On Saturday morning, December 6, 1941, Hornet was brought back up the Elizabeth River to Norfolk Naval Base and tied up to the starboard side of Pier 4. She was here, alongside the USS Yorktown, when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was announced the next afternoon. Relayed through the naval base to the carriers, an urgent ALNAV signal, which was transmitted to all Navy and Marine units, simply read: “EXECUTE WPL FORTY SIX AGAINST JAPAN.”
Such a dispatch triggered an immediate, preplanned response and placed all recipients on a war footing. “WPL,” or “War Plan,” 46 was part of the 1939 RAINBOW series of plans that replaced the Joint Planning Committee’s older, color-coded interwar-period plans, and dealt with a two-ocean war against multiple enemies, with or without allies. The immediate tasks involved safeguarding sea lanes, destroying any enemy raiding forces, and protecting U.S. territory. However, as of December 7, only Japan had attacked the United States, and President Roosevelt would not deliver his famous six-minute speech to the House of Representatives asking for a declaration of war until the following afternoon. “Yesterday, December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy,” Roosevelt said, his well-modulated, patrician voice mesmerizing politicians and citizens alike, “the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”
Upon hearing the news from Oahu, Winston Churchill gratefully remarked, “No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy … but now, at this very moment, I knew the United States was in the war up to the neck and in to the death.”
The Pacific Fleet’s immediate mandate included defending the British, destroying Japanese vessels, and to “CAPTURE AND ESTABLISH CONTROL OVER THE CAROLINE AND MARSHALL ISLAND AREA” while defending Guam and the American Samoa. A tall order given the paucity of forces available, even with the forthcoming addition of the USS Hornet, but with shots now fired and 2,403 dead Americans at Pearl Harbor, the United States squared off to fight. Three days later, the Axis declaration of war on America, which dismayed Hitler’s generals and truly plunged the world into global war, simplified the issue considerably. There was now a clear, unambiguous objective to rid the world of tyranny in any of its forms, providing a moral imperative that the Great War had lacked. On December 10, Hornet stood out of Norfolk to Lynnhaven Bay, then into the Chesapeake for degaussing.* On the same day, Yorktown cleared Hampton Roads bound for the Panama Canal and then the Pacific; she would never again pass through the Virginia Capes.
She would never see home again.
The following day in Rome, Benito Mussolini strutted from his office onto the balcony of the Sala del Mappamondo overlooking the Palazzo Venezia and postured pompously before a crowd of 100,000 screaming Italians. “The powers of the steel pact,” the pudgy, self-styled former journalist arrogantly pronounced, “Fascist Italy and Nationalist Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America.”
Fifteen minutes later Hitler followed suit, addressing a rapturous Reichstag. “First, he [Roosevelt] incites war, then falsifies the causes, then odiously wraps himself in a cloak of Christian hypocrisy and slowly but surely leads mankind to war.” The latter half of his eighty-eight-minute speech was a rant directed at the “the Anglo-Saxon Jewish-capitalist world.” As this was occurring, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington, Dr. Hans Thomsen, managed to pass Germany’s formal declaration of war to the head of the American Division of European Affairs.
The lineup was complete—and the world was once again at war.
An angry, vengeful wave swept across America, unifying a divided populace and transforming a largely isolationist nation into the largest war machine in history. On January 16, Wu Duncan presented Frog Low with his handwritten, thirty-page study of the proposed mission; then both officers went to see Admiral King. Terse as always, the admiral read the report and told the pair, “don’t mention this to another soul.” He looked up and stared grimly at each man. “Go see General Arnold about this and if he agrees with you, ask him to get in touch with me.”
Despite his nickname, “Hap” Arnold was not particularly happy at the moment. Admitting that the Air Corps was “practically nonexistent” in 1940, he found himself in the unenviable position of having been proved correct about the necessity for a modern air force, and now forced to deal with the wartime reality of desperately needing such an air force. Two decades of American isolationism and pacifism had left the Great War military disgracefully emasculated and utterly unprepared for another global conflict. History’s premier lesson, that peace must be built on strength rather than false hopes, had been promptly discarded again after November 1918. The enervating years of the Great Depression and its accompanying budgetary realities only exacerbated the American military’s malaise, and the harsh reality now was that the United States was unable to do much but defend itself—and could barely do that. Too many years of Washington’s complacency, neglect, and indifference had created a frightening reality in early 1942, and Hap Arnold was frightened.
Son of a prominent doctor from Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, at seventeen Henry Harley Arnold entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Nicknamed “Pewt” by his classmates, he was a mediocre student but an excellent athlete with a penchant for practical jokes. “I skated along without too much effort in a spot just below the middle of the Class,” he wrote of his years at the Point, graduating in 1909 and commissioned a second lieutenant. A skilled polo player, Arnold hoped for the calvary but was assigned to the 29th Regiment in the Philippines and disliked the infantry enough to manage a transfer to the Signal Corps.
En route home in 1909 via the Suez Canal, he rendezvoused with friends in Lucerne, Switzerland, and went on to Paris, there witnessing an event that changed not only his life but the lives of hundreds of thousands of men who would be part of the vision resulting from his first view of manned flight. Louis Blériot’s high-winged monoplane was ungainly, barely managing sixty miles per hour, and Hap recalled, “I was not very greatly inspired by its appearance for it seemed to be too fragile looking to have any real value as a means of transportation.” Yet Arnold quite clearly saw the military potential of not only operating above the battlefield but also transforming the sky into a battlefield. It was the ultimate high ground in a fight.
Returning to America, he was garrisoned at Governors Island, New York, when he received Special Order 95 transferring him to Huffman Prairie, an eighty-four-acre pasture northeast of Dayton, Ohio. Joined by Thomas DeWitt Milling, the two lieutenants were ordered to undertake instruction from the Wright brothers themselves, and on May 3, 1911, Arnold flew for the first time. Twenty-eight flights later, each no longer than eight minutes, he soloed with three hours and forty-eight minutes of flying experience. Designated Military Aviator No. 2 in 1912, the twenty-six-year-old pilot quickly began pushing limits and setting records. Arnold was the first to fly the U.S. mail and the first pilot to carry a congressman as a passenger. He won the first Mackay Trophy offered by the Aero Club of America in 1912 and flew as a stunt pilot for several silent films.* It was on these movie sets that Arnold acquired the nickname that stuck to him the rest of his life: “Happy,” or simply “Hap” due to his amiable demeanor.
Witnessing firsthand the firestorm fanned by Billy Mitchell, Arnold agreed with the man’s arguments, if not his methods. Arnold was a major in 1926 when the Air Corps Act granted an expansion to 1,800 serviceable aircraft and 20,018 personnel, including 1,518 officers and 2,500 flying cadets. By 1934 the Air Service had become the Air Corps and Hap was a lieutenant colonel, when the politically motivated airmail scandal erupted. Seeking to strengthen their reelection prospects, Democrats dug into former Republican president Herbert Hoover’s administration looking for dirt. A report emerged linking lucrative airmail contracts to Herbert Hoover’s tenure as commerce secretary. With no hearing or due process of any sort, President Franklin Roosevelt canceled all airmail contracts, and through Executive Order 6591 directed the Army Air Corps to now carry mail.
Army Air Corps Mail Operations (AACMO) divided the country into western, central and eastern zones and did the best it could to carry out the president’s orders. Unfortunately, of the 262 military pilots used, all but one were junior lieutenants with comparatively little experience, and what flight time they did have had generally been performed during the day in fair weather. Only a fraction of these men had any flight time at night, and just two officers had more than fifty hours of instrument flying. Seventy-eight days later, after sixty-six accidents with thirteen dead aviators only one zone, the Western Zone, incurred no fatalities; it was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Hap Arnold.
Fallout from the AACMO fiasco generated public outrage and political embarrassment.
“If we are unfortunate enough to be drawn into another war,” fumed Speaker of the House Henry Rainey, “the Air Corps wouldn’t amount to much. If it is not equal to carrying the mail, I would like to know what it would do in carrying bombs.” A scapegoat was needed, and Major General Benjamin Foulois, chief of the Air Corps and the first Army aviator (airships) was a convenient target. With his term expiring in December 1935, Foulois chose to retire and was succeeded by Major General Oscar Westover. The other immediate consequence was the activation of the General Headquarters Air Force (GHQ), a sort of compromise command structure that inched the Air Corps toward a separation from the army, and the advancement of Hap Arnold to the temporary rank of brigadier general as assistant chief of the Air Corps. On September 21, 1938, the fifty-five-year-old Westover was landing a Northrup A-17 in Burbank, California, when he stalled the aircraft, crashed, and died in the front yard of a little house on Scott Street. Hap was immediately promoted to major general (temporary) and assumed command of the Air Corps.
A resolute man with a curious mind, Arnold could see what was needed and sought solutions to make it so, even if that meant working beyond the established system. He also possessed an uncanny instinct for putting the best men in the positions where he needed them most, and, unlike Billy Mitchell, Hap understood how to work with people to achieve his objectives. Mitchell had once written, “But the advent of air power which can go straight to the vital centers and entirely neutralize or destroy them has put a completely new complexion on the old system of war.” Arnold fervently believed that, and intended to make the Army Air Corps into America’s sharpest sword. To do that he needed the best men available—not just fine pilots, but men who understood engineering and technology, men who were gifted tacticians, and, most of all, men who were bold enough to take the fight straight to the enemy.
Duncan’s analysis was quite good, detailed and thorough, and Hap Arnold was pleased. The type of mission the aviator outlined would strike directly at the heart of Japan and figuratively knock them back on their heels. It would also be done with aircraft, and that would fire the imaginations of the public while loosening Congress’s parsimonious budget strings. What a mission. Hundreds of miles of open sea from a carrier straight into Tokyo. Arnold suddenly hated his office and wished he could physically be a part of this, but he knew that bombing the Japanese capital was for someone else.
Someone else.
Arnold needed a man who could turn Duncan’s pages into reality: a resourceful officer who could overcome the unforeseen yet inevitable technical challenges that were bound to occur, a pilot whose flying ability and reputation was beyond question and who could inspire others to follow him without hesitation. Above all, he needed an aggressive combat leader who would get this done, no matter the risk or ramifications. As these qualities flitted through his mind, Arnold’s thoughts returned again and again to one name and one face.
There really was only one man to put this mission together—and he was sixty feet away down the hall.
Easing the throttles back a few inches, Ski York set 170 miles per hour on the airspeed indicator directly in front of his yoke, then ran an eye over the other vibrating gages.
All good.
Staring through the cockpit windows, Plane 8 appeared suspended in a world layered with shades of gray. Smoky lace swayed from pewter cloud bellies hanging low over white-flecked waves. The horizon, where he could see it, was just a thin charcoal thread running across the blurry, rain-smeared windscreen.
It didn’t matter.
They had instruments and a chart. Bob Emmens held his up and tapped the single black line running west from their launch point. York nodded and banked slightly right to steady the heading indicator on 273 degrees. Near as he could calculate, they were now about six hundred miles from their landfall on Cape Inubo, west of Tokyo. That had definitely not been the plan. They were supposed to launch four hundred miles east of the cape, but the Japanese had changed that. Glancing at the chart on his knee, York half smiled and then stared out through the front quarter panel to the left of his control panel, then down at the map. There was nothing to see—not this far out. Just a heavy black line from Hornet’s planned launch point to Cape Inubo. Tucked inside his coat pocket, he had a map of Honshu marked with targets past Cape Inubo, carefully chosen targets divided up among the other raiders based on their entry into the target area and vulnerability to the four bombs each Mitchell carried.
So … 170 miles per hour was 196 knots. Doing the math in his head, York calculated Cape Inubo was about three and a half hours of flying from here, depending on the wind, and downtown Tokyo, Doolittle’s main target, was fifty miles past the cape, but that didn’t matter either.
Plane 8 wasn’t going to Tokyo.
3 JIMMY AND BILLY
Australia, through the United Kingdom, had been at war since 1939, yet she was even less prepared initially than the United States, and with none of the latter’s astonishing manufacturing potential. The Royal Australian Navy (RAN) possessed six cruisers and five obsolete destroyers in 1939, and had barely three thousand full-time professional soldiers. Raising the 6th Division through volunteers, Melbourne dispatched it to aid the British in North Africa, which left very few troops to defend the homeland and provided a compelling reason for the United States to keep Japan occupied away from Australia’s shores. Australian troops were among the very best in any theater of operations: tough, independent, and resourceful—but in early 1942, there simply weren’t enough available in the Pacific.
Distance, which compounded Japanese logistical limitations, worked for the Allies, but time did not—time that had to be gained, now, by blunting Japan’s momentum wherever possible. To the surprise of the Japanese, American forces in the Philippines did not surrender, but instead fell back defensively to the Bataan Peninsula. Nevertheless, a defensive mind-set did not sit well with the two generals and two admirals appointed to the recently created Combined Chiefs of Staff. Though now competing with the European Theater for men and materiel, the admirals were well aware the Pacific would be primarily a naval and marine war, and they also knew the value of keeping an enemy, particularly a stronger one, off balance. So did the new Commander in Chief, Pacific Fleet (CincPac) Admiral Chester Nimitz.
In the dark weeks following Pearl Harbor this seemed a tall order indeed, and the worst was yet to come. After largely destroying the Far Eastern Air Force in the Philippines on December 8, the Japanese invasion began with Batan, an island off the coast of Luzon. December 22 brought enemy landings along Lingayen Bay, and within twenty-four hours three more divisions landed in Lamon Bay. The day after Christmas 1941, General Douglas MacArthur declared Manila an open city, yet the Japanese bombed it anyway. Withdrawing to the Bataan Peninsula, U.S. and Filipino forces began a successful delaying action that would bog down imperial forces until May 1942.
MacArthur, with a secret $500,000 cash gift from President Manuel Quezon of the Philippines, was more concerned with relocating his headquarters to the island fortress of Corregidor and had little to do with this heroic, desperate action. In fact, the general never spent a single night on Bataan and did whatever he was doing over the next two months from deep inside Corregidor’s Malinta Tunnel. When ordered out of the combat zone by Roosevelt, MacArthur, who obeyed no one but himself, leapt on the opportunity. After dark on March 11, 1942, the general slipped aboard PT-41 on Corregidor’s South Dock and headed south toward Mindanao, abandoning tens of thousands of Filipino troops, American soldiers, and Marines. Of course, he didn’t go alone. His wife, Jean, and son, Arthur, in company with the general’s personal physician and family cook, would also be spirited away from danger to the finest suite at Menzies Hotel in Melbourne, Australia.
While the Philippines were invaded and without a declaration of war on the British Empire, on December 10 the Imperial 38th Division pierced the Gin Drinkers’ Line north of Hong Kong. Capturing the Shin Mun Redoubt, the Japanese headed south toward Kowloon. Major General Christopher Maltby had fallen back to the island fortress but, with no relief or escape possible, surrendered his remaining forces on Christmas Day 1941. Brutality from the Imperial Army toward the helpless populace and captured military personnel quickly mirrored widespread incidents reported from China. At least ten thousand civilians from Hong Kong were massacred, and various British, Canadian, and Indian military personnel were murdered, including fifty prisoners of war taken following the battle at the Ridge near Repulse Bay. Soldiers of Colonel Rysaburo Tanaka’s 229th Regiment killed all the patients in the Salesian Mission, and at least fifty more were bayoneted at St. Stephens College on Stanley Point. Here also, on Christmas Day, twelve British and Chinese nurses were gang-raped.*
During January 1942, Rommel’s Afrika Korps captured Benghazi, and the German 9th Army would eventually turn the Soviet Rzhev–Vyazma offensive into an aptly nicknamed “meat grinder,” inflicting more than a million Russian casualties. In the Atlantic, Nazi submarines were enjoying what they called the Zweite glückliche Zeit, the “Second Happy Time,” and within a few months 609 merchant ships totaling 3.1 million tons would lie on the seafloor. In the Philippines, the Japanese were slowly breaching the defensive lines strung across Bataan and inexorably pushing the remnants of the United States Army Forces in the Far East (USAFFE) south toward Corregidor. With three main prongs, the Imperial Southern Expeditionary Force was thrusting southwest through Borneo and Sarawak toward Java, south through the Celebes toward Timor, and southeast into New Guinea. If the offensive was successful, then northern Australia would be vulnerable and hopefully unusable to the Americans.
Chester Nimitz wasn’t going to wait for this. During January 1942, in the first of two bold moves that would blunt Japanese objectives, Nimitz turned Vice Admiral William Halsey loose with a pair of task forces to raid the northern Gilberts and southern Marshall Islands. Nicknamed “Bull,” Halsey’s aggressive spirit matched his countenance.* He was a fighting admiral who declared, “Before we’re through with them, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell,” and he meant it. During the first month of the war, two audacious plans were put into action that would buy time for the United States by derailing Tokyo’s plans and send a defiant message to the Axis and to the world. The Japanese might have easily climbed Mount Niitaka, but the Americans were now resolute, united, and utterly enraged. Washington intended to strike deep into the Empire’s black heart and ensure it climbed no higher.
On January 25, while Hornet was finishing her shakedown cruise in the Gulf of Mexico, Task Force How (Halsey), built around the Enterprise, and Yorktown, leading Task Force Fox (Fletcher), sortied from Pago Pago Harbor in American Samoa and headed two thousand nautical miles northwest toward the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. Imperial submarines were based in the Marshalls, and supposedly long-range Kawanishi flying boats were operating from bases in the Gilberts. Believing the Japanese would strike toward Samoa to cut the United States–Australia supply line, Nimitz wanted to hit them first. Offensive action would hopefully catch the enemy off guard, disrupt his plans, and give vital experience to American carrier aircrews and a much-needed morale boost all around. Skirting Howland Island, Halsey and Fletcher split and approached from the vast empty ocean east of the Marshalls and Gilberts.
At 0443 on February 1, 1942, Enterprise began launching her strikes from northeast of the Marshalls, and Yorktown, between the island chains, followed suit at 0517. At the end of the day, twelve Japanese vessels had been sunk and thirty-five aircraft destroyed. Taken completely by surprise, enemy shore installations, warehouses, and ammunition dumps were all hit by American aircraft. After-action reports revealed that the startled Japanese had not responded aggressively, and anti-aircraft fire, though heavy, was largely inaccurate. After destroying what they could, both carriers slipped away to the east having lost just five dive-bombers and no fighters. The heavy cruiser Chester took a bomb hit that killed eight men but retired in good order, while the Enterprise recorded a single near miss from a Japanese air attack.
Nineteen days later, a thousand miles southwest of the Marshalls, the USS Lexington, flying the flag of Vice Admiral Wilson Brown, was within striking range of Rabaul. The plan was to launch an attack from 125 miles east of the harbor against ships, or any aircraft, that could be found. However, at 1442 the carrier’s radar detected a group of planes inbound from Rabaul preparing to assault the task force. Lexington’s VF-3 Wildcats shot down five Mitsubishi “Betty” bombers on the way in, and three of the remaining four on their way out. None of the bombs came within a half mile of the carrier, but while this was happening another group of nine Bettys attacked. Lieutenant Edward Henry O’Hare and his wingman, Marion Dufilo, were the only two fighters able to intercept them. O’Hare, a 1937 graduate of Annapolis and son of a prominent Chicago lawyer, slashed into the bombers a mere nine miles from the Lexington.*
