Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (8 page)

The United States entered World War I in 1917, prompting many of Doolittle’s classmates to enlist. Never one to miss out on a good fight, Doolittle decided to skip his senior year and join the Army. He had no desire to serve in the infantry or coastal artillery, but saw potential in the fledgling air force after a recruiter told him the Army planned to train as
many as five thousand new pilots. Flight had long fascinated Doolittle, who as a teenager had attempted to build both a glider and a monoplane on the basis of plans he found in the magazine
Popular Mechanics
, neither of which ever flew. He attended ground school for eight weeks at the University of California, using his holiday break to persuade Joe to marry him. Doolittle had no money, so Joe paid for the license with cash her mother had given her as a Christmas gift. The couple wed Christmas Eve at Los Angeles City Hall. Joe’s remaining twenty dollars paid for the honeymoon in San Diego, where the couple survived off cafeterias that offered service members free meals.

Doolittle finished ground school and then reported for pilot training at Rockwell Field near San Diego. He had never before been up in a plane and was excited for the experience when he climbed into a Curtis JN-4 for his first flight, on January 28, 1918. The two-seater biplane commonly known as a Jenny was America’s first mass-produced aircraft. Made from little more than wood, fabric, and wires, the trainer had a maximum speed of just seventy-five miles per hour. Doolittle and instructor Charles Todd taxied out for takeoff when two planes collided in the skies over the airfield and crashed. Doolittle jumped from the cockpit and darted to the wreckage of the closest plane, occupied by a student pilot who had flown solo. To Doolittle’s horror, the student was dead. In the second plane Doolittle found an instructor and student, both badly injured but still alive. Doolittle and Todd helped pull the two injured aviators from the wreckage as the fire truck and ambulance roared up.

“You all right?” Todd asked Doolittle.

The crash had rattled him, but he confirmed he was fine.

“Okay,” Todd replied. “Let’s go.”

Doolittle climbed back into the Jenny, and Todd fired up the engine. The biplane roared down the runway and lifted off into the sky. Doolittle quickly forgot the tragedy on the ground below as Todd guided the plane up to twelve hundred feet. Doolittle’s logbook shows that the flight lasted just twenty-two minutes, time enough to hook Doolittle on aviation. “My love for flying,” he later wrote, “began on that day during that hour.” The eager student soaked up his time in the cockpit, soloing after just seven hours and four minutes of instruction. Doolittle graduated from flight school and earned his commission as a second lieutenant on March 11, 1918. He knew exactly what type of pilot he wanted to be. “I naturally went into fighter pilot aviation, because there is a basic difference between the fighter pilot and the bomber pilot,” he later recalled. “The fighter pilot is almost always a rugged individualist. The bomber pilot, in that he works with a team, in the airplane, is much more inclined to be a team player.”

Much to his frustration, Doolittle sat out World War I, bouncing around from various posts before landing as an aviation instructor at Ream Field near San Diego. “I was pretty upset,” he later recalled. “My students were going overseas and becoming heroes. My job was to make more heroes.” The experience was not without tragedy. When Doolittle came in one day on his final approach, a student pilot in another plane cut beneath him. Neither Doolittle nor the student with him saw the other plane. The collision damaged Doolittle’s propeller and took off his landing gear, forcing him to put the plane down on its belly. He then learned the gruesome news that his propeller had decapitated the other flyer. Another time as Doolittle and a student took off, a solo pilot drifted across his flight path. Doolittle’s propeller cut off the tail of the other plane. To his horror the other plane crashed and burned, killing the student. In each case Doolittle applied the same approach Todd had taken with him.

“Who’s next?” he called out after one mishap.

“What in the hell have you got in your veins—ice water?” one of the other instructors demanded of Doolittle. “Doesn’t that kid’s death mean a thing to you?”

“I’ll think of that kid tonight,” he fired back. “Meanwhile my job is to make flyers out of these men. So is yours.”

When World War I ended, on November 11, 1918, Doolittle faced a difficult decision: return to the University of California to finish his mining degree or remain in the Army. Many aviators who left the military bought up some of the more than eight thousand Jennys built during the war that the military now sold as surplus for as little as a few hundred dollars. These pilots traveled the nation barnstorming, performing aerial stunts like wing walking, barrel rolls, and loops. Others offered rides to curious passengers for a couple of dollars apiece. Doolittle knew not only that barnstorming was dangerous and nomadic work but that the pay was abysmal. He now had a wife to support. “I was making about $140 a month and the money was there on payday without fail,” Doolittle later wrote. “The
security of the military life was very appealing to me as hundreds of men were demobilized and had to look for jobs while the nation tried to rebuild a peacetime economy. But it was the flying that made up my mind.”

“What future is there in being a pilot?” one of Doolittle’s friends asked.

“Someday aviation is going to be real big business,” he replied. “I’m going to stay in the Army and let the government teach me everything there is to be learned about airplanes.”

The military air show late that November in San Diego convinced Doolittle he had made the right decision when he and other pilots dazzled the crowd with aerial acrobatics. “So close to one another that they seemed almost to touch, they formed a ceiling over the sky that almost blotted out the struggling rays of the sun,” gushed the
Los Angeles Times
. “With majestic solemnity they patrolled the air, magnificent in the perfection of their formation, and while they framed a perfect background at 5,000 feet, the five acrobats below swooped, dived, looped and spun in as perfect unison as though they had been operated by a single hand.” The air service looked to increase the public’s enthusiasm for aviation, encouraging aviators to perform stunts at county fairs as well as attempt record-setting flights, anything to garner headlines. The adventurous Doolittle jumped at the opportunity. “I tried to invent new stunts and realized there was a similarity between aerobatics in the air and acrobatics on the ground in that you mentally previewed a maneuver,” he wrote. “If you failed, you tried it again and again until you mastered it.”

Doolittle pushed himself and his airplane to the limit, much to the frustration of his commanding officers, a reaction captured in an early efficiency report. “He is energetic mentally and physically and possesses but one serious drawback,” the report noted. “That is his inclination occasionally to use poor judgment; i.e., take exceptional and unnecessary risks in flying.” That recklessness was on display one afternoon when he spotted two soldiers walking on a road and decided to give them a fright. He buzzed the soldiers, only to look back and find them waving at him. The indignant Doolittle circled back and flew even lower. This time he felt a bump. A glance over his shoulder horrified him: one of the soldiers lay face down. Doolittle felt certain he had killed the soldier and in his shock failed to spot a fence. He snagged his landing gear on the barbed
wire and crashed a $10,000 taxpayer-funded plane. Much to Doolittle’s relief, he had only grazed the soldier. “Gee, Lieutenant,” the gracious soldier offered, “I’m glad you weren’t hurt.”

Another time Doolittle bet friends five dollars he could sit on the wheel axle while landing, a stunt that happened to be caught on film by movie director Cecil B. DeMille, who was shooting at the field that day. When Doolittle’s commanding officer saw the grainy footage, he knew exactly who it was. “It has to be Doolittle,” he erupted. “No one else would be that crazy!” News of his antics rose up the chain of command. Hap Arnold at the time commanded nearby Rockwell Field when one of his subordinates barged into his office. “Colonel,” he said, “there’s a man down at Ream Field whose conduct has been so bad it requires your personal attention.” Arnold grounded him for a month. Though many of Doolittle’s antics were no doubt reckless, each time he pushed himself he did so in an effort to learn the boundaries of his ability. “The only really dangerous pilot is the one that flies beyond his limitation,” Doolittle later said. “A poor pilot is not necessarily a dangerous pilot, as long as he remains within his limitations.”

Despite Doolittle’s exploits that at times drove his superiors to distraction—from flying through a hangar in order to sweep it out to severing phone lines when he flew under a bridge—there was little doubt the young aviator possessed unique skill. His early efficiency reports often glowed about him, predicting a bright future.

“Doolittle is more valuable to the Air Service than any officer I know,” stated one such report.

“Dynamic personality,” argued another. “An exceptional combination of very capable engineer and superior pilot.”

“One of the most daring and skillful young aviators in the Air Service accomplished in the highest form of combat training.”

Doolittle used his daring in 1922 to attempt to make the first cross-country flight in less than twenty-four hours, from Florida’s Pablo Beach to San Diego. Doolittle had organized a similar transcontinental flight from California to Washington several years earlier; it had ended in failure after two of the three Jennys had run out of fuel or crashed just a few hundred miles into the flight. Doolittle returned to San Diego, only to bang up his own plane after he put it down on a soft and freshly plowed field, having battled heavy winds. The veteran aviator was determined to
avoid the same mistakes that had plagued him before. Doolittle spent two months mapping his route, studying decades of weather data, and overseeing each day adjustments to his plane. “The preparations for this flight were mainly personal,” Doolittle wrote in his report. “Physical, in order to stand the severe strain of the trip, and mental to obviate all chance of worry which, I believe is the factor most apt to cause mental fatigue and bad judgment.”

On the evening of August 6 Doolittle climbed into the cockpit of a specially built De Havilland DH-4, a biplane with a maximum speed of 128 miles per hour. The confident aviator had publicized his planned feat, and thousands turned out to see him off. He throttled up the engine at 9:40 p.m. and roared down the beach. Several hundred yards into the takeoff, the plane hit a patch of soft sand and veered toward the surf. The plane crashed into the waves and flipped over, crushing the nose and ramming the motor back four inches. Doolittle’s elbow smashed the tachometer. He unbuckled his safety belt and dropped out, landing on his head and knocking his helmet and goggles down over his face. Disoriented and convinced he was underwater, he grabbed the fuselage to pull himself up. “I was shocked to find how heavy I was because I thought I would be more buoyant in the water,” he later wrote. “When I pushed the helmet and goggles off my eyes and put my feet down, I found I was standing in only about 10 inches of water!”

The crowd erupted in laughter at the sight of the dazed airman struggling to save himself from drowning in the shallow surf.

One woman asked whether he was hurt.

“No,” a humiliated Doolittle replied, “but my feelings are.”

The young aviator refused to give up. He oversaw the plane’s repairs, ranging from a new motor and propeller to tail section and wings. Armed with thermoses of ice water and hot coffee—each equipped with special drinking straws—Doolittle climbed back into his repaired De Havilland a month later. This time he made no advance publicity of his trip. Eighteen lanterns lined the edge of the surf as he raced down the beach and lifted off at 9:52 p.m. on September 4. A few hours into the trip Doolittle ran into a massive electrical storm. The lightning crashed so close that he could smell the ozone while the cold rains stung his face. “I realized the storm area was too extensive to dodge, and plunged directly into it, trusting my compass to steer a straight course,” Doolittle later wrote. “At each
flash of lightning I peeked over the side of the cockpit, saw familiar landmarks, and, after consulting the Rand-McNally road maps spread out before me, knew that I was flying high and free and true.”

Doolittle flew a straight course, passing just west of New Orleans and on to San Antonio, where he landed just past daybreak. He stayed on the ground only long enough to take on fuel before he charged back into the skies. The empty desert below coupled with the roar of the engine forced Doolittle to fight his body’s hunger for sleep as the hours droned past. Two fellow pilots intercepted the exhausted airman as he approached Rockwell, guiding Doolittle down to the field after twenty-two hours and thirty minutes. The 2,163-mile trip across eight states, which demonstrated how the Army could deploy planes from one coast to another in a single day, earned Doolittle both the Distinguished Flying Cross and the prestigious Mackay Trophy. Major General Mason Patrick, commander of the air service, sent Doolittle a letter of personal thanks. “I have read with a great deal of interest the report of your transcontinental flight,” Patrick wrote, “and desire to extend my most hearty congratulations for your fine work.”

Doolittle applied the next year for one of the Army’s six slots for postgraduate students at MIT. His failure to finish college would have rendered him ineligible, but colleagues persuaded officials at the University of California to award Doolittle his degree on the basis of his work with the Army. The new college graduate and now father of two young sons moved his family to Massachusetts in September 1923. Doolittle set out to solve the mystery of how much punishment a pilot could withstand, as well as a plane before it broke apart, hoping to shed important new light on unexplained crashes. Doolittle married his classroom work with almost one hundred hours of experimentation in the skies, putting a Dutch Fokker PW-7 fighter through a series of intense loops, rolls, and spirals at various speeds. He pushed himself and his plane so hard that he nearly ripped the wings off during a dive at two hundred miles per hour. “I was glad I wore my parachute that day,” he later said. “I almost needed it.”