Posted on 08/24/2025 5:32:05 AM PDT by Rummyfan
n his book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Doolittle Raid pilot Ted Lawson recalls the moment his B-25 bomber reached the coast of Japan – the first land he had seen, he tells us, after being at sea on the USS Hornet for nearly three weeks. "It looked very pretty," he writes:
"Everything seemed as well kept as a big rock garden. The little farms were fitted in with almost mathematical precision. The fresh spring grass was brilliantly green. There were fruit trees in bloom, and farmers working in their fields waved to us as we pounded just over their heads. A red lacquered temple loomed before us, its coloring exceedingly sharp. I put the nose of the ship up a little, cleared the temple, and got down lower again."
Just a moment earlier Lawson noted that he was "surprised" that the small boats anchored just off the shore "were motor boats and nice-looking fishing launches instead of the junks I expected." Japan was the most industrially advanced of all the Asian nations, and while few Americans knew this at the start of the war this fact would make them a substantially more difficult enemy to defeat in the next four years.
Lawson was also surprised to see men and women on the boats waving at the American bombers flying just over their heads. The Japanese, in their turn, had underestimated the keenness of their American enemy to strike back after the humiliation of Pearl Harbor, and the men in the planes on the Doolittle Raid were shocked at how little resistance they met as they flew in to drop the first of many bombs on the Japanese capitol.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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Jimmy Doolittle
Great article. I’ve seen that so many times.
Great movie. They used the real film footage from the bombing raid. The B-25s were hauling a$$ skimming right above the ocean and at ground level except for going over tree tops and power lines before they got to their target.
Too bad they had to launch before they planned.
One of my favorite scenes:
True! It caused several of the planes to run out of fuel causing the crews to get captured with some being executed by the Japs.
Great movie
/
I’ve repeatedly looked to find this and watch it, but haven’t been successful.
Time to go look again.
And of the crew that did escape with the help of brave Chinese, the Japanese murdered thousands in retribution.
This one thing alone is why I view nationalist China as one of the greatest ally the US ever had.
Consider all the airfields across WW2 China, that the Chinese people built BY HAND LABOR.
Then helped destroy them when we pulled out of those airfields to deny the Japanese use of them.
just wow.
We know they didn’t bother, but did they really need to?
We know the Japanese were still unprepared for the raid by air defense.
Was there a naval response?
—- ——
The Japanese picket boat, a 70-ton patrol craft, sighted the U.S. task force and radioed an attack warning to Japan before being sunk by gunfire from the USS Nashville.
The discovery of the task force by the Japanese picket boat was a critical event that led to the decision to launch the B-25 bombers earlier than scheduled.
Very fine movie. When Doolittle announced to the crew they were planning to bomb Tokyo, not a single man backed out. They knew it would be a dangerous mission, but they went forward anyway. The very definition of courage.
bother? Dang autocorrect !
Yes, there was a Naval response.
—-
On April 18, 1942, after Japanese picket boats detected the approaching U.S. task force, the Japanese naval command responded swiftly. The First Air Fleet, returning from the Indian Ocean and operating near the Bashi Channel south of Formosa, received orders to engage the American force. This fleet, centered around the carriers Akagi, Soryu, and Hiryu, was deployed to intercept Task Force 16.
Additionally, 80 Japanese medium bombers had been massed in the Kanto region in anticipation of a carrier threat, reflecting heightened alertness following intercepted U.S. Navy radio traffic.
Despite these efforts, none of the Japanese naval or air units succeeded in locating or engaging the retreating American task force. Search operations continued until April 24 without success. While the immediate naval response failed to make contact, the raid had a profound strategic impact, dispelling doubts within the Japanese Naval General Staff about the vulnerability of the homeland and influencing plans for future operations, including the eventual push toward Midway.
I found it for you. It’s on Tubi for free.
Enjoy!
Watch Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo on Tubi: https://link.tubi.tv/WrN1Aq7W5Vb
The Doolittle crews had an annual reunion featuring a bottle of spirits of some kind. The agreement was that when the group shrunk to just two, they would open the bottle and toast the memory of those who passed before them. I suppose this has already happened.
Family members and distinguished guests, including Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. CQ Brown, Jr., gathered to pay their respects for Cole, who died at the age of 103 April 9, 2019.
https://www.northropgrumman.com/what-we-do/aircraft/b-21-raider/meet-the-raiders
Richard Cole was the last surviving Doolittle Raider. He died on April 2, 2019 at age 103.
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/richard-dick-cole
As a young boy, when I got my very own library card after turning eight years old, one of the first books I checked out of the Fairfax Public Library was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. That set me on a model-building jag that lasted decades!
In 1926, the night before Jimmy Doolittle (then a young Army Air Corps officer) was supposed to do an aerobatic demonstration of Curtiss P-1 in Argentina to convince the Argentinians to purchase the planes, he attended a party, and everyone was smashed. He was demonstrating various handstands and such, and bragged that all young American men were capable of it, that they were all Errol Flynn wannabes. They didn't believe him, so he went outside to a 2nd story balcony and did a handstand on the ledge of the balcony. They all applauded, and he was feeling his oats (he had been a gymnast in college, and couldn't resist really showing off) so while handstanding on the ledge, he executed a complete horizontal leg split, which caused his admirers to break into raucous applause, and at that moment...the ledge he was handstanding on gave way and he fell to the paved courtyard below, managing to land on his feet but breaking both of his ankles.
They took him to the hospital, where they casted both of his lower extremities, but because he had to do the demo, he signed himself out of the hospital against the advice of the clearly angry doctors. When he took the plane up, he destroyed both of the casts, putting the plane thorough a violent performance.
He landed and went back to the hospital, where they refused to cast his legs again, and he had to find some unlicensed doctor somewhere to cast his feet and he gave specific instructions to the doctor on how to make the cast smaller so he could fly.
He went up the next day, and broke one of the casts, and was unable to push that rudder pedal, so he did the entire show with only using the other rudder pedal, nobody noticed, and they bought the planes!
After a few more days, he ended up ripping the casts off himself, IIRC. I think he had to have both of his ankles later re-broken to get them to heal correctly.
First to perform an outside loop, then thought impossible. First to perform an instrument blind takeoff, flight, and landing. Won all the aeronautical trophies. First American to obtain a doctorate in Aeronautical engineering. For his doctoral thesis at MIT, he wrote a brilliant, groundbreaking paper on test flight and handling characteristics. In WWII, besides planning and flying the Doolittle Raid, he changed fighter doctrine when he was assigned to the Eighth Air Force, breaking the convention that the fighters had to stay with the bombers at all costs, freeing them up to go after the German fighters.
He also had an interesting incident when it took over the B-26 squadrons in Italy. The B-26 was considered to be a difficult plane to fly, and an unusually high number of crews had been killed in accidents. Morale was low, and men were refusing to fly the plane. (Pilots nicknamed the original model of the B-26 the “Martin Prostitute" because it had relatively short wings and thus had “no visible means of support.” Subsequent models had the wings lengthened, which increased its safety margin.)
There was nothing really wrong with the plane, it just had to be flown a certain way. General Hap Arnold had asked Doolittle to evaluate the plane for him and determine what the problem was. He found that the jump from the single engine trainers the newly minted pilots were flying to the technologically advanced, fast twin engine bomber with a nose landing gear was a difficult transition to make, and the young pilots were getting killed before they could learn from their mistakes.
Doolittle traveled to several flying training schools and B-26 transition units, gathered the student pilots together, and asked them what they had heard about the B-26 airplane. Almost all said they had heard it wouldn’t fly on one engine, you couldn’t make a turn into a dead engine, and landing it safely on one engine was just about impossible.
When he arrived in Italy as the commander of the B-26 air wing, this negative view of the B-26 as unsafe was prevalent, and morale was very low. He had all the aircrews line up in formation next to the runway, picked a pilot out by saying he needed a volunteer to accompany him (then without giving anyone time to respond, pointed at some pilot and said "You." and then boarded the first aircraft he came to. He taxied out, lined up on the runway, feathered the left engine during the takeoff roll, and made a steep turn into the dead engine, flew around the pattern, and landed with the engine still inoperative. He then did it again in the other direction with the right engine feathered. Then he took the plane up an ran it through a seemingly impossible aerobatics demonstration that men just did not think the plane could do.
That ended the "mutiny" then and there.
That is leadership. By God, that is leadership! (You can probably tell I admire him greatly! He wrote an autobiography I Could Never Be So Lucky Again which is on my list to read, but I enjoyed the section in the excellent book Aviators, The: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight by Winston Groom, which is written in an entertaining and approachable style. One of the best aviation books I have ever read!)
A real wild man. Worked his way through college making money as a boxer, he was a very good gymnast, world class flier, war hero, pioneer aeronautical engineer, and...Hell raiser!
A real man.
Thank you
You guys rock
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You guys rock
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