But there was.
PROLOGUE
APRIL 18, 1942
THE WESTERN PACIFIC OCEAN, 824 STATUTE MILES EAST OF TOKYO
Madness.
It was absolute madness, but he was going to do it anyway.
The pilot’s hands were sweaty and his mouth was dry. Sitting in a bomber cockpit fifteen feet above the wooden flight deck and sixty-five feet over a pitching, churning sea, the twenty-nine-year-old Army Air Forces captain commanded the eighth plane in line for takeoff.
Watching the horizon pitch as the USS Hornet, America’s newest aircraft carrier, swung into the wind, he reached over to three pairs of sliding levers mounted on a pedestal between the two cockpit seats. The left-hand pair were the throttles, and these were all the way back. He left these alone. Nudging the middle two black knobs fully forward, Ed York locked the propellers into position. The red-topped levers on the far right controlled the mixture of fuel and air into the carburetors, and the pilot tapped these all the way forward as well, since he would need all the power possible for this takeoff. Through the rudder pedals, the pilot felt a deep rumble as the warship’s four massive Babcock & Wilcox steam turbines muscled the 26,000-ton carrier through angry seas at twenty knots. In company with the carrier Enterprise and four cruisers, the tiny task force was now less than five hours’ flying time off the enemy coast; it was terribly vulnerable and exposed.
Like wet shields, ninety-six gleaming propeller blades from sixteen B-25 Mitchell medium bombers whirled in the heavy salt air. Two pilots in each cockpit stared at the twin tails of each preceding plane, the white-flecked ocean, and a Navy lieutenant named Edgar Osborne who, with a checkered flag, was leaning into the wind forward of the clustered bombers. Feeling the great carrier dip and rise a few times, the Signal Officer, as he was called, waited until the ship began to drop into a trough, then twirled his flag. When Hornet hit the bottom, the lieutenant lunged forward and pointed at the bow, flag extended like a fencer’s foil. Immediately, the lead B-25 lurched ahead, agonizingly slow, as the carrier’s bow slowly rose under the wave. Everyone watching had the same thought: he’ll never make it.
But Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle did just that. Famed aviator and racing pilot with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Doolittle represented the best that occurred when formal education was combined with practical experience and natural skill. A born leader and skillful organizer, he had the unique abilities and unimpeachable reputation necessary to make Arnold’s basic plan an operational reality in the minimum amount of time.
And time was critical.
Just 131 days after the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, the United States, reeling from a string of defeats, had finally turned to fight. Although two carriers, four cruisers, eight destroyers, and two oilers hardly constituted an armada, it did constitute the bulk of American naval power remaining in the Pacific.*
The fifteen ships were also a dagger, albeit a thin one, aimed directly at the heart of the Japanese Empire.
None of the waiting pilots believed a handful of medium bombers would strike much of a blow, at least not a physical one, against the enemy. Sixteen aircraft with four bombs apiece were simply were not enough, but there were other types of wounds they fully intended to inflict—a psychological one, for instance, pricking the thin skin of Japanese national pride, which might provoke Tokyo into a rash act of some sort. This approach had merit against a foe obsessed with “saving face,” and such an affront would be a figurative gauntlet slapped across the Empire’s collective cheek. It would also show Japan, and the world, that the United States was able and willing to fight back, all propaganda to the contrary, and that she would not capitulate as had the moldy colonial empires Tokyo had defeated so easily over the past four months.
Of course, the mission could also backfire. To exact revenge, Japan might deploy its army from China into the Pacific. Even a fraction of this million-man force would render any near-term American counteroffensive problematic. Such an attack on the Home Islands could also trigger an invasion of Hawaii, which was unlikely, or genocidal retribution in China, which was very likely. On the other hand, such an insult might goad an enraged enemy into vengeance based more on emotion than on strategic or tactical logic—and an angry foe sometimes makes mistakes. Much must be chanced in war, and for Doolittle and his men this calculated risk was worth taking, which was why eighty brave Americans in a handful of land-based bombers found themselves on a pitching carrier deck 750 nautical miles off the Japanese coast.
Charging into twenty-knot gusts, Hornet now had forty-five miles per hour of wind over her flight deck. Doolittle, piloting the lead bomber, needed only another twenty miles per hour to get airborne and avoid sliding off the deck, clipping the carrier’s island with his wingtip, or stalling. Like every other Army pilot behind him, Doolittle had never taken off at sea, but he wobbled into the air with distance to spare, and immediately commenced America’s first offensive action against the Japanese Home Islands. The plan had been to close another 250 miles before launching the Mitchells, but as with most plans, this one had changed. Sighted by a seventy-ton Japanese patrol craft an hour earlier, the element of surprise was lost, and the decision was made to launch immediately. This meant flying 824 statute miles to the imperial capital and arriving over Japan in broad daylight. It also very likely meant not having enough fuel to reach the dubiously friendly Chinese coast after the attack.
Watching from the cockpit of the eighth plane, Captain Edward “Ski” York realized he was holding his breath and exhaled slowly. Staring through the salt-streaked windscreen, he swallowed hard as Doolittle’s bomber seemed to hang motionless over the carrier’s bow, silhouetted against the gray overcast as the big ship began to drop again. But Jimmy made it, and one after another, the next five B-25s clawed their way airborne, circled the carrier, then turned west. York watched the seventh plane, Ruptured Duck, crawl forward and then turn to line up on the broad white stripe running down the middle of the deck.
The Mitchell was a land-based medium bomber and was not designed to take off at sea from a carrier deck. But there it was, waddling into the air just as the six before it had done on this wet, overcast morning on April 18, 1942. Ski didn’t really think the takeoff was going to be difficult, but as he watched, the Duck pitched up drastically, nose-high, and nearly stalled. At thirty feet over the deck this would have certainly been fatal, but the pilot, Captain Ted Lawson, managed to recover and waffle out over the waves. Flaps, York thought. He forgot to lower his flaps for takeoff. Reaching down between the seats, barely above the floor, he checked his own flaps in the ten-degree down position.
Wiping his right hand on his pants, Ski leaned forward so he could see the man standing below the carrier’s wing bridge holding a blackboard. It was Lieutenant Hank Miller, the naval aviator who’d taught the fine points of carrier takeoffs during premission training in Florida to the Army pilots—to all but York’s copilot, Lieutenant Bob Emmens. Ski had done a few with Miller, though no one else knew but Colonel Doolittle. Plane 8 was added to the raid, seemingly at the last minute, and it was important that the other crews believed that. It was important that York’s own crew, except Emmens, believed it as well. Squinting at the blackboard, Ski read the big block letters:
STABILIZER IN NEUTRAL!
Made sense.
With headwind generated by nature and the charging carrier, plus ten degrees of flaps and the carrier’s upward pitch, there was no need to yank back on the controls as Lawson had done. Doolittle and the others had literally been tossed into the air, so York knew to resist the instinctive urge to pull back on the big yoke. Lining up on the white stripe, Ski peered around Emmens to ensure the right wingtip was clear of the carrier’s island. It was, by a scant six feet, so there was no margin for error. Satisfied, he peered at the copilot’s panel, then ran his eyes over the engine gages one last time. Manifold and oil pressure; main fuel tanks; oil and cylinder head pressure … they were all “in the green” range and operating perfectly. Glancing at Bob Emmens, both pilots nodded to each other, and the copilot stuck his fist out the side window, thumb up.
With practiced rhythm, the signal officer began whirling his flag as the carrier dropped. Straightening his legs, York pushed the rudder pedals to the floor to hold the brakes and smoothly shoved both throttles forward to their stops. Throbbing with raw power, the B-25 strained against the power of thirty-four-hundred horses, roaring filled the cockpit, and the entire plane vibrated. “Make damned sure those throttles don’t slip back,” York yelled, and he felt Bob’s hand brace below his on the control quadrant. If the throttles were jarred back during the takeoff, they’d never get airborne, and, with no room to stop, the Mitchell would end up in the frothy ocean.
There!
Miller lunged forward when the carrier bottomed out in the trough, and as his checkered flag leveled, York’s feet came off the brakes. Plane 8 weaved, and Ski’s stomach tightened as the wheels slid sideways on the wet deck. Eyes locked on both white lines, the pilot controlled the rudders with his feet, fighting to keep the nose straight as the bomber gathered speed. From the corner of his right eye, Ski saw the carrier’s island pass and the waving sailors vanished behind his wingtip. Amazingly, after a hundred feet, he felt the Mitchell’s nose lift. Eyes flickering between the painted lines and Hornet’s rising bow, he managed a glimpse of the airspeed indicator: sixty-two miles per hour.
Now … now!
As the carrier’s bow stopped pitching up, he felt that sweet spot every pilot knows when the wheels leave the ground, or in this case the deck, and the plane begins to fly. Swallowing hard again, he ignored a bead of sweat running over his left cheekbone and concentrated completely on keeping Plane 8 pointed at the gray sky between the clouds and sea. Blurred seconds passed … the sweat ran into his mouth … and then they were off! No deck beneath their belly, just tossing white caps.
Seventy-five miles per hour.
He felt Emmens shift and then heard the electric whirring as the flaps came up. The Mitchell’s nose dropped with the loss of lift, but both big Wright Cyclones overcame that with pure power. Eyes locked on the fuzzy horizon, York began to breathe again as the nose lifted slightly and the plane again gathered speed. At one hundred miles per hour he eased the yoke over with a bit of right rudder and leveled off just fifty feet over the water. Truly flying now, Ski stole a glance back toward the Hornet but couldn’t see her. A smaller warship, a destroyer he thought, made a magnificent sight clawing through the big waves with white spray feathering back from her bows.
One hundred and twenty miles per hour.
Reaching down, the pilot pulled the big green gear handle up and heard the hydraulics lift his three wheels. When the gear doors clanked shut, Ed exhaled, wiped his hands on his pants again one at a time, then headed west for the Japanese coast. It was 0846.
“Nice takeoff, Ski!” Bob Emmens shouted over the roaring engines. “How was it compared to your practice takeoffs back in Florida?”
York’s eyes flickered to the bulkhead-mounted interphone box next to his left thigh. It was set to INTER, so the crew could listen to each other, and he needed them to hear this. “How the hell should I know?” York yelled back, and flashed a grin at the copilot, who grinned back. “I never made one.”
PART I
To every man upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
