The Aviators by Winston Groom
Stubborn though he might have been, Lindbergh was also shaken by the fallout from the incident and by watching his immense prestige evaporate.
LESS THAN TWO MONTHS after the Des Moines speech, on December 7, 1941, planes from Japanese aircraft carriers attacked the huge U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in the Hawaiian Islands, essentially destroying the U.S. Pacific Fleet of battleships that were moored there. The attack was a complete surprise, and the United States declared war on Japan the next day. Three days afterward, the Germans and Italians declared war on the United States, rendering the arguments of the America First Committee moot.
For Lindbergh, it was moot the moment he learned of the Japanese attack, but he now found himself in the most awkward position. Here was the war that he believed in fighting, but he had resigned his colonel’s commission. One can scarcely imagine a more frustrating situation for a man of Lindbergh’s temperament. A couple of years before, he had been Colonel Lindbergh, America’s hero. Now he was ex-colonel Nobody, despised by a large portion of the population; the cause for which he had fought so hard was forever lost. And now that there was a war he wanted to fight, he couldn’t get into it. Walter Winchell, a popular commentator of the day, summed it up uncharitably: “His halo has turned into a noose.”
Yet America wasn’t through with Slim Lindbergh, not by a long shot. The years ahead would bring a dazzling conclusion to the young man who made history by flying alone across the Atlantic Ocean. Before long he would take to the air once more—the Lone Eagle again in deadly earnest.
* Titled North to the Orient Anne’s book would become an instant best seller when it was published in 1935.
† The China Clippers were four-engine behemoths that were featured on U.S. airmail stamps of the 1930s.
‡ Nicolson must have confused “Miss Morgan” with Miss Morrow, referring to Anne’s sister Constance. Elisabeth Morgan, Anne’s other sister, had died two months earlier. But in fact, three years later, in 1937, Constance Morrow, at the age of twenty-three, had married Aubrey Morgan, the widower of her dead sister, and they lived happily ever after until their deaths in the last part of the twentieth century.
§ The Lindberghs’ German police dog Thor and Skean, the terrier, were on the other hand shipped to England aboard the Queen Mary, an honor, Lindbergh said, “I’m afraid they have not appreciated.”
‖ The 1925 Treaty of Locarno was an effort by the Allies to adjust with Germany some of the points of the Treaty of Versailles that had ended World War I.
a The so-called impregnable Maginot Line had been built by France after World War I to protect against any future attack by Germany. Unfortunately, it was finished before the danger from airpower was fully understood.
b Germany would produce nearly 34,000 of the Messerschmitts before the end of the war.
c In which England and France allowed Hitler to invade Czechoslovakia unopposed.
d One of Lindbergh’s severest biographers, Leonard Mosley, states that at the request of the U.S. ambassador to the U.K. Joseph Kennedy, Lindbergh summarized his report and that Kennedy, an appeaser, gave it to Neville Chamberlain on the eve of the Munich Conference. Lindbergh himself says he summarized the report for Kennedy, but I can find no supporting evidence that Kennedy gave it to Chamberlain, let alone that it prompted Chamberlain to yield to Hitler.
e Ernst Udet died mysteriously in November 1941. The German press put out the story that he was killed “in an accident with some kind of gun.” Other sources said it was a plane crash. Most people think he committed suicide. Whether at the behest of the Nazis or not, no one knows. Milch suggested that Udet had deliberately impeded Nazi aircraft production.
f The army had changed uniforms since Lindbergh had last worn his.
g Thompson, who was said to be the second most powerful woman in America (behind Eleanor Roosevelt), had been expelled from Germany for her anti-Nazi reporting and hated Hitler and his regime rabidly.
CHAPTER 11
THE RAID
One of the most courageous deeds in military history.
—ADMIRAL WILLIAM “BULL” HALSEY
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING the Pearl Harbor attack, everyone with authority from the president on down was wracking his brain for a way to retaliate against the Japanese. Roosevelt was particularly desirous of striking a blow. As a World War I–era assistant secretary of the navy, he felt a special indignation at the near destruction of the Pacific Fleet and heavy loss of life. Plan after plan was rejected, most often, and most glaringly, because the United States, in the early months of 1942, simply did not have the strength to go forward with them.
All along the East Coast and the Gulf of Mexico, German submarines began ravaging American shipping, especially petroleum tankers on their way from the oil fields of Texas and Oklahoma to the Northeast, exploding and sinking many of them before the eyes of horrified beachgoers from Miami to Maine. On the West Coast, Japanese subs attacked merchant shipping, and on the evening of February 23 one of them surfaced and for twenty minutes bombarded an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, slaying some cattle on a nearby ranch. Meanwhile, with help from the U.S. Secret Service, Archibald MacLeish, the Librarian of Congress, crated up copies of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Magna Carta, and other precious documents and put them on a special train for Fort Knox, Kentucky, where they remained in the gold vault for the duration.
On the island of Bataan in the Philippines, General Douglas MacArthur’s army was losing a life-and-death struggle with the Japanese. Elsewhere the Japanese imperial army and navy continued to swarm across the Pacific and Far East like a plague of locusts, extending their defensive perimeter outward thousands of miles from the main island chain.
The U.S. Navy had been launching and recovering planes from ships since 1922 when the USS Langley was converted from a coal barge into an aircraft carrier. But even by 1942 the standard carrier aircraft simply did not have the range to attack large targets in Japan without putting the carriers themselves in jeopardy of attack from land-based enemy planes, nor with the carrier planes’ small frames could they carry sufficient ordnance. One optimistic idea had been to bring big four-engine B-17 long-distance bombers to the area near Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, just six hundred miles from Tokyo, and strike from there. But Roosevelt was rebuffed by the Soviet dictator “Uncle Joe” Stalin. Hitler’s treachery had once again caused all the worldwide communists, socialists, and fellow travelers to switch their allegiance back to Britain and the United States. Having been double-crossed by Hitler the previous summer, Stalin was unwilling to risk provoking Japan into attacking him as well.
Thus the stalemate continued, as the Japanese octopus crawled over Indo-China, Sumatra, Borneo, Java, New Guinea, and nearly all the Pacific Island groups, including the U.S. possessions of Guam and Wake.
Then one day in early January a bright idea popped into the head of U.S. Navy Captain Francis “Frog” Low, a World War I submariner then on the staff of Vice Admiral Ernest J. King, the chief of the U.S. Fleet. Low had gone to Norfolk to inspect the progress on the new aircraft carrier Hornet, and upon his return he looked out the window of the DC-3 transport plane that was carrying him back to Washington. Low noticed that the outline of the deck of an aircraft carrier had been painted on the surface of an adjacent runway, which he logically assumed was a practice area for carrier pilots-in-training so the navy could avoid the prospect of trainees crashing into the real thing. At the end of the runway, however, sat two big army bombers, of what nomenclature Frog Low did not know. With the kind of dashing cognizance that military brains sometimes exhibit, Low put two and two together—namely, the army and the navy—and when he reached Washington he made straight for Admiral King, who was aboard his flagship, the 333-foot former German yacht Vixen, which was moored in the Potomac River off the docks of the Navy Yard.*
Admiral King was the sort of commander people liked to describe as “more feared than loved,” a hard-b
Low told of looking at the carrier imprint and the bombers and thinking, “If the army has some plane that can take off in that short distance—one that can carry a bomb load—why couldn’t we put a few of them on a carrier and bomb the mainland of Japan?”1
Instead of biting his head off, King looked up from his chair and said thoughtfully, “Low, that might be a good idea,” adding that he should investigate the scheme further and get back to him.2
The carrier people Low contacted were skeptical. It might be possible for some sort of bomber to fly off a carrier, but the pilot would not be able to return because the landing speeds were too fast. Navy Captain Donald B. “Wu” Duncan, King’s air officer, told Low that none of the army’s big four-engine bombers would fit on a carrier because of their wingspans and they also required too much takeoff footage. He asked Low what sort of plane he had in mind.
“How in hell would I know?” came the reply. “I’m a submarine man.”3 There were difficulties with most of the twin-engine medium bombers as well, Duncan said, except perhaps for the B-25, which, with a wingspan of only 67 feet, was enough to clear the carrier’s “island”—the tall superstructure that looms over the starboard side of the deck. (The wingspan of a B-17 Flying Fortress, by contrast, was 103 feet.)
North American Aviation built the B-25, named the Mitchell, after the late General Billy Mitchell. It was powered by two 1,700-horsepower Wright engines to a maximum speed of 300 miles per hour at level flight carrying a payload of 2,400 pounds of bombs with a range of 1,500 miles. Best of all, it would fit on an aircraft carrier and might actually be capable of successfully taking off from one. The beauty of it was that these planes could be launched while the ship was out of range of Japanese land-based interceptors.
The hitch, Duncan said, was retrieving the planes after the raid. He suggested a sort of Rube Goldberg scheme in which the B-25s would take off about five hundred miles from Japan, make their bomb runs, then return to the carrier, which would already be retreating toward Hawaii, and ditch in the ocean to be picked up by rescue crews. But nobody was very comfortable with that last part of it.
Low suggested to Duncan that, as the air officer, he draw up an operations plan and give it to King, which Duncan did on January 15, 1942, thirty-nine days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, while some of the fires in the damaged ships still smoldered. Duncan’s plan totaled fifty pages—written out in longhand, because he didn’t type and didn’t want to trust anything like this to office workers. Duncan immediately realized that the main element in the scheme would be surprise, which became a paramount issue; if Japanese intelligence got any whiff of the plan its forces could ambush the task force and destroy it.
Duncan proposed to use the newly completed aircraft carrier Hornet to launch a raid. The B-25s involved would need to be modified and lightened and navy carrier pilots would instruct the army pilots in the fine art of taking off from a pitching deck at sea. King read over the proposal with intense satisfaction, and next day, for security, he carried it personally to Hap Arnold. The two men could scarcely have been less alike, Arnold with his sunny, gregarious disposition‡ and dour old Ernie King. While their personalities clashed, they cooperated famously with a shared devotion to winning the war.§
Hap Arnold liked the plan and King suggested that he order some army B-25s to Norfolk to see if they could take off from the Hornet, instructing Duncan and Low: “Don’t mention this to another soul.” At this point King and Arnold also decided to bring Roosevelt into the scheme, and the president not only delightedly gave his blessings but made clear his desire that the highest priority should be put behind the mission. While the B-25 “tests” were being conducted, Arnold sent for the most trusted troubleshooter on his staff, James H. Doolittle. He figured that the army’s role in this adventure would need a spearhead, someone who could pull the whole thing off seamlessly—if anybody could.
JIMMY DOOLITTLE HAD COME back into uniform at Arnold’s request on July 1, 1940, as a troubleshooter for aircraft factories and related industrial endeavors as the United States ramped up its military output following the fall of France. He had spent the intervening year and a half helping companies such as Ford and General Motors convert from automobiles to airplanes.
“Do you think, Jim,” Arnold asked, “that we have a plane that can take off in five hundred feet, carry a payload of two thousand pounds, and fly two thousand miles?” Doolittle immediately sensed what Arnold was getting at and asked for a day or two to study the question. When he reported back to Arnold next day that the army’s B-25 might do the job, Arnold told him to work with Duncan and Low on the modifications to the planes and training of air crews. Doolittle had known “Wu” Duncan from the old flying days, and he read his plan with mounting excitement. The two met next morning, right before Duncan left for Pearl Harbor to explain the plan to U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Chester W. Nimitz and his carrier commander William F. “Bull” Halsey.‖ For his part, Doolittle also left that afternoon, for Wright Field in Ohio, where he began to attack the problem of how to modify the B-25s for this strange, important, highly secret mission.
Doolittle’s superb skills as an aeronautical engineer now put him in an ideal position to supervise the conversion of the Mitchells; he was already familiar with the mechanics of the plane and first set about to add enough extra fuel tanks to give the plane the range it required. Next would be to find other ways to lighten the aircraft.
Meantime Duncan, who had returned to Norfolk from Hawaii, arranged for two B-25s to be hoisted aboard Hornet to see if they could make a takeoff. In fact, to Duncan’s delight they got off the deck so quickly that one pilot feared, as the plane reared up, that his wing would hit the projection from the ship’s “island” that stuck out four stories over the flight deck. Granted, the planes carried no extra fuel, full crew, or heavy bomb load. Nevertheless the experiment was considered a success.
What allows an aircraft to take off from the ground (or, in this case, the deck) is a factor called lift, which is a direct function of the speed of the airflow over the wings. Every plane has a takeoff speed—the speed at which it can become airborne—depending on atmospheric conditions. On a carrier, there is the added factor of the speed of the vessel, plus the speed of the wind, as the carrier will always turn into the wind to launch. In the experiment Duncan conducted with the B-25s, the speed of the ship was 20 miles per hour, and the speed of the wind was 25 miles per hour—a total of 45 miles per hour of airflow over the wings. Since the minimum takeoff speed of the B-25 was a low 68 miles an hour, the pilot had only to accelerate to about 23 miles per hour to get airborne. In fact, a takeoff by a 25,000-pound plane in less than 500 feet would have been impossible except from an aircraft carrier. Wind at sea, then, would be an important factor in the raid.
Another problem was usable deck space aboard the Hornet. The navy had calculated the ship could carry sixteen B-25s on deck. The planes were too large to get down the elevator to the ship’s hangar, so they would have to be lashed down and exposed to whatever weather came their way. But they took up so much room that the first planes to take off would have considerably less usable deck space in which to reach takeoff speed. Doolittle set to work on that problem along with the others.
Selecting the flight crews was singularly important, but the question ultimately solved itself. Three squadrons of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group stationed at Pendleton, Oregon, were about the only ones who fit the bill. The Seventeenth was the only intact B-25 unit in the Army Air Corps, its pilots were used to flying and navigating over water, and it had had actual experience patrolling for Japanese submarines off the Pacific coast. On Christmas Eve of 1941, less th
Now, if only they would volunteer. By now, Doolittle—the great risk calculator himself—had calculated the odds of surviving the mission at under fifty-fifty. In the U.S. military “acceptable losses” would have been in the neighborhood of 5 to 15 percent depending on the mission. He was not about to order any airman to accept a challenge such as this.
On February 3, 1942, Doolittle brought twenty-four planes and a hundred and forty officers and men of the group to an airbase at Columbia, South Carolina, where the Seventeenth’s officers informed them the army was looking for volunteers for an important but highly dangerous mission that would take them out of the country for two to three months. That was all they knew; one of the men thought to himself that “dangerous is a pretty bad word when you’re talking about airplanes.” However, to a man they signed on, even the married ones.4
From there they flew to Eglin Field, a remote bombing and gunnery range in a sparsely populated part of the Florida panhandle, arriving between February 27 and March 3. A flying instructor from the Pensacola Naval Station, Lieutenant Henry L. “Hank” Miller, was waiting for them. Miller surprised the senior captains by telling them he was there to teach them how to take off from a carrier in a B-25. They were further surprised to learn that he had never even seen a B-25, let alone flown one. And they became disturbed when they realized that he had not mentioned carrier landings in his introduction.
PRESENTLY DOOLITTLE ARRIVED at Eglin Field. When the men were assembled he entered the room to audible gasps; he was already a legend in the Air Corps. He reiterated what they had been told by their commanders, that they had volunteered for a very dangerous mission. Anybody could still drop out for any reason, and “nothing would ever be said about it,” he told them. Some wanted to know more details but Doolittle was not forthcoming. He was extremely concerned about secrecy and the less anyone knew the better. Even he kept no written records. He told them the mission was top secret and not only were they not to discuss it with their wives, they were not to discuss it with each other, even if they managed to hazard a guess about where they were going. All rumors would be investigated by the FBI, he said. He again gave them a chance to back out. No one did.