Navigating from Shangri-La: Cincinnati`s Doolittle Raider at War

Queen City Heritage
Thomas C. Griffin, a resident
of Cincinnati for over forty
years, participated in the first
bombing raid on Japan in
World War II, the now legendary Doolittle raid. (CHS
Photograph Collection)
Navigating from Shangri-La
Winter 1992
Navigating from ShangriLa: Cincinnati's
Doolittle Raider at
War
Kevin C. McHugh
Over a half century ago on April 18, 1942,
the Cincinnati Enquirer reported: "Washington, April 18
— (AP) — The War and Navy Departments had no confirmation immediately on the Japanese announcement of the
bombing of Tokyo."1 Questions had been raised when
Tokyo radio, monitored by UPI in San Francisco, had suddenly gone off the air and then had interrupted programming for a news "flash":
Enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo for the
first time since the outbreak of the current war of Greater
East Asia. The bombing inflicted telling damages on schools
and hospitals. The raid occurred several minutes past noon on
Saturday. The invading planes failed to cause any damage to
military establishments?
Reporters wanted information. But
Americans, starved for good news from the Pacific, seized
the early reports, dismissed the enemy propaganda, and
celebrated their first significant victory in the war against
Japan. The next day, in fact, newspapers all over the country fed the following naively optimistic headline to their
hungry readers: "Allied Offensive Indicated By U.S. Air
Attack On Japan."3 The euphoria of the day was understandable. America was reeling from a series of defeats:
Pearl Harbor had been surprised, Wake Island and Guam
had fallen; in the Philippines, Bataan had just surrendered
in the worst defeat of American military history, while survivors clung precariously to "The Rock," the little island
fortress of Corregidor in Manila Bay. But the retaliatory
bombing of Japan, the Doolittle Raid, as it came to be
called, changed all that. It had come, President Roosevelt
later volunteered somewhat impishly, "from our secret
base in Shangri-La" (the fictional Utopia of James Hilton's
Lost Horizons)} The daring attack caught the imagination
of the American people and made them feel less impotent.
Cincinnatians knew that history had been made. One witnessed it first-hand.
Since his arrival in Cincinnati over forty years
ago, Bridgetown resident Thomas Carson Griffin has
Kevin C. McHugh, a fellow of
the Ohio Writing Project and
English department chairman
at Finneytown Jr./Sr. High
School in Cincinnati, has an
M.A. in English from the
University of Windsor,
Windsor, Canada.
served as Cincinnati's oral historian for "one of America's
biggest gambles"5 of World War II, the now legendary
Doolittle Raid on Japan. A soft-spoken man, Mr. Griffin
characteristically downplays his part in the first bombing
raid on Japan: "[It] just caught the fancy of the American
people. A lot of people had a lot worse assignments."6
Nevertheless, he has shared his wartime experiences with
Cincinnati and the country, both in speaking engagements
and in print. In 1962 to celebrate the twentieth anniversary
of the historic mission, the Cincinnati Enquirer highlighted Mr. Griffin's recollections in an article that began,
"Bomber Strike from Carrier Recalled."7 For the fiftieth
anniversary in 1992, the Cincinnati Post shared his adventure in a full-page article entitled, "A Veteran Remembers
. . . 30 Seconds Over Tokyo."8 The Historical Society,
which has a taped interview with Mr. Griffin in its archives,
recently invited him to speak to museum-goers9 and spotlighted his part in the raid with a display in the "Cincinnati
Goes to War" exhibit. But Mr. Griffin's experiences in that
war include more than that single mission, no matter how
memorable. They have particular value because they mirror
the experiences of the generation who shaped the present,
a generation that diminishes in size as the anniversaries
climb in number. Those experiences also serve as a lens
through which a new generation of Cincinnatians can discover that the history of some fifty years past is more than
just the events and dates of textbooks but the flesh and
blood of real people like themselves.
Thomas Griffin was born in Green Bay,
Wisconsin, in 1916. He grew up there and then attended
the University of Alabama, graduating in 1939 with an A.B.
degree in political science and economics — and an ROTC
commission as a second lieutenant in the United States
Army because he saw that "war was coming." By 1939
Hider had seized Czechoslovakia and turned up the propaganda blitz that preceded the real blitzkrieg invasion of
Poland. Lt. Griffin — serial number 0377848, he remembers without hesitation10 — first served with the anti-aircraft batteries of the 61st Coast Artillery. He soon volunteered for the air corps, however, because he "didn't want
to be standing on the ground shooting up." Griffin's apti-
Queen City Heritage
tude for mathematics steered him to navigator's school,
which the Army conducted in Coral Gables, Florida, in the
"flying classrooms" of Pan American Airways' Commodore
flying boats. By 1941 Lt. Griffin had been stationed with
the 17th Bombardment Group at Camp Pendleton,
Oregon. At that time the air corps had begun replacing
that unit's lumbering, twin-engined B-18 Bolero Bombers
(military derivatives of the once revolutionary DC-2 airliner) with the faster, twin-engined, twin-ruddered B-25B
Mitchell bomber.11 This changeover, in fact, proved crucial
to Griffin's participation in the first and most famous of his
many World War II exploits.
Because the Japanese attack of December 7,
1941, had left much of the U.S. Navy's Pacific Fleet resting
in the mud of Pearl Harbor, near-panic swept the West
Coast. "There was simply no capability, no air defense and,
with the exception of a few National Guard companies, no
ground defense," recalls fellow Tokyo Raider and 17th
Group pilot, "Brick" Holstrom. "An enemy carrier force
could have bombed [the U.S.] at will . . . . " As a result,
the 17th, the "only combat-ready medium bomb group in
the country," and the only fully B-25 equipped unit, was
ordered "to protect the shipping and coastline of the
Griffin joined the ROTC while
attending the University of
Alabama because he saw that
"war was coming." As a
ROTC cadet he learned to
load anti-aircraft guns.
(Griffin helping load the gun
is fourth from the right;
Thomas C. Griffin Collection)
Northwest" — often at dubious risk to themselves due to
the area's treacherous weather, especially the fog. During
one such dangerous anti-submarine patrol just twenty-five
miles off the mouth of the Columbia River, on Christmas
Eve 1941, Holstrom and the crew of his B-25 are credited
with destroying a Japanese submarine, the first of the
Pacific war to be sunk by an American aircraft.12
About the same time as Lt. Griffin's unit
underwent its first engagement with the enemy, President
Roosevelt was urging the soonest possible retaliation
against Japan, a bombing attack against the Japanese home
islands, to boost American and Allied morale. He pressed
his recommendation in the following weeks, particularly in
light of repeated Allied disasters in the Pacific theater.13 At
that time, only the navy had the capability of carrying out
such attack. To do so, however, would put at risk the
American aircraft carriers that had narrowly avoided
destruction at Pearl Harbor. (America had four carriers in
the Pacific at that time; the Japanese had ten.) Bringing
those vessels within their aircrafts' limited 300-mile range
would put them within striking distance of the Japanese
home fleet, as well as land-based aircraft — which had earlier proved their effectiveness by sinking the British battle-
Winter 1992
Navigating from Shangri-La
ships Repulse and Prince of Wales in the Gulf of Siam on
December 10. Only army bombers had the range to reach
Japan while leaving the naval forces sufficiently distant to
avoid probable detection and destruction. The only
bomber with the capability and dimensions making it theoretically suitable for a carrier takeoff was the B-25B —
though it had never been done before. The challenge thus
fell to the 17th Bombardment Group and Thomas Griffin.
"They asked us to do something," said
Griffin who described how the air corps called for volunteers from the 17th for what planners would only describe
as an "extremely hazardous mission."14 "Air corps crews
were needed . . . ," Griffin remarked matter-of-factly.
"Why were we there? Why were we trained?" By February
27, 1942, twenty-four crews began arriving at Eglin Field,
Florida, for special training. There, in the first week in
March, navigator Tom Griffin and the others met their
mission commander, Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, a small
man with the stature of a Lindbergh, already famous as a
result of his aviation feats and firsts. "The selection of
Doolittle to lead this nearly suicidal mission was a natural
one," said General Henry "Hap" Arnold, Chief of Staff of
the Army Air Forces, in retrospect. "He was fearless, technically brilliant" — earning one of M.I.T.'s first doctorates
in aeronautical engineering — "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."15
At the end of March, after brief training at
Eglin, the special force flew to the McClellan Field at
Sacramento, California, and from there to Alameda Naval
Air Station where the aircraft were lifted by crane onto the
deck of the Navy's newest carrier, the Hornet. Griffin's B25, The Whirling Dervish, became plane number nine of
the sixteen that eventually made the flight. Though Col.
Doolittle had originally hoped for an attacking "force of
18" aircraft, "it was decided that only 15 could be handled
safely" aboard ship.16 The colonel had some misgivings as
he examined the Hornet's flight deck for the first time:
carrier deck before. And no one had ever lifted a fullygassed, fully armed B-25 from one either.18 That the manufacturer's specifications called for a minimum of 1,200 feet
of runway provided little comfort. Unlike airfields, however, carriers could be turned into the wind. This, planners
hoped, plus the ship's forward movement, would provide
the necessary lift to get the heavily loaded planes airborne.
To complicate matters even further, however, the Hornet's
flight deck was narrower than the nearly sixty-eight foot
wingspan of the B-25.19 To avoid collision with the ship's
island (its "control tower"), pilots would have to take off
with their left wing hanging over the edge of the ship, the
left landing gear and nose wheel following white lines
painted on the deck.20 Nevertheless, Col. Doolittle
resolved to add the sixteenth plane to the complement.
"Of course, Doolittle [intended to take] the first plane off,
and that made us all very . . . confident that maybe we
could do it, too." Though "apprehension about taking off
. . . was rife," sub-buster "Brick" Holstrom, pilot of number four, "had no fear, no qualms . . . primarily because of
[his] faith in Doolittle. He had insisted that it was feasible,
and that was that."21
Technical problems plaguing the B-25s,
some quite serious, added to the crews' uncertainties.
While the army bombers might manage to leave the carrier, they could not return: they were too large, they lacked
the arresting hook required to snag the cables used to
"catch" Navy planes during landings, and the tail sections
of the bombers would likely snap off upon impact with a
heaving flight deck.22 This meant that the planes would
have to be flown to land bases, leaving only two options.
The first, shortest, and therefore the safest proposal would
route the planes northwest from Japan to the Soviet Union
where the crews could surrender their ships as part of the
Lend-Lease program. But the Soviets had their own misgivings — in this case a fear of antagonizing the Japanese
with whom they were not at war. Despite the fact that the
Soviet naval attache to Japan had been supplying data
about potential air strike targets to American intelligence,
Soviet Premier Josef Stalin denied the Americans permission to land in the U.S.S.R. after bombing raids on
Japan.23 The alternative required the planes to turn southwest toward airfields in Nationalist (Allied)-controlled
areas of China — well beyond the normal 1400 mile range
of a B-25B.24 There, the planes would be turned over to
the newly formed 10th and 14th Air Forces in the ChinaBurma-India Theater of Operations. Because top-secret
information within the Chinese command had previously
Knowing some of the crews were apprehensive
about taking off when they saw the short deck space, I asked
[ship] Captain [Marc] Mitscher if we could have a sixteenth
B-25 loaded. After we were about 100 miles at sea, I thought
two of the pilots . . . could take off to show the rest of the crews
it was possible.17
The volunteers had plenty of reasons for
their own misgivings. While they had practiced short-distance takeoffs from a carrier painted on the tarmac at
Eglin, none of them had actually flown from a pitching
Queen City Heritage
reached the Japanese with near postal-service regularity,
American planners never briefed Nationalist Generalissimo
Chiang Kai-shek about the actual attack. When asked in
general terms about providing such forward landing fields
for American bombers for an attack upon Japan itself (presumably flying first through China), Chiang balked, fearing retaliation by the Japanese — a fear that later proved
justified. Ultimately he conceded in principle to the Allied
request, but not until March 28.25 The China route had
already been chosen, nonetheless.
To extend the range of the Mitchell bomber,
Doolittle ordered considerable modifications to the plane.
He had the defensive belly turret removed from each ship
to reduce weight. In its place, an extra gas tank was added.
Other tanks were installed, one in the upper part of the
bomb bay (reducing the bomb load to 2000 pounds26) and
a collapsible "balloon" in the crawlway between the nose
and tail sections. Since even these changes couldn't guarantee adequate range, each plane carried an additional fifty
gallons, in five gallon cans, in the tail — the fuel to be
poured into the belly-gun tank by the gunner during the
flight to Japan.27 But the newly installed tanks leaked and
needed constant repair. In fact, some were still leaking at
takeoff.28 To compound the danger, the sheer volume of
aviation gas within each B-25 obviously increased the risks,
too. A single tracer bullet or a hot shell fragment might
ignite the entire plane. What's more, the removal of the
plane's belly guns left only the dorsal (top), power-operated turret with two .50 caliber machine guns and one cumbersome .30 caliber machine gun in the plexiglas "greenhouse" nose as a defense against enemy fighters.
The new power turrets failed chronically,
another "glitch" that was not resolved by launch date.29 In
addition, the new .50 caliber machine guns, fresh from the
manufacturer, jammed after only four or five shots. In the
production rush at the outset of the war, the guns arrived
at Eglin Air Field with critical firing mechanisms rough
and unfinished. So, instead of the sharpening their shooting skills during the few weeks of training, gunners spent
most of their training ironing out problems with their
"shooting irons." 30 In fact, in hopes of warding off
Japanese attackers, two broomstick handles, painted black,
were attached to the small plexiglas "blister" at the tail of
the plane, a tactic that proved surprisingly effective over
Japan.31
Such snags undoubtedly passed through the
minds of volunteers like Tom Griffin when Doolittle asked
the crews, as he did throughout training and on the trip to
Japan, if anyone wanted to drop out — without question
or consequence. No one did. As for the mission itself, writers have detailed the events in great detail, beginning with
pilot Ted Lawson's now classic account, Thirty Seconds over
Tokyo, made into a propaganda film in 1943 (starring Van
Johnson as Lawson and Spencer Tracy as Doolittle). More
recently Stan Cohen's updated pictorial history,
Destination: Tokyo, Carroll Glines' and Duane Schultz's
books, both entitled The Doolittle Raid and released in
1988, provide specifics about the attack itself. Glines' and
Schultz's books also succeed in capturing the feeling of the
participants, using extensive first-hand recollections —
including those of navigator Griffin. Most noteworthy in
understanding the mettle of Col. Doolittle, Lt. Griffin, and
the seventy-eight other Doolittle Raiders (as they came to
be called), are the other last-minute complications that further jeopardized their lives and the mission.
Since the success of the endeavor depended
almost entirely upon the element of surprise, planners and
crews would have been stunned to learn that the Japanese
were expecting the American counterattack. When, on
April 10, their naval intelligence monitored radio U.S.
Navy transmissions, author Duane Schultz reveals that the
Japanese had correctly surmised the location of the
American ships headed their way and that the American
force included as many as three U.S. carriers. Actually, the
Japanese, who could assemble over 200 planes, nine submarines, ten destroyers, six heavy cruisers, and five aircraft
carriers, were looking forward to delivering the knockout
blow to the American Pacific Fleet — when it reached its
300 mile operating range on April 19.32 To assure them-
The crew of plane number
nine, The Whirling Dervish,
as they appeared on the
Hornet before the attack.
(Left to right:) Lt. Thomas C.
Griffin, navigator; Lt. Harold
F. "Doc "Watson, pilot; T/Sgt.
Eldred V. Scott, engineergunner; Lt. James N. Parker,
Jr., co-pilot; Sgt. Wayne M.
Bissell, bombardier. All survived the war. (USAF #
94608)
Navigating from Shangri-La
Winter 1992
•HI
i
selves an adequate warning, they had already stationed a
line of early-warning picket boats some 600-1000 miles to
the south and east of their islands, a measure that was
unknown to American naval intelligence. One of these
radio ships discovered Task Force 16, as it was named,
under Admiral "Bull" Halsey at dawn on April 18, 1942. At
this point Halsey's ships numbered just five cruisers and
two carriers, the Hornet and the Enterprise}3 Bad weather
had forced the admiral on April 17 to take an extra risk to
avoid possible delay. He left behind his slower screening
force of eight destroyers (and two oilers) for a high-speed
approach to the launch point.34 Aware that, if his attacking
force were lost, the United States would have "virtually no
Pacific Fleet,"35 Halsey correctly decided to launch the
bombers immediately — not from the 400-450 miles out as
planned, but from nearly 600-650 miles.36 Hypothetically
speaking, this was far from a worst-case scenario. In the
event of an even earlier discovery, planners had decided
that, if need be, the Hornet should launch the bombers on
Wartime censors obliterated
the squadron insignias on
fliers jackets to prevent the
Japanese from learning what
groups were involved in the
raid. In the left foreground
mission commander Lt. Col.
James Doolittle chats with
the Capt. Marc Mitscher, the
skipper of the Hornet. Griffin
standing in the second row,
third from the right, and
other army fliers look on.
a one-way trip to Japan, so long as it lay within the farthest
limit of the bombers' range. Under such extreme circumstances, Tom Griffin and all the B-25 crews knew that they
were expendable. The most optimistic of eventualities saw
them winding up as POWs — a prospect made less palatable due to the reports all had heard of the brutalities
inflicted upon prisoners in China, Malaya, and the
Philippines. The naval intelligence officer aboard the
Hornet, Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Jurika, told the men that, "if
they were captured . . . , the chances of their survival
would be awfully slim, very, very slim." In reality he
thought they "would be tried by some sort of kangaroo
court and probably publicly beheaded."37 Halsey knew all
this, too, and he knew that his orders multiplied the odds
against all the fliers — among them, navigator Lt. Thomas
Griffin.
The discovery of the American presence and
Halsey's prompt decision nevertheless caught everyone by
surprise. Everyone in the task force had assumed that the
Queen City Heritage
attack would not be mounted until that evening,38 the would plough through the thirty-foot seas crashing over
Japanese thought the following day.39 When at 8:00 A.M., the bow and into the trough of the wave.
the klaxon on the Hornet sounded, and the intercom
Some, like Tom Griffin, "dealt with things as
called, "Army pilots, man your planes," Lt. Griffin was in they came." In contrast, pilot "Brick" Holstrom wonthe wardroom, eating an orange. He hit the deck and was dered, "What the hell do we do now? Whatever it was, we
nearly blown overboard by the wash of the propellers from were headed straight for it, but I resolved to give Tokyo
the planes ahead of him. Griffin's pilot, "Doc" Watson the worst within my power. I had trained for this moment
found his plane incapable of flying because he had given for months and wasn't going to let the opportunity slip
flight engineer-gunner, T/Sgt. Eldred Scott, permission to from my grasp."42 Doolittle had expressed similar, even
service the plane. "I found all the cowling [engine cover] stronger sentiments earlier when one of the raiders had
off the left engine and all the plugs out! The last piece of asked him at a briefing what the colonel would do if his
cowling was snapped in place as the ship ahead started its own plane were critically damaged over Japan.
engines."40 The early launch time also precluded the night
"Each pilot must decide for himself what he
attack that had been planned with Doolittle's number one will do and what he'll tell his crew to do if it happens. I
plane arriving over Tokyo at dusk to mark with incendiary know what I intend to do."
bombs the targets for the raiders who were to follow. It
The same raider posed the follow-up quesalso forced the inadequately armed planes over hostile air tion. The colonel replied:
space in broad daylight, and it meant that the B-25s, if their
I don't intend to be taken prisoner. Fm 45
gas held out, would be arriving over primitive and, as it years old and have lived a full life. If my plane is crippled
turned out, unmarked and unlit airfields in China at night.41 beyond any possibility of fighting or escape, Fm going to have
There was still the question of the takeoff, my crew bail out and then Fm going to dive my B-25 into the
made more complicated by gale-force winds and a lurching best military target I can find. Tou fellows are all younger
deck. Special care had to be taken to launch each plane as and have a long life ahead of you. I don't expect any of the
the Hornet reached the peak of each wave; if not, the B-25 rest ofyou to do what I intend to do.43
B-25 Mitchell bombers
assembled at the stern of the
Hornet. Pilots steered their
planes along white lines
painted on the deck to avoid
colliding with the carrier's
island. During the take off the
planes' left wings dangled
over the ship's side. (Thomas
C. Griffin Collection)
Winter 1992
Navigating from Shangri-La
Fortunately, Doolittle never had to fulfill his Tokyo and we saw Jap[anese] cruisers up ahead and steampledge. The stiff headwinds provided more than enough ing toward Tokyo. And we turned . . . and were about 10 to
lift for all the planes to climb off the deck,44 but not with- 15 feet above the water. . . . They spread out [and] . . . we
out incident. As deck handlers, called airdales, muscled could see what they were doing and we got too close to them
plane number sixteen into place along the white lines, one and they opened up on us. [One of the cruisers] was a sheet of
of them slipped. The wash from the preceding bomber flames. . . . We were flying through columns of water that
sent him into the buzz-saw prop of number sixteen. The they [the shells] were throwing up at us. I just know I was
mishap cost him an arm. As for Holstrom and his B-25, scared. That was the first time. "This is dangerous business. [I
intercepted by nine Japanese fighters and with an inopera- realized.] This is scary I" That's the part of the action I
tive gun turret, he ordered the bombardier to jettison their remember most vividly.
bombs (over Tokyo Bay45), the only one of the raiders to
To conserve fuel, [pilot "Doc"] Watson [had]
do so. He gunned the throttle and managed to lose the throttled back. . . . Finally and reluctantly [he] pushed the
fighters in an overcast.46 Eventually, he and his crew throttles forward and got out of there. I think if we hadn't
reached China. Another plane, however, consuming too prodded him he would have gambled on riding it through.
much fuel, headed for an unauthorized landing in He had fuel consumption on his mind.51
Vladivostok, U.S.S.R. There, the crew was interned for
"He did the best job of conserving fuel" of
any of the pilots — reaching 300 miles inland. "He was the
"the duration." They escaped thirteen months later.47
Tom Griffin's plane found and hit an indus- finest pilot I ever flew with," reminisces Tom Griffin,
trial target, what Griffin recalls as a tank factory in the remembering his friend and comrade who died recently.
Kawasaki district of Tokyo.48 He described his reaction as
The Whirling Dervish neared the drop point: "We were
surprised and shocked to realize that the small black clouds
we were seeing [over the target] were flak [anti-aircraft
fire]. They were shooting at us."49 But that isn't what
Griffin remembers the most. Two memories stand out:
Oddly enough, the one [thing] I remember
more than anything else [occurred] after we had bombed the
factory that was our target. We made a sweeping left turn
and we flew at rooftop level right over [Emperor of Japan]
Hirohito's house. And I enjoyed that. [I] looked down at a
big white house, sort of in a park-like area . . . We scared old
Hirohito. But we couldn't touch him.
Prior to the mission, in fact, Doolittle had made it clear to
all the raiders that they were not to make the same mistake
in attacking the emperor that the Japanese had made in
attacking Pearl Harbor:
On one occasion, I heard a couple of the boys
talking about bombing the emperor's palace — the "Temple
of Heaven." I promptly jumped into their conversation.
"You are to bomb military targets only," I told
them. ccThere is nothing that would unite the Japanese nation
According to engineer-gunner T/Sgt.
more than to bomb the emperor's home. It is not a military Eldred Scott's recollections, this encounter with the
target! And you are to avoid hospitals, schools, and other Imperial Japanese Navy took place some time before when
nonmilitary targets." 50
plane number nine swooped low over Tokyo Bay: "There I
Griffin's other memory marks his initiation into what some
writers refer to as the "brotherhood of war":
I was never frightened because I didn't have
sense enough to be until we were two or three hours south of
was, firing back with a .50 caliber machine gun. Might as
well have had a cap pistol."52
The Whirling Dervish, Griffin's plane, came
through the anti-aircraft fire safely, but the crew's experi-
On April 18, 1942, one by one
the heavily laden bombers
staggered into the air from
the carrier's deck.(Thomas C.
Griffin Collection)
10
Queen City Heritage
ence raises questions about the Doolittle's "official"
account that the raiding force met little enemy opposition.
Looking back at the events, Griffin admits a different view:
It's sort of a bone of contention [between
Doolittle and myself]. Fve heard the General [Doolittle was
promoted following the attack], who was in plane number 1
say that there wasn't much opposition. I've never had the
courage to contradict him. But I was in plane number 9 that
came in over the target about 45-50 minutes later [after
Doolittle's plane number 1 dropped the first bombs]. And
there was a lot of flak . . . . [He] had stirred up a hornet's
nest. . . . He wasn't entirely accurate.
Japanese fishing boat and capture it. Glines does capture
what was undoubtedly, for Tom Griffin, one of the most
privately stressful moments of the attack. While the weather over Tokyo was ideal, it had been terrible for takeoff
and it was just as bad for landing. As the raiders turned for
China, they encountered a terrible storm and fierce headwinds. For a time, in fact, it appeared that all (except for
the plane that flew to the U.S.S.R.) would wind in the Sea
of Japan, a hundred miles or more from land. Then, in the
"last real navigating" he did, Griffin took a wind drift to
find that the wind direction had changed, that the storm
had now created a tail wind. It was this wind change that
enabled the fifteen crews to reach landfall. That reading
was Tom Griffin's last of the flight: the weather closed in
and prevented any of the navigators from "getting a fix"
on their positions. "I felt like baggage," says Griffin.
At one point, an enemy fighter fired tracers
that passed over the left engine of Griffin's plane before
engineer-gunner Scott drove him off. Holstrom's B-25,
says Griffin, "actually had eighteen pursuits [fighters]"
after it.
However, hope springs eternal. It was at this
Tradition holds, too, that — so secret was moment a rift appeared in the clouds overhead and a lone
this mission — the volunteers had no idea where they were star shone through! Four sets of eyes turned on me. 'Griffin!
headed until Task Force 16 had put to sea. True, Doolittle A star! Get a fix!' Their eyes told me that this was to be our
had cautioned the utmost secrecy, telling the airmen at salvation — if I could produce.
Eglin (and played up by Hollywood) that the F.B.I, would
. . . J [did not] attempt to point out that in
take care of anyone who asked too many questions about celestial navigation at least two heavenly bodies must be used
their training. Nevertheless, Tom Griffin counters that, in to obtain a fix . . . . With those four sets of eyes on me it did
about ten days, the volunteers had pretty much put not seem the moment to start a class in elementary navigatogether the clues of the mission — a carrier outlined on tion. I . . . picked up by octant [navigational instrument]
the landing field, for one. He knew the destination, as did wondering what I was going to do. . . . After several moments
Lt. Davy Jones, the pilot of plane number five and naviga- of sighting, the storm once more entirely engulfed the plane.
tion-intelligence officer for the raid. Both had been The star appeared no more. I was off the hook and once more
ordered to Washington where they and army intelligence excess baggage.55
spent a week pouring over classified maps of the target
Lost, in darkness, unable to find airfields that
areas. Their job was to select the necessary charts, which had neither been supplied nor marked by radio beacons as
were copied, crated, and shipped to California. Navigators, planned, the planes made emergency landings sputtered
after all, needed detailed maps to prepare for their part of out of gas and the crews bailed out.
the job. When Griffin and Jones returned to Eglin, they
Four B-25s, like Ted Lawson's Ruptured
remained "very closemouthed" about their absence.53 To Duck, ditched along the coastline, in some cases killing and
maintain the tightest possible security, General Marshall injuring some of the airmen. Lawson, for one, nearly died
even chose not to tell President Roosevelt about the raid.54 as the result of the injuries he sustained. Chance spared
Tom Griffin's recollections include much him when the outfit's only surgeon, Harvard graduate Dr.
more. In his book historian Carroll Glines contends that, (Doc) Thomas White — who had first to qualify as a guncontrary to Col. Doolittle's specific instructions, navigator ner before Doolittle agreed to his being taken along —
Griffin and the crew of number nine had determined, if came down near The Ruptured Duck. In emergency
crippled over Tokyo, to hurl The Whirling Dervish into surgery with the most rudimentary equipment and supHirohito's palace rather than crash or bail out over Japan. plies, White amputated Lawson's badly infected leg. One
Though such a scenario makes good reading, it never hap- gunner was killed outright when his parachute failed to
pened, Griffin claims. He does, however, acknowledege open. Two others were killed in ditching. Eight fell into
that the crew had devised one emergency plan: if forced Japanese hands. These prisoners were subsequently tordown over water, they had agreed to ditch next to a tured, forced to sign "confessions," written only in
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*
,
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mm
Japanese, that they had indiscriminately massacred civilians,
and — ignorant of the charges brought against them —
"tried" as war criminals in the kangaroo court Lt. Jurika
had foreseen. Three were executed, the others receiving
"clemency" through the personal intervention of the
emperor. Their experiences became another Hollywood
propaganda film, Purple Heart, in 1944 and the subject of
Carroll Glines' book Four Came Home. "I've been led to
believe," says Tom Griffin, "that Hirohito himself went
over the trial records and said, 'Shoot these three and put
the others in solitary.'" Of the remaining prisoners, one
eventually died in captivity of malnutrition. The four survivors were rescued in August 1945, when OSS (special services) men parachuted into Peking and negotiated their
Few photos of the Doolittle
Raid survived the ditchings
and crash landing that followed the raid. However, one
showing a pilot's eye view of
the Yokosuka Naval Base did.
The "knob" in the lower left-
hand corner is the spinner of
the plane's left propeller.
(Thomas C. Griffin Collection)
release from their Japanese captors.56
The crew of The Whirling Dervish was lucky.
Watson had nursed his B-25 farther inland than any of the
other planes. Fifteen and a half hours into their flight, the
twin engines sputtering, the crew dropped through the
hatches into the darkness and the storm. Tom Griffin
remembers what it was like bailing out: "It was a peculiar
sensation. . . . I was in a big pendulum. . . . until "[my
parachute] hung up on the tops of some bamboo trees and
I was lowered to the earth with the greatest of ease." All
five of Griffin's crew survived. But they were not yet safe.
The next morning he, co-pilot Lt. James Parker, and gunner-engineer T/Sgt. Eldred Scott met in a Chinese village
where the three were held prisoner by armed Chinese sol-
12
Queen City Heritage
diers until Catholic missionaries identified them as
Americans. "Doc" Watson joined them two days later —
with a shoulder injury so severe that he flew nothing but a
desk for the rest of the war. Bombardier Wayne Bissell was
the last to be reunited with his crew. He had been captured by Chinese bandits who apparently intended to hold
him for ransom. But, Griffin recalls "he escaped by the
simple expedient of running away." Generally, however —
with the exception of one crew turned over to the Japanese
— the Chinese treated the American fliers as heroes and
helped them escape.
In retaliation for the raid, Tokyo ordered the
Chinese airfields taken and the American "war criminals"
captured. "The Japanese seemed to know where all our
crews were," says Griffin. "Their Zeros flew over the town
we were in and circled us at low altitude. . . . [They] later
wiped that town out."57 So ruthless were the Japanese in
their reprisals against the Chinese who had assisted the
Americans, that they did the same to many such places. A
Belgian missionary described what happened to the man
who had aided Lt. Watson: "'They wrapped him up in
some blankets, poured the oil of a lamp on him and obliged his wife to set fire to the human torch.'"58 Doolittle
recorded in his autobiography: "All told, in the wake of
[Tom Griffin's] crew's escape, Japanese forces killed thousands of Chinese peasants for assisting the Americans. It
was later estimated that 250,000 innocent Chinese paid
with their lives for helping us."59
What had Tom Griffin's mission accomplished — particularly in light of the awful cost? On April
19, the day following the raid, the Cincinnati Enquirer
headlines proclaimed, "Fire and Explosive Bombs Do
Widespread Damage, Axis Accounts Hint." The accompanying article reported: "The very fact that the Japanese
radios shouted officially that the 'imperial family is safe'
suggested a major disaster, because only at times of great
emergency are such assurances given." The article cited
INS sources: "Japan, shaken by the impact of bombs on
her own soil for the first time in the war, prepared frantically . . . to meet an openly expected renewal of raids carried out . . . against four of her leading cities by bombers
identified in Tokyo as American."
Even neutral Switzerland cheered the news:
Bern, April 19 — (AP) — The bombing of Tokyo was
described as a demonstration of the "spirit of the offensive
now animating the Anglo-Saxons" by the newspaper La
Suisse, Geneva, today.
The Swiss newspaper, in a front-page editori-
Pictured here is the now
famous photo of Jimmy
Doolittle, thoroughly dejected
because he feared the mission had failed, seated near
the wing of his wrecked B-25
in China. (Thomas C. Griffin
Collection)
Winter 1992
Navigating from Shangri-La
al entitled "From Defensive to Offensive," said the raid
brought the war home to the people of Japan for the first
time since last December 7 [Pearl Harbor].60
The Los Angeles Times reported "Doolittle
61
Did It!" And the Nome, Alaska (Doolittle's home town)
Nugget dared the following headline, "Nome Town Boy
Makes Good."62 So, as far as some of the press was concerned, the Doolittle Raid was an unqualified success.
Navigator Griffin and the rest of the
Doolittle Raiders came to an entirely different conclusion:
"When we [the crews] got together in China and compared our notes and realized we'd lost all our planes, our
initial feelings were that we thought we'd made a mess of
the whole thing. We had an assignment, which was to
bomb military and industrial targets and then deliver
planes to Chiang Kai-shek." None of them had completed
the second part of their mission. A now famous photo of
Doolittle shows the colonel, dejected, seated on a Chinese
mountainside, staring at the remains of his shattered B-25.
"I felt lower than a frog's posterior," he recalls. "This was
my first combat mission. . . . I was sure it was my last."63
"'It's been a complete failure,'" he told his engineer-gunner S/Sgt. Paul Leonard.64
damage. "Two and a half years later," concedes Griffin,
"two B-29s carried more tonnage than all sixteen [raider]
planes." But, historians agree, it was a great psychological
boost for the American people and just as great a shock for
the Japanese. They (like their German counterparts) had
been assured by their leaders that no Allied plane could
ever violate Japan's airspace.67 In fact, on April 16 Japanese
radio had dismissed as ludicrous a Reuters report that three
American planes had bombed Tokyo. Radio Tokyo boasted that it was '"absolutely impossible for enemy bombers
to get within 500 miles of Tokyo."68 After all, ever since
1281, when a fierce storm had miraculously destroyed an
invading Mongolian fleet, Japan had been protected by the
kamikaze, the divine wind.69 As the news of the raid sank
in, so did feelings of shock and disbelief. Ramon Muniz
Lavalle, an attache assigned to the Argentine embassy in
Tokyo, witnessed the Japanese reaction at the time. Later
he concluded, "That raid by Doolittle was one of the
greatest psychological tricks ever used. It caught the
[Japanese] by surprise. Their unbounded confidence began
to crack."70
Some historians, such as Edwin P. Hoyt in
his 1990 book The Airmen, contend that the raid was "primarily valuable as propaganda." However, this interpretation oversimplifies and underestimates its effects. In The
Pacific War John Costello states, "The most far-reaching
impact of the Tokyo Raid was the psychological effect it
had of the [Japanese] Imperial General Staff. The generals
and admirals had suffered a tremendous loss of face, and
their angry overreaction eventually brought a succession of
strategic disasters."71 They became obsessed with what
Costello and John Keegan in The Second World War characterize as "victory disease."72 The raid, says Keegan,
"might have been judged a fiasco had it not registered
with the Japanese high command." There was great
embarrassment over the attack and a fear for the emperor's
well-being.73 A mortified Admiral Yamamoto, who had
planned the Pearl Harbor attack, retired to the cabin of his
flagship, leaving the pursuit of Halsey's Task Force 16 to
his chief of staff.74 But he and the Japanese naval command
"resolved to save face"75 by drawing the remnants of the
American Pacific Fleet into a showdown at which Japanese
numerical superiority would prevail. Yamamoto pressed for
Japanese expansion to the east, against the wishes of the
army, who preferred a southward drive toward Australia.
The army now acceded to Yamamoto's plan — in part to
remove the now ever-present potential of airstrikes on
Japan by eliminating America's westernmost outpost:
As I sat there, . . . Leonard took my picture
and . . . tried to cheer me up. He asked, ccWhat do you think
will happen when you go home, Colonel?"
I answered, Well, aI guess they'll court-martial me and send me to prison at Fort Leavenworth."
Paul said, aNo, sir. I'll tell you what will happen. They're going to make you a general."
I smiled weakly and he tried again. "And
they're going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor."
I smiled again and he made a final effort. "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 tears came to my eyes.65
All three of Paul Leonard's predictions
proved true66. For their heroism Lt. Thomas Griffin and all
the Tokyo Raiders were awarded medals from the Chinese
government and the Distinguished Flying Cross from the
air corps. A modest Tom Griffin responded to the suggestion that he had done anything "heroic." "If the American
people and everyone thought we'd done a great job, we
weren't going to argue with them." As for the results of
the raid, he replies with understatement: "It had some
very fortunate results. . . . Sometimes you have to do little
things to get the pot boiling."
Tactically the Doolittle Raid did little bomb
13
14
Queen City Heritage
Midway Island. Costello describes the feelings of the time: China, Charles Greening of plane number eleven summed
The members of the naval staff were over- up the mission of his plane, the Hari-Carrier:ul think
whelmed with a sense of shame. Navy Chief Admiral they'll call this mission a success anyhow. But there's one
Nagumo, who had been having second thoughts about the thing we'll have to admit."
forthcoming Midway operation, now accepted Tamamoto's
"What's that?" [his crew] asked in unison.
view that unless priority was given to capturing the mid"It was a mission that will go down in the
Pacific islands to extend Japan's defensive frontier, the whole
official report listed under the heading, 'Not as Briefed.'"77
Imperial Navy would soon be on patrol to prevent future carHow ironic, too, that in the fiftieth year after
rier raids on Japan.76
the historic flight, as Esther Griffin, Tom's wife of almost
The rest, as the expression goes, is history. fifty years, acknowledges that sometimes, "when you ask
Just six weeks after the bombing of Japan, the U.S. Navy someone what a Doolittle Raider is, they say, 'Is that a
struck back at Midway. Forewarned of the attack by professional basketball team?'" Undeterred, Cincinnatian
American intelligence — who had cracked the Japanese Tom Griffin tells his story and, in so doing, reminds
code — U.S. Navy fliers turned the tide of the Pacific War. Americans of the sacrifices of his friends. And, whenever
This is, Tom Griffin agrees, the "biggest thing that the possible, he attends the annual reunions of the Doolittle
Doolittle Raid did." The pot, indeed, had been stirred to Raiders, possibly for the reason given in the introduction
the boiling point.
to Destination Tokyo: "Old soldiers get together because
Ironically, shortly after bailing out over once, when they were young, they faced death together —
A series of sketches drawn by
Randy Renner illustrated
scenes of the Doolittle raid.
This one recreates a view of
the cockpit just before take
off. (Illustration courtesy
Randy Renner)
Winter 1992
Navigating from Shangri-La
and survived."78 One of the raiders, fellow-navigator
William Bower of Ravenna, Ohio, recalls nostalgically:
"Oh, it was the greatest, the wildest bunch of men that I
have ever been associated with. There was something
about that Seventeenth Group, about the collection of
people that were in it, that I have never experienced
since."79
At the annual reunion of the Doolittle
Raiders, held as close to the anniversary date as possible,
the living toast their fallen comrades. They raise their silver
goblets — there are eighty of them, each inscribed with
their name of a raider. And there is a bottle of 1896
cognac, the year of General Doolittle's birth — to be
shared eventually by the last two survivors. "I personally
hope I'm not one of the last two because," Tom Griffin
says, "I don't like cognac."
Griffin returned to China in 1983, shortly
after that country opened its doors to outsiders, hoping to
photograph the places he remembered from his Doolittle
days. The Chinese government did little to help him, probably because the current regime wants nothing to do with
long-discredited Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Mr.
Griffin is currently at work on his latest project associated
with the Doolittle Raid. In light of recent political developments, the Raiders Association has asked him to
approach the American and Russian governments about
securing the release of the last possible "prisoner" of the
Doolittle Raid on Japan, plane number eight, interned
along with its crew in the U.S.S.R. If it survives, Griffin
maintains, B-25B number 40-2242 would make an historic
addition to the Smithsonian Institute in Washington or the
Air Force Museum in Dayton. He adds that General
This sketch shows a B-25 on
the flight deck preparing for
take off. (Illustration courtesy
Randy Renner)
16
Queen City Heritage
Doolittle — "The Boss" as he is known by the raiders —
is, at the time of this writing, still alive and living in
Carmel, California with his son. He is ninety-six years old.
In 1991 Doolittle completed his autobiography, I Could
1."Tokyo Bombed, Report," Cincinnati Enquirer, April 18, 1942, p.
1:1.
2. Enquirer, April 18,1942.
3. "Allied Offensive Indicated by U.S. Air Attack on Japan."
Cincinnati Enquirer, April 19,1942, p. 1:1.
4. James A. Cox, "'Tokyo Bombed! Doolittle D o ' o d I t , ' "
Smithsonian, June 1992, p. 118.
5. Rear Admiral Edwin T. Layton, U.S.N. (Ret.) et al, And I Was
There: Pearl Harbor and Midway — Breaking the Secrets. (New York,
1985), p. 380.
6. Thomas C. Griffin, Interview with the author, May 6, 1992.
Hereafter, references to this interview will be 1992 Interview.
7. Paul Lugannini, "Member of Doolittle Tokyo Raid Now Lives In
Cincinnati," Cincinnati Enquirer, April 15,1962, p. 6-A.
8. Nick Clooney, "A Veteran Remembers . . . 30 Seconds Over
Tokyo," Cincinnati Post, April 17,1992, pp. Cl-2.
9. Illness prevented Tom Griffin from speaking in 1992.
10. Thomas C. Griffin, Interview obtained by the Cincinnati
Historical Society, December 5, 1989. Hereafter, references to this
interview will be cited as 1989 Interview.
Never Be So Lucky Again.
World War II did not end for Lt. Thomas
Carson Griffin after the famous attack on Tokyo. He
returned from China, was assigned to the 319th
Bombardment Group, and flew twenty-three missions over
North Africa and the Mediterranean. Promoted in August
1942, Captain Griffin was shot down twice. The first time,
he wound up "in the drink." The second time he bailed
out of his burning plane and was captured by the Germans,
who imprisoned him in the POW complex made famous
by the book and movie, The Great Escape. But that, as the
saying goes, is "another story."
Another sketch by Renner
illustrates a lone B-25 gaining
altitude after dropping its
payload. In the background
explosives and incendiaries
darken the skies over Japan.
The tethered barrage of bal-
loons were designed to prevent low-level attacks such as
the one made by Doolittle's
fliers. (Illustration courtesy
Randy Renner)
Winter 1992
Navigating from Shangri-La
11. 1992, 1989 Interviews. The bomber was named after General
William "Billy" Mitchell, an early and outspoken proponent of strategic air power who was, ironically, court-martialled by the U. S. Army
Air Corps in 1925.
12. Horace S. Mazet, "On the raid that electrified America — and
Foretold Japan's ultimate fate," World War II, March 1992, p. 8.
13. James H. Doolittle with Carroll V. Glines, An Autobiography of
General James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle: I Could Never Be So Lucky
Again (New York, 1991), pp. 230-231.
14. 1992 Interview; Doolittle, p. 242.
15. Carroll V. Glines, The Doolittle Raid: America's Daring First
Strike Against Japan (New York, 1988), p. 16.
16. Doolittle, p. 255.
17. Doolittle, p. 255.
18. At the outset of the planning, to determine the feasibility of the project, two B-25s had safely taken off from the Hornet and returned to
Norfolk, Va. But the first plane nearly struck the island. The painted lines
described in the article were added to prevent an accident like this from
occurring.
19. 1992 Interview; Cox, p. 116.
20. Cox, p. 120.
21. 1992 Interview; Ben Warner, "The Doolittle Raid Remembered," Air
Classics, May 1992, p. 66.
22. Glines, p. 22.
23. Doolittle, pp. 265, 3.
24. Cox, p. 116.
25. Duane Schultz, The Doolittle Raid (New York, 1988), p. 81.
26. Schultz, p. 26.
27. Doolitde, pp. 240-241.
28. Doolittle, p. 272.
29. Doolittle, p. 272.
30. Doolittle, pp. 246-247.
31. Schultz, p. 46.
32. 1992 Interview; Schultz, pp. 109-110.
33. Glines, p. 75.
34. Schultz, p. 14.
35. Schultz, p. 84.
36. There is some confusion about figures — probably the result of the
use by some of statute miles and nautical miles by others. (A nautical mile
is 6076 feet.) The Air Force Museum in Dayton, Ohio, uses the following: a planned launch from 450-650 miles out, an actual launch from
approximately 800 miles. Ironically, the report of the Japanese radio ship
seems least confusing. It reported "three enemy carriers" at a distance of
650 nautical miles from land's end on the eastern tip of Honshu Island —
about 800 miles from Tokyo.
37. Schultz, p. 103.
38. Glines, p. 114.
39. Schultz pp. 109-110. In an interesting anecdote, Schultz tells how a
surprised Prime Minister Tojo "met the enemy for the first time." His
plane was approaching an airfield near Tokyo when a B-25 passed by —
so close that his secretary first realized that the "unusual-looking" plane
was American when he saw the pilot's face (Schultz 159).
40. Glines includes an extensive interview with Thomas Griffin on pp.
114-118.
41. U.S. efforts to keep the mission secret backfired in China. By the time
of the attack, no radio homing beacons, flares, or high-octane aviation gas
had been supplied to the forward Chinese air bases. Even more surprising,
American planners did not take the international date line into account
when they asked that everything be in place by April 20. According to the
original timetable, then the planes should have been arriving in China on
A Renner sketch showing
plane number two as it skims
over Tokyo Bay, its prop raising spray, illustrates how
close to the water the planes
flew. In the background is
Jimmy Doolittle's plane num-
ber one. (Illustration courtesy
Randy Renner)
17
Li
Queen City Heritage
April 19, not April 20. The discovery of the task force caused the planes to
arrive at night on April 18. As it turned out, the issue of the deadline was
a moot point. Nothing had been done to prepare the fields. Even had the
raiders' planes been able to put down at the airfields, without fuel they
would have been "sitting ducks" for the Japanese air forces operating in
the area.
42 1992 Interview; Mazet, p. 66.
43 . Doolittle, p. 270.
44. Hollywood Director John Ford, an officer in the Navy during the war,
filmed the takeoff.
45. Glines, p. 94.
46. Mazet, p. 11.
47. The Soviets, politically embarrassed by the raiders' presence, may have
deliberately looked the other way, allowing them to escape into Iran.
During the crews' captivity, the Soviet embassy in Washington presented
Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., with monthly bills for
room and board and related expenses. Apparently Morgenthau called
Doolittle a number of times to complain, but none of the bills were ever
paid. The Soviets, Doolittle felt, had kept the B-25 anyway.
48. Duane Schultz contends that The Whirling Dervish actually struck the
Tokyo Gas and Electric Company.
49. Schultz, p. 156.
50. 1992 Interview; Doolittle, pp. 265-266.
51. 1992 Interview; Glines, p. 115.
52. Schultz, p. 53.
53. 1992 Interview; Schultz, p. 68.
54. Schultz, p. 67.
55. Glines, pp. 116.
56. Cohen, p. 77. Schultz, p. 174. Shultz cites an extensive study by J.
Merrill in his 1964 book, Target Tokyo: The Halsey-Doolittle Raid. In that
book, Merrill records "that six wards of a Nagoya hospital, six schools,
and numerous homes were damaged" in the raid (Schultz, 174). Most of
this (what today might be called) "collateral damage" resulted from fires
set by 500 lb. incendiary cluster bombs that scattered upon release. One
school boy was apparently struck on the head and killed by one of these.
In conversations with the author, former Vietnam War F-4 reconnaissance
pilot, Col. Wayne Pittman (editor of the Air Force Museum's Friends
Journal quarterly), points out that the air corps did not yet understand
the extreme difficulties imposed by low-level bombing attacks. But
Merrill's study also contains a "partial list of the military and industrial
targets damaged in the raid [that] includes five electric and gas companies, six gasoline storage tanks, five manufacturing plants, two warehouses, a navy ammunition dump, an army arsenal, a navy arsenal laboratory,
an airfield, the government communication minister's transformer station,
a diesel manufacturing plant, a steel fabricating plant, and the Nagoya
aircraft factory" (Schultz, 174). Schultz also clarifies Hirohito's role in the
Four crew members (left to
right) navigator Griffin; bombardier Wayne Bissell, pilot
Harold "Doc" Watson, and
bombardier Eldred Scott
attended a reunion of The
Whirling Dervish crew in
December 1945, in Miami.
Co-pilot James Parker was
not present.(Thomas C.
Griffin Collection)
executions. The emperor evidently wanted an example to be made, to act
as a deterrent against future bombing attacks. Prime Minister Tojo
argued against execution. The law justifying the death penalty for the
Tokyo raid was enacted after the fact (Schultz, 260-261). 1989 Interview.
57. Schultz explains in a footnote on p. 158 that most raiders identified
attacking planes as "Zeros." Few Zeros, he notes, were stationed in the
home islands at the time of the attack. Most home defense aircraft were
fixed landing gear, Nakajima Type-97s ("Nates") — highly maneuverable
planes but obsolescent with a top level speed of approximately 270 m.p.h.
This explains how the newer Mitchell was able, in many cases, to outrun
the Japanese fighters. In addition, several of the much faster Kawasaki
Type 3 Ki-63 ("Tony") fighters rose to meet the raiders.
58. Glines, p. 152.
59. Doolittle, p. 551.
60. Enquirer, April 19, 1942, pp. 1:1-2.
61. John Toland, But Not in Shame: The Six Months After Pearl Harbor
(New York, 1961), p. 335.
62. Glines, p. 148.
63. Doolittle, p. 12.
64. Schultz, p. 3.
65. Doolittle, p. 12.
66. Doolittle's promotion raised some eyebrows and antagonism among
some regular army officers. In 1930 Doolittle had resigned from the regular army as a first lieutenant. He skipped captain when he assumed the
rank of major in the specialist-reserves. In 1940 he resumed active duty as
a major and soon became a lieutenant colonel. Then he again skipped a
rank, that of full colonel, when he was promoted to lieutenant general as
a result of the Tokyo raid. Paul Leonard became Doolittle's crew chief in
North Africa. After an air raid, the general found all that remained of his
friend, his left hand. "It was my greatest personal tragedy of the war,"
Doolittle writes in his memoirs (Doolittle, 335). 1992, 1989 Interviews.
67. 1989 Interview; Schultz, p. 10.
68. Schultz, pp. 112-113.
69. Schultz, p. 10.
70. Schultz, p. 114.
71. John Costello, The Pacific War (New York, 1981), p. 236.
72. Costello, p. 236. John Keegan, The Second World War (New York,
1990) p. 271.
73. Keegan, p. 270.
74. Costello, pp. 235-236.
75. Layton, p. 357.
76. Costello, p. 236.
77. 1989 Interview; Glines p. 122.
78. Stan Cohen, Destination: Tokyo: A Pictorial History of Doolittle's Tokyo
Raid, April 18, 1942 (Missoula, 1992), p.78.
79. Schultz, p.57.