Whirlwind - Barrett Tillman [3]
On the morning of April 18, ten hours before scheduled takeoff, a Japanese picket boat sighted the task force. The vessel was sunk by the cruiser Nashville, but American radiomen overheard the Japanese sending a warning. Doolittle conferred with Hornet’s skipper, Captain Marc Mitscher, and decided to launch 170 miles east of the intended point.
Doolittle lowered his flaps, stood on the brakes, revved his Wright engines, and watched the launch officer. With the carrier’s bow rising in the Pacific swells, the officer’s flag swept down and Doolittle released the toe brakes. Hauling the control yoke full back, he felt his bomber’s wings lift fourteen tons of aluminum, steel, gasoline, ordnance, and living flesh.
He made it. He circled the ship to get his bearings, then set course for Japan, 713 miles away. The other fifteen Mitchells followed at an average of four-minute intervals. Fully loaded, each bomber had 1,141 gallons of fuel—enough for twelve hours or more of cruising at 5,000 feet. Stashed near Chuchow in China’s Hunan Province were 30,000 gallons of aviation gasoline and 500 gallons of oil for the Raiders—assuming they reached their destination deep in the Asian interior.
The fliers’ intended landfall was Inubo Saki, eighty miles east of Tokyo. The twenty-meter promontory with its chalky white lighthouse provided an excellent reference point for the navigators.
Meanwhile, advance warning of strange aircraft inbound from the sea had been radioed to various headquarters. Many Japanese had seen the Raiders but few realized they were Americans. Some farmers and villagers waved. The noontime arrival of Doolittle’s bombers coincided with a scheduled air raid practice, complete with airborne interceptors. But few defenders had any inkling of what was about to happen.
One observer who immediately recognized the unpleasant facts was Commander Masatake Okumiya, a naval officer at Kasumigaura Airbase twenty-five miles northeast of Tokyo. Glimpsing the silhouette of a B-25 skimming past his airfield, Okumiya realized that the radioed warnings had been ignored. Japan’s air defense system—such as it was—anticipated conventional high-level bombers flying in formations, as Japanese squadrons did over China.
At noon local time the Americans saw three V-formations, each of three Japanese fighters—the first of scores sighted over the enemy homeland. Tokyo knew that something was afoot but lacked details.
Approaching Tokyo’s north-central industrial area at barely rooftop height, Doolittle shoved the throttles forward, climbed to 1,200 feet, leveled off, and lined up a factory complex. Antiaircraft fire burst nearby, shaking the bomber’s airframe, but doing no damage. Jimmy Doolittle had a clear shot at his target in good visibility.
In the glass-enclosed nose, Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer checked his makeshift bombsight, which resembled a child’s toy: a protractor mounted on a stick. Mathematically accurate for a given altitude and airspeed, it could place a 500-pound bomb within blast radius of a chosen aim point. The B-25’s ordnance was a mix of 500-pound M43 demolition bombs and M54 incendiary clusters, all considered “extremely satisfactory.”
Braemer punched the bomb release, felt the Mitchell lift slightly, and became the first of a stream of bombardiers who would drop ordnance on Japan. His four incendiary clusters would provide a beacon for trailing bombers.
Having shed his load, Doolittle pushed on the control yoke and descended to rooftop height. America’s hottest pilot was comfortable speeding at low level: he had won every air race worth entering during the 1920s and 1930s.
The Raiders’ targets included petroleum facilities, ammunition stores, aircraft factories, steel mills, and the Tokyo Gas and Electric Company. Lieutenant Travis