Jimmy Doolittle and the Doolittle Raid

The Doolittle Raid was an attack on Japan launched by the U.S. in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. But the leader of the mission was a legend long before his daring efforts in WWII.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson, and today's
episode is a request from listener Laura and her son,
and I don't think she put her son's name in

(00:21):
the email, but in truth, it's only sort of a
request from them. Her son asked for the Doolittle Raid,
which I was game to cover. But really what ended
up happening was that as I was researching, I got
really excited about Jimmy Doolittle himself because he was pretty
amazing and I certainly had no idea how much he
contributed to the field of aviation. So I got really

(00:43):
engulfed in that, really really enjoyed it. So we are
going to talk about the Doolittle Raid, but it will
definitely be like an abridged version. We're not gonna go
into all of the many details. There have been plenty
of books written about it, uh, So don't worry because
if you really wanted deeper, there is a lot of
good stuff out there, including James D. Little's autobiography, which

(01:04):
I really enjoyed and highly recommend. But first we have
to do a little bit of historical housekeeping for context.
So that historical housekeeping is the attack on Pearl Harbor.
On December seven, forty one, there was a two hour
surprise attack on an American naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii.
Japanese fighter pilots just wrought incredible damage on Pearl Harbor,

(01:28):
both in terms of human life and lost military assets.
By the time this short but extremely brutal attack had ended,
more than two thousand American troops were dead and a
thousand were wounded, and the Japanese pilots had taken out
eight battleships, almost a dozen other naval watercraft, and more
than three hundred airplanes. This is the action that led
the United States to enter World War Two, which had

(01:51):
already been going on for two years, and at that
point in the United States formally declared war on Japan.
So keep that in mind. UH, And now we're going
to talk for a little bit about James Doolittle. So
he was really the key figure in the Doolittle Raid, UH,
and the man it was eventually named after, Jimmy Doolittle.
It was also called the Tokyo Raid before it kind

(02:11):
of took on the nickname of the Doolittle Raid. Jimmy
was born James Harold Doolittle on December fourteen of eight
in California, and his parents were Rose Shepherd Doolittle and
Frank H. Doolittle. Frank chased gold, It's how he and
Rose ended up in California, having moved there from New
England in search of wealth, and when Jimmy was four,
Frank once again moved the family in search of gold,

(02:33):
but this time to Nome, Alaska. After seven years in Alaska,
where he got into plenty of scraps with the other
local kids, Jimmy was sent back to California by his
parents so that he could go to school there. As
he moved into his teenage years, he showed some talent
in boxing, and he won a state boxing championship while
he was in high school. While he considered going pro

(02:55):
in the boxing ring, he enrolled at U at U
c l A instead, and Doolittle was a junior in
college when the US entered World War One, and he
immediately enlisted as an Army Signal Corps flying cadet. He
worked as a flying instructor and he was never shipped
overseas and once the war was over, he went back
and finished his undergraduate degree at University of California, Los Angeles,

(03:18):
and then he went on to the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology as part of a select military group of enrollees
to earn his master's degree and his PhD in aeronautical engineering.
Jimmy Doolttle was a legend before the raid because his
life was one of those that was really just filled
with bravado and extraordinary feats. He worked as a stunt

(03:38):
pilot and as a wing walker in the es and thirties,
and he went on to work as a test pilot
and an aviation engineer throughout he was still part of
the United States Military. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross
in for flying cross country with just one stop from
Pablo Beach, Florida to Rockwell, California, over the course of

(03:59):
twenty you and a half hours in a de Haviland aircraft.
It was a flight that had been aboarded on his
first attempt because as he was taking off, the left
wheel of his plane hit a soft sand patch and
the plane went off course and actually ended up flipped
upside down in the water, and Dolittle was mortally embarrassed
by this much publicized flop because there had been a

(04:20):
lot of people on hand to witness this takeoff, but
he didn't try again later, and this time he did
it with no fanfare or press on hand. His second
attempt was rough because a storm came up just as
he took flight, but he powered through it. He struggled
with sleepiness because after the thunderstorm things were so placid
that he started to get sleepy, but the rain itself

(04:41):
was what actually saved him. These rain drops that were
hitting his propeller were being whipped back at him and
ended up running down his back. The cold trickles of
all this water were really annoying, but they also kept
him from dozing off. And his award came because with
this flight he had basically proven that it was possible
to move an Army Air Corps unit anywhere within the

(05:02):
US in less than twenty four hours, and this was
just one of many awards that he would earn throughout
his career. In flight. In early which was the same
year that he earned his doctorate, he set a world
record for a seaplane of two hundred thirty two miles
an hour, and the Schneider's Seaplane Race in Baltimore, Maryland.
He had fitted an existing racing plane that had been

(05:25):
developed cooperatively with the Army and the Navy with pontoons
to enter the seaplane race. The day after the race,
he took the craft out again and beat his own
world record that he had just set, putting it pushing
it up to two hundred forty five miles an hour.
This turned out to cause some sour grapes. That race
had historically been dominated by Navy pilots, so they weren't
really thrilled to lose the title to an Army guy

(05:46):
who would just decided on a whim that he wanted
to fly seaplanes. Yeah, he was, you know, kind of
one of those people that was extraordinary and that when
he set his mind to do something, he was usually
shockingly good at it. Uh Later in he got permission
for a six month long leave from his military career,
and this was to work as an aircraft demonstrator in

(06:07):
South America, showing off the quality and maneuverability of Curtis
P one Hawk fighters. He headed first to Santiago, Chile
in x so he'd gotten the permission in twenty five,
but he actually left in twenty six. Uh, and there
he got in a dog fight competition, like a competition flight,
not an actual dog fight, against German ace Ernst von

(06:28):
Schonbeck of the riktof In Flying Circus. That name rings
a bell. It was not actually a circus. It was
a World War One German fightery unit nicknamed for using
very colorful airplanes. So Doolittle was going up against really
stiff competition and he managed to win, which might be
impressive enough on its own, but there's actually more to
the story. Yeah. At the time of this competition, Doolittle

(06:53):
was flying with two broken ankles. Uh. He had fallen
from a window during a party, attempting to show off
that he could do similar swashbuckling stunts to those of
screen star Douglas Fairbanks. And if you're wondering, yes, alcohol
was involved in this poor decision making. After the fall,
Doolittle had attached his boots to the rudders of his

(07:14):
plane so that he could continue to fly and do
the job that he had traveled to South America for.
And that was the state he was in when he
was challenged by this German pilot. I kind of want
to look into whether he and Luis Alvarez knew each other,
because it seems like from our episode on him, which
is long ago in the archive, at this point, they
probably would have gotten along, I would think. So, Yes,

(07:37):
it sounds like lots of people got along with Jimmy Doolittle.
He sounds like a fabulous and fascinating gent to know.
So after he went back to the United States, the
doctors at Walter Reid rounded him and really really grounded him.
He wasn't allowed to do much of anything for six
months because flying in casts using the workaround setup that

(07:57):
he had figured out had really done serious damage to
his legs. But being the man that he was, he
did not just sit around doing nothing during that time.
And we're going to talk about what he worked on
while he was recuperating, but first let's pause and take
a quick break to talk about one of our much
loved sponsors. So, instead of sitting idle while on forced rest,

(08:18):
Dolittle use his convalescence to return to the subject that
he had written his dissertation on, which was pilots blacking
out during extreme maneuvers, and he started to think specifically
about stunt flying in blackouts. So prior to this time,
and I really feel compelled to mention that at this
point flying planes had only been happening for a little
more than two decades. Uh, this was the mid twenties

(08:41):
and the Wright Brothers and their Kill Devil Hills adventures.
We're in the early nine so it's a really tight timeframe.
So he was thinking about stunt flying and the fact
that only inside loops had been performed in flight up
to this point, and an outside loop was considered too dangerous.
So if you don't know what those are, an inside loop,

(09:02):
if you were to draw a picture on a piece
of paper of a plane doing a loop, like a
loop to loop and inside loop, the pilot would always
be inside the circle, like that's where the cockpit is,
always facing up into the circle, whereas an outside loop,
the pilot would be on the outside of the plane
or on the outside of the circle facing outward. He

(09:22):
was really fascinated by the idea of an outside loop,
and he took advantage of this forced downtime at Walter
Read to speak with other pilots who are being treated
there and get their thoughts on outside loops. He pondered
the idea from an engineering standpoint, trying to figure out
just what might happen to the human body during that
kind of a stunt. So, of course, the minute he

(09:43):
was clear to fly again, he started testing out his ideas.
He ran various partial loop tests before becoming the first
known pilot to successfully complete an outside loop in Never
one to rest on his laurels, clearly, he continued to
do some innovative and adventurous things, and two years later,
on September twenty nine, nine nine, Jimmy Doolittle made the

(10:06):
first blind flight using instruments only in Nassau County in
New York. Prior to that, pilots were depending on visuals
a great deal on what they could actually see out
the cockpit window, but he had developed a beacon system
to give pilots a sense of location when no visuals
were possible, and with that he basically kicked off the
development of the modern cockpit. He also received the Daniel

(10:28):
Guggenheim Medal for Advancing Aeronautics and the Harmon Trophy for
Outstanding Aviation as well for having done this amazing thing.
The following year, which was nineteen thirty, Jenny Jimmy Doolittle
retired from active duty with the Army Air Corps. He
spent the next decade taking home trophies for when winning
speed races and working at Shell Oil while the company

(10:49):
developed high octane fuel that would eventually become the standard
for military aircraft. After ten years away from the military,
James Doolittle was recalled for active duty in nineteen forty
Or Hitler invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium, and France.
He was forty three at the time, and he was
tasked with fulfilling the Army Air Corps need to produce
fifty thousand planes each year, rather than the two thousand

(11:12):
that they had been producing, because even though the US
at this point had not joined the war, they wanted
to be ready working with Detroit car manufacturers. Despite neither
the auto industry nor the army being particularly keen on
that kind of partnership, Doolittle was able to succeed in
this mandate. By the end of one Ford was producing

(11:32):
the consolidated B twenty four bomber. But even though this
was really a huge feather in his cap and he
had performed above and beyond what had been expected or
hoped for, Doolittle was pretty miserable he just didn't like this.
He didn't like a desk job, and he wanted to
return to really active duty, and he made requests for
a transfer to go to a combat unit through all

(11:54):
of the appropriate channels, but he basically got turned down
every time and got constant resistance. But then finally in
January of ninety two, he received a call and was
tasked with a secret mission, and his job was to
plan and execute an air raid against Japan. The attack
on Pearl Harbor that we talked about at the top

(12:15):
of the show and the events that came after it
set the United States on edge and the Pacific. US
troops did not fare well against the Japanese and things
weren't really going well in Europe either. Something had to
be done to neutralize Japan's forces if the United States
is going to make any headway in the Pacific. After
several months of planning, Dolittle and his men were ready.

(12:39):
On April eighteenth of n two, sixteen B twenty five
Mitchell bombers with a total of eighty volunteer crewmen launched
from the aircraft carrier Hornet. Their flight began six hundred
and twenty miles away from Japan, and the original plan
had called for a takeoff from the Hornet at approximately
four hundred miles from Japan's coast, but because a fishing

(13:01):
boat spotted the carrier, things had to be revised at
the last minute. Because their position had been called in,
the Bent had been fitted with extra fuel tanks, which
meant that they lost armament in the process. Because the
airplanes weren't originally intended to take off from an aircraft carrier,
there also had to be really significant changes in the

(13:21):
takeoff procedure. Pilots were trained to take off not at
the usual ninety miles an hour, but it's sixty miles
per hour. You know a lot about how planes take off.
Speed is essential. This is tricky. They also had a
lot less runway than would normally be available aboard each
or five men the pilot, the co pilot, a bombardier,

(13:42):
a navigator and a gunner. And as a personal side note, uh,
the practice runs for these takeoffs were performed in an
auxiliary field to Egglynn Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida,
which is where my dad was stationed for a really
long time, so I know that area well. Uh. The
teams flew low. On their approach, they were about two
hundred feet over the water, and as they reached the

(14:04):
Japanese coastline, they dropped very low, some of them coming
in just a few dozen feet above the ground, and
they made their way to their intended targets, which were
military and industrial sites in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka.
And as they rose into the air to about twelve
hundred feet over their targets, they dropped their bombs and

(14:25):
then they headed to air faields on the Chinese mainland
to land. The wrap up of this mission, which was
basically successful, didn't go as planned. We're going to talk
about exactly what happened right after we pause for another
Reek word from one of our sponsors. You and I
have both made our own websites using squarespace. That is correct,

(14:45):
and we both found it extremely easy and painless. That
is also correct. And for my part, it was possibly
the most easy and painless thing so far about planning
my wedding. It was super easy, super into it if
I basically did all of it while sitting with my
laptop on my bed in my pajamas. Got something in

(15:06):
a couple of hours that looked exactly like I wanted
with all the things that I wanted to have on
It makes it extremely easy for the parts that I
want to be just for invited guests to be password
protected for our guests, and the parts that I'm comfortable
being public out there for the whole world to see.
All of that extremely easy. With square Space. You don't
have to have coding knowledge, you don't have to know

(15:28):
a lot about the elements of design. Squarespace has easy
to use, beautiful templates that give you professional results regardless
of what your experience level is. It is awesome. So
with square space you can make a website that looks
professionally designed regardless of what your skill level is. All
the tools are really intuitive and easy to use, and
you get a free domain if you sign up for

(15:50):
a year, which I did. Uh start your free trial
today at square space dot com. And when you decide
to sign up for square space, make sure to use
the offer code history to get ten percent off your
first purchase square Space. You should. So going back to
the Dolittle raid, while this raid had the intended effect

(16:11):
of scaring Japan and undermining their confidence, it really took
its toll on Doolittle's team. The planes did not make
it to the emergency airfields that they had been planned
to land at because of their very early takeoff, they
were all running out of fuel, and to make matters worse,
a nasty bit of weather was moving in. Doolittle described
in his autobiography actually seeing sharks in the water below

(16:34):
as they were flying and thinking that that would be
an absolutely terrible place to bail out. And eventually they
got a little bit of tail win and they were
able to get a little bit closer to their intended mark.
Every one of the used in the raid was lost.
The soldiers and them had to bail out over China.
Three crews successfully crashed, landed in China and made their

(16:55):
way to safety, but there were also a number of casualties.
UH Before we go on, I want to have a
brief side note on terminology. So my understanding about the
word soldier is that it is usually used for army,
whereas Air Force would normally be called airmen. And you
could make the argument that these guys should be considered
airmen because they were in the Army Air Corps before

(17:16):
the Air Force was founded, but just for the sake
of simplicity, we're sticking with soldiers here, So if you
are an airman, please don't be offended. I'm not trying to,
you know, do any dicey misnomering. But you know, we're
in that that weird phase where it's the air Force
doesn't exist yet, So that's the scoop uh. One soldier
died during the bailout, and while swimming across a lake

(17:40):
to evade Japanese occupation forces. Two men drowned. Eight men
were captured, and of those, three of them were executed.
Another of the remaining five died of starvation while in
custody of the Japanese. One plane landed in the Soviet Union,
where their bomber was taken and the crew was interned.
The Soviets event really moved them to another location near

(18:01):
the Iranian border and managed to bribe someone to smuggle
them across the border to the British consulate. According to
Soviet documents that were later declassified, this entire smuggling operation
was actually the work of Soviet authorities. They wanted to
move the United States soldiers out of the Soviet Union,
but they couldn't violate the neutrality pack they had with
Japan in order to do it. In fact, the United

(18:24):
States military had originally tried to work out a deal
with the Soviet Union to land there after the raid
rather than in China, but again because of the relationship
they had with Japan, the request to do that had
been denied. And as for Doolittle's immediate crew on his plane,
after parachuting into China, they were assisted by American UH,
by an American missionary and UH both Chinese military people

(18:48):
and civilians, and they were able to get home. There's
actually some very wacky stories and Dolittle's book about him
convincing some of the Chinese people he was encountering that yes,
he was an American soldier and he was who he
said he was. But UH, Dolittle thought when he got
home he was actually going to face a court martial
for losing all the aircraft. He would later write quote,

(19:10):
I sat down beside a wing, and I looked at
the thousands of pieces of shattered metal that had once
been a beautiful airplane. I felt lower than a frog's posterior.
This was my first combat mission. I had planned it
from the beginning and lead it. I was sure it
was my last As far as I was concerned, it
was a failure and I felt there could be no
future for me in uniform. He was happy, though about

(19:31):
his parachute landing. He had some real concerns about his
ankles being injured again, because I mean, even though a
parachute slows your fall down, you still land pretty hard,
and his ankles had previously been broken. Uh. Fortunately, Slash,
I was gonna say, but unfortunately, but it's all fortunate.
He wound up landing in manure, which is not ideal,

(19:53):
but it is better than rebreaking his ankles. Yeah, he's Uh.
He was very thankful would be smelly for a little
while rather than have to be in casts again. So
the Doolittle raid had two immediate effects. First, it was
a huge morale boost for US troops, civilians at home,
and the Allies. And second, as we mentioned earlier, it

(20:15):
really sent a shock wave through the Japanese military. The
thought in Japan up to this point had been that
the US lacked real firepower in the Pacific, since so
many vessels and planes had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor
and so many other assets were already deployed in Europe.
As Doolittle wrote in his autobiography quote the bombs could
only do a fraction of the damage the Japanese had

(20:36):
inflicted on US at Pearl Harbor, but the primary purpose
of the raid against the main island of Japan was psychological,
and immediately the Japanese forces scrambled to fortify their defenses
in the Pacific. Their carrier fleet in the Indian Ocean
was called home to protect the islands of Japan. Aircraft
that has been spread throughout the South Pacific by Japan

(20:58):
we're all recalled to patrols at home to defend against
another possible attack from US bombers. This shift of Japan's
military assets back to the Japanese islands, along with the
United States victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea
in May nineteen forty two and the Battle of Midway
in June of that year, enabled the United States to
launch a campaign against Japan at Qualcanal in August of

(21:21):
nineteen forty two. This would have been impossible before the
Japanese defensive stand in the Pacific had been crippled and
immediately after the raid. Of course, Doolittle was not course
court martialed as he expected, and he was instead promoted.
He had been a lieutenant colonel when he led the raid,
but the very next day he was made a brigadier general,
skipping over the rank of full colonel completely. Doolittle was

(21:42):
also awarded the Medal of Honor for his efforts and
honor he was given a month after the raid. The
citation stated the reason for his awards simply and clearly,
and put into perspective just how dangerous the Doolittle raid
had been. It read quote, with the apparent certainty of
being forced to land in an enemy territory or to
parish at see. Colonel Doolittle personally led a squadron of

(22:05):
Army bombers manned by volunteer crews in a highly destructive
raid on the Japanese mainland. Doolittle would go on to
command the Strategic Air Forces, the twelfth Air Force in
Britain and the fifteenth Air Force in North Africa and Italy.
He later commanded the Eighth Air Force, which was instrumental
enforcing Nazi surrender at the end of World War Two,
and after the war, James Doolittle returned to work at

(22:28):
Shell Oil. He was eventually named the president of the
Institute of Aeronautical Science, and he served on the President's
Scientific Advisory Committee. In night three, Doolittle was made the
twenty five recipient of the United States Military Academy sylvanest
Fair Award, given for distinguished military service. Dolittle dine on
September seven, nineteen ninety three, at Pebble Beach, California, at

(22:50):
the age of ninety six. He had had a stroke
earlier in September, and he spent his last several weeks
in his son's home before he passed, and I'm so
awed by his life and what I really loved. One
of the things that came up when I was researching
this was that at one point somebody had referred to
him as the Da Vinci of flight, and he said,

(23:13):
I think they mean more like I'm the Rube Goldberg.
That's not the direct quote, but it was kind of
like that, like he was just like, no, I'm just
I'm just busy trying stuff, which I sort of loved.
It was so uh, sort of humble and wonderful and
witty at the same time. So that is the story
of James Doolittle on the Doolittle Raid. I guess I

(23:36):
have a listener mail, I do this one made me
laugh so hard that Tracy knew immediately that it was
going to be red on the air. Oh yeah, yes.
And then it's such a great email that it came
in on a weekend and I happened to read it
on the weekend and we had Brench and I was
telling the people at Brench it's so great. So this

(23:57):
is from our listener, Ben. He says, Dear Holly and Tree,
see in the Courier Mind Disaster episode, Holly asked why
they thought it was the cold dust and not the
methane from the horses that caused the explosion. Uh, yeah,
it wasn't clear. I mean, there was obviously cold us
that was a problem, but I didn't understand why they
had always been rated so clean in terms of firedamp

(24:17):
like the mind gases, when they had horses that were
underground making methane. And Ben says, I was intrigued by
this question, so I decided to finally put my engineering
degree to good use calculating horse farts. The Courier mine
disaster extended along a hundred and ten kilometers of tunnels,
and assuming the tunnels are two meters wide and tall,
that gives us a volume of four hundred and forty

(24:39):
thousand cubic meters. A mixture of air and methane is
only flammable if it is at least five percent methane,
so the horses needed to make twenty two cubic meters
of methane. A single horse produces roughly thirty two cubic
meters of methane per year, so you would need around
six hundred and ninety horses farting for an entire year

(24:59):
to make the mind flammable. At this point you might
think this is possible. Ninety horses might be reasonable for
a large mine. However, the methane could only build up
to dangerous levels if there was no ventilation. If the
ventilation in the mind was removed, the oxygen in the
mind could only support those horses for three months at most,
and that's with no people also breathing the oxygen. So

(25:21):
an air tight mind would be a really bad idea.
But as you mentioned, the mind was actually ventilated, sending
all those horse farts out into the French country side.
As cool as horse farts are, the coal dust was
the more likely. Culprit Yours and Flatulens Ben he gives
a ps that he's sorry for using metric. Don't be sorry.

(25:44):
This is the most brilliant piece of writing maybe ever.
I want to give some sort of award to Ben
for this. I could not be more delighted by this email.
So now we know about the math of horse farts.
Thank you so much, Ben. That was just spectacular. If
you would like to write to us with your mathematics
of flatulence or anything else, you can do so at

(26:06):
history Podcast at how stuff works dot com. You can
connect with us at Facebook dot com, slash mist in history,
on Twitter at miss in history, at pinterest dot com,
slash miss in history at miss in history dot tumbler
dot com, and on Instagram at miss in history. If
you would like to learn a little bit more about
what we talked about today, you can go to our
parents parents site how stuff Works. If you do a

(26:26):
search for the Doolittle raid uh, the one of the
things that comes up is the North American B twenty
five Mitchell bombers, so you'll get a little more information
on the planes that they were actually taking out into
this raid. Uh. If you would like to visit us,
you can do that at misston History dot com where
you can look at show notes for all of the
episodes that Tracy and I have worked on together, as
well as an archive of every episode of the podcast

(26:49):
there has ever been, so we encourage you to come
and visit us at how stuff works dot com and
Missed in History dot com are on this and thousands
of other topics because at how stuff works dot com.
Mmm m