Posted on 04/18/2017 4:41:46 AM PDT by Zakeet
On April 18, 1942 - 75 years ago Tuesday - 80 incredibly brave men in 16 bombers took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to bomb Tokyo and other Japanese cities in retaliation for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
It was called the Doolittle Raid, after the group’s charismatic leader, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, a renowned avaiator even before the war.
Doolittle’s B-25 was the first to take off from the Hornet. Sitting beside him was a quiet, lanky young man from Dayton, Ohio, named Dick Cole.
On Tuesday, the 101-year-old will be at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton , Ohio. There, he will complete a decades-long tradition and turn over the goblet of his friend and fellow Raider David Thatcher, who died last year on June 22.
The tradition was that the Raiders would meet each year and drink a toast to those who had fallen. Each had their own goblet, and after each Raider died, his goblet would be turned upside down in its case. Cole, 101, will offer the toast this year by himself - he’s the last surviving Raider.
(Excerpt) Read more at thestate.com ...
I’m reading “Target Tokyo” right now. What an incredible story of initiative, audacity, daring and courage.
The military doesn’t keep losing. It is the bleeding heart diplomatic and political second guessing and micro managing from Washington that causes perceived “losses.”
Thankfully, FINALLY, we have a president who is letting the military do their job without feckless idiots who have never seen a battlefield telling them what to do.
GO TRUMP!!
We keep losing because we have agreed to rules that do not allow us to win.
Instead of simply killing the enemy without pity, we make all sorts of stupid rules about not harming the civilians (who are feeding the enemy, providing him cover, intel, etc.). We feed these ‘civilians’ and end up feeding the enemy. We don’t hit the enemy’s logistics either; might hurt ‘civilians.’
Respect.
Two really good films were made about that raid. The well known “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” and the lesser known “The Purple Heart”.
It wasn’t by accident! WWII was America’s last YHWH approved war.
They didn’t give his story, but we know from Doolittle’s biography that his and Cole’s plane crash-landed in Quzhou, in Zhejiang Province, Southwest of Shanghai. All of Doolittle’s crew parachuted out safely, I believe, and with the help of locals, were not captured by the Japanese.
I read it last year, It is a stirring account of the raid and the aftermath. I highly recommend it.
This is also the 242nd anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride.
Everyday, men and women police, firefighters and all members of the military do that very thing. We are blessed.
I’m just over half way through where the raiders have crash landed and are either getting away into the interior of China or getting captured and tortured by the Japanese. The descriptions of their injuries, infections, gangrene; the lack of any basic medical care in rural China and even in their hospitals — yikes. What those men endured is unbelievable. You never hear much about the aftermath.
How unfortunate that they had to launch prematurely several hundred miles west of their planned launch point after getting discovered by the Japanese. I can’t imagine the thoughts and terror the crews experienced knowing that they were not going to reach the destination airfields in the interior of China.
Indeed - highly recommended!
I'm fortunate enough to still be playing softball with one. Marv turned 90 this winter and is still going strong, playing ball 4 mornings a week.......
After reading that article I feel like I was punched in the stomach.
RIP Brave Warriors.
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I wonder if they had known about nitrous back then and would it have made a difference?
You are right. ISIS didn’t start losing in IRAQ until we started eliminating their oil revenues by bombing civilian truck drivers delivering the oil.
Nitrous was known, but they could not have safely used it. The tanks available then could not have been jettisoned and the amount of additional fuel used while under nitrous power and hauling the heavy bottles afterwards would have meant failure. They had to remove most of the B-25s’ guns and the remaining few guns had almost no ammo aboard - that’s how desperately they had stripped the aircraft to get it to complete the mission. Given that no few of them barely made the Chinese coast, it turned out the margin really was so thin that a few pounds might have made the difference.
Same thing for water injection, which was also known at the time and was more common. And then there’s the reliability aspect.
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is long overdue for a high-quality re-make.
I might agree on that. But who would play the roles and would some sort of Leftist agenda be inserted? Also we now have to have the obligatory Gay subplot put in, I leave that one to the imagination.
If you have seen Brad Pitt’s film “Allied”, they somehow managed to add into the story line that Pitt’s character’s sister was a open lesbian and it was just accepted by everyone.
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