Reporting from Shangri-La: Richard Tregaskis and the Doolittle Raiders

International News Service correspondent Richard Tregaskis had been eager to test his courage in combat when he was sent by the wire service to report on U.S. Navy task forces sailing for missions from Pearl Harbor against the Japanese. He finally got his chance in early April 1942, but he and the other Americans onboard the USS Northhampton could not know that they were on their way to be a part of an audacious attempt to strike back at the Japanese and gain a measure of revenge for the attack at Pearl Harbor.

The cruiser was part of Task Force 18, which included ships under the command of Vice Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey Jr., and they were sailing for a midocean rendezvous with Task Force 16, which included a newly commissioned carrier, the $32 million, approximately 20,000-ton USS Hornet. The Hornet and its escorting ships sailed from San Francisco Bay on April 2. Once the two task forces rendezvoused, the ships set course on a secret assignment to bomb Japan. Instead of its usual complement of Douglas SBD Dauntless dive-bombers, Douglas TBD Devastator torpedo aircraft, and Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters, the Hornet had crammed on its narrow flight deck sixteen twin-engine B-25B Mitchell army bombers of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle.

The Seventeenth had been the first group to receive the new bombers, named for military aviation pioneer Major General William “Billy” Mitchell and designed and built by North American Aviation, the firm responsible for the development of such successful aircraft as the T-6 Texan trainer and the P-51 Mustang fighter. The bombers and their small, five-men crews (pilot, copilot, bombardier, navigator, and engineer/gunner) had been ordered to hit industrial and military installations—steel factories, gas and chemical plants, and power stations—in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya. If they survived their bombing run, the crews were supposed to land at airfields hurriedly being prepared for them in China.

Since the destruction at Pearl Harbor President Franklin D. Roosevelt had been seeking a mission against Japan that would bolster morale in the United States and in other Allied countries. According to Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, the head of the U.S. Army Air Forces, the president had insisted that his military commanders “find ways and means of carrying home to Japan proper, in the form of a bombing raid, the real meaning of war.” To meet Roosevelt’s goal, Captain Francis Low, an officer on the staff of Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, came up with the idea to use the Hornet as the launching platform for army bombers to raid the Japanese mainland.

Low worked with Captain Donald Duncan, King’s air officer, to develop a plan for the mission, which received approval from both King and Arnold in early 1942. Arnold tasked the mission to Doolittle, who titled the assignment “Special Aviation Project No. 1” and selected the B-25B bomber, with a cruising range of 2,400 miles, as the aircraft best suited to meet the demands of the mission. The plane’s 67-foot wingspan was barely wide enough to be able to take off safely from the carrier’s narrow, 114-foot-wide deck. Although Doolittle realized the Mitchell’s 2,000-pound bomb load could do “only a fraction of the damage the Japanese had inflicted on us at Pearl Harbor,” its main purpose would be psychological, both boosting American morale and causing “confusion in the minds of the Japanese people and sow doubt about the reliability of their leaders.” He also hoped that the shock might nudge the Japanese military to “divert aircraft and equipment from offensive operations to the defense of the home islands.”

Commanded by Captain Marc Mitscher, the Hornet proved that a Mitchell bomber could take off safely from a carrier with two trial flights off Norfolk, Virginia, in early February. The carrier set out in early March for the West Coast to await delivery of the sixteen modified B-25Bs and their crews at the Alameda Naval Air Station on San Francisco Bay. The planes were loaded by a crane onto the carrier on April 1. Mitscher noted that when all the army bombers had been arranged on the Hornet, the last plane in line “hung far out over the stern ramp in a precarious position. The leading plane [to be flown by Doolittle] had 467 feet of clear deck for take-off” from the 824-foot-long flight deck.

The bombers had been modified to better accomplish their mission, but the airmen knew they faced perilous odds as the Hornet sailed off on April 2 to join Halsey’s task force. Second Lieutenant Chase J. Nielsen, navigator on the bomber nicknamed the “Green Hornet,” figured that his crew had a 50-50 chance of taking off from the carrier without crashing. “If we got off, there was a 50-50 chance we’d get shot down over Japan,” Nielsen recalled. “And, if we got that far, there was a 50-50 chance we’d make it to China. And, if we got to China, there was a 50-50 chance we’d be captured. We figured the odds were really stacked against us.”

Having the 134 army pilots and crewmen sharing cabin space engendered plenty of questions about their purpose, with some navy men believing the bombers were meant for delivery to Hawaii or an isolated American base somewhere in the Pacific. The Hornet crew only learned about their destination after the ship had passed beneath the Golden Gate Bridge and was well out to sea.

Lieutenant Commander Oscar Dodson, the Hornet’s communications officer, responsible for all confidential messages, met daily with Mitscher. On April 3 Dodson remembered going to Mitscher’s cabin and seeing the captain seated at his desk holding a document and smiling. “Without a word he passed the papers to me,” Dodson said. “It was a CNO [Chief of Naval Operations] order for HORNET to launch the B-25s for an attack on Tokyo and other nearby cities. He said quietly: ‘As soon as we are well clear of the shore line, I will announce our mission to the ship.’”

Mitscher spoke to the crew on the ship’s bullhorn, announcing the details about their mission. “In the ship there was a moment of stunned silence,” Dodson noted, “followed by wild cheers which rang throughout the ship.” Still thinking of secrecy, Mitscher, Dodson added, cautioned his men to avoid throwing overboard any “identifying material,” including magazines, letters, daily schedules, or the ship’s newspaper.

Tregaskis remained unaware of the Northampton’s destination during the early days of the voyage. He found the ship’s wardroom a comfortable place to relax after they had reached the open sea, as it had leather-upholstered chairs, some dog-eared magazines, and a continuous supply of hot coffee. “It can be had at almost any time of night or day—replacing old-fashioned (and banned) spirits to warm up cold stomachs,” noted Tregaskis. An officer told the correspondent that on the average four-and-a-half cups of coffee was consumed every day by each person on board.

At dinner, Tregaskis tried to get some of his tablemates to conjecture about where they might be headed. There were plenty of guesses, including Australia and the Indian Ocean to relieve the British fleet. Some sailors anticipated a repeat of former raids on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands. “We’re going on a polar expedition to engage the icebergs,” one sailor joked. When questioned by Tregaskis, Captain Chandler would only say: “You know, when you’re on a ship, there’s no use worrying about where you’re going. It just makes the trip seem longer. How good are you at relaxing?”

Accepting the captain’s mild rebuke, Tregaskis decided to spend part of his time looking for the best spot to be during any action to “watch the fireworks,” as well as investigating the pastimes of the more than 1,000 men onboard the Northampton. One place he investigated as a possible perch was on the bridge, which gave him a good view of the ship. A crew member, however, warned Tregaskis that he had to watch out for the number two turret, as during the raid on Wotje it had caught him unawares and knocked him “ass over teakettle.”

An officer pointed out that a newsreel cameraman who had accompanied the cruiser on its previous raids had set up his camera on the derrick forward of the ship’s after mast, which gave him the opportunity to take cover in a nearby room if the going got too tough. “The only disadvantage of this spot, said my informant, was that when the guns went off, great clouds of soot were knocked loose from the stack and covered the area,” Tregaskis remembered.

Discouraged, the correspondent climbed two levels higher to an open, if precarious, platform upon which, at least, he would be clear of the concussion blasts from the big guns and the resulting showers of soot. “Here I consulted a seaman who laughed and said that the thought this would be as good a place as any. ‘But,’ he pointed to the yard arm, ‘you have to watch out for strafing [aircraft]. On the Wotje trip, we had a bullet in there.’”

The men and ships of Task Force 16 had the answer they were waiting for about their mission on April 12, when, northwest of Midway Island, aircrews from the USS Enterprise were sighted by the approaching Hornet. Soon thereafter, Tregaskis heard the “electrifying news” that the now combined group, designated as Task Force 16, had as its mission a bombing strike against Japan. “We’re four months late, but we’ll give it to ’em now,” Tregaskis heard a gunner exclaim as the news reached the Northampton’s crew.

There was another wave of excitement when he trained his binoculars on the Hornet as it moved closer to the cruiser. He could see a high, irregular mass on the carrier’s deck, which marked the presence of “much larger aircraft than the usual carrier planes. As the ship drew nearer, we could make out the double tails, wide wings, and tricycle landing gears of B-25 army bombers.” Tregaskis believed there must have been “exhaustive” tests done in secret to prove the feasibility of launching such a large plane from a carrier. “Our force was told they will approach to a point about 400 miles from Tokyo. There the bombers will take [to] the air, and we will hightail our way home,” Tregaksis said.

Obviously, Tregaskis noted, the bombers could not return to the carrier deck to land, as there was not enough room nor did the aircraft have the necessary arrester hooks that carrier planes possessed to catch the wires stretched across the flight deck. Spruance suggested to Tregaskis about the possibility of the planes landing in China after their mission. “The admiral was not over-optimistic about our chances of getting away unscathed from the expedition,” the correspondent reported. “He spoke of the long range of the Jap patrol aircraft which might spot us; also of the hundreds of small patrol vessels known to operate along the Jap coast. He spoke of the need for lightning withdrawal after we had made our thrust.” At dinner that evening, a marine captain, crossing the fingers on both of his hands, spoke for many of the crew when he exclaimed: “Oh, oh, oh, God, may they [the bombers] get there.”

On April 17, after refueling, the Enterprise, Hornet, and their supporting cruisers, including the Northampton, sped away from the slower destroyers and oilers to make their final dash to the launching point east of Japan for the Doolittle Raid. The bombers, each of which had been equipped with four 500-pound bombs, were set to take off on the afternoon of April 18.

The afternoon before the scheduled launch, Tregaskis noted that the skies had darkened and the seas were rougher. “The other ships were following in close, but they were barely distinguishable in the heavy, driving mist,” he remembered. “It was perfect weather for our raid—for no Japanese ‘eyes’ could be flying on such a day as this. And so we hurried on to make the most of the weather, rising up over the high combers, rolling and pitching, and shivering from one end to the other, but always crowding on full steam.”

That evening on the cruiser, Tregaskis observed no more “nerves” than usual. Officers read books and played cribbage to pass the time, and one aviation officer entertained others by speaking “earnestly on the subject of airplane armament.” Below decks, the sailors and marines, except for those on watch, had turned in for the night. Tregaskis came upon a veteran petty officer standing alone near the edge of the mess hall and asked him where everyone was. “They’re all squared away for the night,” the man told the correspondent, shrugging his shoulders toward the sailors’ sleeping quarters. “These days when they’re not on watch, they’re so tired they turn in.”

Tregaskis awoke at 4:00 a.m. on April 18 not wanting to miss anything, as there was the possibility the army bombers might take off at dawn, but they did not, remaining firmly tied down. He did uncover a rumor—“scuttlebutt” in navy jargon—that at about 3:00 a.m. the Northampton had detected an unknown ship approximately twelve miles away. When the cruiser turned off course, the mystery vessel turned in the same direction and followed until the Northampton’s superior speed dropped the other ship astern.

At about 7:00 a.m., as he was sitting down to breakfast, Tregaskis heard that a scouting plane had spotted an unidentified ship, but quickly avoided it. Later that morning came a report that the cruiser running behind them had sighted a Japanese patrol boat, the No. 23 Nitto Maru, a modified fishing trawler. These small vessels, dubbed “spitkits” by American sailors, were part of Japan’s early warning system. The Nitto Maru had identified the approaching ships as hostile and radioed a warning home—“enemy carriers sighted. Position 650 nautical miles east of Inubo Saki.”

Fighters and dive-bombers from the Enterprise attempted to sink the Japanese boat, but were unsuccessful, so the cruiser Nashville was sent by Halsey to destroy the vessel. “We could see her streaking towards the horizon, where the Japanese ship was only a faint smudge of gray on the horizon,” Tregaskis recalled. “At last, we had met the enemy.”

Although the Nashville was about four miles away from the Northampton when it opened fire, Tregaskis could plainly see the “brilliant flashes” from the cruiser’s six-inch guns. “Clouds of dirty smoke, with a yellowish hue, were rising over the cruiser. And near the horizon we could see tall narrow geysers like a line of white columns, springing into existence,” he observed. “Then the small popping sound of the gunfire came to us from the distance. Sound is slow to travel in such vast spaces. Almost immediately, the bright flashes of a second salvo burst along the cruiser’s deck. And then the bright little sunbursts of color came in rotation, rolling up and down the length of the ship.”

Tregaskis, who called the action an “impersonal introduction to the art of war,” learned that before the Nitto Maru went under, it had charged at the much larger ship, firing its “three-inch deck gun, until it was blown apart.” Mitscher had briefed Doolittle on the encounter with the Japanese picket boat, telling him, “It looks like you’re going to have to be on your way soon. They know we’re here.”

With secrecy compromised and other enemy patrol craft dotting the sea, Halsey decided to proceed with the mission twelve hours ahead of schedule and 150 nautical miles farther away than planned. The admiral sent a message to the Hornet that read: “Launch Planes. To Col. Doolittle and Gallant Crew: Good Luck and God Bless You.” At 8:03 a.m. the crew on the Hornet heard the announcement: “Now hear this! Now hear this! Army pilots, man your planes.”

Because the Northampton had moved into a position to protect the Hornet, Tregaskis had a “marvelous view of the activity on her flight deck. If the demonstration had been arranged for our benefit, we could not have had better ‘seats.’” Sailors and marines busy on the cruiser’s deck snatched seconds from their duties, despite the constant danger of an enemy air raid, to watch what was happening on the carrier, entering into the action “as wholeheartedly as a great football audience,” Tregaskis reported.

The correspondent could see small figures hurrying around on the Hornet’s deck starting the B-25B’s engines. At about 8:20 a.m. the first of the bombers, piloted by the mission’s commander, Doolittle, with Second Lieutenant Richard Cole as his copilot, “waddled forward” to begin its takeoff. At that moment Tregaskis noticed that the wind had increased to “almost gale force” and he could see the Hornet varying its speed to find a moment at which the least pitching would occur in the raging seas. “I could hear the motors now as the bomber inched forward gaining speed,” he remembered. “Soon the craft was airborne, lifting gradually from the deck of the carrier as a great shout rang out on our deck from the sailors and marines who were awaiting this sight for many days.”

Doolittle’s plane staggered into the wind, leveled off, “moving steadily but low, over the waves and gaining speed,” Tregaskis observed. The B-25B eventually swung over the ships in a slow circle, accompanied by “great cheers” from the crew of the Northampton. “Nobody spoke of the great dangers facing this intrepid crew,” Tregaskis recalled.

All the remaining army bombers took off successfully from the Hornet, but some just barely. The fourth bomber in line appeared to almost stall, Tregaskis recalled, and “it hung sluggishly over the sea its nose pointed upward, but the plane fell forward toward the high waves.” The concerned crew on the Northampton groaned in anticipation of a crash and cried “Up, up” as the bomber staggered down a few feet more to almost hit the waves, gained altitude for a moment, and bogged down again. “The plane was sinking, but finally gained speed, power and height, and streaked off into the stormy sky,” Tregaskis reported, adding that a nearby marine commented, “That makes me feel good all over.”

As the bombers continued to streak off the Hornet, the weather worsened and the seas grew even rougher, breaking over the carrier’s bow. “It’s the first time in my life I ever saw that happen; I probably will never see it again,” one of the Northampton’s officers said to Tregaskis. “Waves breaking over the flight deck of a carrier.” Green water also crashed over the cruiser’s bow, with the water reaching as high as the ship’s navigation bridge. “Steel uprights on our midship deck were bent like bows,” Tregaskis noted. “The captain’s coat was soaking wet and our stacks were dripping with salt water.”

During all this, lookouts on the Northampton received a report that Japanese aircraft had been spotted at a range of 30,000 yards, but later learned what they had seen was an American plane. Tregaskis continued to watch as the final B-25B prepared for its take off. “The last plane wobbled down the deck and paused, waiting for a giant swell to pass by,” he noted. “While the bomber paused, a second gigantic wave rolled into the carrier and crashed high over the flight deck. With field glass[es], I could see the spray sweeping through the propellers of the plane.”

The aircraft’s motors, however, did not stall and after a few seconds the bomber moved slowly into the wind, steadied itself, and rose abruptly into the sky. Picking up speed after it was airborne, the B-25, nicknamed “Bat Out of Hell,” made a slow turn over the Northampton and its crew could see the star insignia on its fuselage and the large words “U.S. Army” on the underside of its wings. “I could make out the black silhouetted figure of a gunner in one of the plane’s transparent ‘bubbles’ or turrets,” Tregaskis reported. “I wondered then if this one man—the [only] one whom I had seen as an individual since the planes began to take off—would survive.”

As the correspondent pondered the army crewman’s fate, the Northampton and the Hornet made sharp U-turns and, with the Enterprise and other escorting cruisers, headed for home “at our greatest possible speed,” twenty-five knots (approximately twenty-nine miles per hour). On the Hornet, a relieved ensign, Robert Noone, reflected that after the last bomber had left the carrier there was “a physical let down all over the ship. Everyone was exhausted from the nervous tension of watching them take off. We mentally pushed every plane off the deck.”

Although the Japanese military had intercepted radio traffic that hinted at a possible U.S. fleet attack, they expected any such mission to be launched from closer to land, approximately 200 miles, the expected range of a carrier plane. They had no expectation of being attacked by long-range army bombers. Doolittle’s raiders used their high explosive and incendiary bombs to hit their targets, receiving scattered opposition from antiaircraft batteries and Japanese fighters.

With their fuel exhausted, the bombers, fifteen in all, had to either bail out or crash land in China. The sixteenth, flown by Captain Edward J. York, went off course and had to land near Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. Although treated well, its crew was interned by military authorities, but managed to escape from the country in May 1943. Doolittle, looking at the thousands of pieces of shattered metal that had once been his plane, sat down on a wing at his crash site in China and felt as “dejected as a frog’s posterior. This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last.”

As he sat there, Doolittle saw his gunner/flight engineer, Staff Sergeant Paul J. Leonard, snap his picture. Trying to cheer up his pilot, Leonard asked him what would happen when they got back to the United States. A dejected Doolittle predicted that he would be court-martialed and sent to prison at Fort Leavenworth. Leonard had a different fate in mind for his commander, telling Doolittle he would be promoted to general and given the Medal of Honor.

Leonard’s prediction came true, but what brought tears to Doolittle’s eyes was his staff sergeant’s comment that when Doolittle was given charge of another airplane, he wanted to serve as his crew chief. “It was the supreme compliment that a mechanic could give a pilot,” Doolittle said. “It meant he was so sure of the skills of the pilot that he would fly anywhere with him under any circumstances.” 

The weather remained overcast and windy as Task Force 16 sped away from Japan’s home waters. An officer confided to Tregaskis that they would probably not have to worry about the Japanese fleet, but still faced danger from patrolling submarines, on the lookout for the Americans. One morning the cruiser tested its guns and the sudden “blasting and banging, without notice, set jittery nerves to jumping,” Tregaskis recalled.

Because the ship’s course had changed sharply during the night, and it seemed to be heading directly for a hostile island base, Tregaskis and others wondered if the task force might be headed for another attack on the enemy. “It was obvious many of the officers wanted to do that,” Tregaskis remembered. One officer told him: “Wild Bill Halsey’s going to hit ’em again before he hauls out of here.” The correspondent, however, could uncover no confirmation for such a plan. He talked to an officer higher up the chain of command, who admitted they knew nothing official but were willing to bet him that the task force was headed “straight home.” Later that day the matter was settled when the ship’s course reverted to its former direction. “And thus more scuttlebutt was laid to rest—as it usually is,” wrote Tregaskis.

During its high-speed run to Pearl Harbor, the Northampton picked up a news report from Los Angeles that quoted Japanese shortwave broadcasts indicating that Tokyo had been bombed by American aircraft. One of the cruiser’s lieutenants reported that the Japanese had claimed they had shot down one of the U.S. planes and gave a purported interview with one of the pilots in which he had confessed that he had been forced to make the flight against his will. “Which gave a good laugh to all of us who had witnessed the unfaltering bravery with which the bombers took off,” Tregaskis wrote. “A good laugh, and a twinge of sadness when we thought some had not come through.”

At lunch, a marine officer had cut through the table chatter with something that was on the minds of several of the crew: “I can’t believe it,” Tregaskis remembered him saying. “Can’t believe what?” he was asked. The marine responded: “I can’t believe that we got over there and back, and sent out our planes, without even a bomb falling on us. It’s impossible.”