Based in Los Angeles, North American Aviation currently produced the T-6 Texan trainer and would subsequently field the wildly successful P-51 Mustang fighter. A full-scale wooden mockup of its NA-62 medium bomber design was assembled by November 9, 1939, and presented to the Air Corps. After 156,000 engineering hours produced 8,500 drawings, the design was finalized and the aircraft entered production, with the first B-25 #40–2165 completed on August 6, 1940. Thirteen days later, legendary test pilot Vance Breese took the bomber on its maiden flight over the Pacific Ocean, with Captain Frank Cook conducting follow-on military evaluations at Wright Field, Ohio.
Early in the development phase, Lee Atwood, North American’s vice president, decided an inspirational name was required for the new bomber, and suggested honoring Brigadier William “Billy” Mitchell. A brilliant airpower visionary decades ahead of his time, Mitchell was also brash, opinionated, and insubordinate, which created numerous enemies for him in the Army hierarchy. “The next war would come in the air,” he wrote. “Planes would strike at cities and factories and not simply at armies. The air was now the first line of defense and, without air power to shield them, armies and navies would be helpless.”
Earning the ire of Army leadership through his outspoken advocacy of the new weapon, Mitchell was loathed by traditional, hidebound Navy battleship admirals for his conviction that surface warships could be threatened, or even destroyed, by aircraft. Sea power remained the cornerstone of national defense, and Mitchell’s loud and persistent claims that aircraft could sink any warship, including the great battleships, were dismissed or ignored. Eventually Congress, always parsimonious in peacetime, warmed enough to the potential budgetary savings and directed a series of tests. Naval aviation sunk a captured U-boat in June 1921, and the following month Mitchell’s First Provisional Air Brigade sank a German destroyer and the cruiser Frankfurt off the Virginia Capes.
His last target during this test was the Helgoland-class dreadnought Ostfriesland, a veteran of Jutland and other naval battles that was ceded to the United States for war reparations: she went to the bottom in twenty-five minutes. Mitchell’s fliers subsequently sank the obsolete USS Alabama (BB-8) in September 1921, followed by the surplus battleships Virginia and New Jersey in 1923. All three American vessels were smaller and less heavily armed than the Ostfriesland—Mitchell had proven his point. Later court-martialed, the general was nonetheless revered by a generation of younger, forward-thinking officers, so Dutch Kindelberger loved the idea of exonerating and honoring him in this manner. Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Corps since 1938 and a longtime supporter of General Mitchell, enthusiastically approved the name. “Billy,” Arnold stated, “was clearly the Prince of the Air.” A ceremony was held at North American’s Inglewood plant in late 1940, with Mitchell’s younger sister attending to christen the bomber. A Vassar graduate who would be captured by the Germans while fighting for Serbian partisans during the next war, Ruth Mitchell chalked “For Fighting Billy. His bomber” on the B-25’s bay door.
The Mitchell was now official.
Under contract AC-13258, 184 bombers, worth $11,771,000 to North American, were to be delivered for the rapidly expanding Air Corps.* But before this could happen, several issues revealed from testing at Wright Field had to be corrected. Frank Cook discovered that when the aircraft controls were coupled with the Norden bombsight, any small trim corrections would be overcompensated for by the rudders, and the B-25 would begin an uncoordinated bank. This led to a “Dutch roll,” the tail wagging in a side-to-side yaw while the wings banked up and down.
Fortunately, these problems were relatively easy to fix. Lateral stability was largely a function of the dihedral, or the angle formed by the wings joining the fuselage. In the Mitchell’s case, only the outboard wing panels had to be adjusted to zero degrees, which was called a “broken dihedral” and gave the bomber a gull-shaped wing. The other alteration was to the vertical tail and rudders, which were too small and subsequently broadened. In early 1941, Major Donald Spence took B-25 #40–2174 flying for an hour and was so satisfied with the results that the basic redesign remained unchanged for the next ten thousand Mitchells off the produc- tion line.
In speaking with Army Air Force officers, Wu Duncan learned that the Army and North American Aviation had been quick to incorporate into the Mitchell combat lessons gleaned from the Royal Air Force. Armor was installed to the crew positions, with an extra ⅜-inch plate in the pilot and copilot seats. Newly added, and just patented in January, were self-sealing fuel tanks. Trapped gases, and the fuel itself, are highly flammable, which create a critical weakness during combat. Armored fuel tanks added too much weight, so other methods were fielded. The Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe both utilized different options to plug leaks, especially the larger, jagged holes made by exiting rounds. Firestone, Goodyear, and United States Rubber all had differing versions, but the concept was basically similar. When a tank or cell was penetrated by gunfire, the fuel would come into contact with multiple layers of vulcanized and natural rubber that would swell and seal the puncture. The principal drawback was decreasing capacity to make room for the rubber lining, which, in the Mitchell’s case, brought usable fuel down from 912 to 694 gallons, with a corresponding loss of range.
Reclassified as the B-25A, the first of forty bombers were assigned to the 17th Bombardment Group (BG) based at McChord Field in Tacoma, Washington. These pilots accumulated flying time and experience in the new bomber while participating in Army maneuvers around the country. They would need it. During November 1941, the group took its newly modified B-25B Mitchells and operated from Pendleton Field, Oregon, mainly flying combat patrols in preparation for the expected war with Japan. Essentially a more heavily armed B-25A, the new B-model was a bit shorter and carried five .50-caliber machine guns. The added weight dropped the airspeed down to just over three hundred miles per hour, but was regarded as a good tradeoff due to the heavier armament.
Duncan knew the 17th BG had the pilots he needed.
New aircraft, but not too new. They’d been flying the Mitchell for about six months, which was enough time to work out the bugs and gain valuable experience. Since December 7, the group had conducted antisubmarine patrols along the Pacific Northwest coast, and on Christmas Eve 1941 attacked a Japanese fleet submarine near the mouth of the Columbia River.* Not true combat experience, Duncan knew, but at least these men had made the mental jump from peace to war and were operating at a higher level because of it. With the plane and unit decided, he had two other questions to answer: which aircraft carrier to use and, equally crucial, who would lead the mission?
Everything around the bomber was a shade of gray.
Smoky wisps of cloud tendrils waved beneath an overcast sky that stretched off toward the western darkness. The horizon was out there someplace, but Bob Emmens couldn’t see it. From two hundred feet up, he could only plainly see the stark outlines of ragged whitecaps blowing across a steel-colored sea. Teeth. They looked like endless rows of teeth. Plane 8 banked up slightly as Ed York eased it a bit further left, then rolled wings level again as the bomber bounced through the rough, wet air. Like all good pilots, Ski could compartmentalize quite well, and up till now that was mainly what he had done. The myriad details of having the crews trained, then getting the bombers to the west coast and aboard the Hornet, plus the other matter that he arranged, were behind him. All the planning and details having been completed, the moment when he was actually flying toward Japan was here.
A long, long way from upstate New York.
The second son of Polish parents who immigrated to the United States in 1895, he was born Edward Joseph Cichowski on August 16, 1912, in Batavia, halfway between Buffalo and Rochester, and less than thirty miles from Lake Ontario. The elder Cichowski became a successful building contractor, as did the oldest son. Ed was having none of it. “I knew I wasn’t going to stay in Batavia all of my life,” he later recalled. “Anyone who wanted to get somewhere left Batavia as quickly as they could.”
Enamored of West Point from an early age, a military career “seemed glamorous and something that I would like to do.” With a gift for absorbing information, Ed graduated from high school at fifteen and enlisted in the Army. He lacked the pedigree and credentials to seek a nomination to the academy, but after a year in the Army he was selected to attend a preparatory school in San Francisco. Once there, he actually had to apply himself to academics but passed the exams with high enough grades to apply for the final West Point appointment allocated to Senator Hiram Johnson (R-CA).
“I loved every minute at the Academy,” he remembered, and graduated in the class of 1938. Deciding Cichowski was too hard to pronounce, Ed legally changed his name to York after leaving West Point, but the Ski moniker stuck with him.* “I wanted to be a cavalry officer,” York related, but he was put off by the $2,000 cost of five pairs of riding boots, pants, and blouses, which was a tall order during the Great Depression. Ski was told “anyone going to flying school has to buy one shirt and one pair of slacks,” and that did it for him. Heading off to flight school, after the basic course, Ed went through fighter training at Kelly Field in Texas, but then the army abruptly changed the rules and anyone over five foot ten inches could not go into fighters. However, at Kelly he met his future wife, Justine, at a big social, so when he departed for March Field, California, she went with him. Later stationed at McChord Field in Tacoma, Washington, by 1942 Ed York had risen to command the 95th Bomb Squadron of the 17th Bombardment Group, and he was there when the whole outfit was moved to Columbia, South Carolina.
Lurching upward, the bomber’s jolt brought Ski back to the present. Out of habit, both pilot’s eyes flickered over their instrument panels. As the pilot in command, York’s panel on the left side of the cockpit displayed the primary flight instruments. The altimeter and airspeed indicator were just forward of his left knee, but not obscured by the thick steering column and heavy yoke. The big flight indicator, with its bright yellow horizon line, was easy to see midpanel in front of his right knee. From the right seat Bob Emmens could see this as well, in case he needed to fly. Between the pilots the center panel was dominated by two oversize circular gages: the directional gyro with its heading indicator and the bank-and-climb gyro unit. Both were essential for instrument flying and had to be accessible from either pilot’s seat.
Below this was a center console more or less divided into three main quadrants. In clusters of two, the throttle, propeller, and mixture controls were on the top along with a hockey-puck-sized knurled knob that could be twisted to lock the throttles in place. There was also a lock lever for the mixture controls so they wouldn’t vibrate out of their setting. About a foot lower, the next quadrant held two pairs of levers for operating the superchargers and oil-cooler shutters, though Bob wasn’t worried about anything overheating today. Like every other aircraft he’d flown, the Mitchell was noisy and either too hot or too cold. Today was cold, and he wriggled his fingers inside the leather gloves to keep them nimble. York’s hand came off the wheel and pointed down to his left, and the copilot nodded. The floor-mounted quadrant held a single lever for the wing flaps, which Ed raised to neutral, and engine cowl flaps that Bob now slid forward to close.
Running his eyes again over the gages, Emmens thought about the first plane he’d ever flown and chuckled to himself. A Taylor Cub—and he’d soloed after less than three hours of flying back in 1935. Seven years ago. That was hard to believe. So was being here, and for certain if he’d gone to medical school like his older brother had and followed his father into medicine, someone else would be the copilot of Plane 8. Born in Medford, Oregon, on July 22, 1914, just eleven days before Germany began the Great War, Bob grew up in a “medical atmosphere” but had no interest in the field. Following his father’s sudden death in 1934, Emmens had to drop out of the University of Oregon so his older brother could finish and go on to medical school.
“Flying always fascinated me,” he fondly recalled, and he became acquainted with the manager of Medford’s airport, who taught him to fly the Cub. One day his mother showed him an ad in the paper that read:
COME TO THE WEST POINT OF THE AIR, RANDOLPH FIELD, AND LET THE ARMY TEACH YOU TO FLY AND PAY YOU AT THE SAME TIME!
After passing the physicals, he was accepted into flight school during February 1937 and left for Texas. “I loved every minute of it … and that gave me my start in flying.” With three years of college to his credit, he was commissioned a lieutenant and rated a pilot in 1938. Bob left for his first duty station with the 89th Reconnaissance Squadron of the 17th Attack Group, which became the 17th Bombardment Group, at March Field. Here he met Ski York, and though they were in different squadrons, their wives became friendly. When the initial twenty crews were picked for a special mission down in Florida, Ski went as the operations officer while Bob remained in South Carolina. Emmens glanced at the pilot and remembered the phone call that put him in this cockpit today. “We need another airplane right away down here,” York told him. One of the other pilots, Lieutenant Jimmy Bates, stalled on takeoff and crashed his Mitchell. Bob never hesitated. “I will see you about 1530 or 1600,” he had replied, and left to pack his footlocker. He’d run across the group commander, Lieutenant Colonel William C. “Newt” Mills, who had asked him what he was doing, so Bob told him. Mills, who’d already lost twenty crews to Doolittle’s unknown excursion to Florida, made Emmens promise to return. “Oh sir, I will be back!” Bob smiled at the memory because the last thing Mills told him was, “If you don’t come back, I am going to have your ass.”
Another smile. Mills could certainly have his ass now, if he could get out here to collect it, wherever “here” is. Tugging the lap belt to loosen it a bit, the copilot stared through the forward windscreen but saw nothing but pewter sky. Same thing from his right-hand window—nothing but waves and clouds. No other aircraft were in sight, nor would they be. After launch every plane was on its own, though he’d heard talk of some trying to join up for the ingress to Japan, the target area, and out to the safety, hopefully, of the Chinese coast.
As for Plane 8 … Bob Emmens leaned forward and squinted at the big magnetic compass mounted atop the glare shield. Bouncing through the rough air as they were, the jiggling numbers were hard to read.
243 degrees.
It was just over seven hundred miles, and Herndon said holding 170 miles per hour would place them over Cape Inubo in approximately four hours, depending on the wind—so just before 1300 hours, ship’s time, or about noon over Honshu. Starting with the center console, Bob’s eyes dropped down and then right to the panel in front of his knees. Manifold and oil pressure were in the green; the tachometer was fine; fuel pressure and cylinder head temperature were also just where they should be. Fuel. The gage was big, a vertical rectangle rounded on both ends and impossible to miss. Emmens stared at the little glass window for a minute, but he knew it was too early in the flight for any issues to reveal themselves.
That would come later.
Taking off from a carrier had never really been a large question, at least not in Wu Duncan’s mind. Naval aviators were trained to do it, so Army pilots could be likewise trained. Landing on a carrier, however, was a different matter entirely, and thankfully not a consideration in this case. The bomber to use had already been determined, so now the remaining question was, Which aircraft carrier to use? In January 1942, these warships, which had struggled for years to find their place in the modern peacetime American Navy, had suddenly become irreplaceable assets for the war against Japan. Only now, faced with bloody proof of the carrier’s efficacy, was the influence of the battleship admirals—the “Gun Club”—waning in favor of aviation. This was especially true in the context of a Pacific war fought across vast distances over specks of land few cared about before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Yet in January 1942, America had only eight flattops available; one of those, the USS Langley (CV-1), was obsolete and currently in Australia, while the Navy’s newest carrier, the USS Hornet (CV-8) was on her shakedown cruise in the Caribbean. Wasp (CV-7) and Ranger (CV-4) were needed in the Atlantic Fleet, which left only Enterprise (CV-6), Lexington (CV-2), Saratoga (CV-4), and Yorktown (CV-5) to cover a 63-million-square-mile Pacific battleground. None of these could be spared to return to Hawaii, let alone California, to pick up army bombers. No, he decided, Hornet was the only option, and in several ways she was the perfect choice.
Currently at sea conducting her shakedown trials, the carrier was due back to Norfolk by the end of January, so the timing seemed good to Low. Commanded by Captain Marc Andrew Mitscher, Hornet was in supremely able hands. His father, Oscar Augustus Mitscher, was a federal agent with the Bureau of Indian Affairs who moved his family to Oklahoma City. Unimpressed with the local educational environment, the elder Mitscher sent his son to Washington, D.C., to complete school. Gaining an appointment to the Naval Academy in 1904, Mitscher proved an indifferent student lacking in deportment and military bearing. Nicknamed Pete, poor grades and excessive demerits forced his resignation in 1906, but his father demanded he reapply, and Mitscher was readmitted as a plebe.* Applying himself in earnest this time, he graduated in 1910 and went to sea in battleships.
Designated Naval Aviator Number 33 in June 1916, three years later Mitscher, now a lieutenant commander, took off in Curtiss flying boat NC-1 from Naval Air Station Rockaway outside Queens, New York, bound for Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula. Two other flying boats, NC-3 and NC-4, were part of the Navy’s attempt to cross the Atlantic in a powered aircraft. On May 16, 1919, Mitscher left Trepassey, Newfoundland, for the Azores but was forced down by mechanical issues. He and his crew were rescued while NC-3, piloted by Commander John Towers, also came down, but taxied two hundred miles over the waves into the Azores.* In the end, only Lieutenant Commander Albert Cushing Read and NC-4 made it all the way into Plymouth on May 31, 1919; yet the die was cast, and naval aviation was growing up fast.
Working tirelessly to advance naval aviation, Mitscher commanded the Saratoga’s initial air group and was the first to land on her flight deck. Promoted to captain in 1938, he was assigned as deputy chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics while awaiting completion of the Hornet. Mitscher was present on October 20, 1941, when Annie Reid Knox, wife of Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, christened his warship and for the next two months he was completely absorbed with the Byzantine issues surrounding a new command. Putting back into Hampton Roads on Christmas Eve 1941, the new carrier stood out three days later with the battleships Washington and North Carolina for her shakedown cruise in the Caribbean.
Straddled by the York and James Rivers and jutting southwest into the Chesapeake Bay, Virginia’s peninsula has always been a hub of naval activity. About five miles south of its tip across the Hampton Roads channel lay Naval Operating Base Norfolk and the headquarters of the 5th Naval District, which included the Norfolk Navy Yard and Naval Air Station. Like a spiny growth, a sprawling line of jutting piers clung to the peninsula’s sheltered western edge along the wide James River, and it was here in late September 1939, at Newport News Shipyard and Drydock, that the keel for hull number 385 was laid down three weeks after Germany invaded Poland. Last of the Yorktown-class carriers, Hornet was designed largely by lessons derived from extensive war-gaming and the Navy’s collective experience with the previous Lexington-class warships.
Saratoga and Lexington were built from partially completed battle cruiser hulls, and with an 888-foot length overall they were considerably larger, heavier, and slower than the 824-foot Hornet. Her nine Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boilers produced 120,000 horsepower for two pairs of Parsons-geared turbines that could muscle the carrier through open seas at thirty-three knots, if needed. With eight five-inch guns and over two dozen smaller pieces, Hornet was better armed than previous carriers, but she carried less armor so her engineering spaces were particularly vulnerable. Mitscher was doubly concerned by this since the fire rooms, which produced the steam, were collocated with the engine rooms that spun the shafts. This meant a single torpedo in the correct spot could put the carrier out of service, or cause mortal damage. However, with an air group comprising up to ninety aircraft and the addition of a search radar, the risk was acceptable, not that Mitscher had a choice.
Saturday, December 14, 1940, was cold and rainy, but that didn’t stop Annie Reid Knox from launching America’s newest warship. “In the name of the United States I christen thee Hornet,” she proclaimed, and with flags flying from the towering scaffolding, the big carrier slid stern first down the slipway as onlookers cheered and waved beneath their umbrellas. Free of land and committed to salt water, Hornet was moved to a “fitting out” pier and, while Hitler invaded Russia, she received her engineering plant, electronics, some weaponry, and other systems necessary to transform the empty hull into a fighting ship. Those preparing Hornet had few illusions that war was indeed coming, particularly Captain Marc Mitscher, who arrived to take command in July 1941.
Sea trials normally took place along the Maine coast, but through the fall of 1940 nearly three hundred merchantmen and freighters totaling over 1.5 million tons now rested on the Atlantic floor. As America stepped up its assistance to Britain, Nazi U-boats became bolder, and wolf packs, small groups of submarines, were attacking in force. Roosevelt responded during April 1941 by extending the Pan American Security Zone, through which convoys were escorted by U.S. warships, to within fifty miles of the Iceland coast. Just before Mitscher took command, the SS Robin Moor, a U.S.-flagged cargo steamship, was stopped by U-69 and sunk after the crew was allowed to abandon ship. Based on the rising risk, America’s newest carrier largely remained in the Chesapeake Bay until completely armed; then she stood out from the Virginia Capes to complete high-speed testing.
The Navy’s caution was well founded.
September 4, 1941, found the old four-stack destroyer Greer (DD-145) off Iceland when a British patrol plane radioed the position of a German U-boat. After dropping depth charges, the aircraft returned to its base, and Greer began trailing the submarine. Obviously believing the destroyer to be hostile, U-652 fired several torpedoes, and Greer began laying the first of nineteen depth charges. Neither ship was damaged, and the U-boat escaped. On October 17, three days before Hornet’s commissioning, the USS Kearny (DD-432), a modern Gleaves-class destroyer, sortied from Reykjavik Harbor in defense of Canadian warships escorting a British convoy. Attacking the wolf pack with depth charges, Kearny took a torpedo from U-568 and was forced to disengage with the loss of eleven dead Americans. Finally, on Halloween Day 1941, the USS Reuben James (DD-245) was escorting HX-156, a fifty-one-ship convoy eastbound from Halifax to Liverpool, when another wolf pack attacked. Immediately laying depth charges, the destroyer was struck by a torpedo from U-552 intended for a merchantman. Reuben James’s forward magazine exploded, and the ship broke up and sank with 115 of the 159-man crew, including all her officers.*
After commissioning, Hornet was moved down the Elizabeth River to the Norfolk Naval Shipyard at Portsmouth until late November. The historical symmetry was pleasing for Marc Mitscher, as it was here that an eighty-three-foot-long wooden ramp, the first flight deck on a ship, was added to the bow of the light cruiser Birmingham (CS-2). In November 1910, five months after Mitscher’s graduation from Annapolis, Eugene Burton Ely wobbled into the air off the cruiser’s bow flying a fragile Curtiss Model D Pusher. Twelve years later, this same shipyard then saw the conversion of the collier Jupiter into America’s first aircraft carrier, the USS Langley (CV-1). Captain Marc Mitscher was proud to bring his carrier, the modern offspring of those historical events, back to where naval aviation arguably began.
