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Hollywood made a movie about it, numerous books have been written about it and now Doolittle’s Raid on Tokyo — the first retaliatory strike against the Japanese after Pearl Harbor — is the topic of the Holmen Area Historical Society’s July 1 meeting.
Mark Doolittle, who owns Mark Jewellers in La Crosse, found out he was a distant relative to Lt. Col. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, the aviator, daredevil and scientist hero of the famed U.S. raid over Tokyo.
Mark Doolittle has collected so much information and so many mementos on the raid he opened a museum, “Doolittle’s Raiders,” in La Crosse.
Mark, who lived in Holmen about 20 years before moving to La Crosse, said he became interested in aviation history when he was in eighth grade but really didn’t do anything with his interest until about 15 years ago. He started going to the annual reunions of the pilots of the 1942 raid and picking up all kinds of mementos.
Mark said he had always been interested in airplanes, even though he never became a pilot. Mostly he was interested in the historical events.
His museum includes the movie poster from Hollywood’s “30 Seconds Over Tokyo,” starring Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson and Robert Mitchum. The museum also houses a piece of the B-25 bombers flown in the raid, replicas of B-25 bombers and artistic renderings of the raid signed by some of the men who survived it.
The raid was a historical event, partly because it was a first for the U.S. military but also because it changed the course of the war.
Many considered it a suicide mission. The April 18, 1942, Tokyo Raid was the first time in the U.S. military’s history that fully loaded bombers took off from an aircraft carrier. The mission launched from the USS Hornet amid choppy seas and storms.
No one, especially the Japanese, thought fully loaded bombers could take off from the short deck of a Navy carrier, but Doolittle knew they could and was involved in planning the mission from the beginning.
The military tried to station itself within 400 miles of Japan but were spotted by a Japanese fishing boats, whose pilots radioed the military. Instead of ditching the planes into the water to make room for the Navy fighter planes defending the fleet, Doolittle’s mission was launched 650 miles away, well beyond the fuel capacity of the loaded bombers.
The men on the B-25s knew it was a one-way mission. All they could hope for was to get far enough inland to land in friendly territory.
According to what Mark found out about his cousin, Jimmy Doolittle was familiar with unfriendly territory. His family moved from California to Alaska and Jimmy was always the smallest in the class, so he was used to getting into scrapes defending himself.
He took up professional boxing to help finance his education at the University of California’s School of Mines at Berkeley. However, he didn’t want his mother to know he was boxing, so he changed his name.
In 1917, he enlisted in the Army Signal Corps reserve before he finished college. In 1929, Doolittle became the first pilot to “fly blind,” using only the aircraft’s instruments.
According to Mark, Jimmy helped develop instruments for airplanes, and he also held several records for coast-to-coast air races, including the record in 1922 for being the first pilot to complete a coast-to-coast trip in less than a day.
On April 18, 1942, Lt. Col James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle led 80 men on 16 Army aircraft to drop bombs on Tokyo. Each plane had a payload of four bombs. Seventy-seven men returned from the raid.
Most of them had to bail out of their airplane when they ran out of fuel and they landed in friendly territory. Two men drowned when they landed in the water and tried to swim to shore, and a third died from the parachute jump.
Eight men were captured by the Japanese who executed three of them and tortured the others. One of them died of malnutrition, but the remaining four eventually were released.
Of the 80 men, nine are still alive and celebrate their achievement every year in a reunion. Doolittle died in 1993 at the age of 97.
Remnants of the planes were recovered 48 years after the raid, when an expedition that included three of the original men went to China and Japan to try to find the remains of the airplanes from which they had bailed. Mark Doolittle’s museum includes a tiny piece of plane No. 3 “Whiskey Pete.”
Despite his thinking the mission was a failure because they lost all the planes, Jimmy Doolittle was promoted to brigadier general for his leadership, skipping the rank of colonel.
In fact, because of the raid, the Japanese reduced their attack forces in order to defend their homeland. They revised their strategy and tried to attack Midway but were met by much larger U.S. forces and were defeated. The Japanese never mounted a winning fight against the U.S. after the Battle of Midway.
He received the Medal of Honor from President Franklin Roosevelt for his bravery. Later, President Ronald Reagan made him a four-star general. After Doolittle retired from the Army, he stayed in the aeronautic field, earning the civilian Medal of Freedom for his contributions to aviation after the war. He also donated his entire retirement pension to causes for veterans.
AT A GLANCEWHAT: Presentation about Doolittle’s raid on Japan
WHO: Holmen Area Historical Society
WHEN: 7 p.m. Wednesday, July 1
WHERE: Holmen Village Hall Senior Center
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