Desperate times call for desperate measures. In the most desperate hours of World War II, 80 volunteers stepped forward to try that which had never been done before, to launch one of the most daring raids in aerial combat history by flying fully loaded medium range bombers from the deck of an aircraft carrier. It was a single mission of only 16 bombers. Its primary objective was to raise the morale of a nation stunned by the surprise attacks and sweeping conquests launched by the Japanese in December of 1941 by doing what was thought to be impossible at the time, bombing the Japanese home islands as fate would have it. When they left the deck of that carrier in the nearly gale force winds of an early April morning, the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders would do far more than boost morale. They would trigger a series of tactical errors by the Japanese High command, errors destined to change the outcome of World War II in the Pacific. 80 men. 68 years later, only six of them are still with us yet. Their tradition dictates that all 80 of them gather, either in body or spirit. Every year on the anniversary of that heroic and historic mission, Richard E Cole, 95, from Dayton, OH, is the oldest surviving Raider. He was Jimmy Doolittle's copilot in the first plane to take off from the deck of the USS Hornet. Tom Griffin from Green Bay, WI. Was the Navigator on Raider airplane #9. Following the raid, he was shot down in Europe and spent nearly two years in a German prison camp. David Thatcher of Bridger, Montana is one of two Raiders awarded the Silver Star for distinguished gallantry in action for actions they took to save the lives of the seriously injured crew members aboard his B25 airplane #7. He is now 89 years old. Robert Hite, the copilot of airplane #16, was captured by the Japanese after the raid and sentenced to death. He was held for 40 months until liberated by American troops on August 20, 1945. He was born in Odell, TX, four men from the Heartland, the northern plains, the Mountain West. And the Southwest. Men whose memories of an America united by the common cause of dire peril and those gained by flying a mission that would lift the nation's sagging spirits and turn the tide of war, are as vivid today as they were in April 1942. When we get together, it seems like the raid was yesterday. It's great to see the ones that are still living and we pay homage to the one that have passed on. I'm Gary Sinise, and this is Missions That Changed the War. We interrupt this broadcast. Bring this important bulletin from the United press. Flash, Washington The White House announces Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In December of 1941, Dick Cole was a young second Lieutenant in the Army Air Corps, Reserved, assigned to the 17th Bomb Group at Pendleton Oregon. On Friday the 5th of December. He had flown to March Field near Riverside, CA on a three day pass. We're given what they used to call an open post where you get like a three day pass. We were in Hollywood at the time. The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On getting the notice that that had taken place. We immediately reported back to March Field and took off and went back to Pendleton and from Pendleton. They divided the group up and we went on submarine patrol flying out of Seattle, Portland, Everett, Washington. And we did that until about the first or second week of February. While Tom Griffin was majoring in political science at the University of Alabama, he went through the ROTC program after graduation. He spent a year with an antiaircraft unit based at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. In 1940, he transferred to the Army Air Corps and was trained in celestial navigation. In January of 1941, he too was assigned to Camp Pendleton, Oregon. They didn't have room for the officers out at the field at Pendleton, so we went into town and the townspeople rented. Bedrooms to quite a number of the Air Force officers. And somebody came in about 3:30 in the afternoon and came rushing in the room and said, isn't it awful? And we said, what do you mean awful? And they told us about this attack on Pearl Harbor. That's the first we knew that. It's an odd thing. That night we went downtown and went to a movie theater. There's a movie on we wanted to see. And while we were watching it, they stopped the movie and a man came up on the stage and said. All airmen from the field are ordered to report to the field immediately. But we got up and and departed and went back out to the field where our Colonel gave us a little pep talk about what had happened and what was going to be expected of us, you know, that sort of thing. So that was my Pearl Harbor day. After graduating from Spring Lake High School in Earth, Texas in 1937 and completing 3 years of college. Robert Hite enlisted as an aviation cadet at Lubbock, Texas on September 9th, 1940. He got his pilot's wings on May 29th, 1941. He too was assigned to the 17th Bomb Group at Pendleton when Pearl Harbor was attacked. David Thatcher was 19 years old when he went from his father's dairy farm in Billings, Montana to Missoula to enlist in the US Army. Because he wanted to get away from dairy for a while. He was in Airplane Mechanics School in Lincoln, Nebraska on December 7th, 1941. There was 20 picked from the 17th group, 5 from each of the four squadrons that went there to go to airplane mechanic school. So some of us were in the movie then. That was Sunday, so when they come out of the movie in the afternoon we heard it was had been bombed. No one expected something like that. The December 7th 1941 was a Sunday and Sundays in flying school when I was in advanced flying training at Victoria, Texas. Three or four of us decided to go downtown Victoria and have lunch down there instead of eating in the mess hall. The base we were on was brand new. We had the B&Q's were were primitive and. The mess hall was not in good shape and so we took the chance to go and get a nice lunch downtown. Well, one of the fellows had a car, and we were allowed to have them by that time in our training. If you're about to graduate, you could buy a car if you had the money to do it. And it had a radio in it, which I'd never seen before in an. Automobile. And we were riding around getting back to the base and the thing said that there was. Something had happened in Hawaii and we just shrugged, so we didn't know what it was. We never really didn't know much about Hawaii. C.V. Glines have been the official historian of the Doolittle Raider Association since 1972. He has authored 3 books on the raid and assisted Jimmy Doolittle in writing his autobiography. He was also a World War Two Army Air Corps pilot. Next morning on Monday morning and we all went to the base for our flying training and always there was a notice for each of our flights as to what the flying was going to be today. And the instructor had formation, flying, gunnery and he said big letters he had written on the bottom of it. There's a war on. Get on the ball. Follow me. Well. That's. You know, that was about the the norm. That was the announcement that we got that there was a war on. We were on wartime. Well, our job was to follow him and that's what we did. That day we went down the gunnery range, we did our gunnery and then instead of coming back to Victoria, he headed out to the Caribbean. And while I was sitting there flying my formation, it was a 6 ship formation. And I wonder why we're going out of gulf here this We're not supposed to go into gulf. We don't have life jackets or anything. We followed him briefly, of course, and and he finally made a turn, went back to Victoria and we got on the ground. One of them had the nerve to ask us: "Sir, were we lost after gunnery at Matagorda Island?" and he said we were supposed to look for submarines. And he went and now, I think, we thought he was kidding. And we really didn't understand what was going on, but we kept on with our training. That's all we were supposed to do. In his now memorialized speech to Congress on December 8th, 1941, asking for a declaration of war, Franklin D Roosevelt called the attack on Pearl Harbor unprovoked and dastardly. In Congress, only Montana Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin, the first woman to be elected to the United States House of Representatives, voted against entry into World War II. The treachery and success of the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7th, 1941 wasn't the only bad news Americans had to process. Yesterday, the Japanese government also launched an attack against Malaya. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Hong Kong. Last night, Japanese forces attacked Guam. Last night, Japanese forces attacked the Philippine island. Last night, the Japanese attacked the Wake Island. And this morning, the Japanese attacked Midway Island. Three days later, on December 11th, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. In an instant, the hope of avoiding war, held so fervently in so many American hearts, was pulverized by a coordinated multifront onslaught that had been years in the planning. After Pearl Harbor, there is nothing but bad news coming. The Japanese with a very small army. I mean, we look back today and wonder how they could possibly have done what they did with the number of troops they employed. But they employed them in such a clever manner in joint operations. The Japanese Army and Navy, which are infamous for not cooperating, were able to cooperate on this sort of island hopping, base hopping trip down through Indochina down to Singapore. Tom Griffin of Cincinnati, Ohio. Was the navigator on the 9th airplane to take off from the deck of the USS Hornet in the Doolittle Raid. The Doolittle raid was so important because it was the first offensive action of our forces against the enemy. We were in this World War and our allies in Russia were being driven back at this time towards their principal cities of Stalingrad and Leningrad and Moscow. In North Africa, the British were being driven back by Rommel and his German forces backs toward Cairo. Things were looking bad there in the Atlantic Ocean. German submarines were sinking our shipping wholesale. We didn't have the organization at that time to go after them successfully. We're losing all kinds of shipping in the Pacific. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, they went from one victory. To another. They took over places like Guam and they went down into the edge of the Philippines and put a large army in the Philippines, and were in the process of defeating our forces there. That was the springtime of '42. On December 7th, 1941, a complete sense of betrayal consumed millions of Americans who had been arguing and demonstrating against America's entry into wars in either Europe. Or the Pacific. Many prominent Americans, such as aviation hero Charles Lindbergh, General Robert E. Wood of Sears, Roebuck, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert R. McCormick of the Chicago Tribune, and even future presidents John F Kennedy and Gerald Ford, became active in organizations such as the America First Committee that strongly advocated America's neutrality. We cannot allow. The natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction. The Roosevelt administration is the third powerful group which has been carrying this country toward war. The undeclared Acts of war perpetrated by Japan on the 7th and 8th of December 1941. Brought the isolationist movement in the United States to a swift and bitter end. Four days after the Pearl Harbor attack, the America First Committee dissolved itself virtually overnight, America found itself at war on 2 fronts. No one was more determined to strike back at Japan than President Roosevelt almost two weeks to the hour after the Pearl Harbor attack. Those responsible for planning and directing the mobilization of the country's military forces met with the president in his White House study. General George C. Marshall was Roosevelt's Army Chief of Staff. General Henry H. "Hap" Arnold was the Chief of Staff of the Army Air Forces. Admiral Ernest J. King served as Chief of Naval Operations. On this day, the trio would be joined by Harry Hopkins. President Roosevelt's Special Advisor. Admiral Harold R. Stark. Henry Stimson, Secretary of War and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox. Well, I guess the best way to get a joint mission is to have it come from the commander in chief. And President Roosevelt was anxious to have some retribution. He wanted to know the people the United States know that we weren't flat on our backs and we could do something. This is early in December, maybe two weeks after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt emphasized that he wanted a bombing raid on the home islands of Japan as soon as possible. This request, repeated over and over again in the weeks following, was transmitted to the respective Staffs of Marshall, King and Arnold each time they returned to their offices. The biggest obstacle to a retaliatory bombing mission was that no working Allied air base was close enough to Japan to allow even our longest range bombers to get there. Ironically, the flash of insight that led to the Doolittle raid did not come from an aviator, but a Navy submariner, Captain Francis Lowe, the operations officer on the staff of Admiral Ernest J. King. On a trip to the naval yard at Norfolk, Virginia, notice that the Army Air Corps twin engine bombers were making passes over an aircraft carrier silhouette which had been painted on the runway. In a rare interview following the war, Lowe gave his account of what he saw. I had occasion to fly from Washington to Norfolk to look into the redness of one of our new carriers and as we took off from the. Airstrip to return to Washington and were circling to gain altitude. I noticed down below me the outline of a carrier deck. This was not unusual because we had them painted on muddy landing fields so that young aviators who were going to carriers would learn how small such a deck was. But also making passes or appearing to make passes Over this carrier deck were some twin engine bombers that looked like B-25s or B-26s. It was born, I would say, the the concept of the raid. One might call it fortuitous association, because I never would have thought of it had I not seen the bombers passing over the carrier deck. Admiral King had been using the USS Vixen, A gunboat moored at the Washington shipyard, as his flagship and second office. Several of his staff were working and living aboard the ship on the evening of January 10th, 1942. After King had retired to his cabin, Lowe decided to share his fortuitous association. King reportedly had a stern demeanor and was not easily approachable. Lowe was not an aviator. He did not know how the Admiral would receive his idea. Lowe told King that though Navy fighters had an operating radius of only 300 miles off an aircraft carrier in Norfolk, he had observed twin engine army bombers, which had a much greater range. Practicing over the carrier profile on the runway, what if they could actually operate off a carrier? What if the Navy could give the long range Army Air Corps bombers a ride within range of the Japanese home islands, setting them up for a sea base strike on January 10th, 1942, while Francis Lowe was sharing his ideas with Admiral King in Washington DC. Tom Griffin, Dick Cole, David Thatcher. Robert Hite and the rest of the 17th Bombardment Group were flying out of Tacoma, Washington and Portland, Oregon patrolling for threats to the West Coast of the United States. At the time of Pearl Harbor, we spent the next six weeks our group flying out from Tacoma, Washington and Portland, Oregon. Looking for whatever might show up, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and as far as we knew, they would come and attack the West Coast of America. But of course they had other plans. They thought they had done enough damage and they they could go elsewhere in the Pacific and more or less take over the Pacific, which they did. Back in Washington, somewhat to Francis Lowe's surprise, Admiral King directed him to talk to Captain Donald Duncan. King's air operations officer the very next morning about his idea, he added sternly. Don't tell anyone about this. In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt pressed the US military for a plan to strike back against the Japanese homeland, Francis Lowe, a Navy captain. After watching twin engine bombers making passes over the outline of an aircraft carrier on a runway near Norfolk, VA, suggested a bombing strike might be possible from the deck of a carrier, Admiral King, chief of Naval Operations, told Lowe to explore the idea with Donald Duncan, his air operations officer. And he told him something else. Don't tell anyone about this. Lowe had two pertinent questions for Duncan. First, can an army medium range bomber land aboard a carrier? Second, can a land based bomber loaded with bombs and crew take off from a carrier deck? The answer to the first question was a quick no. The risk of landing airplanes that size on a carrier was too high, but even if it were possible. The elevator would not be able to get the bombers below decks to make room for other landings, but a carrier takeoff? That was another matter in this rare archival footage, Duncan recalls being contacted by Lowe. When Captain Lowe, the operations officer on Animal King staff, told me that he and the Admiral had been discussing the possibility of launching army bombers. From carrier decks they hit Japan and told me that the Admiral wanted me to investigate it and write up a concept of operation. Checked over the various types of army bombers that we might use, and came up with the answer that the B-25 was probably the best bet. They looked at a bunch of airplanes, the B-18, which was a terrible airplane for a bombing mission, and the B-26, which had a suspect reputation, but the B-25 seemed to fill the bill, the North American B-25. When the B25 came about, it was like a kick in the pants. As far as maneuverability and speed and fun to fly. The Mitchell B-25 was one of the iconic success stories of World War II. By the end of its production, nearly 10,000 various models of it had been built. It was used by the Allied Air Forces in every theater of the war it served across four decades. The B-25 is developed by North American Aviation with a very easy airplane to fly. It was far easier to fly than the Marauder. The B-26 Marauder, had a much lower wing loading. And with the lower wing load it could get off in shorter distances. And Marauder need a much longer runways. Had to land a lot faster airspeeds. But you could take a young pilot right out of advanced training with a couple 100 hours in his logbook, Put him in B-25 and very quickly transition, learn his combat skills and send him off to war. He's a competent combat pilot. The B-25, properly modified, could carry 2000 pounds of bombs and make a 2000 mile flight if extra gas tanks were installed. Normally it would take at least 1200 feet of runway with that kind of load. If it were lightened, however, it might be made to leap off in a little over 1/3 of that distance, especially with a forward speed of a carrier and a wind of about 25 knots. Lowe and Duncan knew a test would be required. Under normal circumstances, such a test flight would not be difficult to conduct. But these were not normal circumstances. Both men had Admiral King's words ringing in their ears. Don't mention this to another soul. On January 31st, 1942, Captain Duncan flew to Norfolk. The USS Hornet, the Navy's newest aircraft carrier, was due there to be readied for her first mission. He went aboard the Hornet the afternoon of February 1st and explained the test to Marc A. Mitscher, the Hornet's skipper. Duncan had made arrangement with Hap Arnold's office to have three B-25s waiting. When the carrier arrived, the Army Air Corps chose Lieutenant John Fitzgerald to head the test crews. He was a 1940 graduate of the Advance Flying School with over 400 hours in B-25s in Norfolk. Fitzgerald and his fellow pilots made several practice runs at an auxiliary airfield before going aboard the carrier. One of the test airplanes lost an engine during these drills, leaving only the two planes flown by Fitzgerald and Lieutenant James F. McCarthy to make the historic first takeoffs of Army Air Corps multi engine bombers from a Navy ship. The surprising performance of the B-25 nearly led to disaster when the takeoffs were attempted. Fitzgerald's plane left off the deck so quickly and so high it's right wing nearly flew into the tower that overhung the flight deck, Fitzgerald later recalled: "I was surprised to observe that we had been provided almost 500 feet of usable deck and that the plane's airspeed indicator showed about 45 mph just sitting there. When I got the go signal, I let the brakes off and was almost immediately airborne. One thing that worried me, though, was the projection of the island out over the flight deck. The wing of my plane rose so rapidly that I thought I was going to strike this projection. I pushed the control column forward and the wing just barely passed underneath. I climbed and circled back to watch Lieutenant McCarthy take off." It was now established that the B-25 bombers could indeed take off from a carrier deck. But what would happen when they were weighted with a full crew, bombs, and an expanded fuel load? That question would soon become the sole focus of the diminutive, brilliant man whose name would eventually be memorialized by this mission that changed the war. Immediately following the attack on the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin D Roosevelt began pressing his military leadership for a plan to conduct a retaliatory airstrike against the Japanese homelands with no Allied air base within striking distance of Japan. Two naval officers on Admiral King's staff had successfully tested the takeoff of B-25 bombers from the deck. Of an aircraft carrier. It was something never before tried in the history of aerial warfare to plan the mission and train the crews. Chief of Staff of the Army Air Forces Henry "Hap" Arnold made a surprise choice. He turned to a man who had once resigned his Army Air Corps Commission in order to enter private business. He chose one of America's most famous aviators, James H. Doolittle, in doing so. Arnold tapped a man who is not only a brilliant aviation tactician, history would bear witness that he also identified one of the most revered and visionary leaders of the modern American military. It was very difficult to believe when the rumors started. Then it was led by Jimmy Doolittle. Jimmy Doolittle the racing pilot, Another impossibility. It would just seem like it was a false rumor, but it it took place and. All of these impossibility things happened through the leadership, the planning of the then Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, former racing pilot. devil-may-care, couldn't care less, we go. It was not that way. He was master of the calculated risk. As a kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio. Dick Cole used to ride his bicycle to a levee above McCook Field to watch the Army Air Corps test pilots, including Jimmy Doolittle. Some of the old pilots like MacCready and Doolittle and Spaatz flew in and out of there when they were testing the air. They were there refueling. They flew for 26 days, something like that. But anyway, that was one of the the pass times that I had when I was a kid. For something like this, there is an element of show in it. There's an element of innovation and they they selected the guy who could combine leadership and innovation and great flying characteristics in Jimmy Doolittle and oddly enough, sort of on the outs Jimmy Doolittle at the time. Had rejoined the Air Force but he'd gotten out because after I think was 11 years of the first Lieutenant, he decided he had to make some money for his family and and got out during the 30s into the hardcore who had stayed in including General Arnold. That wasn't the thing to do. You know, he he he was sort of not in the best favor at the time. James Harold Doolittle was born in Alameda, California on December 14th, 1896. His father was a Carpenter. Went to Alaska in search of gold. After joining his father in Nome at age 11, Doolittle moved with his mother to Los Angeles. In 1917, at the age of 21, Doolittle, who had had a brief career as a professional boxer, enlisted in the Army Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps to train as a pilot. He was quickly promoted to Lieutenant. He served in the Army Air Corps from 1917 to 1930. When he became a major in the Army Air Corps Reserves. Flying was Jimmy Doolittle's passion. In 1922, he made the first cross country crossing in under 24 hours. He became the first person to win all major aviation racing trophies. He won the Schneider Trophy in 1925 and the Bendix Trophy in 1931. In 1932, he won the Thompson Trophy, flying a closed course race in Cleveland. An average of 252 mph in the Gee Bee R-1 Racer, Doolittle made aviation history on September 24th, 1929 when he became the first person to take off, fly and land an airplane entirely by instruments. He flew a 15 minute course around Mitchell Field on Long Island in a modified NY-2 Husky in his personal logbook. He modestly referred to the watershed accomplishment as a blind flying exhibition. After leaving the military in 1930, Doolittle went to work for Shell Oil Corporation to establish an aeronautical branch. In this capacity, he was given credit for leading the company to develop 100 octane fuel for aviation. Between the two world wars the Army Air Corps had been relegated to the job of flying the mail. Doolittle knew that it was falling behind the rest of the world's flying forces. New, more powerful engines were needed, but there was no way to efficiently fuel them. In his 1991 autobiography, Doolittle wrote. I was concerned that we were falling behind other nations in military aeronautics and that we should be looking forward to the development of more powerful engines for warplanes so that heavier loads could be carried faster. The Army Air Corps was not even a third rate Air Force compared with the air forces of other nations. At Doolittle's urging, Shell made the first delivery of 100 octane rated fuel to the Army Air Corps for test purposes, in 1934. When Doolittle traveled to Germany on shell business, he found a nation bristling with militarism. He saw Boy Scout troops that had been converted to Hitler Youth. Drilling as soldiers and singing Nazi war songs, he met German pilots who openly talked of the inevitability of war in Europe, and who bluntly asked him what the United States would do about it. Jimmy Doolittle knew "Hap" Arnold, the chief of the Army Air Force as well, Arnold had been his commanding officer at Rockwell Field near San Diego. Following World War One. Doolittle visited Arnold. And told him he believed that America's involvement in the war in Europe was inevitable. September 1st 1939, two weeks after Doolittle's conversation with Arnold, the Germans marched into Poland and 1400 Luftwaffe planes bombed and strapped A stunned population. In May of 1940, the German Blitzkrieg extended into the Netherlands, Belgium. And France. On the 16th of May, in a speech before Congress, President Roosevelt called for a program that would eventually produce at least 50,000 airplanes a year. A little over 2 weeks after that, on June 4th, 1940, Ira Eaker, General Arnold's Executive officer, wrote Jimmy Doolittle asking him to return to active duty on July 1st at 44 years of age. Jimmy Doolittle became a U.S. Army Air Corps officer for the second time, beginning a journey whose outcome was far from certain. Jimmy Doolittle was a tremendous man, a big man in a little man's body, you might say, very intelligent. Never seemed to have any element of fear in his makeup whatsoever, you know he had. He had occasion to fly the wings off of two planes he had to bail out of in the 1920s, those old crates, and then of course, over China he bailed out again and we thought, boy, that old man, 46 years old, bailing out of aircraft. But he was a he knew no fear and he was just an outstanding leader in every respect. Well, I think people don't realize that Jimmy Doolittle had a doctorate from MIT. That he had earned Dr. of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering. This man was an educated individual. He had a Master's, A Bachelor's, A Master's and then a doctorate. Everybody knew who General Doolittle was, that he was one of the famous pilots and he was going to be the leader of our raid. So everybody in our outfit volunteered to go with Jimmy Doolittle. Doolittle reentered the Air Corps as a Major. His initial assignments seem to be directly related to President Roosevelt's goal to make the United States the arsenal of democracy. "Hap" Arnold knew that Doolittle's technical knowledge and industrial experience uniquely qualified him to play a key role in the conversion of domestic manufacturing to wartime production. Captain's Lowe and Duncan brought the concept of the raid to "Hap" Arnold on January 17th. The General immediately sent for Jimmy Doolittle. He began with a single question. What airplane have we got that could take off in 500 feet with a 2000 pound bomb load and fly 2000 miles? A day later, Doolittle independently arrived at the same conclusion as had Lowe and Duncan. The B-25 was the only alternative. Arnold briefed Doolittle on the concept of the raid and added "Jim, I need someone to take this project over, get the planes modified and train the crews." On January 2nd, 1942, Japan captured Manila in the Philippines. On January 12th, Japan invaded Burma. On January 20th, Germany held the Wannsee conference in a Berlin suburb to find a final solution. For the Jews, on January 25th Japan invaded the Solomons. In the 13th century Mongolian invaders were driven back from Japan not by defenses, but by the Japanese typhoon season. Since that time, the militarists in Japan had told the people that a kamikaze or divine wind protected their nation. As the Japanese swept through the Pacific with frightening speed, this long held belief in a national invincibility and the invulnerability of the home islands was mightily reinforced. What the Japanese high command did not know was a half a world away. An aeronautical genius with a gift for leadership and 80 brave souls who would come under his command had a bold plan to shatter that facade in doing so. They would receive a lifesaving lift from a divine wind of their own, a lift that would allow them to complete a mission that changed the war. When they announced that they wanted volunteers, whole group volunteered, including the the group commander. And everybody in the 17th Bomb, we were in the 17th Bomb Group, wanted to go with Jimmy Doolittle. Originally we were supposed to take off on the evening, along Japan at night and be over, reach China the next morning, but it didn't turn out that way. You don't take off on a mission like this without a light at the end of the tunnel. We all thought that somehow we'd get out of it. Since the US entry into World War II on December 8th, 1941, the conflict had gone badly on every front. On January 2nd, 1942, Japan captured Manila in the Philippines. On January 12th, Japan invaded Burma. Germany had aligned itself with Japan and declared war on the United States on January 25th. Japan invaded the Solomons. America was desperate to do something to slow the Axis juggernaut. President Roosevelt knew that American morale was flagging. He was interested in launching an aerial strike against Japan's home islands. Americans wanted retribution for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Military leaders wanted to demonstrate to the Japanese high command that we had the ability to reach their civilian population. In early January 1942, the Navy and the Army jointly conceived a daring plan to transport Army Air Corps B-25 twin engine bombers within striking distance of Japan by aircraft carrier. Launching such a strike from a carrier had never been tried before. The risk would be enormous. To lead the mission, chief of the Army Air Forces Henry H. "Hap" Arnold tapped one of America's most famous aviators. A man who had resigned his Army Air Corps Commission in 1930 but returned to active duty 10 years later at age 44, James H. Doolittle. Arnold wrote: "The selection of Doolittle to lead the nearly suicidal mission was a natural one. He was fearless, technically brilliant, a leader who not only could be counted upon to do a task himself if it were humanly possible, but could impart that spirit to others." Doolittle would impart that spirit to men like Tom Griffin, David Thatcher, Dick Cole, Robert Hite and 75 other members of the Army Air Corps 17th Bombardment Group. In order to execute the Doolittle Raid, one of the most daring missions in the history of aerial combat. A mission that was destined to change the outcome of World War II. I'm Gary Sinise, and this is missions that changed the War. In the third week of January 1942, "Hap" Arnold told Jimmy Doolittle that he and Navy Admiral Ernest King had decided on a target date of April 1st, 1942 for the departure of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet for Japan. The Navy's newest carrier would carry up to 20 of the Mitchell B-25s. Dick Cole eventually became Doolittle's copilot on airplane number 1. That's one of the things that I think people should remember about Colonel Doolittle. He actually assumed command of the mission on the 17th of January. You know, they had already preselected the launch date of 19 April. And during that time, he had to plan the mission, get the troops, get the airplanes, get the supplies, get them trained and so forth to to meet that 19th of April deadline, which he did in a couple days less than the 90 days in addition to that he flew the mission. Doolittle would later write. I had my verbal marching orders from Hap. And his authority to get the job done. That was all I needed. I called the assignment Special Aviation Project Number 1. After his reenlistment in the Army Air Corps, Doolittle was given exclusive use of a Curtiss P-40 Warhawk in which to fly himself to his far-flung assignments. Now, he wrote: "I took off in my P-40 for right field to lay the groundwork for the job ahead." In the Pacific Northwest, the 17th Bombardment Group had been flying submarine patrol since the attack on Pearl Harbor. It would soon learn of its rendezvous with destiny. In order to ensure that a minimum of 18 B-25s would be available for the mission to bomb Japan Doolittle requisitioned 24 of the group's planes. Volunteers for the mission would be sought from among the experienced crews assigned to those planes, the 34th, 37th, and 95th Squadrons of the 17th Bombardment Group. Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel William C. Mills and the associated 89th Reconnaissance Squadron under Major John A. Hilger, could be released most easily on February 3rd, 1942. Orders were teletyped to Pendleton Oregon to transfer without delay all planes and personnel of the 17th Bomber Group to Columbia Army Air Base in Columbia, South Carolina. Mills and Hilger were told to pass the word among the men that volunteers were being sought for an extremely hazardous mission. The base, it wasn't complete yet. We lived in tents and we were doing training missions. Because the word was that we were going to be, go from there to Africa. And when we got there, they said they were planning a very unusual dangerous raid and they wanted to warn us that it was going to be a dangerous raid and they wanted volunteers knowing that it was going to. And the whole group volunteered. I put my name on the list that there was in front of the squadron Op. On the way to to Columbia I had received my upgrade to first pilot and the pilot that upgraded me came around and want to know if we could go together as a crew. Well, we had had our flight training in B-25s and and we had heard that there was a very special mission being led by General James H. Doolittle and everybody. In in the Air Force at that time knew that James H. Doolittle was a very special pilot and had broken many records already and everybody in the 17th Bomb, we were in the 17th Bomb group wanted to go with Jimmy Doolittle. I was just on the ground crew then and I wanted to do some flying so was able to get on the crew. And it just happened to be one of the crews that have picked. Doolittle requested an air base where the selected crews could train in relative seclusion. Ideally, the base should be near water so that navigators could practice over water navigation. There should be facilities for gunnery training and an auxiliary field available where the pilots could practice short field takeoffs. Eglin Field in western Florida near Fort Walton Beach was assigned. There were all kind of theories or conjecture on what we're going to do. Most of us thought they were going to load us on an airplane, on a carrier and take us to some preselected area where we would take off and go and land at a a place and start fighting the war. I'm sure that somebody figured they were going to Japan, but I wasn't one of them, I wasn't observant or whatever you want to call it. The plan for the Doolittle raid was to recover the bombers launched from the Hornet and an airfield near Chuchow in a sector of China controlled by Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek's. Nationalist Chinese Army If the Navy could deliver the B-25 bombers within 450 miles of Japan, the mission would require them to cover approximately 1900 miles in the air. To make it to China, Doolittle needed to increase the range of the airplanes to 2100 miles. That meant extending the standard 1300 mile range of the B-25Bs flown by the Raiders by some 800 miles. Since Doolittle needed the modifications to the planes done before training began at Eglin Field, he flew his P-40 to right field in Dayton, Ohio almost immediately upon receiving responsibility for the mission there, engineers made drawings for the installation of the fuel tanks and necessary plumbing on January 22nd, 1942. He wrote a memo requesting 18 B-25B's be sent to Mid-Continent Airlines in Minneapolis, Minnesota to begin the work. They took all the air, all the weight off the airplane they could. The bottom to it was removed because we knew we'd be flying so low that no enemy fighter could get underneath us. The lower turret. On the B-25 was problematic under the best of circumstances. There was trouble with activating the system that extended and retracted the device. The attitude of the gunner and the operation of the site were difficult, making it impossible to train Gunners in time for the raid, Doolittle said: "A man could learn to play the violin good enough for Carnegie Hall before he could learn to fire that thing." The turrets were. Removed they took all the oxygen equipment out to. Lighten the airplane we wouldn't be needing that. Took most of the radio equipment out because we had to fly silent and then they replaced that bottom turret that they removed with a 60 gallon leakproof tank. That's one that a bullet will go through and then it'll self seal. Doolittle's plan was to avoid detection by flying the entire mission at extremely low altitudes. Below 10,000 feet, oxygen for the crew is not required. Therefore the oxygen systems were considered expendable for the raid. There's a crawlway between the top of the bomb bay and the top of the airplane, just enough distance in there so a person can crawl through there. They put a collapsible rubber tank in there and it held over 100 gallons. And we still had room for four or five 100 pound bombs below that tank. In addition to the auxiliary tanks installed in the airplanes, the plan called for 12 five gallon gas tanks to be handed up to the engineers just before the B-25s departed the Hornets deck for Japan. How much difference could the five gallon gas cans make? The Doolittle Raiders plan would use fuel mixture at RPM settings that minimize their fuel consumption throughout the mission. At those settings, the B-25s were likely flying a little more than 150 mph, using approximately 103 gallons of fuel each hour. At that rate of consumption, the 60 extra gallons contained in the gas cans would give the planes an additional 85 to 90 miles in the air. That flying time could well be the difference between landing in a safe haven and ditching in open water off the coast as events unfolded. For most of the Raiders, the gas cans would make the difference between life and death. The tanks added in Minnesota plus the portable gas cans would add an additional 425 gallons to the 646 gallons in the main wing tanks of each B-25, giving each of them. 1141 total gallons of fuel. It made the bombing mission and rendezvous landing in Chuchow, China possible, but with very little fuel to spare. If you stop to think about it, they were taking 16 airplanes that were used to operating maybe over a four or 500 mile range and intending to fly them off a carrier, which they were never designed to do. Fly them a long distance to bomb Japan and then fly them an even. Equally long distance to get the safe bases in China. I mean on the surface it sounds almost like what would later be called a kamikaze mission. There are many, many hazards and so the the risk was extremely high and and the risk was not only high to the pilots involved, but it's to the nation there wasn't one of them that didn't know exactly how risky it was. There was enormous risk, but there were other reasons why the Doolittle Raid was designed the way it was. Top secret reasons. To this day it is not widely understood that the US planned to launch a sea based bombing raid on the home islands of Japan in the spring of 1942. The Doolittle Raid was in fact. A multipurpose mission, the raid was one piece of a five part plan to establish a major fighting air command in the China, Burma, India Theater by mid January of 1942. The Air War Plans Division had a strategy to establish a new 10th Air Force in Burma to support the Allied effort to subdue the Japanese invaders of the Chinese mainland. This plan. To create a nucleus for a buildup of Allied air power in the theater was called Operation Aquila. Point one of Aquila called for the Doolittle B-25s and crews to be flown to Chungking following the raid, then absorbed into the 10th Air Force 35 C-40 S7s. The military designation of the DC-3 were to be provided to create an aerial supply lifeline for the new Air Force. 33 A-20 attack airplanes were to be ferried from the factory to the Chinese Air Force and the pilots assigned to the 10th Air Force. 23 heavy bombers, B-24s were to be the first long range bombers. This unit was named the Halpro Group for its commander, Colonel Harry A. Halverson. Its mission was to conduct long range strategic attacks on Japan from bases in China. Finally, 51 P-40 fighters were to be assembled in West Africa, then ferried to China for Claire Chennault's Flying Tigers. Facing the looming deadline of an April 1st departure, Doolittle realized he needed help. The aircraft needed major modifications. Targets and the flight plans to reach Japan needed to be determined. Bomb sizes and weights had to be calculated and a plan to return crews safely home after refueling and delivering the B-25s to the Chinese nationals needed finalizing. Got the necessary procurements, he got the pilots and the airplanes and got the thing organized. In the 90 days that he had to do it in, I don't think we could get that done today. One key to maintaining secrecy during the planning of the mission was for Doolittle to make all of the various arrangements on a face-to-face basis. Knowing he would be putting many hours on his personal P-40, he solicited a recommendation for a deputy commander who could oversee the training being done at Eglin Field. Major John Hilger was chosen. Hilger was described by Doolittle as a no-nonsense perfectionist. He would eventually be the pilot of the 14th B-25 on the raid. Since naval aviators had to be proficient in carrier takeoffs and landings, Major Hilger suggested a Navy flight instructor might be the right person to teach the Army pilots carrier takeoff procedures. Pensacola flight instructor Lieutenant Henry L. Miller was chosen, even though he had never seen a B-25. When Miller got to the B-25 headquarters at Egland, he met Edward "Ski" York, who would go on to pilot airplane number 8, Davy Jones who would pilot airplane number 5, and Ross Greening, the pilot of airplane number 11. Miller later recalled that the three seemed surprised when he introduced himself. "I didn't know that the whole operation was still a mystery to them" He wrote. The first thing the pilots had to learn how to get this B-25 Mitchell bomber, twin engine bomber up in the air in less than 500 feet. Now this, this was training entirely different than they'd ever been trained. They had to sit at a line with the full throttle, full brakes, full flaps, let go of them and just. Bring that plane up in the air as soon as it would get airborne. They first marked off the runway at a auxiliary field. They didn't do it. We did not make any of those fancy takeoffs at the main base because we didn't want anyone to see what we were doing. There was an auxiliary field out in a timber and they marked off the runway and distances. Of. Over 1000 feet and then down to 800 and 600 and 400 feet. And this was the distance that we were going to have on the deck of a carrier. Of course, this plane now had no gas load of any mutt. It didn't have a bomb load. It was. In other words, it was an empty plane. When we were on the carrier with the we were going to have the addition of a big wind and so forth, we hope. So they had to learn to get this plane up in the air as soon as they could. And over a period of two or three weeks practicing this, the boys learned how to get this thing up there. And it was entirely different from the training they had had on the plane flying it, entirely differently. On March 3rd, 1942, less than a month before the targeted departure date for the mission, Doolittle landed at Eglin Field and assembled the 140 men who had been assigned to the project. He came to Eglin Field after the the crews were gathered, made a speech telling us what. We would be doing. But he would not., he didn't discuss the destination or any part of it. He said it was a dangerous mission and that he was satisfied with the training that we had received and that if anybody wanted to back out, they could with no questions asked. Nobody backed out as a matter of fact when they announced. As they wanted volunteers, the whole group volunteered, including the the group commander and the fact that he was who he was, manner of speaking. He came across to you as somebody as that if he's going to lead this mission well then I wanna go because he sounds like a good leader. The first thing he emphasized to us was we were going to train for this very secret mission, and if the word got out that what we were planning on doing, we would never reach our target. That was the main thing he emphasized to us, secrecy, don't talk any place off this base, and I think our boys did a very good job of that. All through the whole thing, most of our people didn't know exactly where they were going to go. They knew that we were going to take off the deck of a carrier, but we didn't. They didn't know. There was something else The trainees from the 17th Bombardment Group did not know Doolittle. Superiors considered him too valuable to send on such a high risk mission. Jimmy Doolittle was appointed to plan the operation. He was not scheduled to fly on the Doolittle raid. Most of the dangers faced by the Doolittle Raiders were addressed through planning, adapting and training for the unexpected. However, the most immediate threat to the cruise and the mission. Was the fact that none of the pilots or crews had ever done an actual takeoff from a carrier? Deck B-25 owner and pilot Larry Kelly explains. To get airborne at 500 foot, the dual Raiders had to use especially different technique than a normal takeoff technique. Once in position, flaps fully down. Now taking off with a full flap down position gave you some advantage. It lowered the stall speed and it deflected some thrust downward to give you some lift. But flaps fully down in position, brakes lock, throttles up to full takeoff power. Watching the deck officer, and as a deck officer then gauging the pitch of the deck was signaling them to take off. Brakes will be released. They' begin to take off, roll, pull back on the yoke, raise the nose of the airplane, and at 85 mile an hour, then the airplane would start to fly away. Now the Hornet was making 24 knots in the water. That's 28 miles an hour approximately. And the storm they were in was giving them 30 knots of wind and the Hornet was steaming directly into the wind. So the 30 knots of wind was an additional 35 mile an hour, which gave them 68 miles an hour wind across the wings before they even began to take off. Now that means they only had to accelerate about 20 mile an hour to be able to fly away. Doolittle was able to get off in a 470 foot deck distance 100 foot early. But that only put them into the next immediately critical phase of flight. They had to reach safe single engine airspeed. Remember where they were taking off at 85 miles an hour indicated. Now they had to accelerate the airplane 60 mile an hour to reach a safe single engine speed. Safe single engine speed in a multi engine airplane or in a 20 engine airplane like the B-25 is that airspeed which is 145 mile an hour by which the airplane will remain controllable if you lose 1 engine. The option of the pilot if you lose 1 engine and you've not reached safe single airspeed is the reduced power and the lander ditch straight ahead. Now in the Raider situation after they had taken off at 85 mile an hour while they're accelerating to this 145 mile an hour if they lost an engine, the pilots only option was reduce power, ditch the airplane straight ahead and risk being ran over by the Hornet. Ted Lawson and Dean Davenport had an especially difficult takeoff. Ted had his flaps down full because it already completed the checklist and the prop blast coming up actually began to push him across his wet deck. Remember, they're on an aircraft carrier. Storm waters. Waves are crashing across the deck. Strong winds, 68 mile an hour wind already. So the prop blast actually started pushing him. So he raised the flaps to reduce that sail effect. The excitement of the moment Ted starts taxing up into position using his white lines. He's looking at the left and Dean's looking at the right. The flap lever is down here between. In the center, Dean didn't know the flaps were up. Ted forgot the flaps were up. He was signaled off. He began his acceleration. Now he's in a situation where he needs an additional 20 mile an hour. He's got to accelerate about 40 mph before he's going to have enough wind across the wings to be able to stay airborne. If you ever seen the famous video, they drop off the end of the deck. They almost hit the water, but he was able to slowly accelerate away and climb out. If they had not had that thirty nights of wind across the deck, they wouldn't went off the end of the deck right into the water and been ran over by the Hornet. And this was really a test of flying. To fly B-25s off a carrier was unheard of. Nobody would have contemplated it except for this emergency. And in actual fact that you you had to be pretty good pilot to get it off of been easier to have lost one or two of those airplanes on takeoff from a carrier. I mean, there's no no question that. Unless you were properly trained. And so you needed a man like Doolittle who could see all the parameters of the mission and and and then inculcate in the people following him the desire to make the mission. Though a highly experienced and decorated pilot, Jimmy Doolittle subjected himself to Lieutenant Miller's dramatic flight training regimen, he wrote. I took Hank Miller's course because I was determined to go on the mission, however. If I couldn't pass the course or wasn't as good as the younger pilots, I was going to go as a copilot. Hap Arnold, the head of the Army Air Forces, saw it otherwise, he had no intention of risking the priceless asset known as James H. Doolittle on such a dangerous mission. When Doolittle raised the possibility, Arnold replied. I'm sorry, Jim. I need you here on my staff. I can't afford to let you go on every mission you might help plan. Hap Arnold said go and see General Harmon and tell him that if he thinks you can go that it's alright with me. And at that time he ran down the hall and stuck his head in the door and I think his name was Miff Harmon, nickname. But he said Miff, Hap says that I can take the. The mission, if you think it's all right and Miff said well he's a commander. If it's alright with him, that's alright with me. Right away he started to leave and he heard the squawk box say but Hap I just told him he could go and and that's how he got to be commander of the mission. The kid on a bicycle who used to watch the Great Doolittle test flying airplanes in Dayton, Ohio explains how he became his copilot on this legendary mission. Midway through our training, the pilot that we were with became ill and had to drop out. The crew and I talked it over and. They diplomatically elected me to go and talk to the operations officer like you. You go, which I did. The operations officer was the Captain "Ski" York. He said, Well, the old man is coming in this afternoon. I'll cool you up with him and if you do okay well you got yourself a job. I thought that. I had not heard a captain talk about his commanding officer by calling him the old man. And I thought, well, maybe that's not such a good idea. Now we get to fly with an old man, and it turned out to be Colonel Doolittle. Dwight D. Eisenhower said in preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless but planning. Is indispensable, in planning an operation that had never before been attempted. Countless problems were envisioned, and creative, sometimes brilliant, solutions for them abounded. Two such solutions came from the inventor and artist who became the pilot of Airplane number 11, Captain Charles Ross Greening of Carroll, Iowa. Greening called his first brainchild the Mark Twain bombsight. It was a device he feared might be rejected because it was so simple. The B-25s slated for the Doolittle raid were outfitted with the expensive and highly classified Norden bombsight, such as the one shown on this B-17 Flying Fortress. However, the Norden was designed to be highly effective at altitudes of 4000 feet or above. The Doolittle raid plan called for the bombs to be dropped at altitudes of 1500 feet or lower. Ross Greening later recalled. I set about designing a new bombsight specifically for this mission, one that could be effective at altitudes of 100 to 1500 feet. Using scrap metal and the shops at Eglin Field, Greening made this simple sight. As long as the Bombardier knew the altitude and airspeed of the plane, he could compute the angle at which the siding bar should be set. When the target passed, the line of sight, bombs were released. For low altitude bombing, greening site proved to be more accurate than the Norden bomb site. At the time, Norden bombsights cost over $10,000 apiece. The materials for the Mark Twain sight cost about $0.20 each. All of the Doolittle bombers were refitted. The B-25s of 1942 were woefully short of defensive armament. They were equipped with highly unsatisfactory top and bottom turrets, both of which contained 50 caliber machine guns. The decision had already been made to refit the bottom turret of the Doolittle Raid airplanes with an auxiliary fuel tank. The nose contained a single 30 caliber machine gun that the Bombardier had to move from one gun port to another. The tail was completely unprotected. The ingenious Captain Greening had another. Idea Doolittle put it this way. Much credit must go to Ross Greening for solving our armament problems. He suggested we installed 2 broomsticks in the tail and paint them black to simulate a tail gun position which would hopefully detour attacks from the rear. I approved so this critical mission which required 16 V-25s, 2 aircraft carriers, 8 destroyers, 4 cruisers and two Oilers. Was now highly dependent on 20 cent bomb sites and tail sections bristling with 50 caliber broomsticks less than a month before the Doolittle Raiders were going to board the Hornet. The maps that the crews would require and the identifying of the targets in Japan remain to be done. Tom Griffin was the navigator on airplane number 9. It just happened that I got a bit of a break. I guess you'd say. Another fellow named Davy Jones and I in early February were sent up to Washington, DC to work with Air Force Intelligence. Now that we worked with two men there, they changed the lock on the door and they were told to just cooperate with us, get what we were asking for and don't ask any questions. So we spent about 10 days getting all the maps and charts. Of Japan and China that 20 crews were going to need and we had to know the exact location of potential military and and industrial targets that we might use so we could know just where to send our boys. Davy Jones and I created these, all this information, these maps and charts and things, and and it happened that Jimmy Doolittle flew into Washington, DC that day. Picked us up and we flew down to Eglin Field with our our box full of all this secret information that we were going to disseminate on a carrier later. There was one facet of the planned raid that was seemingly beyond Jimmy Doolittle's control the plan to recover the bombers and their crews in China. The plan was that a plane was to come from Chongqing the headquarters of the Chinese and land at a field called Chuchow. With the sufficient gas to gas our planes up so we could take off and fly into interior China. The political and military conditions in China were such that Hap Arnold did not believe he could share the full details of the Doolittle raid plan with anyone in the country without compromising the mission. Well, there was a great reluctance by Colonel Doolittle and the. Air staff members that knew about it and the Navy officers that knew about the what they were hoping to do to communicate to anybody in China because they felt that they couldn't be trusted, that there were too many ears and eyes listening and looking. And what goes went on over there, especially on Chiang Kai Shek's staff. And so they decided to keep it as secret as possible. But to make requests for information or for for, for example, having gas available for the aircraft to refuel and refuel when they got to China, and also to have a a beacon place that the two or three of the bases and so that they could home in on it. The aircraft, when they reached the Chinese coast, could home in on radio beacons to find the airport. Where they could land and be refueled and then proceed to Chongqing which was the ultimate destination. On March 25th, Hap Arnold sent General Joseph E. Stilwell, the ranking American officer in China, a message specifying the stocks of fuel that would be needed and the airfields where they should be available. Stilwell responded that, according to the Chinese, Huei Lin and Chuchow were the only field safe enough for heavy bomber operations. Doolittle later wrote: "I was not too worried about the apparent misunderstandings in China. I thought any problems would be worked out by the time we left the carrier." However, what would eventually befall to B-25s that made it to China would bear little resemblance to the plan Doolittle believed to be in place when the bombers left the Hornet in the third week of March. Navy Admiral Nimitz's staff wired a message to Washington that contained a prearranged code phrase tell Jimmy to get on his horse. Those seven words meant it was time for the planes and crews to leave Eglin Field, Florida for the Air Depot at Sacramento for the last minute checks on each airplane before flying on to San Francisco to be loaded aboard the Hornet on the morning of March 23rd. Jimmy Doolittle called all the crews together and told them to get ready to move out. Those who would not be going on the mission were sent back to Columbia with this admonition from Doolittle. Don't tell anyone what you were doing here at Eglin. Not your family, your wives, anybody. The lives of your buddies and a lot of other people depend on you keeping everything you saw and did hear a secret. twenty-two airplanes and flight crews had been ready for the mission. Every man who trained to fly the mission was going aboard the Hornet for backup sake and to ensure the security of the mission. In effect, the flight from Eglin Air Force Base in Florida West to the Air Depot at Sacramento, California was the first leg on the Raiders ultimate journey to Japan. Sacramento was supposed to be a routine stop for minor adjustments and last minute maintenance, but it turned out to be an experience that Jimmy Doolittle reduced to just five letters at Seattle. The mishandling of the precisely tuned B-25s and the slow pace of the work caused Doolittle to call Washington. He refused to talk to anyone but Hap Arnold, though Arnold intervened the stop in Seattle. Likely caused one B-25 to burn excessive amounts of fuel. Its crew had to make an unplanned landing in Russia, where they were imprisoned. On April 8th, the Enterprise and its task force under the command of Admiral William Bull Halsey would depart Pearl Harbor for an April 12th rendezvous with a Hornet in the Pacific at latitude 38 degrees zero minutes north and longitude 180 degrees zero minutes. From there They would try to steam through 1500 treacherous miles of enemy controlled waters to get within 450 miles of Japan. Perhaps it was the men of the Doolittle Raid Admiral Halsey was thinking about when he later wrote; There are no great men, only challenges that ordinary men are forced by circumstances to meet. At the time of all this Action took place we were 650 miles and having to launch early. Right away, our field became a problem. And our best calculations were that after about five hours, we were going to run out of gas and we were going to be short of China by about 100 to 150 mile. So I think all of the planes made some kind of a decision. In our plane, we thought, well, we're going to be running out of gas. If we see a ship, we'll ditch next to it and they'll take us aboard. And if it's a friendly ship, fine, we'll sail off with them. If it's an unfriendly ship, we each had 45s, and we'll pull out our 45s to take over the ship. I was in the back of the airplane. The other four fellows were in the front. They were all thrown out to the nose. The pilot and Co pilot was still strapped to their armor, planted seats when they came to in the water. I was knocked unconscious for a little while in the back and sort of came to and and got seawater running in what I thought was the bottom of the airplane. Well I finally realized the airplane was upside down. I never believed that it would be possible for a guy to live on rice, but you know. You can live on rice.(chuckles) I didn't think it was possible. I think they were very scared. They tortured them brutally. They would take iron rods and put them behind the break of the knee and then they would jump on the thighs and which caused, you know, obviously a great deal of pain. Outside there was a lot of wind, rain and lightning and you were going to have to go through that hole into a foreign country than having any idea where you were or anything about it. So maybe that was the the scariest time. On January 17th, 1942, Chief of U.S. Army Air Forces Henry H. Hap Arnold assigned the responsibility for one of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's highest military priorities, A payback attack on the Japanese home islands to one of the most famous aviators in history, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, in a mere 66 days Doolittle had identified the airplanes that could be modified to launch a carrier based attack some 450 miles from Japan. Had assembled the volunteer crews. Modified the Mitchell B-25s to give them the range to reach a safe haven in Free China after the raid and accomplish the mapping and charting the crews would require. Now, on March 23rd, 1942, Doolittle assembled the men who had been training for the mission at their training base near Fort Walton Beach, Florida. It was time to fly the planes West to the Sacramento, CA Air depot for final adjustments, as he had before Doolittle offered any man who wanted to the ability to leave the highly dangerous mission without recrimination. None did. You don't take off on a mission like this without a light at the end of the tunnel. We all thought that somehow we'd get out of it. Well, in the training in Florida we were always flying just above the water all the time. Right down over the over the river valleys and between the trees and then we hedge hopped all the way across the United States to Alameda that down as low as we could fly. Yeah, I think Bill asked me if I would go as his copilot and I said, well, of course. Somewhere along the line they interject the thing that was a suicide mission. I don't think it was any more of a suicide mission than the guys taking off from England going over to Germany. It was just the signs of the times and that's the way it had to be. And that's the way it was, and that's the way it was accepted. I'm Gary Sinise, and this is Missions That Changed the War. The Doolittle Raider B-25 began arriving at McClellan Army Airfield in Sacramento early in the last week of March 1942. They were already highly modified and carefully tuned aircraft. Doolittle arrived at the Air Depot on March 26th. He made it clear that no one was to tamper with or remove anything from any aircraft. There were specific tasks to be performed by the civilian personnel at the depot. New propellers were to be installed. 60 gallon gas tanks not already installed were to be fitted where the lower turrets had been removed. New covers had to be fitted for the Bomb bay auxiliary tanks. New glass navigation windows were to replace the plexiglass type. Doolittle smelled trouble almost immediately, he wrote. Despite my pleading, the civilian maintenance crews went about their assignments at a leisurely pace. This, naturally, made me very angry. I told my crews to stay with their planes and watch the work being done. Ted Lawson was the pilot of Raider Airplane Number 7. In his now famous book, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, he wrote. All of us were so afraid that they'd hurt the ships the way they were handling them. Yet we couldn't tell them why we wanted them to be so careful. Yet we all kept beefy until Doolittle got on the long distance phone, called Washington and had the work done the way we wanted it done. Then he called General Arnold in Washington and told them, in effect, build a fire to these guys for me because they're not answering my feelings for urgency. And well, they got the message from General Arnold directly and the but it looks as though one, at least one aircraft, the one that went to Russia, was the one that had the difficulty with carburetors. The technician that was checking it says these things are way out of whack. They're too, they're too lean and they've got to be enriched. And so they he changed them. And that, apparently, is the airplane that had to go to Russia because of fuel overburn. On March 30th, just two days before the Raiders were due aboard the Hornet, Doolittle said he would be going into San Francisco to have dinner with his wife, Joe. She had been in Los Angeles visiting her ill father. Coincidentally, Doolittle had also received a message to meet that evening with Admiral William Halsey. Halsey recalled, "Our talk boiled down to this" We would carry Jimmy within 400 miles of Tokyo if we could move in that close, but if we were discovered sooner, we would have to launch him anyway, provided he was in reach of either Tokyo or Midway. With a word from General Arnold, the pace of the work of the Sacramento Air Depot picked up, but when an exasperated Doolittle was ready to depart for Alameda to put the planes aboard the USS Hornet, a maintenance officer presented him with a form for evaluating the work that had been done. Doolittle hastily scrawled the word lousy across it and stomped off for his B-25. The young officer turned to Doolittle, second in command Jack Hilger, and shouted Who does that guy think he is? He's heading for a lot of trouble. He sure is, Hilger answered. He sure is. Doolittle had originally requisition 24 B-25s for the mission. Two had fallen by the wayside during training at Eglin Field. 22 airplanes were now bound for the dock at Alameda to be loaded aboard the Hornet, but the room on the deck only allowed for 16 planes to take off. Doolittle had decisions to make. It was interesting how he did that as each pilot taxied Is playing up to Doolittle Standing, the boss would shout up to the pilot: "Is everything Okay with your plane"? and not knowing what an important question this was. If the man says well my left engine is a little rough that's all it took and that's how they eliminated four planes. Now the crews themselves were put on the carrier with us and went across the ocean with the probably first for security reasons. But actually, as we went across the Pacific, Doolittle had the pos, the ability to make some personnel changes that he would have liked to have made and wouldn't have been able to made without these extra crews. On our way to Alameda, our plane flew under the Oakland Bay Bridge and flew got to Alameda and looked down those aircraft carrier there with five or six airplanes on the deck. So we landed. Taxied right up to the dock right beside the carrier and he used three eyebolts to screw into the top of the airplane and then use that to hoist the airplane up on the deck of the carrier. And I had to be in the pilots compartment to set the brakes when they sat down on the deck of the carrier. So I didn't walk aboard the carrier. I didn't walk off out either. Well, as the number of airplanes took up more than more of the deck, it became very apprehensive on how much of the deck was left for us to take off from. But we had taken off from a dry runway in the same distance, fully loaded at Eglin and in the actual take off we had the carrier speed wind, we had the natural wind and I think most of us were pretty confident we could get off. As a matter of fact, Carl Dolittle wrotie in his final report that a night take off would have been possible. On April 1st, 1942, the men of the Doolittle Raid walked aboard the Hornet. Waiting for them on the ship was the Navy pilot who had trained them on short field takeoff techniques at Eglin Field, Bill Miller. I was proud of those fellas that day, Miller recalled. As each man came aboard, he saluted the national Ensign and then the officer of the deck and said Sergeant or Lieutenant or captain reporting for duty, Sir. At 3:00 PM on April 1st, the Hornet unmoored from the dock in Alameda and moved to birth Number 9 in San Francisco Bay. The Doolittle Raiders were getting settled aboard the ship. Well, they've treated us pretty well. We didn't. I was enlisted, man. So they. We didn't have to sleep in the hammocks, They let us sleep in the bunks. Doolittle called the Raiders together. After a brief lecture on security, he surprised them by letting them go ashore for the evening. We were told that we could go in the Doolittle Raider boys and spend an evening in San Francisco and to meet a boat which would pick them up the next morning at a certain Wharf and take us back out to the carrier. So we were very happy about that. And we later learned that the boss, Jimmy Doolittle, went into town and met with Bull Halsey, who had flown in from Hawaii. Halsey was going to be in command of the two carriers and for the street of our whole task force. From venues like the Top of the Mark, In the Mark Hopkins Hotel, the Raiders could look down and see their B-25s poised for this top secret mission in the middle of San Francisco Bay. The cover story had been put out that the planes were being taken to Hawaii. The Raiders might not have known exactly what they were headed for, but they were reasonably sure it was not Waikiki Beach. The aircraft carrier Hornet steamed out of San Francisco Bay on April 2nd, 1942. With 16 U.S. Army B-25 Mitchell bombers on her flight deck and all 22 bomber crews on board. I had never seen a carrier before and I was really surprised by the size of the thing. Two cruisers and four destroyers, whose job was to protect the vulnerable and valuable carrier, accompanied the Hornet. The task force also included an oiler, a floating gas station that would refuel the flotilla in Mid Pacific as the Hornet cleared Port. Doolittle. Call the Army crews together. He told them for the first time where they were going and what they were going to do. He told them that their chances of getting back to the States were pretty slim and that any crew member who wanted to withdraw could do so. No one did. The Hornet was America's newest aircraft carrier and her crew was as green as green apples. But they were eager for action. Their skipper, Captain Pete Mitcher, had ordered the words Remember Pearl Harbor painted on the Hornets smokestack. When we first got on the carrier and told in San Francisco Bay, we were very tight lipped. We had been told of course, don't tell anybody anything. Now here we were getting on this nice brand new carrier and these Navy boys were naturally very curious. They wanted to know what this was all about and where we were going. And we of course wouldn't tell them. We had strict orders not to tell them. And they were very unhappy with us. I think most of them thought that this brand new carrier was going to be used to transport a bunch of Army boys in their planes to probably Hawaii. They didn't like the idea at all. On April 4, two days after the task force left San Francisco, the bosun's whistle sounded aboard the Hornet, and Captain Mitcher made an announcement over the ship's loudspeakers. Now hear this. The target of this task force is Tokyo. The Army is going to bomb Japan, and we're going to get them as close to the enemy as we can. This is a chance for all of us to give the Japs A dose of their own medicine. Mitcher's message was sent simultaneously by semaphore Morse code to the rest of the task force. There was wild cheering on every ship. And from that time on, the Navy and we got along very well, they were the big chair went up and they were of course very happy to hear what we were going to do. And it was they got so friendly then that they invited us into their poker games. And most of the Doolittle Raiders took off 18 days later. Flat broke. We left our money with the Navy Boys. Doolittle's crews had plenty of things to keep them busy. The army bombers were not built for ocean duty and the salt air caused all kinds of problems. Spark plugs, generators and hydraulics failed, fuel tanks leaked, one engine had to be completely overhauled and there were continuing problems with the gun turrets. Well, we went up on on deck every day to check the airplane. You've seen pictures of how the airplanes are tied down on the deck and the the salt air would tighten those ropes up, had to make make sure they weren't too tight, but then when the...it got dry then they'd loosen up, so had to check that all the time and every few days they'd have to take those covers off the engines to run them up, make sure they were running all right and they had those covers on there to try and keep us all there. We get to the engines. In the evenings, the bomber crews explored the ship, read books, listened to records, ate ice cream in the ship's mess. The rest of the time we go up on deck we could... to exercise we'd run the whole circle of the deck and up and down those stairs. There's a lot of stairs on a carrier. Most of the army crews had never been to sea before, and several of them were seasick for most of the voyage. On April 8th, the aircraft carrier Enterprise steamed out of Pearl Harbor to rendezvous with a Hornet. Admiral William Bull Halsey commanded the Enterprise. Two cruisers, four destroyers and an oiler accompanied it as well. Enterprise and Hornet would rendezvous in mid Pacific. From then on, airplanes from the Enterprise would provide defensive air cover for the combined task force as it steamed for Japan. On board the Hornet, the sailors were edgy. They knew that a single Japanese submarine, a Japanese battleship or a Japanese carrier task force could put their precious Hornet in jeopardy. The original plan was if we ran into an enemy task force out there and we were within flying distance of foyer, we're supposed to take off immediately so the the Hornets air, the carrier could get his airplane there. Or if we were within distance of Midway, I think it was we could we could do that, or if we were in within distance of Japan would take off and fly there. If not, then they were going to push the airplanes overboard so that Hornets get to get this airplane in the air. I think this is one of the things that's often missed is the value of the Hornet at the time was just unimaginable to the Navy because we were had had Pearl Harbor where our fleet was gone and we were down to a very, very few aircraft carriers and to risk one on a mission like this was just really significant. On April 9th, The day before the Hornet and Enterprise joined up, Allied Ground Forces fighting on the Bataan Peninsula in the Philippines surrendered to the Japanese army. The next day, 76,000 American and filipino prisoners of war began a 60 mile weeklong forced March that would leave 12,000 dead from starvation, thirst and Japanese brutality. It would be known as the Bataan Death March. As the combined task force made its way toward Japan, Doolittle's B-25 crews were kept busy, but they still had plenty of time to think about the mission that lay ahead. It was not a suicide mission in the sense that everybody knew they were going to be lost, that it was there was a one way trip for them. None of them ever felt that way. As far as I know. They were following their leader and that leader. If he could do it, we could do it, and that's why he was in the number one airplane. No, it was. We did not consider a suicide mission later as we as we had to take off 250 miles earlier than we had planned and things didn't look so good. We thought, well, this is going to be pretty rough, but I think you more or less always feel sorry for this other guy. He's going to get it, but I'm going to get through this somehow and you don't take off on a mission like this without a light at the end of the tunnel. We all thought that somehow we'd get out of it. Halsey's task force and the entire mission, was in much greater danger than anyone imagined. The Japanese Navy had intercepted a radio message on April 10th that they knew Halsey was heading east toward Japan. With two carrier groups, they began planning the destruction of the American carriers. But the Japanese did not envision the Americans putting bombers on an aircraft carrier. They believe the planes to be Navy fighters, planes that would have to launch within 300 miles of Japan in order to reach the islands. They thought the Americans would be close enough to attack by April 14th. They prepared to strike Halsey's task force with landbased bombers 600 miles from Tokyo, then to follow up with torpedo planes. Sinking the American carrier groups would complete the destruction of America's Pacific Fleet. But there were no more radio intercepts, and bad weather kept Halsey ships hidden from the Japanese. When April 14th, the expected invasion date came and went, Japanese officials relaxed and assumed Halsey was headed somewhere else. At 3:00 in the morning on April 18th, radar on the Enterprise picked up two small ships about 12 miles ahead. They were part of an early warning network ringing the Japanese islands. The task force went into full alert and changed course to avoid being seen at 03:40. Enterprise signaled all clear. Four hours later, a lookout on the Hornet cited another enemy boat. Soon after, Hornet's radio operator intercepted a message in Japanese. Halsey's task force had been spotted. April 18th, 1942 dawned bright and clear in Tokyo. Officials prepared for a civil defense drill to be held later that morning, but no one believed that American bombers could reach Japan. And most people just went about their business. The early in the morning our task force went between two Japanese picket ships 650 miles out. They actually they were fishing vessels equipped with radios to report just the sort of thing they saw that morning, two carriers and four cruisers heading for Japan. And before they were sunk, our people realized that they had been able to radio into the main islands of Japan that this task force was heading for you. Halsey wrote. Although we were 600 miles from Tokyo instead of the 400. That we had hoped for the fact that our task force had been reported left me no choice. At 0:800, I sent Pete Mitcher a signal "launch planes" and to Colonel Doolittle and his gallant command good luck and God bless you. Halsey ordered the cruiser Nashville to sink the Japanese picket ship the Nitto Maru. In rough seas. Nashville's crew fired 924 six inch shells, but scored just one hit on the picket boat. The Japanese raised a white flag and their ship promptly sank. Early in the morning, most of us were probably below deck. We could hear that the guns going out. And it almost immediately it seemed like they announced a little speaker that army pilots man your planes, so they had to pack up our bag and get up to the airplane as soon as possible. Like everybody else, it was around I think 6:00, o'clock. When we got up, some of us were down and having breakfast the first real notification was when the Nashville opened up on the Nitto Maru. I for one want to make sure that I arrived at the airplane before the Colonel Dolittle. Well, I was the 2nd Lieutenant and he was Lieutenant Colonel and I didn't want to get the verbally lambasted for being late. And the other thing is that I wanted to get up in the airplane and go through the checklist and have a lot of the things that I could do that he wouldn't have to worry about. We're pretty much in take off position when Colonel Dolittle came. Doolittle called all the crews on deck and went over their instructions one more time. He offered the men one more chance to step down. There were no takers. Several backup crew members begged for a chance to take someone's place on the Mission again. No takers. One of the backup pilots did find a place on the Mission. Robert Heights plane had been left behind at Alameda in San Francisco. I always thought that Dad was copilot of plane 16. Well, originally he was pilot of one of the four planes that couldn't fit on the on the aircraft carrier and that Bill Farrow didn't apparently didn't get along with his co-pilot or his co-pilot decided that he didn't want to go, and Bill came and and asked my father to fly with him. Robert Hite, co-pilot of plane number 16, would be captured by the Japanese and would spend three and a half years in captivity. Mitcher turned the Hornet directly into the wind and ordered full speed ahead. Well the the weather was the ocean was very, very rough. The water was coming up over the deck of the carrier. Launching early meant the planes would have farther to go and need more fuel, but their fuel tanks were already full. After I got in the airplane, they handed me up a a dozen five gallon cans of gasoline. Then before we got to Japan, they used the gasoline out of that turret tank first. Then I was able to dump the gasoline out of the wasn't a dozen cans into the turret tank. Then it cut a... used of crash ax to cut a hole in each end of the empty cans and I kicked him out the window. I did that so they would sink immediately instead of leaving a trail across the ocean from the direction we'd come. Doolittle's plane was the first to take off. It was at the start line. Brakes locked, engines running at 8:20 that morning. The Navy signalman was twirling his flag to give him the signal to when to take off. They'd run the engines up full power, and the signalman could tell from the sound of the engines when they were at full power. So then when the bow of the carrier was at the lowest spot closest to the water, he he dropped, dropped to the deck and and flung our flag forward. And that's when they're supposed to start rolling. Then by the time the airplane got to the end of the bow or the top of the bow, The carrier... the bow the carrier was as far as from the waters could be so that given them that much distance between the water and bow the carrier. I was in plane number 9. There was a probably 200 feet or more of clear deck ahead of us, but each one of us were pulled up to that same line. We all had 400 feet to take off, and one reason that they did that was because. our right wing tip just missed the island by about 6 feet, and our left wheel then was about 6 feet from the edge of the carrier deck. So if we veered to the right or left in a longer takeoff run we might hit the right wing or the left or the left wheel overboard. So we all took off from the same place and we all got airborne as as planned. And it was it was a little exciting at first, but plane number 9 that I was on by the time it was our turn, we were feeling pretty brave about the whole thing. Eight planes had successfully negotiated the takeoff ahead of us. But I would bet that the top the average flight time for the pilots on the on the mission was probably about $500.00 and in the B-25 maybe $100.00. So it was they were, by a modern standards, terribly under trained. But by their standards, they were good. They were proficient, they could fly instruments, they could fly formation. And they they knew the nature of the mission. I think that all of them went in knowing exactly what was at risk. Their lives were at risk, but it was worth it. It was the mission they were assigned to do. In his autobiography, Admiral Halsey wrote the wind and sea were so strong that morning that green water was breaking over the carrier's ramps. Jimmy led his squadron off. When his plane buzzed down the Hornet's deck at 08:25, there wasn't a man topside in the task force who didn't help sweat him into the air. One pilot hung on the brink of a stall until we nearly catalogued his effects, but the last of the 16 was airborne by 09:24, and a minute later my staff duty officer was writing in the flight Log. Commencing retirement from the area at 25 knots. Here Let me say that in my opinion, their flight was one of the most courageous deeds in all military history. When the aircraft carrier Hornet turned into the westerly wind to launch the bombers, it pointed almost. Directly at Tokyo Bay. Now each plane went in on its own. It took takes gas and and time to to form a formation. So each plane was on its own. We didn't have gas to waste and and getting together in formation. So we were about four or five minutes apart. Which meant that in most cases we never saw another B-25 on that day and well, when we took off 650 miles out. There was a solid overcast and high winds, and as we proceeded towards Japan, about two hours all that cleared up and we had a nice sunny day for the rest of the day. Way into late afternoon it was nice and sunny, so we got a big break there, but we went in right on the deck so the radar couldn't pick us up so easily. Flying inbound to to Japan, they they were had no idea of what the Japanese intercept. capabilities were. They knew that they had been detected and so they were obviously cautious the the technique would be to fly low and fast, but the faster you go, the more fuel you use. So they had to compromise in in their cruise control techniques to to fly at a reasonable speed to get them and get them over Japan and subsequently over China. I think that the average pilot flying it was probably exhilarated because it's it's fun to fly at relatively low levels. And the average copilot was probably concerned A) that he wasn't getting enough stick time and and B) that he had to make sure that the engines weren't getting too hot because he's running the mixtures too late. The mixture is extremely important when you're trying to get mileage out of your airplane. You're not caring, you don't care anymore about speed. Particularly you're caring about getting a distance out of the engines. So they all practice cruise control in that sense. The fuel situation was made even worse by the additional fuel tanks, one in the belly and one over the Bomb bay of each bomber. The tanks had been poorly designed and poorly built, and they leaked from every corner and from every connection on every one of the 16 planes. Fuel critical to the mission was leaking away. Once they were off the carrier, the crews faced about three and a half hours of flying time to Japan. They were barely flying 150 to 160 mph just above stall speed. They were flying 15 to 30 feet off the water. As the excitement of the launch wore off, they thought about the mission ahead. Most of the crews agreed that they didn't have enough fuel to reach China Aboard Plane number 9, navigator Tom Griffin calculated just how far their fuel would take them. And our best calculations were that after about five hours we were going to run out of gas and we were going to be short of China by about 100 to 150 miles. So I think all of the planes made some kind of a decision in our plane, we thought, well, we're going to be running out of gas. If we see a ship, we'll ditch next to it and they'll take us aboard. And if it's a friendly ship, fine, we'll sail off with them if it's an unfriendly ship. We each had 45s and we'll pull out our 45s to take over the ship. Those... you have to have a light at the end of the tunnel and that was the light we had. Spread out over some 500 square miles of open ocean, the 16 bombers were heading for targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuku, Nagoya and Kobe. The Japanese people had been told that they were invulnerable. Months of victories had demonstrated that destiny, the gods, and military might were on the side of the emperor. Above all, they believed their homeland was safe from attack. Sixteen American planes and 80 brave men were about to prove otherwise. Dick Cole was the co-pilot of plane number One, which was piloted by Colonel Doolittle. We launched at about 8:20 in the morning and it put us over Tokyo at right around noon, we shored into Japan about 20 miles north. We could see Tokyo Bay, and we turned South and took us on a course over Tokyo, east of the Imperial Palace. We had incendiary bombs and the reason was that since we were supposed to launch at dusk on the 19th, arrive over Tokyo, drop the incendiary bombs and light up Tokyo so that it would cause a big fire. Also it would give the following airplanes a some kind of a reference. To where they're wanted to go, but having the launch early put us over Tokyo in the middle of the day on the 18th. Couple of things that may have helped us. The Japanese had just practiced an air raid exercise and they had a bomber called the Betty that had two tails and for the first airplane. We feel that a lot of the people on the ground thought it was one of their airplane when they saw the B-25 because we were not jumped by any other airplane. We flew low level till Fred Braemer recognized from photographs that they had given us on the carrier. At that time Colonel Doolittle pulled up to 1500 feet and we dropped our incendiary bomb and immediately went back down on the deck. The ack ack opened up on us and it was pretty intense but was not accurate. Of the 16 Mitchell bombers, only two made landfall where they expected. Inaccurate compasses, overcast skies and a 40 knot headwind made accurate navigation impossible Once the planes were over Japan. All 16 navigators were able to lead their planes to their targets, but getting lost even briefly burned precious fuel and the Japanese knew they were coming. Picket boats guarding the coast and patrol planes sent out the search for the Nitto Meru had spotted the inbound Raiders several 100 miles out. When we were over Tokyo, we had counted 37 airplanes above us and they did not see us. Civilians who saw the Mitchells mistook them for Japanese planes. The morning air raid drill had been ignored by most of the populace and they assumed that the low flying bombers were just part of the exercise. As we came over the coast, wit was Saturday, right at noon. Beautiful day. There were a lot of people on the beach. They were waving to us and and I, WE were flying so lo. I can see the expression on their faces. They were cheering. I'm sure they thought we were dropping the airplanes. We followed the Japanese coast all the way South West until we got to the tip of Japan and then headed West to China. Plane number 8, still burning too much fuel, hit its target, a factory north of Tokyo. As they speed away on the deck, pilot "Ski" York, copilot Robert Emmens and navigator Nolan Herndon discuss their options. The Russian city of Vladivostok was 600 miles north. Although Doolittle had ordered that no one land in Russia, the crew of Plane number 8 felt they had little choice. York turned the bomber North. And when we got over the city of Tokyo itself, we went in at rooftop level till we got to what we call our initial point where we pulled up to 1500 feet to make our bombing run on our assigned target. Plane number 9 happened to just fly right over Hirohita's house at about 50 feet. And then we proceeded down to the northern section of Tokyo Bay and headed across to bomb our target, Which was a factory in the Kawasaki district of Tokyo making tanks and we made our bomb run. The Bombardier in the nose and the top turret gunner could see what our bombs did. The pilot Co pilot and I couldn't tell, so we had to take their word for it. But they said that we really flattened that target. There was Flack in the sky everywhere and there were Japanese zeros flying around. And we went in right at rooftop level, which made it very difficult for them to attack us. And they had Flack towers and they had to depress their guns to shoot at our people. And I actually saw their shells exploding in the street as as we went across the city as they were shooting at us. Despite clouds of antiaircraft fire and swarms of Japanese fighter planes, all 16 Mitchell's hit their targets and raced away undamaged. Getting lost on the way in had an unexpected benefit. The bombers hit Tokyo from every possible direction, and the Japanese defenses were thrown into chaos. 15 Mitchell's and their crews now headed for China across the China Sea. Most of them doubted that their remaining fuel would get them there. Behind them, Tokyo burned, Admiral Halsey later wrote:" We had our radios tuned to Tokyo. One of their glibest liars came on and began describing in English the wonders of life in Japan, of all the warring countries in the world". He said "Japan alone was free from enemy attack. It would continue so". Indeed, Japan was blessed among nations, and right there we heard the air raid sirens Jimmy's. boys had arrived. We were captured by the Japanese and they carried us back to Japan and and so they gave us court martials and all of that. And they condemned us to death and then they decide to let us live. They executed three of the pilots and so that left the rest of us with the with the possibility that we could be later on could be executed anytime. So I kept walking and it dust I came out on a Cliff. And down below I saw a little cantonment of a couple of buildings that had a Chinese Nationalist flag flying up above. On the table was a sketch of a on a piece of paper of a two tailed airplane with five parachutes coming out of it. And the pilot had a deep gash in his left leg and one in his left arm. And most of his teeth have been knocked out. The copilot had a a gash in his right right leg, and I had used the had to get you some old dirty rags to try to close up the cuts on the the other wounds. So when we knew we were over the the rim of the China, we pulled up to 11,000 feet or 10,000 to clear any mountains in that part of China. And then as we ran out of gas, we just bailed out. By the time we got up there going into China, we could not let down. It was night time. We were in a big storm and there are mountains below us. So all we could do was to head into that storm, run out of gas and bail out. That's what 11...55 men bailed out of 11 planes. On April 18th, 1942, just 132 days after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Tokyo was burning. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon when the first B-25 flown by the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders dropped its first bomb. The Japanese high command and the civilian population was caught off guard. As the Raiders approached the coast of Japan they saw smiling civilians waving at them from fishing boats, beaches and baseball parks. They were so convinced their island home was beyond the reach of the Allied bombers, they didn't imagine that danger was imminent, even though U.S. Army Air Corps bombers were screaming overhead just above the treetops. It was one of the most brilliantly conceived operations in aerial combat history. All 16 Mitchell B-25s found their intended targets and delivered their payloads. What the enemy did not know was the Doolittle Raiders were nearly 12 hours and 250 miles early for their rendezvous with history. The USS Hornet and the B-25s had been spotted much farther out than their planned launch distance. eEarly this morning, 80 Doolittle Raiders had scrambled aboard their airplanes knowing they did not have adequate fuel capacity to reach any safe haven. It was an act of valor rarely matched in modern military history. Before it was over, a despondent Jimmy Doolittle, not knowing the location or the fate of his gallant crews, would sit atop the wreckage of his airplane and predict his own court martial. He didn't know the raid he had led would play a pivotal role in turning the tide of events in the Pacific in favor of the Allies. That he had, in fact, just completed a mission that would change the war. I'm Gary Sinise, and this is missions that changed the war. tewnty-seven year old Richard Cole was seated in the copilot seat of Doolittle Raider B-25 number one. As a young boy in Dayton, Ohio, he used to ride his bicycle to a levee above McCook Army Airfield. To watch the legendary pilots of the Army Air Service test flying the leading edge airplanes of the day. One of those pilots was James H Doolittle. Now Doolittle was seated inches away on Dick Cole's left as they lowered their bomber down to rooftop level in Tokyo's western suburbs. They had hit their targets and were hightailing it for a planned landing field in eastern China near Chu Chow. We flew low level till Fred Braemer recognized from photographs that they had given us on the carrier at that time Colonel Doolittle pulled up to 1500 feet and we dropped our incendiary bomb and immediately went back down on the deck. The Ack Ack opened up on us and it was pretty intense but was not accurate. We flew maybe 100 miles South at lower level and not wanting to turn toward China and alert them over the possibility that they would recognize where we were going. And we we turned on a southwest heading and flew open water just strictly by magnetic navigation. But they had been bucking headwinds since they had left the carrier with the extra distance they had been forced to fly, they did not have the gas to make landfall. Then the weather began to change. It had been severe clear over Tokyo, but now the ceiling was dropping and the wind was swirling. By the time they reached Yakushima on Japan's western coast, visibility was down to 600 feet. The bad news was night was falling and they were in a serious storm. The good news was the headwind was now a 25 mile per hour tailwind. It just might provide enough push to get them to the China coast. Tom Griffin was the navigator in the airplane number 9. Now according to the anticipated wind, we were going to have a headwind, which was the normal wind at that time of the year, in particular across the China Sea. And our best calculations were that after about five hours, we were going to run out of gas and we were going to be short of China by about 100 to 150 miles. And there was another bigger problem. There was supposed to be a portable homing station there so we could use our radio compass and arrive their land and gas up and fly on into western China. But the fact that we arrived when we did, in the middle of that big storm, there wasn't any chance of trying to make an approach into one of the fields. The other thing is that that homing station was in an airplane at Christ on a way to get there, so it was not there. The other thing was that the Chinese hearing our engines thought it was the Japanese air raid and they shut off all electricity. So we were in limbo. After 13 hours in the air and flying 2250 miles. The right front fuel tank was showing empty. Doolittle told his crew to bail out. It was about 9:30 PM. For me, the most scared and worrisome and whatever the other adjective you want to use of the whole mission, was standing in the airplane looking down at that black hole. Because we ejected the Hatch and outside there was a lot of wind, rain and lightning and you were going to have to go through that hole into a foreign country than having any idea where you were or anything about it to maybe that was the the scariest time. After putting the B-25 on automatic pilot Jimmy Doolittle shut both gas cocks off and left the airplane. He landed in a rice Paddy in a sitting position. He was neck deep in night soil. The Chinese had had been for centuries had been merching their crops and fertilizing their crops was what they called night soil. This is human waste and animal and and human waste to fertilize their crops. Following a cold, wet night, an elderly farmer he had met on the road took Doolittle to a local Chinese military headquarters. There were some tense moments when Doolittle refused to surrender his sidearm to the soldiers, but he eventually convinced them he was an American ally, and they began to help him. At about 9:00 PM, airplane number 7 was nearing an island off the coast. At Sang Chow, pilot Ted Lawson thought he could spare the crew the risk and trauma of bailing out by affecting a controlled landing in shallow water. Just about dark. It was raining. Finally spotted a some land and and the pilot spotted a strip of beach and he thought he could land on that beach. The the engines have been running so cool all the time. That stopped at the last second when he was landing and they had the wheel down. We hit the water with the wheel down and it immediately turned us over. I was. I was in the back of the airplane. The other four fellows were in the front. They were all thrown out through the nose, the pilot and Co-pilot was still strapped to their armor plated seats when they came to in the water. I was knocked unconscious for a little while in the back and sort of came to and and got seawater running in what I thought was the bottom of the airplane. Well, I finally realized the airplane was upside down and that. Plexiglass on a turret had shattered, and that's where the water was coming in. So then I was able to open escape hats on the bottom of the airplane and crawl out there. By that time, I got out of the airplane the other four fellows had were already up on the beach. In one of the countless acts of Chinese heroism performed in the wake of the Doolittle Raid, the resistance leader operating in the area helped Thatcher create bamboo pallets so the injured could be transported. We found out later that they, the Japanese, landed 65 Jap soldiers on that spot where we crashed, came looking for us, but we had a head start on them, got across the island. Airplane #15 had scored a direct hit on the steelworks in the northeastern part of Kobe. It was making its way to the Chinese coast at Sandman Bay as the weather closed in. It was nearly 9:00 PM. The left engine was backfiring and the right one was generating very little power. The pilot, Donald Smith, had decided on a water landing about 400 yards offshore. It went well. There were no injuries. In the roughly 8 minutes that the plane remained afloat. The engineer, gunner, Lieutenant Thomas White, scrambled to recover some critically important tools. Thomas White was not an average gunner. Well, Doctor White was a flight surgeon, but he when he found out about the raid, he asked Colonel Hilger who was the 2nd in command and Doc White was about his age, the same age as Hilger, in other words, older than the normal or the average Raider. And he said, well, I'd like to go on the raid. And Colonel Hilger said, well, you can't go Doc. We uh... We've got five men on each airplane. We can't find another seat. For you. It just wouldn't be right. So he said if you, but if you want to be a a gunner, you you could maybe go as a gunner, but you're not a gunner, you're a flight surgeon. He said, well, I could I could be a gunner. Let me have a chance to try. So he went down and shot the guns and did. I think he came off second best in making a score compared to some of the other gunners. And so he got the job as a gunner. And so here, this was a fortuitous choice to have him go on those on that mission, because he certainly was helpful when he got to China. After a night in a fishing village, friendly Chinese rode Doctor White and the rest of the crew to the island of Nandian. Again, the locals put their lives on the line. Hiding the crew in a Buddhist temple while 65 Japanese soldiers swept through the area looking for them. On Nandian, Doctor White learned of the injuries suffered by David Thatcher's crew. According to Lieutenant Smith, from the moment he did, he seemed to have only one desire, which was to reach them as soon as possible. It was the ideal providential meeting of these two crews with Doc White that saved one of the Raiders, Ted Lawson, saved his life because Lawson was about to lose his leg and Doc White amputated it. He gave Lawson blood from his own arms, the Doc himself, when it got too bad of the Lawson was about to go. Then he gave blood from his own himself. Which is, I imagine, difficult thing to do. The day began badly for the crew of airplane #16 as they sat with propellers turning on the deck of the Hornet. A sailor on the deck crew slipped A prop blast from airplane #15, blew him backwards into Sixteen's left propeller. His arm was so severely injured it required amputation. The crew members were Lieutenant William G. Farrell, pilot. Lieutenant Robert Hite, copilot Lieutenant George Barr, navigator Jacob D. DeShazer, Bombardier, and Harold A Spatz, engineer gunner. In Nagoya the crew found their targets, a battery of oil storage tanks and an aircraft factory. So far, George Barr wrote, all had gone well. I gave the pilot a new heading and we started our last leg of the trip. Like the other 15 Raider B-25s, #16 encountered the Curse of the Storm and the Blessing of the Tailwind. And like every other airplane, they experienced the sinking sensation of getting no response from Chu Chow on 4495, Kilocycles, landfall and nightfall arrived together just as the fuel warning lights came on a break in the overcast revealed the lights of a city. Navigator Bar quickly figured it was Nanchang. They were over an area believed to be in Japanese control. There was no choice now. All hands took to their parachutes. When they landed, it was nearly 1:00 AM. By daylight, all five would be in Japanese hands. For Robert Hite, George Barr and Jacob DeShazer, it was the first day. Of three and a half years of hell on Earth, Bill Farrow and Harold Spatz would never see their homeland again. The targets for airplane number three were industrial buildings and docks on the east side of Tokyo. Once again, the 20 cent bomb site designed by Ross Greening at Eglin Field performed flawlessly. #3, which was nicknamed Whiskey Pete for pilot Bob Gray's Pinto pony back in Texas, made its run for the Chinese coast. At 10:00 PM, flying in thin, overcast, both fuel gauges registered empty. The crew went out in the usual order, engineer, followed by the Bombardier and the navigator and the co-pilot. The pilot left last. Jacob Manch, the copilot, spent a cold night in driving rain. His parachute gathered about him. For two days he wandered, trying to find a railroad the Raiders were told operated in this part of China. On the third day, tired, hungry and scratched by thick Briers, he sat waist deep in a stream. Suddenly, the thicket parted. And a smiling Chinese man with several companions confronted him. With sound effects and hand gestures. They indicated they knew where Manch's plane had crashed. They led him to a village where he saw Chinese gorillas carrying parts of Whiskey Pete. He found something else. The body of his crewmate, Engineer Leland D Faktor of Plymouth, Iowa. Faktor had either struck the plane after leaving it, experienced a parachute failure or just hit the ground excessively hard? He appeared to have died instantly. Sadly, airplane # 6 suffered the highest casualties of the raid. Dean Hallmark, the pilot, delivered his bombs on a steel mill north of Tokyo. The airplane nicknamed the Green Hornet was running on fumes when the coast of China was still 10 minutes ahead of them, a water landing loomed the navigator ,Chase Nielsen remembered it was a very hard and fast landing that left him temporarily unconscious. When Nielsen awoke, he realized he was in immediate peril. The wreckage of the plane was being pounded by surf. It was sinking fast, though he was bleeding and his nose was broken. He climbed up through the windshield, inflating his May West life preserver. He joined Bob Meder, the co-pilot, on top of the submerging plane while the crew struggled to inflate their malfunctioning life raft. William Dieter slipped off the wing at nearly the same moment a huge wave washed the rest of them off the now fully submerged B-25. Though they tried to maintain voice contact in the dark, each man was now left to his own fate. Chase Nielsen would later write. I couldn't do a thing but ride the waves. I half swam and half floated for what seemed like hours. I thought about my family, the fellows back at Columbia, South Carolina, who did not go on the raid, the wonderful Navy men who brought us to the launch point, and we're probably now being chased by the whole Japanese Navy. I wondered where the crews of the other 15 planes were. And whether Jimmy Doolittle's first combat mission might have been his last. I feared the worst might happen to Dieter and Fitzmaurice because they seem to be so badly hurt. Nielsen made it to shore the next morning from a hiding place in the stand of trees, he saw villagers and two Chinese soldiers looking at two bodies on the beach. It was William J Dieter from Vail, Iowa, and Donald E. Fitzmaurice from Lincoln, Nebraska. The local Chinese did all they could to hide Chase Nielsen, Dean Hallmark, and Bob Meder, the surviving crew members of the Green Hornet. Though the area was swarming with Japanese soldiers. After one Japanese patrol left, the three returned to the beach where the Chinese had hidden the bodies of Dieter and Fitzmaurice. They placed their comrades in two wooden boxes, chose a spot high on the beach, and buried them. The three officers prayed silently over the two enlisted men who had given their last full measure. I bailed out and left Colonel Doolittle. He was the last one out and my shoot open properly and looking down and to get the ripcord I pulled the thing so hard that I gave myself a black eye. I was fortunate that my chute drifted over a pine tree and I ended up about 12 feet off of the ground. So it was like jumping, jumping in a feather bed that it was raining very hard. So I pulled part of the chute in and made kind of a hammock affair and. I spent the night in a tree. When Daybreak came and I could see the ground. I had a compass and started walking West and at dusk I came out on a cliff and down below I saw a little cantonment of a couple of buildings that had a Chinese Nationalist flag flying up above and the only reason I knew it was a Chinese Nationalist flag was that the same emblem was painted on the the AVG P-40s that I had read about before. Anyway, I walked down there and I was accosted by a young lad and he took me to a building that was empty except for a table. On the table was a sketch. Of a on a piece of paper of a two tailed airplane with five parachutes coming out of it. So I finally got him to take me where he took whoever drew the sketch, which he did, and I walked into this building and it was Cololnel Dolittle. He's the one who had drawn the sketch. I said, Boy am I glad to see you. But Doolittle was far from happy. He recalled the days after the crash landing. When the soldiers found our plane Paul, Leonard and I went to the crash site to see what we could salvage. There is no worse sight to an aviator than to see his plane smashed to bits. This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and had lead it. I was sure it would be my last. As far as I was concerned it was a failure and I felt there could be no future for me in uniform now. Even if we had successfully accomplished the first half of our mission. The second-half had been to deliver the B-25s to our units in the China, Burma, India Theatre of Operations. My main concern was for my men. What had happened to my crew probably happened to the others. As I sat there Paul Leonard took my picture and then, seeing how badly I felt, tried to cheer me up. He asked What do you think will happen when you go home, Colonel? I answered. Well, I guess they'll court martial me and send me to prison at Fort Leavenworth, Paul said. No, Sir, I'll tell you what will happen. They're going to make you a general. And they're going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor. Colonel, I know they're going to give you another airplane. And when they do, I'd like to fly with you as your crew chief. It was then that the tears came to my eyes. It was the supreme compliment a mechanic could give a pilot. Sixteen B-25s left the deck of the Hornet on the Doolittle Raid. Every one of them reached Japan and bombed their targets. It was true that all the airplanes were lost. Airplane number 8, the airplane that seems to have had its carburetors either changed or reset at the Seattle Air Depot, was forced to seek the quickest landing opportunity available. It went to Vladivostok in Russia, where it was confiscated by the Soviets. The crew was interned for over a year until the five men affected their own escape. As for Doolittle's men, three Raiders died the night of the raid. Leland Faktor, the engineer gunner on airplane #3, did not survive his bailout. William Dieter, the Bombadier on airplane # 6 , was too severely injured to survive the ditching of the airplane off the coast. The same was true for his crewmate Donald Fitzmaurice, the engineer gunner on the same airplane. Eight Raiders became prisoners of the Japanese. Lieutenant Dean Hallmark, Lieutenant Robert Meder, and Lieutenant Chase Nielsen. All crew members of airplane number six were captured. The entire crew of airplane #16, Lieutenant William G Farrow, Lieutenant Robert L Hite. Lieutenant George Barr, Corporal Jacob Daniel DeShazer and Sergeant Harold A Spatz became POW's. The treatment of the prisoners was horrendous. They interrogated us and all of that, you know, each one individually. And there was two airplanes of us that had been captured. And they condemned us to death, and the Imperor reprieved us to life imprisonment. Our sentence was to be kept in solitary confinement. I think they were very scared. They tortured them brutally and they don't talk a lot about that in any of the books. When they put a a rag over their face and they would pour water until you almost drowned and pass out and and then they would go on slaps, beats, socks, punches common every day. Bamboo shoots between the joints. They would take iron rods and put them behind the break of the knee and then they would jump on the thighs and which caused obviously a great deal of pain. By April 24th, 6 days following the raid, all of the captured Raiders had been flown to Tokyo. Their mistreatment continued unabated until August 28th, when they were made to stand trial. The trial was conducted in Japanese. The men had no idea what was being said. A record of the trial concluded that the eight had been found guilty as charged, and are hereby sentenced to death for reasons unknown, Dean Hallmark, William Farrow and Harold Spatz were sentenced to be executed. On October 14th, 1942, Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz were informed they were to be executed the next day. They were given paper and pencil and told they could write to their family and friends. Hallmark wrote to his father, mother and sister. I hardly know what to say, he wrote. They just told me I am liable to execution. I can hardly believe it. I wanted to be a commercial pilot and would have been if it wasn't for this war. To his mother, he wrote. Try to stand up under this and pray. Bill Farrow wrote his widowed mother. Don't let this get you down. Just remember that God will make everything right and I will see you again in the hereafter. My faith in God is complete, so I am unafraid, Harold, Spatz wrote to his widower father in Lebo, Kansas. If I have inherited anything since I became of age, I will give it to you and Dad I want you to know that I love you and God bless you. I want you to know that I died fighting for my country like a soldier. The next day On October 15th, 1942, the three Do Little Raiders were executed by firing squad. Those fellows were tortured, they were starved, they're put in solitary confinement, they were beaten repeatedly and nothing they could do about it. I mean, they just live that very tortured existence. Each was growing steadily weaker, and Bob Meder was the weakest of the five. Meder looked like a walking skeleton on December 1st, 1943. That Once sturdily built, athletic meter died quietly in his cell. The Japanese were completely incensed by the Doolittle Raid. They had been concerned that such a raid might originate in China. General Claire Chenault. Head of the celebrated Flying Tigers, who were operating in China, recalled that the Japanese drove 200 miles into East China to seek revenge, Chenault wrote. One sizeable city was raised for no other reason than the sentiment displayed by its citizens in filling up Jap bomb craters on nearby airfields. A quarter million Chinese civilians and soldiers were reportedly killed in the three month campaign. The Chinese had been at war with the Japanese since 1937. They knew well the brutality they employed against those who oppose them. Yet time and again, they risked all to try to help the lost American Flyers get to their ultimate destination, the wartime capital of Chongqing. Their legacy is typified by a story of Tung Sheng Liu, a Chinese engineering student who was pressed into service. To help airplane #2 escape at the time, he risked his life for the American Flyers and undertook this most hazardous of journeys. Liu had a young pregnant wife, man, Ming Wang Liu. He was leaving behind. During our whole trip under Liu's guidance, our treatment was superb, navigator Lieutenant Carl Widener was quoted as saying. He had risked his neck for us. After World War II ended, Liu came to the U.S. to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Minnesota. He maintained lifelong friendships with the airmen he helped in China. Liu became a U.S. citizen in 1954. Four years later, he began work as a civilian aeronautical engineer at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, where he helped develop the C-5 military transport aircraft. Only two men have been named honorary Doolittle Raiders. One is Hank Miller, the naval aviator who taught the Doolittle crews how to pull a B-25 off the deck of an aircraft carrier in less than 500 feet. Tung Sheng Liu is the other. He died May 3rd, 2009. He was honored at the 2010 Doolittle Raider reunion. His children, Tom Sheridan and Melinda Liu, attended. Since 1988 Melinda Liu has been the Beijing Bureau chief for Newsweek magazine. I think it's very hard for people of our generation to understand what our parents went through in the environment that that they went through. That was a very special time. My father was basically like millions of other Chinese trying to get through the war and just happened by happenstance to be in a certain situation that that propelled him to heroic actions and very unusual circumstances and it changed his life forever. It began as a boost for the sagging morale of a shocked and angry nation, but the Doolittle raid turned out to be so much more. And it looked like their next big step well might be Australia. Drive down to take over Australia. And that was just the time when we hit. And the Japanese decided they were going to put an end to that possibility in the future. In six weeks after our raid on Japan, they got together a huge fleet and headed across the Pacific. They had four carriers, they had cruisers and battleships and they were going to take over Midway first, possibly Hawaii next. And our intelligence had broken their code, knew they were coming and Halsey had our ship, the Hornet and the Enterprise, the other carrier that was with us and the third carrier, the Yorktown. And they had, he had us sitting up north of Midway and waiting. And when the Japanese struck Midway, we flew down there and the rest is history. What happened? Our Navy Boys sunk all four of those carriers, and it was a tremendous victory for our side. And from that time on, if you analyze the Pacific War, instead of being on the offensive everywhere, they were back on the defensive until we were just within easy striking distance of Japan in the summer of 45'. Following the Battle of Midway, the Japanese never scored another victory in the Pacific. All 80 Doolittle Raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross. For this mission, the Chinese government decorated all of the Raiders. Those imprisoned and tortured also received the Purple Heart. David Thatcher was awarded the Silver Star. Doctor Thomas White was awarded the Silver Star. James H Doolittle was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Every Doolittle Raider who was able to fly at the completion of the raid did so. And so I went back overseas with the first Air Commando group that made the aerial invasion of Burma later on in 1944. I came back to dealing on Furlow for a couple of weeks and then went through Mcdill Field to Tampa, Florida and began training in B-26s was a twin engine bomber with a single tail. And then we were flying submarine patrol between Oran, Algeria and and the coast of Spain until about the middle of April 1943 and we moved up to the front and we were bombing the Italian and German forces until I finally chased them out of North Africa. I was on 26th bombing Masons over there. And we all got two weeks leave before we went to our new group. In my case it was that B-26 group at Harding field, Louisiana. Captured. This... This happened in the summer of 43 on the 4th of July. Now we had a whole big flight of B-26s and we flew over to Sicily. And they hit us big time and down we went and we were on fire. So I bailed out and pull my ripcord a little later when I was when I got to the ground, I was captured immediately by the Germans down there in this field. Thirteen Raiders would ultimately lose their lives later in World War II in China. Jimmy Doolittle made a promise to his men. Colonel Doolittle promised the group. It says if we survived, survived the mission it is. I'm going to throw you the biggest party you've ever had after it's all over after the war, anyway. We had the first reunion and it everybody had a good time. It was all fun and games and so forth. And somebody said, why don't we do this again? And Jimmy said, hey, wait a minute fella, this cost me a pretty penny to have this party, He says I can't afford to do it. And some of the other aviation interest sponsored the, the and the city itself. And after that, it was kind of like Topsy. We began to receive invitations every year. Great to see the gang every year. After 10 years, Mrs. Doolittle said. And she put her foot down and said from now on the wives are going to go to these reunions and that changed the whole tenor of our activities, yeah, I assure you. But from that time on it was a big improvement because we couldn't have kept on the way we were. It's not just what they did, which was extremely important for the nation at that time, but how they've lived their lives since really. And they have put together a foundation which supports youngsters coming up in aerospace engineering and so they continue to make contributions wherever they go, whatever communities. They visit and so they that they are continuing as an inspiration to the next generation of airmen. It seemed like there was a guiding hand favoring us on that whole mission, because when you analyze the whole mission, everything went our way and we did the maximum damage that we could do against our enemy. With 16 planes, each carrying a ton of bombs, we we really accomplished our our mission and of course we upset them so much that their plans brought on the the big defeat of Midway later so. This this little raid accomplished quite a bit in the in the war after we started having these annual reunions and the city of Tucson had invited us there. And when we got there we found that they had 80 cups, silver cups engraved with our names on them, in this case those who had who were deceased. The cups were upside down. And so for the years that went on in all of our reunions, some cadets from the Air Force Academy brought this case of cups to our reunion. And we had a regular ceremony drinking to those that had passed on this that year, and the cups were turned over. Gentlemen, the toast to those who are gone. When we get together, it seems like the raid was yesterday. It's great to see the ones that are still living, and we pay homage to the ones that have passed on. The mysteriousness of the thing, the way it was designed was that in this case that holds the goblets, There was a bottle of Corvoisier that was laid down the same year when Doolittle was born. As the story goes, at the end of the trail there will be two Raiders sitting together with their goblet and some of their Corvoisier in the in the cup and that would be the end of the Doolittle Raiders. 80 men. 68 years later, only six of them are still with us. Yet their tradition dictates that all eighty of them gather, either in body or spirit, every year on the anniversary of that heroic and historic mission, a mission that changed the war.
