Tokyo Raiders - remembrance of air force unit

Airman, August, 2001 by Tech. Sgt. Mark Kinkade

Organized by a firebrand colonel, bonded by an improbable mission and honored by a nation desperate for heroes, Jimmy Doolittle's Tokyo Raiders are still together.

The B-25 Mitchell bomber was running on fumes high over China and fighting a headwind churned up by a rising storm. First Lt. Bill Bower, ready to bail out, paused at one of the bomber's hatches and peered into the darkening sky below for some sign that his crew got out of the aircraft safely.

It was, he said nearly 60 years later, the only time he wondered if he was going to survive the mission.

"It was the one time I came close to being scared," he said. "When it came time to step out."

He wasn't scared when, months before, the Army Air Forces asked for volunteers for a secret mission.

He wasn't scared when the captain of the USS Hornet announced to the ship's crew and the 80 aviators onboard, "This task force is bound for Tokyo."

And he wasn't scared when Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle gathered the pilots and aircrews together in the bowels of the ship the day they were to launch 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers off a 400-foot aircraft carrier flight deck and asked, "What do you want to do, boys?"

They knew what they were going to do. They were Doolittle's Raiders, and they were going to follow their tough little commander wherever he went, even if it was on a bombing raid over Japan.

"It was our mission to do it," Bower said. "We were to show the world it could be done. And we did."

In less than 24 hours on April 18, 1942, Bower and the rest of the Raiders launched the bombers in a churning storm, bombed targets in Japan and headed for China.

Morale boost needed

More than anything, the United States needed a success against the enemy. The Pearl Harbor attack had put the nation on its heels, and a series of lightning-quick assaults on islands in the Pacific made the Japanese seem invincible.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt wanted to hit back. If he could bloody Japan's nose and show some small imperfection in the enemy's armor, national morale would turn around.

War Department planners hit on the idea of launching Army Air Forces bombers off a Navy carrier, then recovering the aircraft at airfields in China. The call for volunteers went out in March 1942. Commanding General of the Army Air Forces Maj. Gen. "Hap" Arnold gave Doolittle the task of organizing and training the volunteers for the mission.

Doolittle was well-known not only as a military pilot, but also for his civilian air racing accomplishments. Short, stocky and nearly bald, he had a reputation for stretching an aircraft to its operational limits, and for doing things his way.

"He made sure we put those planes through every possible function," Bower said. "There was nothing about the bomber's capabilities we didn't know when we finished training."

Nolan Herndon joined Doolittle's cause because he wanted to get involved in the war. A navigator, bombardier, nose gun operator and all-purpose crew member, Herndon was a first lieutenant fresh from his hometown of Fort Worth, Texas, when the call for volunteers went out.

"You don't join the service unless you plan on doing something like that," he said recently during a reunion of Doolittle's crews.

Herndon and the rest of the volunteers -- most from the 17th Bombardment Group in Pendleton, Ore. -- trained at Eglin Field, Fla. Doolittle addressed the group of men on the day he arrived.

"My name's Doolittle," he recalled in his biography. "I've been put in charge of the project you men have volunteered for. It's a tough one, and it will be the most dangerous thing any of you have ever done. Anyone can drop out, and nothing will ever be said about it."

No one told them what they were going to do, but most of the crews had a sense of what was coming.

"We all figured it was something big, something that would make a splash," Herndon said. "Once we found out we were going to California, we kind of knew what we might be doing."

In April 1942, the crews boarded the Hornet, and the bombers were lashed to the decks. As the ship sailed under the Golden Gate Bridge with an escort of support ships, the captain sent the message that the force was going to Tokyo. Cheers erupted throughout the task force.

A change in plans

A storm kicked up around the Hornet carrier battle group two days before the planned raid. Rain drenched the bombers on the tossing flight deck, and the weather forced the accompanying battleships to fall back, leaving the carrier unprotected.

When Navy radar spotted Japanese ships ahead of the carrier, Adm. William "Bull" Halsey ordered Doolittle to launch the mission even though the ship was 700 miles from Japan, instead of the planned 400.

Despite the storm tossing the ship like a rubber duck in a bathtub full of kids, 1st Lt. Richard Cole was ready to take off. He was co-pilot on the lead aircraft, flown by Doolittle.

"We happened to be with the best pilot in the world, and there was no doubt we would succeed]," he said.

Doolittle led the way, dropping incendiary bombs to light the way for the other aircraft. They swept in low over the coastline, so close one Raider later recalled they could see the astonished faces of Japanese fishermen on the shoreline below.