Lt. Dick Cole stood over the open escape hatch of a B-25 bomber, gripping his parachute cord and looking down into 9,000 feet of seamless black. It was the night of April 18, 1942, and the plane, bucking in a roiling storm, had just led one of the most audacious and unlikely missions of World War II—the first Allied bombing of Japan. Now, out of fuel over China, the bomber was doomed. Cole dived out headfirst and vanished. The Doolittle Raid was a pivot point of the war. Cole survived, and would outlive all his 79 fellow raiders. When he...