March 11, 2023 • 24 mins
This 2016 episode discusses the Doolittle Raid, 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on the balloons of
World War Two, we talked about how Japan's development of
balloon bombs was spurred on by wanting away to strike
back at the United States after the Doolittle Raid. Our
episode on Jimmy Doolittle and the Doolittle Raid came out
on February tenth, twenty sixteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic.
(00:23):
In this episode, I speculated on whether Jimmy Doolittle had
ever met another figure from a long ago podcast episode,
which was physicist Luis Alvarez. It seemed like they would
have gotten along to me. It turns out yes they did.
In Alvarez's memoir, he described Jimmy Doolittle as one of
his two principal heroes of aviation, the other one being
(00:45):
Chuck Yeager, and he said that those two men were
the only two people he ever asked for an autograph
in his adult life. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello
(01:06):
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson. In today's episode is a request from
listener Laura and her son and I don't think she
put her son's name in 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,
(01:31):
because he was pretty amazing and I certainly had no
idea how much he contributed to the field of aviation.
So I got really 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, so don't
(01:53):
worry because if you really want to dig deeper, there
is a lot of good stuff out there, including James
Doolittle's autobiography, which 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 seventh, nineteen forty one, there
was a two hour surprise attack on an American naval
(02:16):
base near Honolulu, Hawaii. Japanese fighter pilots just wrought incredible
damage on Pearl Harbor, 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
tapes were dead and a thousand were wounded, and the
Japanese pilots had taken out eight battleships, almost a dozen
(02:39):
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 already been going on for
two years, and at that point the United States formally
declared war on Japan. So keep that in mind, and
now we're going to talk for a little bit about
James Doolittle. So he was really the he figure in
(03:00):
the Doolittle Raid and the man it was eventually named after,
Jimmy Doolittle. It was also called the Tokyo Raid before
it kind of took on the nickname of the Doolittle Raid.
Jimmy was born James Harold Doolittle on December fourteenth of
eighteen ninety six 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
(03:22):
there from New England in search of wealth. And when
Jimmy was four, Frank once again moved the family in
search of gold, 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,
(03:43):
he showed some talent in boxing, and he won a
state boxing championship while he was in high school. While
he considered going pro in the boxing ring, he enrolled
at UCLA instead, and Doolittle was a junior in college
when the US entered World War One. He immediately enlisted
as an Army Signal Corps flying cadet. He worked as
(04:04):
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, 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.
(04:25):
Jimmy Doolittle 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
pilot and as a wing walker in the nineteen twenties
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
(04:46):
Flying Cross in nineteen twenty two for flying cross country
with just one stop from Pablo Beach, Florida to Rockwell, California,
over the course of twenty two and a half hours
in a de Haviland aircraft. It was a flight that
had been a ordered 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
(05:06):
course and actually ended up flipped upside down in the water,
and Doolittle was mortally embarrassed by this much publicized flop
because there had been a lot of people on hand
to witness this takeoff. But he did 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
(05:27):
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 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
(05:49):
award came because with this flight he had basically proven
that it was possible to move an Army Air Corps
unit anywhere within the 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 nineteen
twenty five, which was the same year that he earned
his doctorate, he set a world record for a seaplane
(06:12):
of two hundred thirty two miles an hour in the
Schneider's Seaplane Race in Baltimore, Maryland. He had fitted an
existing racing plane that had been 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
(06:32):
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 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. Later, in nineteen
(06:56):
twenty five, he got permission for a six month long
leave from his military career, and this was to work
as an aircraft demonstrator in South America, showing off the
quality and maneuverability of Curtis P one Hawk fighters. He
headed first to Santiago, Chile in nineteen twenty six, so
he gotten the permission in twenty five, but he actually
left in twenty six, and there he got in a
(07:17):
dog fight competition like a competition flight, not an actual
dog fight, against German ace Ernst von Schonbeck of the
Richtofen 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
(07:39):
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 was flying with two broken ankles.
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,
(08:02):
alcohol was involved in this poor decision making. After the fall,
Doolittle had attached his boots to the rudders of his
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,
(08:24):
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,
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 Reed rounded him and really really grounded him.
(08:46):
He wasn't allowed to do much of anything for six
months because flying in casts using the workaround set up
that 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
(09:07):
loved sponsors. So, instead of sitting idle while on forced rest,
Doolittle used his convalescence to return to the subject that
he had written his dissertation on, which was pilots blacking
(09:28):
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. This was the mid twenties and
the Wright Brothers and their Kill Devil Hills adventures. We're
(09:48):
in the early nineteen hundreds, 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,
if you were to draw a picture on a piece
(10:08):
of paper of a plane doing a loop like a
loop to loop, an inside loop, the pilot would always
be inside the circle. 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 was
really fascinated by the idea of an outside loop, and
(10:28):
he took advantage of this forced downtime at while to
read to speak with other pilots who were 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
was cleared to fly again, he started testing out his ideas.
(10:50):
He ran various partial loop tests before becoming the first
known pilot to successfully complete an outside loop in nineteen
to twenty seven. Never one to rest on his laurels, clearly,
he continued to do some innovative and adventurous things, and
two years later, on September twenty ninth of nineteen twenty nine,
Jimmy Doolittle made the first blind flight using instruments only
(11:12):
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 Guggenheim Medal for Advancing Aeronautics and
(11:34):
the Harmon Trophy for Outstanding Aviation as well for having
done this amazing thing. The following year, which was nineteen thirty,
Jimmy Doolittle retired from active duty with the Army Air Corps.
He spent the next decade taking home trophies for winning
speed races and working at Shell Oil while the company
developed high octane fuel that would eventually become the standard
(11:55):
for military aircraft. After ten years away from the military,
James Doolittle was recalled for active duty in nineteen forty
after Hitler invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium in 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
(12:16):
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 nineteen forty one, Ford
was producing the consolidated B twenty four bomber. But even
(12:39):
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 of the appropriate channels, but he basically
(12:59):
got turned down every time and got constant resistance. But
then finally in January of nineteen forty 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 of the show and the events
that came after it set the United States on edge
(13:22):
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 was going to make any headway in
the Pacific. After several months of planning, Doolittle and his
men were ready. On April eighteenth of nineteen forty two,
(13:45):
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 boat spotted the carrier, things had
(14:06):
to be revised at the last minute. Because their position
had been called in, the B twenty fives 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 takeoff procedure. Pilots
were trained to take off not at the usual ninety
(14:29):
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 B twenty five
or five men the pilot, the copilot, a bombardier, a navigator,
and a gunner. And as a personal side note, the
(14:50):
practice runs for these takeoffs were performed at an auxiliary
field to Eggln Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, which
is where my dad was stationed for a really long time,
so I know that area well. The teams flew low
on their approach. They were about two hundred feet over
the water, and as they reached the Japanese coastline, they
dropped very low, some of them coming in just a
(15:10):
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 then they
headed to air fields on the Chinese mainland to land.
(15:33):
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 reef word
from one of our sponsors. So going back to the
(15:53):
Doolittle raid. While this raid had the intended effect of
scaring Japan and undermining their confidence, 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
(16:16):
autobiography actually seeing sharks in the water below 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 B twenty five's used in the raid
was lost, the soldiers in them had to bail out
(16:37):
over China. Three crews successfully crashed, landed in China and
made their way to safety, but there were also a
number of casualties. 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
(16:59):
be considered airmen because they were in the Army Air
Corps before 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 do any dicey misnomering. But you know,
we're in that weird phase where it's the Air Force
doesn't exist yet, so that's the scoop. One soldier died
(17:22):
during the bailout, and while swimming across a lake 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
(17:44):
Soviets eventually moved them to another location near 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
(18:07):
order to do it. In fact, the United 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 the 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 by an
(18:29):
American missionary, and both Chinese military people and civilians, and
they were able to get home. There's actually some very
wacky stories in Doolittle'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 Doolittle thought when he got home he was actually
(18:51):
going to face a court martial for losing all the aircraft.
He would later write quote, 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 led it.
I was sure it was my last. As far as
I was concerned, it was a failure, and I felt
(19:12):
there could be no future for me in uniform. He
was happy, though about 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.
Fortunately slash, I was gonna say, but unfortunately, but it's
(19:35):
all fortunate. He wound up landing in manure, which is
not ideal, but is better than rebreaking his ankles. Yeah,
he was very thankful to 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,
(19:57):
and the Allies. And second, as we mentioned, it really
sent a shockwave 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
(20:20):
a fraction of the damage the Japanese had 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
(20:41):
had been spread throughout the South Pacific by Japan were
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 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
(21:03):
campaign against Japan at Guadalcanal in August of 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 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
(21:25):
rank of full colonel completely. Doolittle was also awarded the
Medal of Honor for his efforts, an 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 perish at sea.
(21:48):
Colonel Doolittle personally led a squadron of 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 in forcing
Nazi surrender at the end of World War Two, and
(22:11):
after the war, James Doolittle returned to work at Shell Oyle.
He was eventually named the president of the Institute of
Aeronautical Science, and he served on the President's Scientific Advisory Committee.
In nineteen eighty three, Doolittle was made the twenty fifth
recipient of the United States Military Academy's Sylvanas Thayer Award,
given for distinguished military service. Doolittle dine on September twenty
(22:32):
seventh of nineteen ninety three at Pebble Beach, California, at
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 love. One
of the things that came up when I was researching
this was that at one point somebody had referred to
(22:56):
him as the Da Vinci of flight, and he said,
I think they mean or 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 try and stuff awesome, which I sort
of loved. It was so sort of humble and wonderful
and witty at the same time. So that is the
(23:18):
story of James Doolittle on The Doolittle Raid. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
(23:43):
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever
else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you miss in History
Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
(24:07):
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on the balloons of
World War Two, we talked about how Japan's development of
balloon bombs was spurred on by wanting away to strike
back at the United States after the Doolittle Raid. Our
episode on Jimmy Doolittle and the Doolittle Raid came out
on February tenth, twenty sixteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic.
(00:23):
In this episode, I speculated on whether Jimmy Doolittle had
ever met another figure from a long ago podcast episode,
which was physicist Luis Alvarez. It seemed like they would
have gotten along to me. It turns out yes they did.
In Alvarez's memoir, he described Jimmy Doolittle as one of
his two principal heroes of aviation, the other one being
(00:45):
Chuck Yeager, and he said that those two men were
the only two people he ever asked for an autograph
in his adult life. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed
in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello
(01:06):
and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson. In today's episode is a request from
listener Laura and her son and I don't think she
put her son's name in 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,
(01:31):
because he was pretty amazing and I certainly had no
idea how much he contributed to the field of aviation.
So I got really 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, so don't
(01:53):
worry because if you really want to dig deeper, there
is a lot of good stuff out there, including James
Doolittle's autobiography, which 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 seventh, nineteen forty one, there
was a two hour surprise attack on an American naval
(02:16):
base near Honolulu, Hawaii. Japanese fighter pilots just wrought incredible
damage on Pearl Harbor, 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
tapes were dead and a thousand were wounded, and the
Japanese pilots had taken out eight battleships, almost a dozen
(02:39):
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 already been going on for
two years, and at that point the United States formally
declared war on Japan. So keep that in mind, and
now we're going to talk for a little bit about
James Doolittle. So he was really the he figure in
(03:00):
the Doolittle Raid and the man it was eventually named after,
Jimmy Doolittle. It was also called the Tokyo Raid before
it kind of took on the nickname of the Doolittle Raid.
Jimmy was born James Harold Doolittle on December fourteenth of
eighteen ninety six 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
(03:22):
there from New England in search of wealth. And when
Jimmy was four, Frank once again moved the family in
search of gold, 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,
(03:43):
he showed some talent in boxing, and he won a
state boxing championship while he was in high school. While
he considered going pro in the boxing ring, he enrolled
at UCLA instead, and Doolittle was a junior in college
when the US entered World War One. He immediately enlisted
as an Army Signal Corps flying cadet. He worked as
(04:04):
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, 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.
(04:25):
Jimmy Doolittle 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
pilot and as a wing walker in the nineteen twenties
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
(04:46):
Flying Cross in nineteen twenty two for flying cross country
with just one stop from Pablo Beach, Florida to Rockwell, California,
over the course of twenty two and a half hours
in a de Haviland aircraft. It was a flight that
had been a ordered 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
(05:06):
course and actually ended up flipped upside down in the water,
and Doolittle was mortally embarrassed by this much publicized flop
because there had been a lot of people on hand
to witness this takeoff. But he did 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
(05:27):
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 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
(05:49):
award came because with this flight he had basically proven
that it was possible to move an Army Air Corps
unit anywhere within the 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 nineteen
twenty five, which was the same year that he earned
his doctorate, he set a world record for a seaplane
(06:12):
of two hundred thirty two miles an hour in the
Schneider's Seaplane Race in Baltimore, Maryland. He had fitted an
existing racing plane that had been 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
(06:32):
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 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. Later, in nineteen
(06:56):
twenty five, he got permission for a six month long
leave from his military career, and this was to work
as an aircraft demonstrator in South America, showing off the
quality and maneuverability of Curtis P one Hawk fighters. He
headed first to Santiago, Chile in nineteen twenty six, so
he gotten the permission in twenty five, but he actually
left in twenty six, and there he got in a
(07:17):
dog fight competition like a competition flight, not an actual
dog fight, against German ace Ernst von Schonbeck of the
Richtofen 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
(07:39):
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 was flying with two broken ankles.
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,
(08:02):
alcohol was involved in this poor decision making. After the fall,
Doolittle had attached his boots to the rudders of his
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,
(08:24):
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,
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 Reed rounded him and really really grounded him.
(08:46):
He wasn't allowed to do much of anything for six
months because flying in casts using the workaround set up
that 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
(09:07):
loved sponsors. So, instead of sitting idle while on forced rest,
Doolittle used his convalescence to return to the subject that
he had written his dissertation on, which was pilots blacking
(09:28):
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. This was the mid twenties and
the Wright Brothers and their Kill Devil Hills adventures. We're
(09:48):
in the early nineteen hundreds, 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,
if you were to draw a picture on a piece
(10:08):
of paper of a plane doing a loop like a
loop to loop, an inside loop, the pilot would always
be inside the circle. 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 was
really fascinated by the idea of an outside loop, and
(10:28):
he took advantage of this forced downtime at while to
read to speak with other pilots who were 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
was cleared to fly again, he started testing out his ideas.
(10:50):
He ran various partial loop tests before becoming the first
known pilot to successfully complete an outside loop in nineteen
to twenty seven. Never one to rest on his laurels, clearly,
he continued to do some innovative and adventurous things, and
two years later, on September twenty ninth of nineteen twenty nine,
Jimmy Doolittle made the first blind flight using instruments only
(11:12):
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 Guggenheim Medal for Advancing Aeronautics and
(11:34):
the Harmon Trophy for Outstanding Aviation as well for having
done this amazing thing. The following year, which was nineteen thirty,
Jimmy Doolittle retired from active duty with the Army Air Corps.
He spent the next decade taking home trophies for winning
speed races and working at Shell Oil while the company
developed high octane fuel that would eventually become the standard
(11:55):
for military aircraft. After ten years away from the military,
James Doolittle was recalled for active duty in nineteen forty
after Hitler invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium in 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
(12:16):
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 nineteen forty one, Ford
was producing the consolidated B twenty four bomber. But even
(12:39):
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 of the appropriate channels, but he basically
(12:59):
got turned down every time and got constant resistance. But
then finally in January of nineteen forty 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 of the show and the events
that came after it set the United States on edge
(13:22):
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 was going to make any headway in
the Pacific. After several months of planning, Doolittle and his
men were ready. On April eighteenth of nineteen forty two,
(13:45):
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 boat spotted the carrier, things had
(14:06):
to be revised at the last minute. Because their position
had been called in, the B twenty fives 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 takeoff procedure. Pilots
were trained to take off not at the usual ninety
(14:29):
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 B twenty five
or five men the pilot, the copilot, a bombardier, a navigator,
and a gunner. And as a personal side note, the
(14:50):
practice runs for these takeoffs were performed at an auxiliary
field to Eggln Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, which
is where my dad was stationed for a really long time,
so I know that area well. The teams flew low
on their approach. They were about two hundred feet over
the water, and as they reached the Japanese coastline, they
dropped very low, some of them coming in just a
(15:10):
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 then they
headed to air fields on the Chinese mainland to land.
(15:33):
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 reef word
from one of our sponsors. So going back to the
(15:53):
Doolittle raid. While this raid had the intended effect of
scaring Japan and undermining their confidence, 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
(16:16):
autobiography actually seeing sharks in the water below 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 B twenty five's used in the raid
was lost, the soldiers in them had to bail out
(16:37):
over China. Three crews successfully crashed, landed in China and
made their way to safety, but there were also a
number of casualties. 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
(16:59):
be considered airmen because they were in the Army Air
Corps before 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 do any dicey misnomering. But you know,
we're in that weird phase where it's the Air Force
doesn't exist yet, so that's the scoop. One soldier died
(17:22):
during the bailout, and while swimming across a lake 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
(17:44):
Soviets eventually moved them to another location near 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
(18:07):
order to do it. In fact, the United 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 the 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 by an
(18:29):
American missionary, and both Chinese military people and civilians, and
they were able to get home. There's actually some very
wacky stories in Doolittle'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 Doolittle thought when he got home he was actually
(18:51):
going to face a court martial for losing all the aircraft.
He would later write quote, 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 led it.
I was sure it was my last. As far as
I was concerned, it was a failure, and I felt
(19:12):
there could be no future for me in uniform. He
was happy, though about 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.
Fortunately slash, I was gonna say, but unfortunately, but it's
(19:35):
all fortunate. He wound up landing in manure, which is
not ideal, but is better than rebreaking his ankles. Yeah,
he was very thankful to 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,
(19:57):
and the Allies. And second, as we mentioned, it really
sent a shockwave 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
(20:20):
a fraction of the damage the Japanese had 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
(20:41):
had been spread throughout the South Pacific by Japan were
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 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
(21:03):
campaign against Japan at Guadalcanal in August of 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 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
(21:25):
rank of full colonel completely. Doolittle was also awarded the
Medal of Honor for his efforts, an 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 perish at sea.
(21:48):
Colonel Doolittle personally led a squadron of 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 in forcing
Nazi surrender at the end of World War Two, and
(22:11):
after the war, James Doolittle returned to work at Shell Oyle.
He was eventually named the president of the Institute of
Aeronautical Science, and he served on the President's Scientific Advisory Committee.
In nineteen eighty three, Doolittle was made the twenty fifth
recipient of the United States Military Academy's Sylvanas Thayer Award,
given for distinguished military service. Doolittle dine on September twenty
(22:32):
seventh of nineteen ninety three at Pebble Beach, California, at
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 love. One
of the things that came up when I was researching
this was that at one point somebody had referred to
(22:56):
him as the Da Vinci of flight, and he said,
I think they mean or 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 try and stuff awesome, which I sort
of loved. It was so sort of humble and wonderful
and witty at the same time. So that is the
(23:18):
story of James Doolittle on The Doolittle Raid. Thanks so
much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode
is out of the archive, if you heard an email
address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the
course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our
current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
(23:43):
Our old health stuff works email address no longer works,
and you can find us all over social media at
missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show
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