Doolittle wanted to fly the mission as a pilot. “But I wanted to go only on the basis that I could do as well as or better than the other pilots who took the training,” he said. “I took Hank Miller’s course and was graded along with the others. I made it, but if I hadn’t I intended to go along as a copilot and let one of the younger, more proficient pilots occupy the left seat.”

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On one of his training flights, Doolittle flew with Lieutenant Richard E. Cole, copilot; Lieutenant Henry A. Potter, navigator; Sergeant Fred A. Braemer, bombardier; and Sergeant Paul J. Leonard, engineer-gunner. The original pilot had become ill and did not return to flying duty. These men became Doolittle’s crew.

Meanwhile, Captain Wu Duncan had arrived in Honolulu and conferred with Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and conveyed the plan for a Navy task force to transport the army bombers to the launch point. Nimitz liked the idea and gave the task of carrying it out to Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey, who was anxious to tangle with the enemy any way he could.

Duncan worked with the CINCPAC (commander in chief, Pacific) planning staff on the details for a 16-ship task force. It was decided that seven ships would accompany the Hornet from the Alameda Naval Air Station near San Francisco and rendezvous with an eightship force that included Halsey’s flagship, the carrier Enterprise. The joinder would take place near the 180th meridian.

By the middle of March, the Hornet, now destined to be the ship that would deliver the B-25s to the takeoff point, passed through the Panama Canal and proceeded to Alameda. At the end of the third week in March, Captain Duncan wired Washington from Honolulu: “Tell Jimmy to get on his horse.”

This coded message was all Doolittle needed to get his men and planes moving to the West Coast. Since two of the B-25s had been damaged in training, the 22 remaining planes were flown to McClellan Field, Sacramento, Calif., for final inspections before proceeding to Alameda. All of these crews would go aboard the carrier.

Captain Duncan flew to San Diego to confer with Captain Marc A. Mitscher, skipper of the Hornet. Mitscher had not been told about the mission until then and was delighted to have a part in it. Since he had watched the first two B-25s take off successfully several weeks previously, he was confident it could be done. Duncan then went to San Francisco to await the arrival of Doolittle from Florida, Halsey from Hawaii and the Hornet from San Diego.

The three men, joined by Captain Miles Browning, Halsey’s chief of staff, met informally in downtown San Francisco to discuss the details and determine if anything had been left undone. The plan was for the Hornet, in company with the cruisers Nashville and Vincennes, the oiler Cimarron, and the destroyers Gwin, Meredith, Monssen and Grayson–to be known as Task Force 16.2–to leave San Francisco April 2. Halsey, on the Enterprise and in charge of Task Force 16.1, would leave Hawaii on April 7, accompanied by the cruisers Northampton and Salt Lake City, the oiler Sabine,, and destroyers Balch, Benham, Ellet and Fanning.

The rendezvous of the two forces would become Task Force 16 and would take place on Sunday, April 12, at approximately 38 degrees 0 minutes north latitude and 180 degrees 0 minutes west longitude. The force would then proceed westward and refuel about 800 miles off the coast of Japan. The oilers would then detach themselves while the rest of the task force dashed to the launch point.

Halsey later reported in his memoirs that, “Our talk boiled down to this: we would carry Jimmy within 400 miles of Tokyo, if we could sneak 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.”

What Halsey did not discuss was the tremendous risk the Navy was taking. If marauding Japanese submarines discovered the task force steaming westward, it would be an excellent opportunity to cripple what was left of the Navy’s strength in the Pacific. Doolittle knew full well that if Halsey’s ships were under heavy attack, the B-25s stored topside would be pushed over the side to make flight deck available so the Hornet’s fighters could be brought up on deck to help protect the task force.

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