Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor

by Scott, James M.

  Stilwell had only recently arrived in China after a twenty-three-day voyage that covered some twenty thousand miles. His touchdown had coincided with the Japanese assault on southern Burma, a vital fulcrum on which the direction of the war balanced. The capital and principal seaport of Rangoon—the start of the Burma Road—had fallen to the Japanese in early March. This thin jungle membrane stood as a final barrier, blocking the Japanese from pushing through India and joining forces with the Germans in the Middle East. Much to Stilwell’s frustration Chinese forces proved far outmatched. Although China boasted almost three million uniformed men, a lack of resources forced most to bed down beneath shared blankets and to fight in straw sandals. Disease and malnutrition compounded China’s woes, robbing the nation of as much 40 percent of its forces each year. Officer desertions likewise were frequent. “You will know long before you get this what I’m up against,” Stilwell wrote to his wife. “It’s not a pretty picture.”

  Because he was not briefed about the raid, Stilwell failed to appreciate Arnold’s urgency in finalizing the plans. He at last cabled Arnold on March 22 that Standard Oil of Calcutta had 30,000 gallons of 100-octane gasoline plus another 500 gallons of 120-oil in 5-gallon tins. “Please advise purpose for which it is being held,” Stilwell asked. “For use in American Army Aircraft, request authority to move this fuel to China.” Arnold ordered the fuel moved to Kweilin immediately; he would provide ten transports to help. He further ordered twelve men stationed at each airfield, including one who spoke English. All men and supplies had to be in place by midnight on April 9–10. To illuminate the runways, five flares would line either side, plus an additional five on the windward end of each runway. “The success of a vital project which I discussed with you prior to your departure depends upon this movement being accomplished by air without delay and in using every possible precaution to preserve its secrecy.”

  Rather than import fuel from India, Stilwell in a March 29 message recommended using Chinese gasoline. Only the airfields at Chuchow and Kweilin, the Chinese advised, were safe for heavy bombers. If America wanted to use the others, a qualified officer would first have to inspect them. “Other than fuel, no ammunition, bombs, or supplies are required,” Arnold cabled. “To meet date of April 10, use Chinese 100 octane or any other gasoline available. One take-off and landing only by medium bombers contemplated by operation. Only those airdromes for this operation should be marked. To insure availability, oil and gasoline supplies at these airdromes must be checked, and as soon as possible this information forwarded here. Means for rapid servicing from drums must be furnished servicing details.” The date for the task force’s departure loomed: time was up. “On April 20th, special project will arrive destination. An attempt will be made to notify you should a change in arrival date arise,” Arnold cabled. “For variation without notice you must however be prepared.”

  DOOLITTLE HAD GOTTEN the message from Arnold that the time had come to depart Eglin for the West Coast. He summoned his men at 3 a.m. on March 24. For Brick Holstrom the news arrived with a bang on his hotel wall from York in the next room. “Hey, come on,” York shouted. “We’ve got to go!”

  Doolittle informed his men that twenty-two aircrews would fly cross-country to the air depot at McClellan Field in Sacramento for final modifications and tune-ups. From there crews would continue on to Alameda Naval Air Station and load the Hornet. Any extra aircrews would return to Columbia.

  “Get your financial affairs in shape—all of you,” Doolittle warned. “And don’t, in your letters to the folks or to your wives, give any hint where you are going.”

  The stress of the operation finally caught up with the pilot Vernon Stintzi, who developed severe gastric symptoms—an ulcer. Thomas White, the mission doctor, diagnosed the lieutenant with anxiety neurosis and relieved him from flying duty. Doolittle saw Stintzi’s departure as an opportunity. “Rather than bump somebody else out of a position,” he said, “I will take this crew that doesn’t have a pilot.”

  The aircrews hustled that Tuesday morning to prepare to depart, a scene captured by Ken Reddy in his diary. “Operations was like a mad house,” he wrote, “everyone trying to get off on a very short notice.”

  Miller watched the hurrying fliers with envy just as Doolittle approached. “I hear you had an accident,” Doolittle said, referring to Bates’s crash the day before.

  “Yes, Sir,” the Navy lieutenant replied. “But there’s nothing wrong with the technique or anything else of the airplane. What was wrong was Bates. He just wasn’t flying the airplane. The airplane was flying him.”

  Doolittle understood. He told Miller that the crews were headed to the West Coast and would finish up final instruction at a California airfield.

  “Well, you know, Colonel,” Miller said, “it’s a matter of professional pride with me. I don’t want anybody on the West Coast telling you, ‘No, let’s start all over again with this technique.’ If it’s possible I’d like to go with you, if we’re going to have time to do more of this practice out there.”

  “If it’s all right with Washington,” Doolittle answered, “you can fly out with me this afternoon.”

  Doolittle wanted to keep York as well, who had been given permission by Colonel Mills to help train the fliers in Florida, but not actually go on the mission. He phoned Mills up in South Carolina.

  “Newt, old boy,” Doolittle said, “I am going to need York out in Sacramento for a few days. You don’t mind if he comes out there and then he comes right back afterwards?”

  Mills hesitated, no doubt suspicious, before he relented: “All right.”

  When Robert Emmens landed that afternoon in Florida with the bomber to replace the one Bates had crashed, he discovered that most of the other aircrews had all cleared out, leaving York to sweep out the operations building.

  “Where is everybody?” Emmens asked.

  “They have all left for the West Coast,” York answered. “Do you want to go on this thing?”

  “More than anything.”

  “We could be that substitute crew,” York said. “They got pretty shook up in their accident, and they need another crew as well as the airplane.”

  Doolittle wanted to use the cross-country flight as another training exercise, instructing his pilots to hedgehop west and test gas consumption, buzzing the rural countryside just as the men would Japan. The aircrews, who flew in formations of up to half a dozen bombers, decided to have some fun.

  “We kept so low we could look up at the telegraph wires,” Lawson later wrote. “All of us seemed to figure we might not be around very long, so we might as well do things we always wanted to do. It was the craziest flying I had ever done, and I had done some kid-stuff tricks, like banking a B-25 through a low, open drawbridge.”

  Lawson’s navigator Second Lieutenant Charles McClure described how the pilots terrorized some of the locals on the ground below. “When we departed Eglin, going across Alabama we were flying below many trees and in general, were chasing farmers, particularly Negroes, as they plowed. One old colored boy was dragged across the field by his scared mule because he had the reins wrapped under his arms,” McClure later wrote. “One Negro man grabbed two colored children and ran for a shack which I am sure would have blown over had the prop wash hit it.”

  The pilots did more than scare the locals. “The trip to the West Coast was an enjoyable legal cross country buzz job which would probably give me a screaming class A nervous breakdown now,” recalled Aden Jones. “I pulled some sagebrush off of the bottom of that airplane,” remembered Jacob DeShazer. “I’d see the cattle stick their tails up in the air and run. We’d just go over their backs.”

  Bad weather forced many of the crews to break up the trip in Texas, spending a night in San Antonio before flying on the next day to Phoenix, Riverside, and ultimately Sacramento. Doolittle, however, pushed onward, flying across the Rocky Mountains on instruments.

  Navigator George Barr used his downtime in Texas to call the fami
ly he lived with after the death of his mother. “I am going on a special mission with Jimmy Doolittle,” Barr exclaimed. “Wish me luck.”

  The airmen pressed on the next day. “We flew to Sacramento non-stop in the longest flight I have made, being nine hrs. and 25 minutes,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “I rode most of the way in the nose and I really got a good look at the country.”

  Hilger flew across southern Arizona, following Highway 10 through the Dragoon Mountains and Texas Canyon.

  “Can you see that little spot over there of a town?” Macia asked the major. “That is where I was raised.”

  “What in the hell is the name of that place?” Hilger asked.

  “Tombstone.”

  Lawson and McClure’s mischief continued on the final day of the flight. “Over Texas, we chased cattle for hours. Near El Paso we were chasing automobiles off of the highways and at one point, a bus skidded to a stop and as we pulled up, we saw passengers heading for the open country,” McClure wrote. “Going up the valley to Sacramento, we were right on the deck and noticed when we passed over farmers, each of them waved to us which was not at all like the colored people in the South.”

  Doolittle landed at McClellan and met with air depot commander Colonel John Clark and his senior engineering and maintenance personnel. Doolittle still had a list of modifications and equipment he needed before the task force’s April departure.

  “I would like to have a complete inspection of each airplane including airplane engine, equipment, and accessories,” Doolittle began, according to a transcript of the meeting. “We don’t want the airplanes taken to pieces. Just inspected insofar as they can be inspected—cowling, doors opened, etc. Also a pair of propellers installed on each plane. Forty-four have been ordered.”

  “We did not get any teletype on it,” one of the men protested.

  “They were ordered three weeks ago.”

  Doolittle felt the now familiar pushback to his demands, even though the depot’s instructions to cooperate were clear. “Services and supplies requested by Colonel Doolittle,” orders stated, “will be given the highest priority.”

  He pressed on with the briefing, alerting the officers that the planes had been modified with several added gas tanks. The sixty-gallon rubber bag that would go in place of the lower gun turret would arrive in Sacramento either that day or the next along with new covers to replace the larger ones for the added bomb bay tanks.

  “My ship is complete,” Doolittle told them. “Use it as a model.”

  He instructed the officers to remove the liaison radio sets from each bomber and the tracing antenna and asked for parachutes.

  “How many were you supposed to have, sir?”

  “About 60 pack type and about 40 detachable. When they come in we want to have them fitted to the pilots and labeled,” Doolittle continued. “There will be a man here from Wright Field to install six still cameras in six of the airplanes and 16 movie cameras in the other airplanes.”

  Doolittle again warned them not to tamper with the planes unless maintenance crews found a major issue. “If you find something definitely wrong, we want that fixed,” he said. “We are anxious to give them the last finishing touch and take them away.”

  Since the plan was to turn the bombers over to China, Doolittle instructed them that the original Norden bombsights, radios, and instrument accessories would all be collected in Sacramento and then shipped to the final destination.

  “I am particularly interested in propellers,” Doolittle said, returning to his earlier topic. “They should be painted. Don’t want shiny ones. They should have been here two weeks ago.”

  “What about ammunition?”

  “We’ll get that from Benicia Arsenal.”

  Doolittle requested that any burned-out instrumentation lights be replaced. “Wherever there are places for spares I would like to have spares put in,” he added. “Also spare fuses. All we are going to have for these ships are what is on them.”

  If any problems came up, Doolittle instructed the depot officials to contact Captain York.

  “This project is a highly confidential one,” he concluded. “As a matter of fact, I am having to notify General Arnold in code that I arrived.”

  Doolittle’s meeting translated into serious orders—at least on paper. “Under no circumstances is any equipment to be removed or tampered with on these airplanes,” orders stated. “This will be strictly complied with at all times on this Project. Inspectors or men working on the Airplane finding defective or damaged parts must notify the Project Officer or Project Supervisor of this condition before accomplishing any work.”

  Doolittle’s fliers landed one after the other at McClellan.

  “Stick close to the field,” Doolittle instructed his men. “I want every first pilot to make absolutely certain that his plane is in perfect shape.”

  He warned his crews that mechanics planned to remove the radios: “You won’t need it where you’re going.”

  Many now assumed that meant Japan.

  The rubber gas tanks, cameras, and broomstick tail guns drew questions from the curious ground personnel, prompting a sharp retort: “Mind your own business.”

  Despite strict orders, problems persisted, as described by Lawson. “I had to stand by and watch one of the mechanics rev my engines so fast that the new blades picked up dirt which pockmarked their tips,” he wrote. “I caught another one trying to sandpaper the imperfections away and yelled at him until he got out some oil and rubbed it on the places which he had sandpapered. I knew that salt air would make those prop tips pulpy where they have been scraped. The way they revved our engines made us wince. All of us were so afraid that they’d hurt the ships, the way they were handling them, yet we couldn’t tell them why we wanted them to be so careful. I guess we must have acted like the biggest bunch of soreheads those mechanics ever saw.”

  Doolittle finally picked up the phone to Arnold.

  “Things are going too slowly out here,” he told the general. “I’d appreciate it very much if you would personally build a fire under these people.”

  Arnold obliged.

  Another time Doolittle chatted with several pilots in base operations when he heard a bomber engine backfire. He looked over to see a B-25 cough black exhaust as a worker tried to start the engine. An expert had visited Eglin to tune all the carburetors, not to regulation but to help guarantee each plane could achieve the maximum range. Doolittle had specifically ordered that no worker touch any of the carburetor settings—and under no circumstances change them.

  “What’s going on here?” Doolittle demanded.

  “We’re just readjusting the carburetors,” the mechanic countered. “They’re all out of adjustment.”

  “I was madder than a son of a bitch,” Doolittle later recalled. “I naturally blew my top.”

  He cooled down and picked up the phone again to Arnold.

  The crews ran into a similar headache with the arsenal, forcing yet another call to Washington. Even Doc White battled the post’s uncooperative medical supply officer. “In several instances he had the desired supplies on his shelves but apparently did not want to deplete his stores and by one excuse or another refused to fill most of my requisitions,” White griped in his report. “The Surgeon refused to override his decisions in spite of my explaining the urgency of my needs.”

  As work progressed on the bombers, the men used the evenings to relax. Ken Reddy went bowling, danced at the Breakers, and even visited a honky-tonk with the daughter of a sheep rancher. Others hung out at the Senator Hotel, where some of the airmen stayed. One night a few of the fliers decided to drop dollar bills from the hotel window to see what kind of commotion might unfold on the street below, a plan that ran afoul after some of the bills landed on a ledge below. “We lowered Dean Hallmark head-first out of the window and held him by the ankles; he retrieved the bills and sent them down to the street,” Holstrom recalled. “About this time some of the senior guys told everybody to
knock it off before someone called the cops.”

  Greening, Jones, and York stumbled out of the hotel bar, only to find an elderly gentleman passed out in the lobby.

  “Let’s give him a hot foot,” Jones suggested.

  Jones stuck a lit match in the toe of the gentleman’s shoe while the airmen retreated to the far side of the lobby to watch. The match burned down and went out as the gentleman slept soundly. Jones did it again, this time using two matches, but once again the trick failed to waken the man. The third time he decided to use the entire matchbook to line the sole of the gentleman’s shoe.

  “Shame on you boys!” a woman, who had watched the prank unfold, protested. “Why don’t you leave the poor man alone?”

  The gentleman suddenly woke up. Rather than target Jones, he turned on the woman. “Go away y’ol’bat!” he barked. “Let ’em have their fun.”

  He then promptly passed out again.

  Other airmen used the downtime to write final letters home, including engineer Jacob Eierman. “This will be my last letter for sometime because we are on our way—I am not able to tell you where we are going, but you will read about us in the newspapers,” he wrote. “If the information leaked out as to where we are going, none of us would ever come back.” Engineer Melvin Gardner echoed him. “Please don’t worry mother,” he wrote. “Remember no news is good news.”

  A classified message arrived from Arnold, directing Doolittle to travel to nearby San Francisco for a meeting with Admiral Halsey, his chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning, and Duncan. After his briefing with Duncan at Pearl Harbor, Halsey wanted a face-to-face with Doolittle—the man for whom he was about to risk the remnants of the Pacific Fleet. Nimitz agreed, ordering him to fly to the West Coast. The officers met March 30 in the bar of the luxurious Fairmont Hotel atop Nob Hill, which afforded spectacular views of the bay. The men sat in the bar, but Halsey feared Doolittle had too many friends in the area who might recognize him, so the group moved up to Halsey’s room. “It immediately occurred to me that a personal contact with Jimmy Doolittle, whom I did not know at that time, was desirable,” Halsey later recalled. “First, so that we could size each other up, and secondly, to discuss way and means.”