When the B-25s landed at Alameda on April 1, Doolittle and Captain Ski York greeted each crew. “Anything wrong with your plane?” they asked. If a pilot admitted some malfunction, he was directed to a nearby parking ramp instead of the wharf.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Aviation History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

Originally, only 15 planes were to be loaded, but Doolittle asked for one more to be hoisted aboard. When the carrier was at sea, it would take off and return to the mainland to show the other B-25 crews that takeoffs were not only possible but could be made easily. Although the bomber crews had been told that B-25s had made carrier takeoffs previously, none had ever seen it done nor had they done it themselves. Lieutenant Miller, the Navy pilot who had instructed them in carrier takeoffs, would be aboard that B-25.

The next morning, Task Force 16.2 prepared to depart from San Francisco Bay. Just before the Hornet was to depart, Doolittle was ordered ashore to receive an urgent phone call from Washington. He recalled:

“I thought it was going to be either General Hap Arnold or General George Marshall telling me I couldn’t go. My heart sank because I wanted to go on that mission more than anything….

“It was General Marshall. ‘Doolittle?’ he said. ‘I just called to wish you the best of luck. Our thoughts and our prayers will be with you. Goodbye, good luck, and come home safely.’ All I could think of to say was, ‘Thank you, Sir, thank you.’ I returned to the Hornet feeling much better.”

Shortly before noon, the Hornet passed under the Golden Gate Bridge. That afternoon, Mitscher decided to tell his men where they were going. He signaled to the other ships, “This force is bound for Tokyo.” As he recalled later, when he made the announcement on the Hornet, “Cheers from every section of the ship greeted the announcement, and morale reached a new high, there to remain until after the attack was launched and the ship was well clear of combat areas.”

The next day, April 3, Doolittle changed his mind about sending the 16th plane back to the mainland. A Navy blimp, the L-8, arrived overhead with spare parts for the B-25s (see “The Mystery of the Pilotless Blimp,” July 1991 Aviation Heritage). Air-patrol coverage was provided as far as possible by a Consolidated PBY Catalina.

Doolittle assembled his crews and introduced Commander Apollo Soucek and Lt. Cmdr. Stephen Jurika. Soucek was the ship’s air officer, and he described the basics of carrier operations. Jurika, the Hornet’s intelligence officer, briefed them on the target cities and surrounding areas.

Jurika had been an assistant naval attache in Japan in 1939 and had obtained much valuable information about Japanese industry and military installations. He spoke to the crews almost every day, telling them of Japanese customs, political ideologies and history. Doolittle allowed the pilots to choose their targets in the assigned cities. Lieutenant Frank Akers, the carrier’s navigator, gave the pilots a refresher course on navigation. Doc White, the physician gunner on Lieutenant Don Smith’s crew, gave talks on sanitation and first aid.

Doolittle made it a practice to meet with the crews two or three times a day. He continually warned them not to bomb the Imperial Palace and to avoid hospitals, schools and other non-military targets. He said that most planes would carry three 500-pound demolition bombs and one 500-pound incendiary. He planned to take off in the late afternoon with four incendiaries and drop them on Tokyo in darkness. The resulting fires would light up the sky and serve as a beacon for those following and guide them toward their respective targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya and Osaka. All aircraft would then proceed to China and be guided by homing beacons to landing fields where they would refuel before proceeding to Chungking, the ultimate destination.

Mitscher and Halsey joined forces as planned. Meanwhile, arrangements in China were not going well. Japanese ground forces were moving in strength toward the airfields where the B-25s were to refuel. Although the Americans and Chinese in Chungking were told that they could expect some aircraft to arrive and to prepare for them by placing fuel and setting up homing beacons, they were not told that the planes would be arriving from the east after bombing Japan. Misunderstandings developed, and were compounded when Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek asked that the arrival of the planes be delayed so he could move his ground forces into position to prevent occupation of the Chuchow area where one of the refueling airfields was located.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to