Due to the greater accuracy of daylight bombing a daylight raid is contemplated. The present concept of the project calls for a night take off from the carrier and arrival over objectives at dawn. Rapid fueling at the landing points will permit arrival at Chungking before dark.
A night raid will be made if due to last minute information received from our intelligence section or other source a daylight raid is definitely inadvisable. The night raid should be made on a clear night, moonlight if Japan is blacked out, moonless if it is not.
All available pertinent information regarding targets and defenses will be obtained from A-2, G-2 and other existent sources.
The Navy has already supervised take off tests made at Norfolk Va. using three B25B bombers carrying loads of 23,000#, 26,000# and 29,000#. These tests indicate that no difficulty need be anticipated in taking off from the carrier deck with a gross load of around 31,000#.
The Navy will be charged with providing a carrier, (probably the Hornet), loading and storing the airplanes and with delivering them to the takeoff position.
The Chemical Warfare Service is designing and preparing special incendiary bomb clusters in order to assure that the maximum amount that limited space permits, up to 1000# per airplane, may be carried. 48 of these clusters will be ready for a shipment from Edgewood Arsenal by March 15th.
About 20,000 U.S. gallons of 100 octane aviation gasoline and 600 gallons of lubricating oil will be laid down at Chuchow and associated fields. All other supplies and necessary emergency repair equipment will be carried on the airplanes.
1st Lt. Harry W. H … e, now with the Air Service Command and formerly with the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, will be charged with making arrangements for the fuel caches in China. He will work through A-2 and A-4 and with Col. Clare Chenault, a former Air Corps officer and now aviation advisor to the Chinese government. Col. Chenault should assign a responsible American or a Chinese who speaks English to physically check and assure that the supplies are in place. This man should also be available to assist the crews in servicing the airs. That the supplies are in place can be indicated by suitable radio code signal. Work on placing supplies must start at once.
Shortly before the airplanes arrive the proper Chinese agencies should be advised that the airplanes are coming soon, but the inference will be that they are flying up from the south in order to stage a raid on Japan from which they plan to return to the same bases. Radio signals from the bombing planes immediately they drop their bombs may be used to indicate arrival at gassing points some six or seven hours later.
Care must be exercised to see that the Chinese are advised just in time as any information given to the Chinese may be expected to fall into Japanese hands and a premature notification would be fatal to the project.
Lt. Col. J. H. Doolittle, Air Corps, will be in charge of the preparations for and will be in personal command of the project. Other flight personnel will, due to the considerable hazard incident to such a mission, be volunteers.
Each airplane will carry its normal compliment [sic] of five crew members; pilot, co-pilot, bombardier-navigator, radio operator and gunner-mechanic.
One crew member will be a competent meteorologist and one an experienced navigator. All navigators will be trained in celestial navigation.
Two ground liaison officers will be assigned. One will remain on the mainland and the other on the carrier.
At least three crew members will speak Chinese, one in each of the target units.
Should the Russians be willing to accept delivery of 18 B-25-B airplanes, on lease lend, at Vladivostok our problems would be greatly simplified and conflict with the Halverson project avoided.
Doolittle was now actively traveling back and forth to Wright Field tasking engineers to draw up plans modifying twenty-four Mitchell bombers with three extra fuel tanks, each a leakproof, 225-gallon rubber cell made by the U.S. Rubber Company that would be installed in the top of the bomb bay. It had to fit above specially designed shackles that would hold each bomber’s four-bomb payload. The crawl space at the very top of the bay was to house a 160-gallon rubber cell that could be collapsed when empty and discarded. This would then permit the flight engineer to move freely throughout the aircraft. Finally, the belly turret was to be removed, and a sixty-gallon tank put in its place. This could be refilled in flight by the engineer with the ten five-gallon cans each plane would carry. These modifications would increase the B-25’s fuel capacity to 1,141 gallons, of which 1,100 were usable—and they’d need every drop of it. If the tanks could not be properly installed, then the mission was moot.
February 3, 1942, saw an order sent to Lieutenant Colonel William Mills of the 17th Bombardment Group, endorsed by Hap Arnold, directing that twenty-four Mitchells, with all their flight crews and required mechanics, armorers, and ground-support personnel, be sent immediately to Columbia Army Air Field, Columbia, South Carolina. En route, they were directed to land at Mid-Continent Aviation in Minneapolis to have the fuel tanks, labeled “special equipment,” installed. The selection of crews was left to Major Jack Hilger, newly appointed as Doolittle’s deputy, who delegated this to three squadron commanders from the 17th; Captains Karl Baumeister, Al Rutherford, and Edward “Ski” York.
Doolittle would not command a unit flying aircraft he was unqualified to pilot, so while the details were worked out and with the Mitchells en route, he got himself checked out to fly the B-25B by March 3, 1942. Once the bombers landed in Columbia, Jimmy had already picked Eglin Field in Florida as a forward operating and training base, though the administration for his “B-25 Special Project” would remain in South Carolina. Eglin was perfect: off the beaten track, with auxiliary fields available for short takeoff training, and right on the Gulf of Mexico so the pilots could hone their overwater navigation and flying skills. As their new fuel tanks were installed, the crews left Minnesota and trickled into Eglin by March 3, and training commenced immediately.
The Navy ordered Lieutenant Henry “Hank” Miller, a carrier-qualified instructor, to teach the Army pilots the fine points of taking off from a carrier at sea. The bombers would take up about half the available deck space since they could not be stored below, which would leave about four hundred feet for the first several Mitchells to get airborne. From an earlier experiment flying Mitchells off the Hornet while it was in Norfolk, Miller knew the bomber could get airborne with full flaps at about seventy miles per hour; of course, this assumed the carrier was making twenty knots and there was at least a twenty-five-knot wind over the bow—but it could be done with room to spare.
While the pilots trained, Hornet sortied from Norfolk and headed down the East Coast. Doolittle was making regular trips to Wright Field and Washington, as well as the Edgewood Arsenal, to have his bombs built. He did this in his own B-25, both for expedience and to build up his flying hours in the Mitchell. By the middle of March 1942, Jimmy managed to backdoor his way into actually leading the mission, replacing Captain Vernon Stinzi, who fell ill, as pilot in command of B-25 #40-2344. Also during this time, Hornet passed through the Panama Canal heading for Alameda, ostensibly on her way to the war in the Pacific. In a manner of speaking, this was true, though only Captain Marc Mitscher was aware of the carrier’s true mission.
On the final day of training in Florida, Captain Ski York replaced Lieutenant Jimmy Bates, who stalled and crashed his bomber on takeoff. This was a bit odd, as there were already seven other fully trained spare crews ready to go, but York was a squadron commander and Doolittle’s chief of operations, so no one gave it too much thought—at the time. Jimmy, like Hap Arnold, relied on verbal orders and kept no written records. “Typically these men,” Hap’s grandson Robert confirmed, “were given tasks, huge or narrow, with verbal authority.” As March 1942 drew to a close, Doolittle gathered his men and told them the next step of the special project: head to McClellan Field in Sacramento, and then to Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay. Those who had postulated they were going to North Africa were left scratching their heads. No one openly discussed the mission—Doolittle’s explicit orders—but in privately discussing their destination, none of the pilots had satisfactory answers. Those who did know—Doolittle himself, Jack Hilger, Davey Jones, and Ross Greening—said absolutely nothing. The last man that knew the overall mission details, and his own recently disclosed mission details, also said nothing. But then Ski York never was much of a talker.
4 PAYBACK
Lurching upward, the B-25 cocked sideways, then corkscrewed sickeningly as it hit a pocket of warm air. Swearing under his breath, Bob Emmens muscled the bomber back to level flight and stared ahead through the curved rectangular windows at the Japanese coast. For the past hour the horizon had noticeably darkened, stretching from end to end with what had to be the island of Honshu, largest of the Home Islands. Running his eyes over the gages, Bob was satisfied with the engine revolutions per minute, cylinder head temperatures, and oil pressure. What worried him, and York, was the fuel. By their reckoning, Plane 8 was still at least an hour east of Cape Inubo, and they had switched to the specially installed 260-gallon bomb-bay tank forty-five minutes ago. This was supposed to be done at the cape, but the 160-gallon collapsible rubber tank in the passageway atop the bomb bay had already run dry.
“Hey Bob,” Ed leaned right and held up his kneeboard. “Take a look at this.” Down the center of the paper were two columns of numbers, one for each engine, with lines drawn under both at the bottom. Beside this he’d written 1,141, the total gallons carried, and subtracted the first number from it along with the fuel burned during takeoff. There was a circled total at the bottom. Glancing outside at the horizon, he looked back at the kneeboard, then met York’s eyes and nodded.
It was not enough.
Not enough to get to China anyway, but the two pilots already knew that. They also knew exactly why they were short of fuel. This aircraft, #40-2242, was the only B-25 on the mission with factory carburetors installed. Of course, the bomber’s carburetors had been previously modified for low-altitude flying, as were those on all the Mitchells—but these were changed back at McClellan Field, and the carburetors on each of Plane 8’s Wright-Cyclone engines were now the original unmodified type, which would burn fuel at unacceptable levels. Unacceptable, that is, for the 1,200-mile flight across the East China Sea to Chuchow, China. Though Doolittle knew Plane 8 was going to Russia, the colonel purposely left the details to Emmens and York so he could plausibly claim ignorance of the whole affair. The pilots had no intention of telling him about the adjustment, so Doolittle’s very genuine anger at the mechanic added further realism to the cover story. During their remaining day at McClellan it would have been simple enough to undo the adjustments, but the carburetors were never “fixed,” and fortunately no one ever asked if the original mission settings had been restored.
York’s numbers showed they’d spent over two hundred gallons thus far and were about forty gallons into the bomb-bay tank. That meant Plane 8 was burning something like ninety-eight gallons per hour, over twenty-five gallons more per hour than the modified B-25s, and this was at optimum cruise speed, not the combat speed they’d fly over Japan. From the center of Tokyo to the tip of Kyushu was just over five hundred miles, which at 250 miles per hour would take two hours and burn over 250 gallons of fuel. Chuchow was another thousand miles past Kyushu, and even at a reduced speed the B-25s with modified carburetors would be sucking fumes over the Chinese coast.
Plane 8 could not make half that distance, and the two pilots now had the math to prove it. Replacing his kneeboard, Ed York tapped the yoke and wrapped his hands around it, and Emmens released the controls. Sitting back, Bob wriggled his fingers and stared out the side window at the waves. They seemed a lighter blue now, though that could just be the light. Suddenly, movement above the horizon caught his eye and he leaned forward, heart pounding. There! Again! Opening his mouth to speak, Emmens abruptly stopped. A bird. It was just a bird, though a big enough one for him to see it. Some type of albatross, he reckoned. Waving to get York’s attention, he pointed toward the bird. The other pilot craned forward and scanned a moment, then nodded. Relieved it wasn’t a Japanese fighter, Emmens knew the bird meant land was reasonably close. After 450 miles of open water, land, even enemy land, was something of a relief. Yet it was Japan; 140,000 square miles brimming with several million Japanese who would joyfully cut his head off and stick it on a pole if they could. That, he knew, was at least one certainty if Plane 8 went down in enemy territory. The thought made his mouth dry, and he forced himself to concentrate on the cockpit instruments rather than whatever lay past Cape Inubo. Death or destiny, he would meet it soon enough.
Jimmy Doolittle was troubled by no such thoughts at the moment. Fifty minutes ahead of Plane 8, he pushed both throttles forward and roared over the Joban beach on Japan’s east coast at 250 miles per hour while Emmens was watching his seagull. Passing close to an enemy cruiser and beneath a long-range patrol aircraft on the way in, Jimmy had no idea what type of reception awaited the raiders.
But all was quiet for the moment.
He had also periodically angled into the wind during the ingress, and his navigator, Lieutenant Hank Potter, called over the interphone that the spike of land they’d overflown was not Cape Inubo. As near as he could calculate, they were about forty-five miles north of the intended landfall, which would put them about eighty miles from Tokyo. Doolittle didn’t care. In fact, he instantly decided not to correct, but to fly on west a bit, then turn south for the Japanese capital. This way, he figured to avoid the airfields and anti-aircraft guns situated between Tokyo and the east coast. Lieutenant Travis Hoover, flying #40-2292, had caught up with Doolittle thirty minutes after takeoff and flown loose formation with the colonel all the way into the Japanese coast. Passing the beach, as it became obvious Doolittle was heading west, Hoover waggled his wings and “promptly turned off toward his target area.”
Racing over Honshu at treetop level, Jimmy passed Kasumigaura Bay and zigzagged past Mount Yamizo. Popping out onto the central plain, he kept the bomber low and fast, angling southwest now toward the Tone River. Far away to the south he could make out a solitary fuzzy peak silhouetted against the clear sky. Fuji. It had to be. Crossing the river twenty miles north of the Japanese capital, he rather absently noted the beautiful landscape turn into innumerable clusters of small buildings, seemingly built at random, with no straight roads visible anywhere. Potter called out course corrections, and with light touches to the yoke and rudder, Doolittle lined up on a target that he still couldn’t see. People on the ground were waving, he was surprised to see, and “there were many planes in the air,” he later recalled, “mostly bi-planes.”
Trav Hoover, who had turned over Joban, was actually first into Tokyo. Crossing the Edo River at fifty feet, he paralleled the Naka then pulled up to nine hundred feet just northeast of the Awakawa River. His primary target was the Senju Steam Power Plant, a large complex in the triangle formed as the Sumida and Awakawa Rivers converged. Such a low-altitude run-in allowed no time for fine-tuning anything, and visual references were nonexistent. So when Hoover spotted smokestacks off his nose, next to a river, he twitched the yoke and lined up on them. It was a huge rectangle with buildings and smokestacks built up to the edge of the southern river, and this is what Lieutenant Dick Miller, his bombardier, tried to hit.* In fact, it was the Kinukawa Steam Electrical Plant collated with the Asahai Electro-Chemical Industries Ogu factory a mile west of Senju on the other side of the Sumida River. His first bomb missed long of the target by some two hundred yards, impacting in an intersection in front of the chemical factory forty yards from the riverbank. Hoover’s remaining bombs hit two hundred fifty yards farther southwest in the Ogumachi residential area, causing fires and panic.
About ten miles out from Tokyo, Doolittle shoved the throttles forward to their stops and eased back on the yoke. Surging upward now, feeling exposed and vulnerable, he was looking for the Tokyo Arsenal, which, from the scanty maps provided, was a military complex just west of a wooded park. There! Jimmy saw it and bunted over to hold twelve hundred feet. Light in the seat as the dust floated upward, he was thinking no one had spotted them when several black puffs appeared off the nose, like burnt popcorn against the blue sky. Still, none of the enemy aircraft seemed to notice the American bomber zipping over their sprawling capital city.
That, he knew, would change in less than a minute.
At 1130 Hornet time, 1230 local time, some sixty-five miles east of downtown Tokyo, Plane 8 thundered clear of the haze one hundred feet over the surf about the time the colonel’s incendiaries were detonating. York and Emmens knew the next planned leg perfectly: 262 degrees from Cape Inubo for sixty-two miles, just over fifteen minutes, basically straight ahead to the center of the imperial capital. But as the coast appeared, York pushed both throttles up, pulled back on the yoke to climb up a few hundred feet, then booted the right rudder and banked Plane 8 hard to the northwest—away from Tokyo. Bracing his forearm against the side window, Bob Emmens stared down the wing line at Japan. He could see the mouth of a big river, eight football fields wide, oozing into the ocean. A sandy beach flashed past, and he suddenly saw a fenced-in area filled with people, maybe two hundred of them.
A fifty-foot watchtower stood in one corner, and as the bomber raced overhead, he saw waving arms and men jumping up and down—then they were gone. “At that speed it was just a glimpse,” he recalled, “but I’d swear those faces were the faces of white men, not Orientals.” A prisoner of war camp, perhaps? They’d seemed excited to see the bomber, and if they were Caucasian prisoners, they had also seen the American star painted on the wings. Maybe, he thought, a ray of hope illuminated their black existence for that brief moment.*
He hoped so.
Ed cranked the yoke back to the left and rolled out heading northwest. Keeping the airspeed high and the bomber low, Plane 8 raced over the Japanese countryside just above the trees. They were so low Emmens could make out peasant men with broad-brimmed hats and women with tight bands across their chests. So low he could make out the woman’s tight black bun knotted behind her head. People waved, including a group of schoolchildren being bunched into a ramshackle building. The air felt different after hours over the sea; it was rougher, and the briny smell had been replaced by a heavier, earthy odor. After five minutes of paralleling a river, the terrain steepened, and York threaded his way up into the hills between two lakes.† Cresting a ridgeline, Bob caught a glimpse of the Atlantic less than ten miles off the right wing, then it disappeared as Ed dove down into a narrow valley. Up ahead was a line of north-south mountains, and York headed for a visible saddle that would hopefully shield them from the formations of Japanese planes the gunner, Sergeant Dave Pohl, kept calling out.
