The Doolittle Raid April 18, 1942

See Bibliography | April 18, 2021 | Self

[Retain Mike]

Jimmy Doolittle's co-pilot, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” Cole, was the last living raider and died April 7, 2019 at 103 years. I knew so many men like him as I grew up and throughout my years. I knew an ace who served in the Flying Tigers, a ranger who scaled Point-Du-Hoc, a UDT sailor who cleared surf obstacles before the Okinawa landing, and a man with the 10th Mountain Infantry who received two silver stars and was the only one of eight officers in his company to land in Italy and soldier through the102 days until the Germans surrendered.

Now like Richard Cole all the men I knew have passed as well. I do not plan to forget them and will post this story annually to help others remember.

One week after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt began pressing the U.S. military to immediately strike the Japanese homeland. The desire to bolster morale became more urgent in light of rapid Japanese advances. These included victories in Malaya, Singapore, the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, and the Dutch East Indies, as well as sinking the British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse.

Only improbable, audacious ideas warranted consideration, because submarines confirmed Japan placed picket boats at extreme carrier aircraft range. One idea even involved launching four engine heavy bombers from China or Outer Mongolia to strike Japan and fly on to Alaska. Captain Francis Low, a submariner, first broached to Admiral Ernest King the idea of flying Army Air Corps medium bombers from an aircraft carrier. King thought Low’s “foolish idea” might have merit and ordered him to contact Captain Donald Duncan, King’s air operations officer. Duncan reviewed the specifications of all Army Air Corps bombers and decided the B-25B could do the job. King then sent Low and Duncan to General Hap Arnold who bought the idea. Arnold quickly agreed, because he and Jimmy Doolittle had independently made the same assessment.

By mid-January 1942 Doolittle began assembling the planes and crews. As one of the first MIT aeronautical engineering graduates with a PhD, he agreed with Duncan’s assessment in choosing the B-25B, and he knew exactly how to turn a possibly into a reality. Few Army personnel underwent training or had experience for operations involving ocean navigation. Therefore, crews were chosen from the 17th Bombardment Group flying anti-submarine patrols from the newly build airfield at Pendleton, Oregon.

Unaware of this pending mission, the 24 crews flew to Minneapolis where Mid-Continent Airlines made significant modifications to the bombers. Installing auxiliary fuel tanks increased capacity over 70%. Range eventually increased from about 1,000 to 2,500 miles by also utilizing flying configurations and practices designed to conserve fuel. Increased fuel weight then required removing a 230 pound liaison radio. The lower twin 50cal. remote control turret was later removed at Eglin Field Valparaiso Florida saving 600 pounds. An armored 60 gal fuel tank was then inserted. Cameras were installed to record bombing results.

While in Minneapolis Captain David M. Jones told the officers their destination was not Columbia, South Carolina for anti-submarine patrol. They were asked to volunteer for a dangerous, important, and interesting mission for which no information could be given. Nearly everyone volunteered even though most were new to their trade. Of the 16 pilots Doolittle actually took on the raid, only five had won their wings before 1941 and all but one was less than a year out of flight school.

Jimmy Doolittle, now a Lieutenant Colonel, met all 140 of them in Eglin’s operation’s office. He said, “If you men have any idea that this isn’t the most dangerous thing you’ve ever been on, don’t start this training period…..This whole thing must be kept secret. I don’t want you to tell your wives…..Don’t even talk among yourselves about this thing. Now does anyone want to drop out?” Nobody dropped out.

The crews began training with Lieutenant Henry L. Miller, USN (who later became an “Honorary Tokyo Raider”) on Elgin Field 48 days before the raid. The crews used a remote runway flagged to mark available carrier deck length. In three weeks, the crews learned to take off at near stalling speeds of 50-60 miles per hour, overloaded, and in just over a football field length. At Pendleton pilots had used a mile long runway to build up speed to 80-90 miles per hour.

As the mission armament officer, Captain Charles Ross Greening improvised substitutes after removal of the top secret Norden bombsight and the lower gun turret. At Elgin he and Tech Sergeant Edward Bain designed a substitute bomb sight with two pieces of aluminum. The “Mark Twain” device could be rapidly fabricated in the base metal shop and provided superior accuracy for this low-altitude bombing assignment. On board the Hornet, Greening accomplished the planned installation of a pair of black-painted broom handles simulating machine guns in each aircraft's tail cone to intimidate attacking fighters.

After training twenty-two bomber crews hedgehopped across country to San Francisco. The sixteen crews who reported no problems had their planes lifted aboard ship. Those who reported problems, however minor, were devastated when Doolittle excluded them from the mission.

The Hornet left the U.S. and joined the Enterprise at sea April 13, 1942. Admiral Chester Nimitz, in charge of the Pacific Fleet had now risked two of his four aircraft carriers in this venture along with 14 escorts and 10,000 total crew members. The task force steamed towards the Japanese home islands just four and one-half months after the Pearl Harbor disaster. From radio traffic analysis, the Japanese knew the carriers that had eluded their six carrier strike force on December 7 were underway somewhere in the Western Pacific. Unbeknownst to the Americans, along with other special measures, the Japanese patrolling picket boats were 650 miles, not 300 miles, offshore to provide the intelligence needed for an overwhelming counterattack.

The Army crews shared quarters with the navy squadrons. Edgar McElroy, pilot of #13 aircraft remembers bunking with two members of Torpedo Bomber Squadron Eight. He later learned that they along with all but one member of the squadron died attacking Japanese carriers at the Battle of Midway.

Once the Hornet was at sea, Doolittle told the raiders their mission was to attack Japan. When the ship’s captain passed the word, the Navy crew exploded into cheers. While underway towards Japan, the industrial targets were briefed by Lt Stephen Jurika who was naval attaché in Tokyo 1939-1941. He imparted information from not only his own travels, but from a Soviet counterpart who had spent several years researching possible bombing targets. The Soviet Union was long aware of Japan’s plans to attack the U.S.S.R. (strike north against the traditional enemy), or to attack colonial possessions of the U.S, Netherlands, and Britain (strike south for desperately needed natural resources such as oil).

On April 18 the U.S. task force encountered this new picket line 170 miles before their planned launch. The pilots rushed to their planes as the ship plowed into the wind and 30-foot seas. Each aircraft received at this last minute up to 11 extra 5gal gas cans. A Navy officer twirled a flag, listened for the right tone from the revving engines, and felt for the precise moment to release them on the pitching deck. The pilots, who had never flown from a carrier, saw the ship’s bow reaching into a grey sky, and then plunging into a dark angry ocean sending salt spray across the deck. When released, they quivered down a bucking flight deck keeping the left wheel on a white line to just miss the superstructure by six feet. Every plane and 80 crewmen lifted safely from a rising deck into the stormy sky; even Ted Lawson who discovered he had launched with flaps up and initially fell towards the ocean. The bombers proceeded independently to Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, and Kobe. They carried three 500 pound demolition bombs and one 500 pound incendiary cluster.

In his War Department Doolittle wrote, “The damage done far exceeded our most optimistic expectations.” However, he considered the raid a failure. He saw the raid as secondary to the bombers safely arriving and providing Chiang Kai-shek and Claire Chennault an offensive capability to the Chinese air force. Every plane had been lost, because they were unable to reach safe landing sites. One plane and crew was interred in the Soviet Union, but was allowed to escape in 1943. Fifteen crashed in China resulting in three crewmen deaths. The Chinese who spirited the others to friendly hands paid a terrible price. Hirohito was enraged and authorized a reprisal expedition into Chekiang and Kiangsi provinces. According to Curtis LeMay, the Japanese not only destroyed military bases and infrastructure, but turned villages into cinders and killed 250,000 civilians.

Eight crew members were captured, and all were condemned to death. Premier Hideki Tojo asked Emperor Hirohito to commute all the sentences, but the Emperor allowed three to be executed. One later starved to death in Japanese prison camps.

The raid proved a crucial psychological boost demonstrating Americans could do the impossible even if their battle fleet had been blasted to wreckage, and they were losing an army in the Philippines. The Japanese Imperial Navy suffered a devastating loss of face, because Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto had guaranteed the Emperor that the Americans would never attack their home islands. The raid confirmed Yamamoto in his determination to attack Midway, and there begins another story.

I Could Never Be So Lucky Again by James H. Doolittle with Carroll V. Glines

Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo by Ted Lawson

Hirohito: Behind the Myth by Edward Behr

Japan’s Imperial Conspiracy by David Bergamini

Charles Ross Greening, Colonel United States Air Force http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/crgreening.htm

Greening, Colonel Charles Ross (1914-1957), HistoryLink.org Essay 10320 http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=10320

The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo–One Family’s Untold Story https://timothyblotz.com/tag/minnesota-doolittle-raid

Captain David M. Jones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Jones

The Navy Targets Tokyo http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2015-04/navy-targets-tokyo

Letters from the Precipice of War (Steven Jurika) http://www.usni.org/magazines/navalhistory/2014-01/letters-precipice-war

Sorge: A Chronology (Excerpts 1942) http://richardsorge.com/excerpts/1942/index.html

The Official Website of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders http://doolittleraider.com/

Doolittle Raiders 70th Anniversary: http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=doolittle+raiders+70th+anniversary&qpvt=doolittle+raiders+70th+anniversary&FORM=IGRE http://doolittlereunion.com/

GENERAL DOOLITTLE's REPORT ON JAPANESE RAID http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/rep/Doolittle/Report.html

North American B-25 Mitchell http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B-25_Mitchell

Pendleton Field http://www.ohs.org/education/oregonhistory/historical_records/dspDocument.cfm?doc_ID=C9A94F93-E10A-57A0-B694B0AFFE69184C

A final toast for the Doolittle Raiders http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/14/opinion/greene-doolittle-raiders

80 Brave Men the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders Roster http://www.doolittleraider.com/80_brave_men.htm

Jonna Doolittle Hoppes "Jimmy Doolittle Raid" presentation at Historic Flight Foundation http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgt8PMoRGG8

Doolittle Raiders: The Last Reunion (VIDEO) http://salem-news.com/articles/may302013/doolittle-raiders-rn.php

Doolittle Raider forum, etc. http://www.doolittleraider.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=128&t=579 http://www.dontow.com/2012/03/the-doolittle-raid-mission-impossible-and-its-impact-on-the-u-s-and-china/ http://www.historynet.com/countdown-to-the-doolittle-raid.htm

A VETERAN’S STORY: Interview with The Last Raider http://www.warbirdsnews.com/warbird-articles/veterans-story-interview-raider.html

[Retain Mike]

This essay is my way to remember annually the extraordinary men I met growing up; men who seemed to consider their WW II service as a common rite of passage. My contact with these men started about age ten when my dad began taking me out golfing on the weekends. There was a man who used the first golf cart I ever saw, because as a brigade commander of the 41th infantry in New Guinea he was debilitated by sickness. I remember one fairly good golfer who had a weird back swing. I found out he was crippled while serving with the Big Red One in Sicily. My Economics professor in college served with one of the first UDT teams to clear barricades and mines in the surf zone before Pacific landings. I often ended up as a dishwasher at the country club and noticed the chef always limped as he moved around the kitchen. He saw my puzzled look, and said he got the limp from a wound received when he was with the Rangers at Pointe De Hoc. Those are just a few of the stories I remember among so many others I could tell or have forgotten.

[Rummyfan]

Incredible men. Great story.

[MuttTheHoople]

I had a petroleum engineering professor who was a navigator on a B-24. He interned twice in Sweden.

[DIRTYSECRET]

Were any of them able to refuel in China?

[silverleaf]

Outstanding

[marktwain]

Chiang Kai Shek begged FDR *not* to do the raid.

FDR was insistent, strictly for propaganda purposes.

The Japanese killed 250,000 Chinese in retaliation.

FDR was way out of his league in WWII. Fortunately, he depended on his generals a fair amount.

Still, a lot of his decisions were disastrous.

[DFG]

Sgt Jacob DeShazer was the bombadier on #16 “Bat”. He is one of the 8 men that were captured by the Japanese and condemned to death. Hirohito commuted his sentence. DeShazer was held for 40 months. DeShazer became a Christian while a prisoner in China. After the war, he returned to Japan as a missionary and led Captain Mitsuo Fuchida to Christ in 1950. Fuchida spent the rest of his life as a missionary in Asia

From Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_DeShazer

After bombing Nagoya, Japan, the “Bat” attempted to reach safe haven in China. DeShazer and the rest of the B-25 crew were forced to parachute into enemy territory over Ningpo, China when their B-25 ran out of fuel because of the extra distance it was forced to fly by early launch of the raid. DeShazer was injured in his fall into a cemetery and along with the rest of his crew, he was captured the very next day by the Japanese. During his captivity, DeShazer was sent to Tokyo with the survivors of another Doolittle crew including Robert Hite, and was held in a series of POW camps both in Japan and China for 40 months – 34 of them in solitary confinement. He was severely beaten and malnourished while three of the crew were executed by a firing squad, and another died of slow starvation. DeShazer’s sentence was commuted to life imprisonment by Emperor Hirohito. As the war came to an end, on 20 August 1945, DeShazer and the others in the camp at Beijing (Peiping), China were finally released when American soldiers parachuted into the camp.

Missionary in Japan
During his captivity, DeShazer persuaded one of his guards to loan him a copy of the Bible. Although he only had possession of the Bible for three weeks, he saw its messages as the reason for his survival and resolved to become a devout Christian. His conversion included learning a few words of Japanese and treating his captors with respect, which resulted in the guards reacting in a similar fashion.[2] After his release, DeShazer entered Seattle Pacific College, a Christian college associated with the Free Methodist denomination, and then Asbury Theological Seminary in Kentucky, where he began studies to become a missionary, eventually to return to Japan with his wife, Florence, in 1948.

DeShazer, the Doolittle Raider who bombed Nagoya, met Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, becoming close friends. (For That One Day: The Memoirs of Mitsuo Fuchida, Commander of the Attack on Pearl Harbor, translated by Douglas T. Shinsato and Tadanori Urabe. Fuchida became a Christian in 1950 after reading a tract written about DeShazer titled, I Was a Prisoner of Japan, and spent the rest of his life as a missionary in Asia and the United States. On occasion, DeShazer and Fuchida preached together as Christian missionaries in Japan. In 1959, DeShazer moved to Nagoya to establish a Christian church in the city he had bombed.

[mosesdapoet]

Good Job nicely done. Had a cousin who was shot down during a bombing run in a 24 over Germany made it to France linked up with the resistance made it back to the UK

[PeterPrinciple]

Eight crew members were captured, and all were condemned to death. Premier Hideki Tojo asked Emperor Hirohito to commute all the sentences,

---

If true, why would Tojo request this?

[colorado tanker]

Thanks for posting. As this generation has almost completely passed, we need to keep the memories of their extraordinary achievements alive.

[ConservaTexan]

My maternal grandfather was on the Hornet when the Raiders launched. I went through his Navy steamer trunk and found several items associated with the raid. Very interesting stuff. I kick myself for not discussing his time in the USN in greater detail before his passing.

[USAF1985]

Ditto my uncle. A marine storming the shores at Iwo Jima.

[mountainlion]

The father of a friend of mine was a navigator on Dolittle light. An uncle was in the 10th Mountain Division. A distant cousin was Admiral Arlie Burke, I was not interested in checking thee people out when I was a kid and now it is too late. I missed out on a lot.

[Fiji Hill]

A year later, on April 18, 1943, Japan’s Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku was killed over Bougainville when his plane was shot down by US P-38’s.

[ConservaTexan]

The Greatest Generation is an understatement.

[SuperLuminal]

As a 9-year old at the time, I can clearly remember the elation in our neighborhood and my Mother believing it meant my Dad would be home soon... He had enlisted in the Marine Corps in February 1942 and was still in basic training...

However, in August he began the first in a series of island-hopping visits across the South Pacific with the First Marine Division, eventually, with time out for wounds, ending up with the Sixth Marine Division on Okinawa and, after the slant-eyed bastards surrendered, in China...

The only thing, about the war, he ever talked about (until I was leaving for P.I. in the summer of 1951) was that he joined the Marines primarily because he hated boats and open water... Of course, for 3.5 years, he ended up spending a lot of time on boats and open water...

[W650]

Enjoyed the write up.

During the depression my dad was in the Army, after he got out, he want back the the recruitment station and at the last minute decided to join the Navy. He was stationed at Pearl Harbor in 1940 and then attached to the USS Yorktown as part of the torpedo crew. When the second wave of planes attached he was in the crows nest of the ship. A gun mounted there and they were trying to shoot down the attacking planes. He said one of the Japanese planes flew close by and the man in the rear seat stood up and was shaking his fit at them. The men near him were doing the same back. Moments later that plane was shot down.

Some of my uncles and older men I worked with and new were veterans in both theaters and never spoke of their experiences. My dad only spoke of the lighter side and I had to pry any info out of him. After Midway the returned to the south Pacific on a destroyer starting at Guadalcanal as the Marines were driving the enemy off. Then up through the Solomon's, Philippines Mariana's and Saipan.

[MacNaughton]

One of my favorite stories coming out of WWII.

11/02/2007 - Misuo Fuchida and Paul Tibbets Meet

[wjcsux]

Real American heroes!

[L.A.Justice]

I do remember the movie PEARL HARBOR...

The movie did cover Doolittle Raid...Alec Baldwin played General Doolittle...