Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (58 page)

The poverty amazed the fliers; everyone seemed to be dressed in rags. Beggars crowded around the windows in train stations, pleading for bread crusts. “The children were the most impressive,” Emmens wrote. “Bands of them dressed in absolute tatters, no shoes, and covered with filth—completely black, some of them—roved the railroad station area and begged for food.” A scene in Omsk particularly troubled the pilot. “One of the children had nothing on but a piece of dirty cloth with a hole cut in it for his head,” Emmens wrote. “It had no bottom and no sleeves. The lower half of him was as naked as the day he was born. His stomach, like those of 80 per cent of the children we saw, protruded from lack not only of proper food, but of any kind of food.”

After seventeen days the train neared Kuibyshev, Russia’s wartime capital and home to all the foreign embassies.

“I think your people will be expecting you,” Mike, the translator-guard, announced.

The news thrilled the airmen, who after a month in Russia, had yet to see anyone from the American embassy or
consulate. The night before the train arrived, they hustled to get ready. “We shined our brass. We made a list of things we were running out of. We needed toothpaste, toothbrushes, soap, shaving cream, and lotion. And we would ask for some cigarettes,” Emmens later wrote. “And, of course, we would give them messages to send home to our families saying that we were okay.”

The train pulled into the station at 5:30 a.m. Mike locked the airmen in the compartments and departed with a final request from them to contact the embassy and make sure American officials knew they were there. The airmen waited anxiously. An hour passed, then two; morning turned into afternoon. The fliers grew glum. Mike and the other guards arrived back at dusk, smelling of soap and vodka, having spent the day bathing and drinking, as opposed to tracking down diplomats. “Not one word did we hear from the American Embassy,” Emmens recalled, “nothing.”

The train pulled out of the station that evening, once again chugging west. A few days later, on May 19, it reached Okhuna, a small village about ten miles from Penza. A half dozen Soviet officers welcomed the fliers, ushering them into waiting cars for a twenty-minute ride through an area with no paved streets or sidewalks. “The same sad and bitter-looking people were trudging slowly along the paths,” Emmens recalled. “Again, only rags constituted their clothing.”

The cars rolled up to the compound, which was surrounded by a tall wooden fence and guarded by a gate. Inside the men found three buildings, including a guesthouse where York settled alone in one bedroom, while the others paired off into shared quarters. The rooms offered clothes racks along with iron cots and kapok-filled mattresses. Despite the coarse sheets and blankets, the men considered the quarters comfortable.

“Well, here we are!” Emmens announced to his roommate, Nolan Herndon.

“Yeah,” Herndon replied, “where?”

CHAPTER 21

As parents of one of your brave men our eternal gratitude is yours.

—MR. AND MRS. EDMUND MILLER, MAY 20, 1942, TELEGRAM

DOOLITTLE ARRIVED BACK IN
the United States on May 18, after a two-week journey that took him through India, North Africa, and even South America. A staff car awaited him at the airport in Washington, whisking him directly to the War Department, where he met with General Arnold. Doolittle debriefed the general about the mission, pointing out his concerns for the captured aircrews and the loss of the bombers. Arnold assured him the loss of the bombers was not a problem. The two men then met with General Marshall, whom Doolittle found in surprisingly good humor.

Afterward Arnold instructed the new brigadier general to go to the uniform store and buy some new clothes and then head home to his apartment at 2500 Q Street, in northwest Washington, and remain out of sight until Arnold called him. Joe Doolittle meanwhile was in Los Angeles, tending to her sick mother. Arnold had secretly phoned her in advance of her husband’s arrival, inviting her to Washington. Joe Doolittle flew all night on a commercial plane to Pittsburgh, landing the morning of May 19; there an Army officer ushered her onto a military transport to Washington.

Arnold rang Doolittle late that morning
and told him he would swing by the apartment and retrieve him in a few moments. The general just two weeks earlier had sent a final memo to the president, giving him an ultimate tally of the mission’s outcome and taking a swipe at the Japanese. “With the 15 planes reported located in East China, 1 interned in Siberia, and 1 which the Japanese claim is on exhibition, there is a total of 17 accounted for—which is 1 more than we sent over.”

The car pulled up outside Doolittle’s apartment, and to his surprise both Arnold and General Marshall sat in the back seat. Doolittle saluted and climbed in the front with the driver. The car pulled away from the curb. Doolittle waited for someone to tell him where the men were headed, but neither Arnold nor Marshall spoke. Doolittle finally could not contain his curiosity any longer and asked.

“Jim,” Arnold answered, “we’re going to the White House.”

“Well, I’m not a very smart fellow and I don’t want to embarrass anyone,” Doolittle said. “What are we going to do there?”

“The President is going to give you the Medal of Honor,” Marshall interjected.

The raid had thrilled Marshall, who later wrote that it “was successful far beyond our most optimistic hopes.” He had a week earlier sent a secret memo to Arnold, outlining the details of Doolittle’s honor and his ideas for an elaborate media rollout. He had directed Arnold to prepare a press release and even a proposed statement for Doolittle. “It will be necessary to keep this citation secret for a long time,” Marshall advised. “However, the fact of the award of the Medal of Honor should be made public the day it becomes known that Doolittle is in town. I wish to arrange the affair so that he is kept under cover until received by the President and decorated.”

Doolittle was floored by the honor—and immediately protested. “General, that award should be reserved for those who risk their lives trying to save someone else,” Doolittle argued. “Every man on our mission took the same risk I did. I don’t think I’m entitled to the Medal of Honor.”

Doolittle watched as Arnold’s cheeks turned red with anger and Marshall suddenly scowled. He knew he had just offended them both.

“I happen to think you do,” Marshall shot back.

The car fell silent. “This was the only time Hap ever got mad at me and General Marshall ever spoke
sternly to me,” he later wrote. “The highest-ranking man in Army uniform had made his decision. It was neither the time nor the place for me to argue.”

The officers arrived at the White House, where Doolittle was pleasantly surprised to find Joe. He had last seen her forty-seven days earlier in San Francisco. The two had little time to catch up before aides ushered them into the Oval Office at 1 p.m., followed by a gaggle of reporters and photographers.

President Roosevelt, who had pushed his military leaders to develop the raid, perched behind his desk. He greeted Doolittle and shook his hand, telling him that the raid had accomplished everything he had hoped.

The president pinned the Medal of Honor on Doolittle just above the left pocket of his uniform shirt as Marshall read aloud the citation. “Brigadier General James H. Doolittle, United States Army, for conspicuous leadership above and beyond the call of duty, involving personal valor and intrepidity at an extreme hazard to life,” Marshall read. “With the apparent certainty of being forced to land in enemy territory or to perish at sea, General Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers, manned by volunteer crews, in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland.”

Generals Arnold and Marshall both saluted Doolittle, while Joe rewarded her husband with a kiss.

News photographers shot stills and motion pictures of the historic event. The War Department handed out a three-page press release and a two-page statement attributed to Doolittle, giving the country the first real details of the mission, from hedgehopping across Tokyo to the types of targets bombed. The statement even mentioned the baseball game Jack Hilger’s crew witnessed.

Doolittle then took to the airwaves in a radio talk broadcast the following evening, where he graciously credited the mission’s success to the seventy-nine young pilots, navigators, bombardiers, and gunners who volunteered. “No group of men could have thrown themselves into a task more whole-heartedly,” Doolittle told listeners. “They did not seek the path of glory. They merely volunteered for a hazardous mission, knowing full well what such a phrase implied concerning their chances for personal safety. They followed the finest traditions of American fighting men.”

Reporters lapped it up, peppering Doolittle
with questions in a press conference after the Medal of Honor ceremony.

“We flew low enough so that we could see the expressions on the faces of the people,” Doolittle remarked.

“And what was that expression?” someone asked.

“It was one, I should say, of intense surprise,” Doolittle replied with, as one reporter noted, a twinkle in his eye.

He went on to tell reporters that nine Japanese fighters attacked his bomber over Tokyo. “I was able to run away from all of them,” he said, before turning to face the journalists. “Better make that ‘evade all of them.’”

“Are you going back again?” a reporter asked.

“That is in the laps of the gods and the hands of the War Department.”

Doolittle couldn’t resist a little fun—albeit off the record—when asked whether he could have bombed the palace. “Why,” he said. “I could have blown that chrysanthemum-painted bedpot right out from underneath the imperial throne.”

Reporters wanted to know what losses America suffered.

“No planes were left in Japan,” Doolittle said. “Some were damaged, but none was shot down. No plane was damaged to an extent that precluded it from proceeding to its destination.”

He likewise refuted claims that the enemy had the wreckage of one the mission’s bombers on show in Tokyo. “The Japanese do not have one of our planes on display,” he said. “They may have painted up one of their own to look like ours, or they may have gotten an American plane from somewhere else, but not from us.”

Reporters followed up by asking a stunned Joe Doolittle her thoughts. “I’m too thrilled to speak,” she replied.

Absent from all the details released, of course, was any mention of the
Hornet
or the fact that the bombers had taken off from a carrier. More important—and what would later pose a problem for the War Department and the administration—was Doolittle’s dodge over the fate of the bombers. The press and as a result the American public were left with the deliberately false impression that all of the bombers as well as airmen had made it through the mission safely, even though by then Doolittle and his superiors knew that fifteen of the sixteen bombers had in fact crashed and that two of the crews had been captured. “Doolittle emphasized,” noted a story the next day in the
Chicago Daily Tribune
, “that all planes and men came thru safely and
hooted at Japanese claims that they have one or more of the American planes on display.”

The world had waited in anticipation to learn who had masterminded and executed the stunning assault on the Japanese capital. One month and a day later it had its answer in what would prove a public relations masterpiece, just as Marshall had envisioned. America’s aviation darling Jimmy Doolittle, the newly promoted general and recipient of the nation’s highest award for heroism, was a hero many already knew. The MIT-educated racing and stunt pilot, who had captivated Americans for decades with his aerial feats, was the perfect face to put on America’s war effort.

The photo of the president pinning on the five-pointed star plastered the front pages of newspapers across the nation, accompanied by stories filled with the harrowing details of the raid that Doolittle now shared in his statement and interviews. Long profiles of the famed aviator followed in papers and magazines, reminding readers of his past heroics. Typical was the 1,797-word article in the
Washington Post
that carried the headline “His Life Story Reads like a Thriller, but with Perfect Timing.”

Articles and editorials alike glowed with praise for America’s new hero. More than a few made a play on Doolittle’s ironic surname.

“Jimmy Doolittle is a man whose exploits utterly belie his name,” declared the Baltimore
Sun
.

“He should be named Doomuch,” recommended the New York
Daily News
.

“Jimmy did it,” heralded
Time
magazine.

Other newspapers argued that only someone of Doolittle’s caliber could have been trusted to organize and lead such a dangerous mission. “This was a test of skill and courage,” wrote the
New York Times
. “It took a splendid flier like Doolittle, resolute, intrepid and resourceful, to carry it through.”

The
Chicago Daily Tribune
echoed that sentiment. “The bombing of Tokio may seem compounded of magic and the spirits of evil to a Japanese, but the American people will know that to Jimmy Doolittle it was a job,” the paper argued. “It was a job of planning, of organization, of navigation, of flying, of finding the target and releasing the bomb loads—and all of this has been Jimmy Doolittle’s life.”