April 18, 1942

Two Hundred Thirty Minutes Toward Tokyo

All the aircrews scrambling aboard their bombers knew they would run low on fuel that day. With the task force spotted, the Raiders would have to fly some four hundred miles farther than planned.

Hornet adjusted course to starboard, turning into a 27-knot wind. Green water broke over her pitching flight deck. In Plane Number One, Doolittle waved farewell to naval officers up on the bridge; Mitscher saluted. At 8:15 AM Doolittle gunned the engines of his B-25, now weighing over fifteen tons with its full load of fuel and bombs. A Navy flight deck officer, whirling a black checkered flag, gave Doolittle the "go" signal. Deck crews pulled the chocks from the wheels. Then the starter hit the deck as the bomber began rolling down the 470 feet of clear flight deck.

Lieutenant Ted Lawson, pilot of "Ruptured Duck," wrote in his 1943 account of the raid, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, "We watched (Doolittle) like hawks, wondering what the wind would do to him, and whether we could get off in that little run to the bow. If he couldn't, we couldn't."

The great aviator picked up speed, held to his line and, as Hornet lifted up on top of a wave, took off with yards to spare. It was 8:18. Doolittle circled back to align his magnetic compass heading with the ship's course.

The next five bombers also flew from the carrier successfully. Lawson, in Plane Number Seven, inadvertently left his flaps up and dipped perilously low before finally becoming airborne at 8:30. At intervals ranging from one to five minutes, the next eight planes took off without incident. Plane Number Sixteen, "Bat Out of Hell," launched at 9:21.

Task Force 16 had accomplished its mission. Within minutes the carriers and cruisers reversed course and headed back toward the destroyers and Hawaii at twenty-five knots.

Jimmy Doolittle and his 79 comrades skimmed along, barely forty feet above the waves. Cruising at only 150 knots to conserve precious fuel, they would reach a hostile shore around midday. Flying independently and fighting twenty-knot headwinds, the sixteen B-25s stretched out in a ragged line some two hundred miles long, scattered by wind shifts.

At 9:45 a Japanese patrol plane, six hundred miles off Japan's east coast, spotted what looked like a twin-engine land-plane flying toward Honshu. Tokyo intelligence dismissed its strange report, assuming that the detected American task force had turned back or would not reach launch position for carrier-based planes until the next day. The Japanese Navy laid an ambush for the US ships 300 miles from the home islands.