB TOKYO. UNITED STATES AND CHINA RULE THE PACIFIC! They were fed a dinner of mashed potatoes, pie, and wine, and the next morning they were taken to have hot baths, in a tub.

  • • •

  On Saturday, April 18, in Hyde Park, New York—April 19 in China—Franklin Roosevelt was working at his home office with secretary Grace Tully and speechwriter Sam Rosenman when a call came in from the White House: Radio Japan was broadcasting a report of Americans bombing Tokyo.

  Smiling broadly and chain-smoking, a thrilled president told Grace and Sam the entire story. Rosenman had an idea: “You remember the novel of James Hilton, Lost Horizon, telling of that wonderful, timeless place known as Shangri-La? It was located in the trackless wastes of Tibet. Why not tell them that’s where the planes came from? If you use a fictional place like that, it’s a polite way of saying that you did not intend to tell the enemy or anybody else where the planes really came from.”

  Roosevelt called a press conference for April 21. There he made an extremely cryptic announcement confirming that American bombs had fallen on Japan, the planes having come “from our new base in Shangri-La,” and refused to take questions. FDR became so enamored with this allusion that he renamed the chief executive’s Maryland country getaway Shangri-La; today it is known as Camp David.

  The great majority of Doolittle Raiders eventually arrived in Chongqing, the capital of Free China, in what could only be considered a miracle. Eighty airmen had bombed the heart of Japan, with seventy-five of them crashing into enemy-controlled territory and then smuggled across a quarter of China. One was dead; five were in Russia; five were healing in Linghai; ten were MIA. Considering the history of Special Aviation Project #1, it seemed like providence.

  In an amazing turnabout, Doolittle and his men had mirrored Admiral Yamamoto’s December 7 strategy, with Special Aviation Project #1 just as much of a surprise to the Japanese as Operation Z had been to the United States. Mitsuo Fuchida: “Headquarters spokesmen sarcastically pooh-poohed the attack as not even a ‘do-little’ but rather a ‘do-nothing’ raid. In point of physical damage inflicted, it was true enough that the raid did not accomplish a great deal. But the same could not be said of its impact on the minds of Japan’s naval leaders and its consequent influence on the course of the war at sea. The fighting services, especially, were imbued with the idea that their foremost duty was to protect the emperor from danger. Naturally, they felt that it would be a grave dereliction of this duty if the emperor’s safety were jeopardized by even a single enemy raid on Tokyo.”

  After the war, MacArthur’s occupying forces uncovered data on the effects of the Doolittle Raid: 50 dead, 252 wounded, 90 buildings damaged or destroyed. It seems like so little, especially when compared to the deaths of Pearl Harbor, but the repercussions were immense. Not only was this act of retaliation the first US victory of World War II, but after month after month of defeat and humiliation in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific, it was also the first real victory for the Allies as a whole. Many Americans would remember for the rest of their lives where they were when they learned Tokyo had been bombed, especially the majority of citizens who were convinced at the time that Germany, Italy, and Japan were going to win the war. The raid proved, at a crucial moment, that the Axis powers weren’t invincible.

  An enraged Japan exacted vengeance on the Chinese who’d helped Doolittle and his men. On April 20 Hirohito signed an order “to destroy the air bases from which the enemy might conduct air raids on the Japanese homeland. The captured areas will be occupied for a period estimated at approximately one month. Airfields, military installations, and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed.” The Imperial Japanese Army ripped up American church missions and Christian graveyards while sending over six hundred sorties to bomb the southeastern provinces, ultimately killing an estimated 250,000 Chinese. “We fed the Americans and carried them to safety so that they could bomb Tokyo again,” one Chinese schoolteacher said. “Then, the [Japanese] dwarf invaders came. They killed my three sons; they killed my wife, Angling; they set fire to my school; they burned my books; they drowned my grandchildren in the well. And I crawled out of the well at night, when they were drunk, and killed them with my own hands—one for every member of m
y family they had slaughtered.”

  Even after being awarded the Medal of Honor, Brigadier General Doolittle never thought of his raid as victorious: “The raid had three advantages, really. The first advantage was to give the people at that time a little fillip. The news had all been bad until then. The second advantage was to cause the Japanese to worry and feel that they were vulnerable, and the third and most useful part of the raid was that it caused a diversion of aircraft and equipment to the defense of the home islands which the Japanese badly needed in the theaters where the war was actually going on. It, for me, was a very sad occasion because, while we had accomplished the first part of our mission, we had lost all of our aircraft, and no commander feels happy when he loses all of his aircraft. And of course, we lost some of the boys.”

  • • •

  Green Hornet arrived over China having run out of gas four minutes before making landfall and at an altitude of only a hundred feet—too low for bailing out. When Dean Hallmark tried to bring her down in the water, the plane slammed against a wave with such force that it was thrown back up and then crashed in a nosedive. Bob Meder tried to revive gunner Don Fitzmaurice and bombardier Bill Dieter, but nothing could be done for them.

  Discovered by peasants, Hallmark, Chase Nielsen, and Meder were taken to a Chinese camp but then were captured by the Japanese, as were the five crewmen from Bat out of Hell. Though Doolittle had explicitly ordered his men not to bomb the Temple of Heaven, a raid on the home islands was seen by many in Tokyo as an attack on the emperor, and the POWs would be dealt with accordingly.