Seaman First Class Robert Wall, amid the struggle, tumbled into the Bat out of Hell’s left prop, gouging his back and cutting his left arm at the shoulder.
DeShazer was on the deck to pull the wheel chocks when the accident occurred. He surveyed the bloody scene with horror.
“Give them hell for me,” Wall muttered, a message DeShazer couldn’t hear over the roar of the engines, but could read on the seaman’s lips.
“Help me get him to one side,” DeShazer barked at one of the other sailors. The two men pulled the injured the seaman to safety.
The tragedy shocked the crew.
“The seaman’s arm was practically cut off,” navigator George Barr recalled. “This accident unnerved me and it was all I could think about as we lined up for our takeoff. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a taste of worse to come.”
DeShazer climbed up into the bomber, only to discover more problems. The tail of the previous plane had punctured a hole in the Plexiglas nose.
“Should I tell the pilot,” he wondered.
Doolittle had warned that crews would push any defective plane over the Hornet’s side. DeShazer had worked too hard to let a busted nose stop him. He would tell Farrow about the hole—after the bomber was airborne. Farrow released the brakes seconds later and the Bat out of Hell shot down the flight deck.
Across the task force sailors watched Farrow’s bomber climb into the gray morning skies. “When the last plane had left there was a physical let down all over the ship,” remembered Ensign Robert Noone, a signal officer. “Everyone was exhausted from the nervous tension of watching them take off. We mentally pushed every plane off the deck.” Exhaustion soon turned to euphoria. “We all cheered loudly and choked down a few patriotic tears,” added Kernan, the Enterprise plane handler who had bet on the loss of at least half the planes. “I thought my ten dollars well lost in a good cause, as if I had actually contributed the money to success in the war.”
One sailor clasped his hands above his head; another blessed himself. “For a few minutes the sky was full of them,” Life magazine’s John Field wrote. “With the deep-throated roar of their twin motors, their beautiful lines, and their American insignia painted boldly on their wings and fuselages, they made us all feel proud.” Fellow journalist Robert Casey recorded the scene in his diary. “Quiet on the horizon,” he wrote. “There hasn’t been a hitch. All have shot straight up in the teeth of the hurricane.”
Mitscher had watched the takeoffs with a mix of disbelief and shock. The veteran aviator had tensed up each time one of the bombers roared down the deck, his arms instinctively moving as though he sat before the controls. “With only one exception, take-offs were dangerous and improperly executed,” he complained in his report. “Apparently, full back stabilizer was used by the first few pilots. As each plane neared the bow, with more than required speed, the pilot would pull up and climb in a dangerous near-stall, struggle wildly to nose down, then fight the controls for several miles trying to gain real flying speed and more than a hundred feet of altitude.”
Other senior naval officers were more forgiving. “The job that was done in launching those planes was to me a miracle,” recalled Captain Frederick Riefkohl, the skipper of the Vincennes, who watched the takeoffs from astern of the Enterprise. “I expected at any time that those big planes would crash into the sea, but the timing was perfect.” No one was more pleased than Lieutenant Hank Miller, who had trained all eighty of the airmen. “Without a doubt every officer and man aboard the Hornet would have pinned every medal in the world on those people who went off that deck in those airplanes,” he later said. “They really had what it took.”
DOOLITTLE SETTLED IN FOR the long flight to Tokyo, pleased to have successfully answered the question of whether a loaded B-25 could lift off from a carrier. “Take-off was easy,” he later boasted in his report. “Night take-off would have been possible and practicable.”
The wind blew out of the northwest as Doolittle guided the bomber down to wave-top level, skimming just two hundred feet above the dark waters. He reviewed plans for the arrival that night in China, hoping that Lieutenant General Stilwell had made the necessary arrangements at the airfields.
In the seat next to him copilot Dick Cole also wondered what China would be like, confident that despite the added distance his crew would make it: “It never once occurred to me that there was a possibility that we would never get there.” Cole instead hummed the folk tune “Wabash Cannonball,” failing to notice that he had attracted the attention of others: “One time I was singing and stomping my foot with such gusto that the boss looked at me in a very questioning manner like he thought I was going batty.”
Half an hour into the flight First Lieutenant Travis Hoover’s bomber closed in on Doolittle, who soon banked to give wide berth to what appeared to be a camouflaged naval vessel. Hoover spotted patches of white smoke around the ship, indicating possible gunfire. Carl Wildner felt the tightness return to his stomach. “Why am I here,” he thought, “when it would have been so easy to be somewhere else?”
All sixteen bombers had successfully lifted off from the Hornet with an average interval of less than four minutes, forming a loose string some 150 miles long. Most flew due west, aiming to cross the Japanese coast at Inubo Saki, a rocky cape topped with a lighthouse east of Tokyo. “There was no rendezvous planned, except at the end of the mission,” Lawson recalled. “Those who took off early could not hover over the ship until a formation was formed because that would have burned too much gas in the first planes. This was to be a single file, hit-and-run raid—each plane for itself.”
Airmen emptied the five-gallon gas cans, hacked holes in them, and tossed them into the seas as the pilots hedgehopped across the blue waves, some buzzing so low that salt water occasionally sprayed the windshield—Bat out of Hell’s props even nicked a wave once and sent a shudder through the bomber.
Soon after takeoff pilot Davy Jones asked engineer Joseph Manske for an update on the bomber’s total fuel, which the young airman provided.
“Well, boys,” Jones announced over the interphone. “We don’t have enough gas to make our destination, but we’ll go as far as we can.”
A hush fell over the bomber.
“What in the world have I gotten myself into?” Manske thought, realizing there was only one thing to do. “Being brought up in a good Christian home,” he later wrote, “I got down on my knees and prayed.”
The harried takeoff had left Corporal Bert Jordan frazzled. Once in the air he organized his space and tested the .50-caliber machine guns, only to discover that the turret didn’t work; the electrical lead was not connected, a fact he would not learn, however, until after the mission. The frozen turret rendered the guns worthless. Jordan, meanwhile, noticed that the left wing tank leaked. He tried to alert pilot Brick Holstrom, but couldn’t communicate with him over the roar of the engines. When the crawlway tank was finally empty, Jordan climbed forward to the cockpit to deliver the bad news.
Other planes suffered similar problems. Davy Jones realized his bomber was short thirty gallons in its left rear tank, and the Whirling Dervish’s turret tank started to leak at the corner seams about fourteen inches from the top. Technical Sergeant Eldred Scott alerted pilot Harold Watson over the interphone and hurried to transfer the fuel as fast as he could. Scott likewise found that the left gun hydraulic charger failed, forcing him to charge the .50-caliber machine guns by hand.
With the bomber en route, DeShazer got on the phone to Farrow, informing him of the busted nose. “We’ve got a hole in this thing about a foot in diameter.”
“What did you say?” Farrow replied, struggling to hear over the roar of the engines.
DeShazer repeated the news.
Copilot Bobby Hite climbed down to examine the damage. “Take your coat off,” he instructed DeShazer.” We’ll see if we can stuff our coats in that hole.”
At 160 miles per hour, the coats blew out.
A few Japanese ci
vilian and naval vessels plowed the seas below; their numbers would only multiply as the bombers closed in on Japan.
“We’re entering the danger zone, now,” pilot Donald Smith warned his crew over interphone. “Keep on the alert. Surface vessel on our right-hand side.”
“I see it, sir,” Edward Saylor replied, manning the gun turret.
A few of the bomber pilots, including Doolittle, spotted enemy patrol planes in the skies as well. “A twin-engined land plane came out of a cloud ahead of us and passed us on the right,” Jones recorded in his report. “I maintained course while it turned to avoid us. The Japanese markings were plainly visibly on it.”
Joyce also encountered a twin-engine patrol just an hour and a half into the flight. “It immediately dove out of the clouds and pursued me,” he noted in his report. “I increased power and was able to out distance the patrol plane which did not fire on me but I think recognized that I was the enemy.”
These brushes foreshadowed the danger ahead, prompting many of the crews to fire a few test rounds, including Ruptured Duck gunner Dave Thatcher.
“Damn, boy,” copilot Dean Davenport announced over the interphone when the .50 calibers started to rattle. “This is serious.”
The Ruptured Duck buzzed a merchant ship.
“Let’s drop one on it,” Davenport joked.
Others on board agreed.
Lawson let them joke.
“Okay,” navigator McClure finally said, giving up the idea, “but I bet that guy is radioing plenty to Tokyo about us.”
Pilot Donald Smith in the TNT killed time tuning radio stations, picking up a Japanese broadcast several hundred miles out. “A normal program seemed to be in progress,” he logged in his report. “I listened to it at intervals for over an hour.”
Smith wasn’t the only one who tuned into Tokyo radio station JOAK, the same station Lieutenant Jurika had monitored over the past week for any news of the task force’s detection as the Hornet closed in on Japan. “That’s what you’ve got to follow,” Chase Nielsen, the navigator of the Green Hornet, instructed pilot Dean Hallmark. “Just keep that needle centered and you’ll split Tokyo right in the middle.”
The early flow of adrenaline that had propelled the airmen off the Hornet’s flight deck waned as the bombers droned on toward Tokyo, the cold blue swells of the Pacific tumbling below as the minutes turned to hours. “We kept going in and, after two or three hours, it got tiring,” Lawson recalled. “I was keyed up enough, but at our low level and sluggish speed it was a job to fly the ship.”
The crew of the Green Hornet rode in silence. “We were too busy thinking, and our nerves were kind of taut,” Nielsen wrote. “I got to thinking about my wife, Thora. She and I were married December 8, 1941, the day after war was declared. We had 40 happy days together before I volunteered for the Doolittle flight.”
“Conversations were short and to the point,” recalled Emmens. “Every man was going over again in his mind each item for which he knew he was responsible. Of course, little black thoughts like an engine going out over that expanse of salt water, and the possibility of a reception committee of Jap Zeros, crept forward often enough to keep our minds well occupied with imaginary forced landings and combat tactics.”
Emmens distracted himself with a mental inventory of all his purchases from the Hornet’s store. “I thought about the stack of razor blades, candy, and cartons of cigarettes,” he recalled. “I then laughed at myself for buying such things as if I would be gone a year, when actually here we were on our final mission, and it would be over that same day. And we would be starting back home, probably, in a few days.”
The sun burned away the morning clouds as the planes pressed on toward the enemy’s homeland. Pilots kept close watch on the fuel consumption. Lawson smarted over the fact that the morning’s warm-up on board the Hornet had forced him to burn through the equivalent of eight of his five-gallon tins. “Forty precious gallons,” he later wrote, “gone before we were on our way!”
Jones had an almost fatalistic acceptance of the challenge he would face, estimating that he needed an extra 150 gallons of gas to make up for the added distance. “Navy got jittery and booted us off 10 hours too early,” he griped in his diary. “810 miles to Tokio—guys all knew they couldn’t make it. Oh well.”
Ski York busied himself with calculations of the bomber’s fuel consumption.
“Hey, Bob, take a look at this,” he said around 11 a.m., more than two hours into the flight. “Am I screwy or are we burning this much gas?”
Emmens reviewed the numbers. Was the gas gauge inaccurate, he wondered, or had the plane developed a leak.
“Hell, Ski,” he replied, “if that’s right we’re not going to get near the Chinese coast.”
Navigator Nolan Herndon dropped his charts and inspected the bomb bay fuel tank. The lieutenant reported the bad news: the gas gauge was correct.
“Great,” David Pohl, the gunner, said it himself. “Mrs. Pohl’s young hero is headed for a ditching somewhere in the China Sea—provided we get through the flak and fighter screen over Tokyo. Here I am, a Boston boy of 20, the youngest of the 80 Doolittle raiders, a sergeant whose future just passed.”
The crew had few options, none of them good. The airmen could land in Japan, but after an attack a landing there would likely lead to the crew’s torture and possible execution. The fliers could attempt to reach China, ditch in the sea, and pray for a long-shot rescue by an American submarine before sharks ate them. The final option was to fly to Russia, a much shorter distance. Even then the crew faced the possibility the Russians would mistake them for an enemy and shoot them down.
“Have you got a course from Tokyo to Russia plotted, Herndon?” York asked.
“I’ve plotted all possibilities.”
“Russia’s neutral, isn’t she?” engineer Staff Sergeant Theodore Laban asked.
“Doolittle didn’t exactly issue a direct order not to go to Russia, but he made it plenty obvious that it wasn’t a good idea,” York added. “They’d probably give us gas and we’d be on our way across occupied Korea and China tomorrow morning.”
“We hope!” Emmens answered.
The debate was soon interrupted.
“There’s the coast,” someone shouted. “This is it!”
THE NITTO MARU ’S REPORT reached Admiral Yamamoto on board the Yamato, his flagship, just after breakfast at seven thirty on April 18. Efforts to follow up with the ill-fated picket boat had so far failed, but few doubted the report’s veracity. Increased American message traffic in recent days—coupled with radio intelligence developed on April 10—had led many to conclude that Yamamoto’s long-feared raid on the nation’s capital was imminent. Japan had mistakenly concluded that America had lost a carrier in a submarine attack near Hawaii in January, leaving the United States with only three flattops. According to Nitto Maru’s errant contact report, the entire Pacific Fleet carrier force now steamed straight toward Tokyo. Yamamoto’s worst nightmare had come true. He ordered Tactical Method No. 3, Japan’s plan for the defense of the homeland. “Enemy task force containing three aircraft carriers as main strength sighted 0630 this morning 730 miles east of Tokyo,” he flashed. “Operate against American fleet.”
Most inside the Naval General Staff believed Japan had at least a day to prepare. The short range of carrier fighters and bombers meant raiders would not strike in all likelihood until the morning of April 19, given that the flattops would have to steam within two hundred miles of Tokyo in order to launch and recover planes. That was the tactic the United States had taken on previous raids against the Marshall and the Marcus Islands, not to mention the one Japan had used for the attack on Pearl Harbor. Senior leaders in the meantime hurriedly cobbled together all available air and naval forces to repel the invaders. Many of Japan’s frontline forces were still at sea; others had just returned in need of rest. Resourceful leaders went so far as to pilfer fighters and bombers from the carrier Kaga, a Pearl Harbor veteran n
ow in Sasebo for repairs after striking a reef. Within a few hours Japan amassed no fewer than ninety carrier fighters, eighty medium bombers, thirty-six carrier bombers, and two flying boats.
Rear Admiral Seigo Yamagata, commander of the Twenty-Sixth Air Flotilla, which was tasked to perform defensive air patrols east of the home islands, alerted his attack and reconnaissance units of the impending strike. Four twin-engine medium bombers crewed by up to six airmen had lifted off from Kisarazu Air Base near Tokyo at 6:30 a.m. for a routine morning patrol flight that extended out 700 nautical miles. Three hours and fifteen minutes into the flight, pilots spotted two twin-engine enemy bombers at a range of 580 and 600 nautical miles and at a distance from the Japanese planes of just two miles, though surprisingly this unusual report failed to dissuade Japan’s leaders that the American attack would not come at least until the next morning. Anxious to go on the offensive, Japan launched three medium bombers at 11:30 a.m. Twenty-nine more, armed with aerial torpedoes, roared into the skies at 12:45 p.m. accompanied by two dozen carrier fighters equipped with extra fuel tanks.
Japanese warships likewise readied for battle. Vice Admiral Nobutake Kondo, the Second Fleet commander, who had just returned to Yokosuka from southern operations the day before, prepared to return to sea at once in charge of all available surface forces. That included the fleet’s Fourth Cruiser Division, made up of the Atago, Takao, and Maya, as well as the Fifth Cruiser Division’s Myoko and Haguro. Vice Admiral Shiro Takasu, commander of the First Fleet with its four battlewagons, would depart Hiroshima Bay to support him. Forces at sea likewise raced to intercept the Americans, including a submarine squadron of six boats some five hundred miles off Honshu. Another squadron of five submarines abandoned its mission to Truk to search north of the Bonin Islands. In the Bashi Strait, off the southern coast of Formosa, Vice Admiral Chuichi Nagumo ordered his powerful carriers Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu east. Fighter pilot Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the Pearl Harbor attack, raced to the Akagi’s operations room.
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 23