“Well, if it’s all like this,” Sutherland thought to himself, “this will be fine.”
Jurika climbed from the flight deck up to the bridge for a better view. “I could see the salvos from the Nashville,” he remembered. “There were heavy swells and the picket boat was going up, it would be on top of a swell and then it would be seen, then it would be down, and you couldn’t see a thing except perhaps the top of its mast. The splashes were all around it, but it was still there.”
The gunfire startled many of Doolittle’s men.
Brick Holstrom grabbed a Navy ensign in one of the Hornet’s passageways. “What’s going on?” he demanded.
“I don’t know,” the officer replied. “I think they’re firing at a submarine.”
The Nashville’s thunderclap nearly took the hat off mission doctor Thomas White, while bombardier Jacob DeShazer stood in awe on the carrier’s deck. “The whole side of that Navy ship looked like it was on fire,” he recalled, “booming away.”
Eight Enterprise fighters circled five thousand feet overhead as the Nashville blasted the Nitto Maru. The aviators dove to attack, only to spot a second patrol, the eighty-eight-ton Nanshin Maru No. 21. The pilots diverted to strafe the smaller boat, raking the tiny trawler from stem to stern with .50-caliber machine-gun fire. One of the pilots made eleven passes, burning through at least twelve hundred rounds. The obliterated boat began to settle, prompting the pilots to join the attack on the Nitto Maru.
Enterprise bomber pilot Ensign John Roberts hungered for action. He pushed his bomber over at 7,500 feet and dove on the Nitto Maru, but pulled out of the attack at 3,500 feet to avoid one of the fighters. Roberts returned with a glide-bomb attack, dropping one 500-pound bomb, which missed by about 100 feet. He joined the fighters to strafe the dogged Nitto Maru until most ran out of ammunition. Lieutenant Roger Mehle summed up the attack in his report: “Liquidation of enemy personnel. Vessel placed out of operation. When left it was wallowing in a trough of the waves.” Another pilot was more succinct, describing his fellow fliers as “a bloodthirsty bunch of bastards.”
The Nitto Maru erupted in flames at 8:21 a.m. and finally slipped beneath the waves two minutes later, exactly half an hour after the assault began. Two survivors bobbed in the water, neither of whom could be recovered; the skipper watched one of the injured sailors drown. The Nashville had hoped to silence the Nitto Maru, but radiomen picked up continual transmissions for twenty-seven minutes after the cruiser fired the first shot. There was no doubt Japan now knew of the approaching armada.
The ninety-ton fishing boat had robbed the Nashville of 928 rounds of six-inch ammunition, including 13 rounds needed to clear the guns after the battle ended. The skipper was mortified, blaming the poor shooting on his inexperienced gun crews and the churning seas that helped shield the Nitto Maru. “Expenditure of 915 rounds to sink a sampan appears ridiculous, and obviously was excessive,” he wrote in his report, “but in this instance was not wholly inexcusable.”
DOOLITTLE HAD WATCHED the battle alongside Mitscher on the Hornet’s bridge.
“It looks like you’re going to have to be on your way soon,” the skipper told him. “They know we’re here.”
Halsey flashed a message about that time to the Hornet. “Launch planes,” the admiral ordered. “To Col. Doolittle and gallant command, good luck and God bless you.”
Doolittle shook hands with Mitscher and then darted below to his cabin to grab his bag, yelling at his men he encountered to load up. Many of the raiders had just sat down to breakfast in the wardroom when the carrier’s loudspeaker crackled to life. “Now hear this! Now hear this! Army pilots, man your planes!”
Others proved equally ill prepared. Ross Greening had just finished a letter to his wife, while Edgar McElroy relaxed with a copy of the Hornet’s Plan of the Day. News of the aircrew’s imminent departure caught Jack Sims in the most precarious position. “I happened to be in the ‘head’ when I heard the order,” the pilot recalled. “Believe me; that was the best catharsis one could ever ask for!”
Doolittle ran into Miller.
“Would you help get the pilots in the airplanes?”
Miller agreed.
Sailors darted across the wet decks to help the Army airmen yank off engine and gun turret covers. Others topped off fuel tanks, rocking the bombers back and forth to get air bubbles out. Crews handed five-gallon gasoline cans up through the rear hatches to the gunners, as others untied ropes and removed wheel chocks so Navy handlers could position the bombers for takeoff. Airmen armed the ordnance already loaded in the bomb bays, as crews brought up the last of the incendiaries from below deck. “We had spent months preparing for this first bombing of Japan,” navigator Chase Nielsen recalled, “and we were keyed up like a football team going into the big game.”
Problems soon arose.
Davy Jones had suffered a leak in his bomb bay tank only the day before, forcing technicians to patch the bladder and then leave it empty overnight to dry. As crews now rushed to fill the 225-gallon rubber sac and top off the wing tanks, they discovered that the Navy had shut off gas lines, a common procedure in the event of a surprise attack. Ross Greening ordered his crew chief to haul his extra tins over to Jones, optimistic that the Navy would turn the lines back on in time to allow him to finish fueling.
Harold Watson had green-lighted the replacement of his bomber’s fouled spark plugs that morning before general quarters. “When the alarm sounded, I found all the cowling off the left engine and all the plugs out!” he recalled. “The last piece of cowling was snapped in place as the ship ahead started its engines.”
Shorty Manch appeared alongside Ted Lawson’s Ruptured Duck with a fruitcake tin in hand. “Hey,” he shouted up to bombardier Bob Clever. “Will you-all do a fellow a big favor and carry my phonograph records under your seat? I’ll take my record-player along in my plane and we’ll meet in Chungking and have us some razz-ma-tazz.”
Miller stopped by as well, extending his hand for a farewell shake. “I wish to hell I could go with you.”
Airmen checked in with the Hornet’s navigation room for the latest weather reports, wind information, and the ship’s location. Crews knew that the magnetic compasses, after more than two weeks aboard the steel carrier, were far out of calibration. Furthermore, the squalls would prevent navigators from using a sextant to shoot sun or star shots. Pilots would have to fly dead reckoning to Japan. Compounding the challenge was a twenty-four-knot headwind they would have to battle. The biggest concern, however, came down to distance. The Hornet remained 824 statute miles east of Tokyo, almost twice as far as Doolittle had originally planned.
Ross Greening was inspecting each plane, making sure the bombs were all armed, when navigator Frank Kappeler approached.
“Captain Greening, we are over 800 miles from Tokyo,” Kappeler exclaimed. “I didn’t know we were going to be this far away.”
Greening chased down and informed Doolittle, who merely nodded and did not utter a word.
He already knew.
News of the Hornet’s distance from Japan soon spread throughout the crews. “I wasn’t concerned about it,” recalled Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator. “We had full confidence in our pilot. We had full confidence in our airplane; we had full confidence in ourselves, and we had this to do.”
Others didn’t share Potter’s confidence.
The likelihood of running out of fuel loomed large. “The way things are now, we have about enough to get us within 200 miles of the China coast, and that’s all,” Jack Hilger leveled with his crew. “If anyone wants to withdraw, he can do it now. We can replace him from the men who are going to be left aboard. Nothing will ever be said about it, and it won’t be held against you. It’s your right. It’s up to you.”
Hilger’s men absorbed the news.
Bombardier Herb Macia remembered his parents and his wife, Mary Alice, pregnant with the couple’s son. He thought of everything he wished he had told them before he
left, drawing comfort in the idea that his death would at least be honorable. “This couldn’t have happened to me, but it’s happening to me, so I’m going to go in and really do it right,” he concluded. “That’s all I care about!”
Others in the crew shared Macia’s determination.
“Not a man withdrew,” Jacob Eierman, Hilger’s engineer, later wrote. “Although I don’t suppose any of them felt any better than I did.”
Brick Holstrom warmed up the engines; then his navigator climbed in and delivered the bad news. “What the hell do we do now?” he thought.
Pilot Billy Farrow asked bombardier Jacob DeShazer whether he knew how to row a boat, while a sergeant shouted to DeShazer as he climbed in the back, “We just got one chance in a thousand of making it.”
It wasn’t just the airmen who were worried.
“We knew that the pilots really didn’t have a Chinaman’s chance of getting to China with those airplanes,” Miller recalled. “It was just too far.”
Despite the poor prospects posed by the added distance, aircrews still hurried to prepare for takeoff, stowing gear, warming up engines, and going over checklists. Carl Wildner did so even as his stomach churned. “I was scared,” the navigator on the second bomber later wrote. “We knew the odds were against us and it seemed to me we were doing things without thinking—like automatons. I guess we were and maybe that’s the way it was supposed to be.”
The Hornet swung into the wind at 8:03 a.m. and increased speed to twenty-two knots. The seas crashed against the flattop’s bow, alarming even the most veteran sailors. “It’s the only time in my life,” Halsey recalled, “I ever saw green water come over the bow and right onto the flight deck of a carrier.”
Navy handlers positioned the bombers as far back on the flight deck as possible, two abreast and crisscrossed. The near-gale-force winds coupled with the revving engines made it difficult for the flight deck crew to maneuver, each of whom wore a safety line to keep from getting blown into the whirling props. “It sure was windy!” recalled George Bernstein, a flight deck crewman. “We had to literally drop to the deck and hang on with our fingers in the tie-down fittings when the B-25s revved up.”
Over this roar Miller shouted instructions to the pilots: keep the trim tabs in neutral and the flaps down. Any changes he would display on a blackboard. “Look at me,” Miller demanded, “before you let your brakes off!”
Doolittle climbed into the lead bomber alongside his copilot, Second Lieutenant Dick Cole. Throughout the plane sat the navigator, Second Lieutenant Hank Potter, the bombardier, Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer, and the gunner and crew chief, Staff Sergeant Paul Leonard. Rain beat down on the cockpit windshield as Doolittle stared down the 467-foot flight deck. The days of practice and the nights of worry had come down to this moment—not just for Doolittle but for all sixteen aircrews. “We all stood around, watching and sweating it out,” recalled Eierman. “We had done plenty of practicing—on land—but this was going to be the first real take-off from a carrier with one of our big bombers.”
The loudspeakers crackled on board the other ships in the task force: “Hornet preparing to launch bombers for attack on Tokyo.”
Troops ranging from cooks and quartermasters to engineers and gunners crowded rain-soaked decks for a chance to witness the historic event—a few even saw an opportunity to profit. “Sailors, like stockbrokers, work everything out by betting, and there was soon heavy money down on both sides: would they make it, would they not?” recalled Alvin Kernan, an Enterprise plane handler. “The odds were that the B-25s wouldn’t have been on the Hornet if there had not been successful tests somewhere, but with all the skepticism of an old salt about anything the services did, I put down ten dollars at even money that less than half of them would get into the air.”
Doolittle revved up the bomber’s twin engines and checked the magnetos. The carrier’s speed and the furious storm combined to create as much as fifty miles per hour of wind across the Hornet’s deck, perfect conditions for takeoff. He flashed the thumbs up sign to Lieutenant Edgar Osborne, the signal officer who clutched a checkered flag. Sailors pulled the wheel chocks out as Osborne waved his flag in circles, signaling Doolittle to push the throttle all the way forward.
“Everything all right, Paul?” Doolittle asked his crew chief.
“Everything okay, Colonel.”
Osborne watched the Hornet’s bow so as to release Doolittle just as the carrier began to dive down the face of a wave. The time required for a B-25 to traverse the flight deck meant that the bomber would reach the bow on the upswing, catapulting the plane into the air. Osborne dropped the flag and Doolittle released the brakes. The bomber roared down the flight deck at 8:20 a.m. “The scream of those two engines, the excitement and urgency, made an incredible sight. I was lying face down on the wet deck, clutching tiedown plates to keep from being blown back by the terrific wind. When Doolittle’s B-25 began to move, it seemed unreal,” Greening later wrote. “I had chills running up and down my spine from excitement.”
Doolittle’s left wheels hugged the white line that ran down the deck. He passed fifty feet, then one hundred.
Then two hundred.
“He’ll never make it,” someone shouted.
The bomber charged toward the end of the flight deck and then appeared to vanish.
“Doolittle’s gone,” McClure thought to himself. “We’ll have to make it without him.”
The plane then roared up and into the gray skies over the bow.
“Yes!” Knobloch shouted. “Yes!”
Sailors crowded along the flight deck and carrier’s island erupted in cheers. “The shout that went up should have been heard in Tokyo,” Thomas White, the mission’s doctor, remembered. “We were all yelling and pounding each other on the back. I don’t think there was a sound pair of vocal cords in the flotilla.”
On board the cruiser Salt Lake City journalist Robert Casey captured the moment in his diary. “First bomber off the Hornet. Miraculous,” he wrote. “The carrier is diving, deluging deck with white water. The big plane is just about catapulted as the ship lifts out of the sea.”
In the skies overhead Doolittle instructed Cole to raise the wheels as he circled over the Hornet, where the carrier’s course was displayed in large figures from the gun turret abaft the island. Doolittle paralleled the flight deck, allowing Potter to calculate any error with his magnetic compass before he pressed on toward Tokyo.
On deck below First Lieutenant Travis Hoover throttled up his bomber. The aircraft shook and shuddered. Hoover’s mouth was dry as he stared down the flight deck at the bow, now buried in a wave. Osborne dropped the flag and Hoover released the brakes, charging down the runway just five minutes after Doolittle. “I was running out of deck,” he recalled. “I came back on the yoke and she stood up like a bucking bronco.”
The bow wash pushed the bomber’s nose even higher. Sailors and airmen alike looked on with horror, convinced the aircraft would stall and crash. Hoover and copilot Bill Fitzhugh stiff-armed the controls to wrestle the bomber’s nose back down as the plane appeared to dive toward the waves.
“Up! Up!” airmen on deck shouted. “Pull it up!”
Hoover did and soon regained control; a sense of relief washed over him. “I felt wonderful, almost euphoric,” he recalled. “We’re airborne.”
The graceless takeoff failed to impress some of the naval aviators, one of whom compared his vacillating takeoff to that of a “kangaroo.”
The third pilot in the queue, Bob Gray, stunned his fellow fliers when he roared down the flight deck at 8:30 a.m., trading brown lace-ups for cowboy boots. “They are the most comfortable shoes in the world,” he professed. “Just the thing for walking.”
Miller watched Gray climb into the skies, then scrawled a note on his blackboard, reminding pilots to keep the stabilizer in neutral. The fourth, fifth, and six bombers took off successfully over the next ten minutes.
Ted Lawson had tested the Ruptured Du
ck’s flaps during the engine run-up, but in the excitement failed to lower them again before he released the brakes at 8:43 a.m. “We watched his plane disappear before the bow of the ship,” Greening recalled, “then come waddling back up like some big bullfrog, right on the water ahead of the carrier.”
In his report Miller reflected on Lawson’s near disaster with a bit of humor, noting the most important fact: “He got away with it.”
York shot down the flight deck next, at 8:46 a.m.
“Nice take-off, Ski,” Emmens said. “How did it seem compared to the practice take-offs you’ve been making on the ground back at Eglin?”
“How the hell should I know?” York answered. “I never made one.”
The pilots now settled into a rhythm, as bombers nine through thirteen followed one another at just three-minute intervals. Each plane that took off safely not only added a few extra feet of deck space for the next pilot but also helped boost the confidence of all the others. That was certainly the case for pilot Bill Bower. “It seemed like he was as unconcerned about this raid as he could possibly be,” recalled his navigator, Bill Pound. “My impression was that it was just another cross-country trip to him. Only difference was that the take-off strip was a little shorter than usual.”
Greening didn’t quite share the sureness of his colleague. “I could see many faces peering down from the bridge and navigation rail on the carrier’s island. All of the crewmen whose aircraft hadn’t been brought aboard were there,” he later wrote. “I wondered how many still were willing to change places with us now.”
By 9:15 a.m. all but one of the bombers had safely lifted off; the earlier thrill now waned. The tail of the Bat out of Hell, the final plane, dangled over the carrier’s stern just as a strong wind swept across the deck at 9:19 a.m., lifting the B-25’s nose and threatening to topple the bomber into the ocean. “Sailors, slipping on the wet decks and fighting the wind, swarmed around our plane,” recalled copilot Bobby Hite, “every available man grabbing a handhold on the nose and front wheel.”
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 22