Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (6 page)

ADMIRAL ERNEST KING RETIRED
to his cabin after dinner on the evening of Saturday, January 10, 1942. Much to the frustration of the sixty-three-year-old Ohioan, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, Christmas and New Year’s had passed without any reprieve from the bad news that dominated the Pacific. The admiral had spent the afternoon at a conference of two dozen senior American and British military leaders at the Federal Reserve Building, downtown on Constitution Avenue, the eighth of twelve such war strategy sessions that would later be known as the Arcadia Conference. The two-and-a-half-hour meeting, which had focused on topics ranging from how to blunt Japan’s southward advance to immediate assistance for China, had adjourned with plans to meet again the following afternoon. King had hurried back to the Washington Navy Yard in time for dinner and an evening of work aboard his flagship, the
Vixen
, a 333-foot steel-hulled yacht moored in the frigid Anacostia River.

King was no stranger to long hours. The six-foot-tall admiral, who always wore a hat to hide his baldness, had graduated fourth in the class of 1901 at the Naval Academy, where his rosy cheeks had earned him the nickname Dolly, which he despised, favoring instead the name Rey, the Spanish word for king. He had served aboard destroyers and battleships and later commanded submarine divisions and even the sub base in New London, Connecticut. Recognizing the importance of naval aviation, King had earned his wings at forty-eight and later commanded the carrier
Lexington
. But the admiral wasn’t without his flaws, from his wandering hands, which left women afraid to sit next to him at dinner parties, to the thirst for booze that had prompted him to invent his own cocktail, a mix of brandy and champagne that he dubbed “the King’s Peg.” The admiral’s biggest fault, however, was his volcanic wrath, best described by one of his daughters: “He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy. He is always in a rage.”

Despite his personal failings King had passion for military history and proved a brilliant strategist. A crossword puzzle addict, he admired Napoleon and walked the Civil War battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg. His appreciation of history had led King—appointed by the president on December 20—to try to stall the official date he would take command until January 1, a move he felt would prevent the calamitous losses of 1941 from staining the legacy he hoped to create. Though America’s war plan called largely for playing defense in the Pacific until the defeat of Hitler, King planned to seize every opportunity to go after the Japanese. That was the best way to keep the enemy off guard and unable to strike, a philosophy he outlined in a memo to fellow senior military leaders. “No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows,” King wrote. “The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”

Captain Francis Low appeared at the admiral’s door on the
Vixen
. The forty-seven-year-old New York native, who served as King’s operations officer, had graduated in 1915 from the Naval Academy. The son of a retired Navy commander, Low captained the academy’s swim team, setting the school’s 220-yard record and earning the nickname Frog. He had spent much of his career in the submarine service, commanding five boats and later a squadron before he landed on the admiral’s staff. If
anyone was used to King’s tirades it was Low, who viewed his boss at times as both “rather cruel and unusual” and a “little understood and immensely complicated individual.” “He was difficult to work for,” Low later wrote in his unpublished memoir, “but serving with him was a liberal education—if one survived.” Low had suffered one such blowup a year earlier on the battleship
Texas
when he was executing a routine course change in the middle of the night. The admiral appeared on the bridge within minutes.

“Who made that signal?” King barked.

“I did,” Low answered.

King exploded, accusing Low of usurping power and undermining his authority. The shocked subordinate escaped to a wing of the bridge, his pride wounded. King cooled down and tried to apologize. “Low,” the admiral began, putting his hand on his shoulder. “Don’t feel too badly about this.”

But Low turned on his boss.

“Admiral,” he fired back, “aside from asking for my immediate detachment, there is not one goddamn thing that you can do to me that I can’t take.”

That bold move had earned King’s respect.

“What is it, Low?” the admiral asked this January evening.

Low had what he later described as a “foolish idea,” but given the dark early days of the war felt it was at least worth a mention.

“I’ve been to the Norfolk yard, as you know sir, to see the progress made on the
Hornet
,” the captain began. “At the airfield they have marked out a strip about the size of a carrier deck, and they practice take-offs constantly.”

“Well,” King replied, baffled by the direction of Low’s comments. “That’s a routine operation for training carrier-based pilots.”

“If the Army has some plane that could take off in that short distance,” Low continued. “I mean a plane capable of carrying a bomb load, why couldn’t we put a few of them on a carrier and bomb the mainland of Japan? Might even bomb Tokyo.”

Low waited for the irascible admiral to brush him off—or worse—but to his surprise King leaned back in his chair. This was precisely the bold concept that appealed to the admiral’s desire to go on the offensive. “Low,” King answered, “that
might be a good idea. Discuss it with Duncan and tell him to report to me.”

Low phoned Captain Donald Duncan, King’s air operations officer. The forty-five-year-old Michigan native, who still answered to his Naval Academy nickname Wu, had graduated just two years behind Low. A trained naval aviator with a master’s degree from Harvard, Duncan had served as navigator on the carrier
Saratoga
, as the executive officer of the Pensacola Naval Air Station, and later as commander of the first aircraft carrier escort,
Long Island.
He was also politically connected. His sister Barbara, before her 1937 death of cancer, was married to Harry Hopkins. “One thing I’ll say about you,” King once told Duncan, “you’re no yes-man.” Duncan would never forget that comment: “I always thought that, coming from Admiral King, was a very great compliment.”

“This better be important,” Duncan warned Low when the two met that Sunday morning at the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue.

“How would you like to plan a carrier-based strike against Tokyo?”

Low had piqued Duncan’s interest.

“As I see it,” Low explained, “there are two big questions that have to be answered first: Can an Army medium bomber land aboard a carrier? Can a land-based bomber loaded down with bombs, gas, and crew take off from a carrier deck?”

Duncan considered the questions, explaining that a carrier deck was too short for a bomber to land on. Even if it could, the fragile tail would never handle the shock of the arresting gear. Furthermore, a bomber would not fit in the aircraft elevator, making it impossible to stow the plane below to allow others to land.

“And my second question?” Low pressed.

“I’ll have to get back to you.”

Duncan started right away, drafting a preliminary plan. The main question was what, if any, plane could handle such a mission. Low had initially suggested the bombers might return to the carrier and ditch in the water, though Duncan’s study showed it would be better if the planes could fly on to airfields in China. Since intelligence indicated that Japanese patrol planes flew as far as three hundred miles offshore, America would need a bomber that could launch well outside that range, strike Tokyo, and still have enough fuel to reach the mainland. Duncan
reviewed the performance data of various Army planes. The Martin B-26 could cover the distance and carry a large bomb load, but it was questionable whether the bomber could lift off from a carrier’s deck. Likewise, the B-23 could handle the demands of the mission, but the plane’s larger wingspan risked a collision with the carrier’s superstructure and limited how many bombers would fit on deck. Duncan realized that the twin-engine North American B-25 appeared best suited for the mission. Not only would its wings likely clear the island, but with modified fuel tanks the B-25 could handle the range and still carry a large bomb load.

Duncan next turned to ships. The Pacific Fleet had just four flattops, the
Saratoga
,
Enterprise
,
Lexington
, and
Yorktown
, the latter reassigned from the Atlantic after the attack on Pearl Harbor. But Duncan had another carrier in mind—the new 19,800-ton
Hornet
, undergoing shakedown in Virginia. Duncan knew the
Hornet
would report to the Pacific about the time it would take to finalize such an operation. Low had recommended the use of a single carrier, but Duncan realized the mission would require two. With the cumbersome bombers crowding the
Hornet
’s flight deck, a second flattop would have to accompany the task force to provide fighter coverage along with more than a dozen other cruisers, destroyers, and oilers. Lastly, a check of historical data revealed a likely window of favorable weather over Tokyo from mid-April to mid-May.

When Duncan concluded his preliminary study, he and Low presented the results to King. The aggressive admiral liked what he heard.

“Go see General Arnold about it, and if he agrees with you, ask him to get in touch with me,” King ordered. “And don’t you two mention this to another soul!”

The men agreed.

King then turned to Duncan. “If this plan gets the green light from General Arnold,” he said, “I want you to handle the Navy end of it.”

GENERAL ARNOLD HAD FOR
weeks mulled over the president’s demand that America bomb Japan, struggling to determine how the Army Air Forces might best execute such a bold mission. Few people in the nation could top the airpower expertise of the fifty-five-year-old Arnold, whose trademark grin had long ago earned him the nickname Hap, short for “happy.” A 1907 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy,
he had learned to fly from none other than Orville and Wilbur Wright, taking to the skies in a primitive biplane that lacked safety belts and whose sole instrumentation consisted of a simple string that fluttered in the wind to indicate the aircraft’s skid. Only after a bug hit Arnold in the eye one day while landing did pilots adopt the trademark goggles. The six-foot-tall Arnold had completed his aviation course in just ten days in May 1911—his total flight time amounted to less than four hours—to become one of only two qualified pilots in the Army.

An avid prankster who once rolled cannonballs down a dormitory stairwell at West Point, Arnold was one of aviation’s leading pioneers. He not only earned the distinction of being the first military man to fly more than a mile high, but he was the first pilot to carry the mail and even buzz the nation’s Capitol, a stunt he joked in a letter to his mother prompted lawmakers “to adjourn.” But the two-time recipient of aviation’s prestigious Mackay Trophy nearly suffered tragedy in the fall of 1912 on an experimental flight in Kansas designed to observe artillery fire. Arnold’s plane suddenly spun around, stalled, and dove. Only seconds before his plane would have hit, Arnold pulled the aircraft out of the dive and landed. The near crash so rattled him that he refused to fly. “At the present time,” Arnold wrote to his commanding officer, “my nervous system is in such a condition that I will not get in any machine.” To a fellow flier he was more blunt. “That’s it,” he confessed. “A man doesn’t face death twice.”

A sense of failure haunted Arnold for the next four years until he finally conquered his fear and climbed back into a cockpit. Over the years, Arnold advanced up the ranks, often in spite of himself. The maverick spirit that propelled him to risk his life in flimsy early airplanes made Arnold bristle at authority, drawing the frequent wrath of his superior officers, one of whom went so far as to hurl a paperweight at him. Arnold even clashed with Roosevelt in the spring of 1940 over Allied aircraft sales, resulting in the president’s threatening to send him to Guam and exiling him from the White House for nine months. Despite his bullheaded personality—as well as his notoriously poor administrative skills—few could help admiring the tenacious general. The zealous advocate of American airpower, who had learned to fly in an Ohio cow pasture under the watchful eye of the local undertaker, had over three decades helped shape aviation’s fundamental mission of bombardment. “The best defense,” Arnold wrote, “is attack.”

Arnold had walked out of Roosevelt’s December 21 meeting with an order to bomb Japan but no clear path on how to execute such a mission. The general knew from experience that that was Roosevelt’s style. “Once the President of the United States agreed upon the general principles,” Arnold once observed, “he relied upon his Chiefs of Staff to carry them out—to make plans for the consummation of these general ideas.” But the challenge Arnold faced was that his forces in the Pacific had been decimated in the opening hours of the war. Of the 231 planes assigned to the Hawaiian air force, only 79 still worked. The Japanese likewise had wiped out half the Far East air force in the Philippines. The immediate demands for airplanes had reached a climax, as Americans feared further attacks on Hawaii, Alaska, and even the West Coast. “Every commanding officer everywhere needed airplanes to stop the Japs from attacking his particular bailiwick,” Arnold later wrote. “They all wanted heavy bombers and light bombers; they wanted patrol planes and fighters.”

Arnold struggled to balance his limited resources with the increased pressure to take the fight to Japan. Ideas for how to avenge Pearl Harbor flooded Washington—a California tire dealer had even offered a $1,000 reward to the first flier to hit Tokyo. Though well-intentioned, most of the proposals showed little understanding of the logistics involved, from the great distances to the fuel and range limitations of American aircraft. Some of the ideas bordered on the absurd, including the recommendation that America drop bombs into volcanoes to trigger eruptions that might “convince the mass of Japanese that their gods were angry with them.” The
Fort Worth Star-Telegram
’s president, Amon Carter, a close friend of Roosevelt’s aide Edwin “Pa” Watson, suggested one of the more novel ideas: tap commercial airline pilots to fly four-engine bombers to Tokyo via Alaska. “It could, with proper secrecy and press censorship, be made in the nature of a surprise, the same as they gave our men in Pearl Harbor,” Carter wrote. “Five hundred planes carrying from two to four thousands pounds of bombs could blow Tokio off the map.”