With all due respect, 'No sh*t, Sam Snead - how many knots of wind did the guy have? From the look of the sea state, Hornet must have had 30 knots over the deck.
When they trained at Eglin they only had whatever wind happened to be blowing and in those woods it probably wasn’t much.
Doolittle’s Raiders did accomplish it.
I imagine the combined wind and ship’s speed was probably maybe 65 mph.
The AAF guys that Doolittle had at Eglin were able to take off without the benefit of the head substantial wind. The 30 knot head wind of the Hornet sailing at full power into the wind only added to their ability to take off within the length of the carrier deck. The octane rating of the gasoline they had versus a possible lower octane by the History Channel attempt would have produced less power coming from the engines.
I recall reading the studies of performance studies of flying some German and Japanese fighters using their 87 octane gasoline and then flying them with US and British 100 octane gas; their engine performance was improved by the 100 octane gas.