Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [2]
Barrett Tillman
April 2009
Prologue
OFF HONSHU, APRIL 18, 1942
REVENGE SPED TOWARD Japan at nearly four miles per minute, borne upon olive-drab wings.
Flown by America’s finest aviator, the lone bomber approached the enemy shore at 200 feet. Three hours after taking off from the aircraft carrier Hornet, the forty-five-year-old pilot was determined to do something that had never been done: bomb Japan.
Piloting the twin-engine B-25 was Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, a stocky, balding flier often called a daredevil in the press but best described as master of the calculated risk. In his twenty-five years of flying he had proven both his cool head and his hot hands, winning prestigious races, setting records, and pioneering the crucial science of instrument flight. An oft-published photo showed him standing before his stubby Gee Bee racer with his Phi Beta Kappa key visible beneath his leather jacket. With a Ph.D. in aeronautics, he spoke with an engineer’s precision, saying “aeroplane” and describing friends as “chaps.”
Four months earlier, when Japanese carrier aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, Doolittle had been a major conducting special projects for General Henry H. Arnold, the Army Air Forces chief. America was still reeling from Tokyo’s stunning blow against Hawaii as a nonstop onslaught rolled up U.S. and Allied forces across the Pacific: from Guam to Wake Island to the Philippines, East Indies, and the Asian mainland. The nation and President Franklin D. Roosevelt called for retribution.
Thus was born the First Special Aviation Project. Oddly, it was the brainchild of a submarine officer, Captain Francis Low. He conceived the idea of launching long-range Army bombers from an aircraft carrier and proposed a daring concept: a hit-and-run raid against Japan itself, launched well beyond the limited reach of Navy carrier aircraft. If all went well, sixteen B-25 Mitchells—named for the late airpower advocate William “Billy” Mitchell—were to land in China after bombing Japan.
It was a high-risk operation, calling for volunteer aircrews who were told only that they would be “out of the country for two or three months.” More men stepped forward than could be used. The crews were selected from all four squadrons of the 17th Bomb Group (Medium), the first B-25 unit. Originally stationed at Pendleton, Oregon, the group had flown antisubmarine patrols along the Pacific coast. A crew of the 17th reported sinking a Japanese sub off the mouth of the Columbia River on Christmas Day 1941, but the boat (the brand-new I-25) escaped to torpedo a tanker a few days later.
In February the group transferred to South Carolina to hunt U-boats in the Atlantic. A sub kill was claimed off the East Coast, making the 17th the first unit credited with destroying Axis submarines in both oceans.
The volunteers went to Eglin Field, Florida, to train for the special mission. Mostly they were youngsters: twelve of the sixteen pilots were lieutenants, and only five had won their wings before 1941. Fifteen of the copilots were less than a year out of flight school. Doolittle’s crew was typical, with an average age of twenty-five. Besides Doolittle, merely two of the eighty fliers were over thirty: Major John A. Hilger and Technical Sergeant E. V. Scott in Lieutenant Harold Watson’s number nine aircraft.
Flying a loaded Army bomber from an aircraft carrier had never been done. But during tests off the Virginia coast in February, two B-25s got off the Hornet without difficulty, demonstrating that fully armed and fueled bombers could operate safely. The plan went ahead.
Steaming via the Panama Canal, Hornet rendezvoused with her sister carrier, USS Enterprise, north of Midway on April 12. The task force was commanded by Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, the jut-jawed seadog who would become America’s most renowned naval warrior. The “Big E,” with her regular Navy