"The First Heroes": The story of the Doolittle Raiders of World War II
Written: Feb 28 '05 (Updated Oct 07 '06)
Product Rating:
Pros: Outstanding, accurate, well-written tale of the 1942 air raid on Japan.
Cons: Perhaps too pro-American for some tastes, but I loved it.
The Bottom Line: The Doolittle Raid is told through first-hand interviews, from its formative plan through its dramatic execution. A truly inspiring tale of "a few good men."
Don_Krider's Full Review: Craig Nelson - The First Heroes: The Extraordinary...
The first five months of World War II did not go well for the United States as it faced the Empire of Japan.
At Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, the U. S. Pacific fleet had been caught by hundreds of Japanese aircraft at anchor, ships with watertight doors wide-open and "skeleton (smaller than normal) crews" on a peaceful Sunday morning on December 7, 1941.
Three days later, without air cover but at sea, the British Navy was caught by Japanese air power, resulting in the loss of the British warships HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales.
Allied forces were beaten everywhere by the Japanese war machine. China had already been involved in years of fighting with the Japanese, with hundreds of thousands of casualties.
Now, in December of 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor was followed by hundreds of Japanese planes pounding American air bases in the Philippines, destroying half of America's air power there on day one of America's involvement in World War II.
The Japanese sank their military teeth into taking Kowloon, Korea, Indochina and Hong Kong. U. S. forces were overwhelmed on Guam and Wake Islands. By month's end, 10,000 Japanese troops had invaded the Philippines.
At Bataan and the tunnel fortress of Corregidor, the nearly 100,000 Filipino-American troops (more than 70,000 of them American) commanded by U. S. Army General Douglas MacArthur, cut off from fresh supplies and soon riddled with "dysentery, scurvy, malaria, and beriberi" fought on, but soon MacArthur was ordered to leave his troops, lest he be taken prisoner.
The Japanese attacked the Australian air base at Rabuul on New Britain Island. Australian warships at anchor in Darwin, Australia, were bombed and air bases in the city are also attacked.
Singapore fell to Japanese troops --- many of the surrendering troops, including units from China and India, were executed by the conquering Japanese.
The Philippines fell. Corregidor fell.
At Bataan, 78,000 hungry, ammunition-starved U. S. troops were overwhelmed by 50,000 well-fed, heavily armed Japanese troops. The Americans surrendered, then were forced-marched some 65 miles on what became known as "the Bataan Death March" --- 10,000 Americans died while in Japanese hands on the march.
By April of 1942, Japan controlled much of the Pacific Ocean (including a pair of islands off the coast of Alaska in the Aleutians). Losing only 15,000 of her own troops killed or wounded, Japan has inflicted casualties on the Allies of "320,000 killed, wounded, and captured" in just five months of fighting.
Japanese submarines, at least twice, fire their deck guns, with mainly a demoralizing result on the American public, at the U. S. west coast shoreline. Americans fear an invasion will follow.
Then along came Jimmy Doolittle and his American airmen with a daring plan to boost American morale. That plan and its execution is detailed very well in the 2003 paperback book "The First Heroes" by Craig Nelson.
The Doolittle raid:
The aptly named "Doolittle" air raid on Japan in April of 1942 really did little as a military operation, but with America's back to the wall it was an amazing morale builder that may have prevented the "gloom and doom" attitude that sometimes makes nations fall.
The plan was to train American pilots, all volunteers, for what amounted to a suicide mission to show the Japanese they weren't untouchable. The airmen had to agree to complete silence about the mission --- if they volunteered, they could not tell even their loved ones about their target ("loose lips sink ships," being the motto of the day).
It was a bold plan involving land based B-25 bombers, modified and with new fuel specifications. These airmen were to fly the B-25s from an American aircraft carrier against the Japanese mainland.
The B-25 bomber is a large aircraft and carries a good-size bomb load (what the pilots referred to as "eggs"). It's twin engines and "double tail" design made it somewhat unique among American bombers of World War II (the better-known B-17 and B-29 bombers had one large tail section with four engines, for instance).
The plane needed more of a runway to take off from than the deck of an aircraft carrier like the brand new USS Hornet had (she had just completed her shakedown cruise and had to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean through the Panama Canal to boost U. S. Pacific forces).
Doolittle intended to retrain attitudes. The words "can't do" were unacceptable to him.
Doolittle employed a plan, first proposed by Navy Captain Francis Low, to use U. S. land-based bombers from an aircraft carrier at sea. The plan involved using the carrier as a floating island that could get within a few hundred miles of Japan and launch the planes undetected (Navy carrier planes, at the time, didn't have the necessary range to hit Japan, but Army bombers, launched from a carrier, would have the range).
The men Doolittle chose would have to be volunteers. They had to know that just training to make a bomber take off a shorter runway might kill them. Taking off a bouncing carrier deck in high seas was risky at best. These men had to accept that this might be a suicide mission as they would be flying into the heart of Japan's air defenses.
Doolittle's Raiders did the "impossible" by revving their engines to a fearsome pitch, while holding the planes in place, and then taking off, giving them the necessary air speed for take off from a carrier deck --- the planes would not be expected to land back on their carrier, just to take off from it.
To get them on the carrier, the 16 bombers were hoisted aboard the USS Hornet in February of 1942 in Norfolk, Virginia, and lashed down for the long cruise from the Atlantic Ocean through the Panama Canal and into the Pacific Ocean.
The plan was "simple" from there. The carrier task force would launch the planes, each with five-man crews (a total of 80 men in 16 planes), they would bomb military targets from a low altitude over the Japanese mainland, then fly to areas of China not yet under Japanese control and hopefully land there.
The "simple" plan became complicated. Undetected by U. S. submarines scouting Japanese waters were Japanese intelligence vessels disguised as fishing boats. One of these ships was encountered, and sunk, by the American fleet, which then had to launch its bombers at long range --- they "might" have enough fuel to crash into the waters off China, "maybe," but they had to "scramble" now to launch their "eggs" if the mission was to succeed.
Somehow they succeeded, despite being seen by Japanese ships and Japanese warplanes (which apparently assumed that any aircraft flying over Japan just had to be Japanese planes, at least until the bombs started to fall).
Japanese propaganda said the Americans had bombed civilian targets, but the Doolittle Raiders were very careful to hit only military targets, according to the airmen themselves.
The tale doesn't end there. The Americans had to try to make it to China, avoid Japanese troops in China and eventually be hustled out of China by friendly Chinese forces to the United States. Some Americans didn't make it. Some American airman were captured, put on "trial" and beheaded by the Japanese.
In the end, the American people cared about one thing: a handful of gutsy American airmen had hit the Japanese in their own country --- limited "payback" for Pearl Harbor and other losses, but "Payback" just the same.
The Doolittle mission gave Americans hope, and the surviving Doolittle Raiders became American heroes via films like "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" (based on an instant best-seller of the same title written by one of the Doolittle Raiders, pilot Ted Lawson, portrayed in the film by actor Van Johnson).
Even the execution of captured Doolittle Raiders by the Japanese worked against the Japanese, who thought the beheadings would scare the American public --- the event led to the sale of more War Bonds to finance the war effort than any other event of the war (an ad campaign with posters saying "Japanese Execute Doolittle Men - We'll Pay You Back Tojo"), according to the book's author.
Doolittle, well, he became a national icon. His Congressional Medal Of Honor was personally pinned on him, upon his return to the United States, by President Franklin Roosevelt.
The USS Hornet which launched the attack? She was sunk by the Japanese in the Fall of 1942 during the Guadalcanal Campaign.
The author, writing style:
"The First Heroes" by Craig Nelson is his fourth book. His writings have appeared in such magazines as Salon, Blender and Genre. For some two decades he was a book editor for HarperCollins, Hyperion and Random House.
The Washington Post has called this book "awe-inspiring," and Nelson's writing is a well-researched (including many first-hand accounts), journalistic style: he knows his subject and explains a lesser-known period of World War II in greater detail than has been done before.
Nelson tries hard to be objective, but he seems in awe of the Doolittle Raiders --- I have no problem with that. This is an American tale, as inspiring as the stories of the defenders of Wake Island and of the Alamo: a small group of American men facing incredible odds, not for personal gain, but because the mission needed to be done.
A very nice touch in the book is the listing of each of the 16 bombers, including the nicknames of the planes (names like "Green Hornet," "Ruptured Duck," "Bat Out Of Hell," and others), the crewmen's names with the plane they flew on and the age of the crewmen.
One is struck by the youth of these airmen, many in their 20's and one pilot as young as 22, with the "old man" of the group being Lieutenant-Colonel (later General) Doolittle himself, who was 45 years of age at the time of the mission.
The book:
An outstanding, more-than-slightly "gung ho" tribute to the Doolittle Raiders, Craig Nelson's "The First Heroes" was published by Penguin Books. It made the national Top 10 best-seller lists in hardcover in 2002 and this paperback version, in its 10th printing, was first published in 2003.
The book is very well-illustrated with photos and maps throughout its 430-plus pages. The book was praised by, among others, The Library Journal, which said, "This book will find a place in every substantial World War II collection."
Through first-hand interviews with survivors of the mission, told with detailed background information on the history of the war's early months, Nelson tells a fascinating, riveting story of one of the war's boldest moments.
Final recommendation:
I highly recommend "The First Heroes" by Craig Nelson. It will inspire you in its depiction of the courage of the American spirit. Enjoy!
The surviving Doolittle Raiders meet every year for a reunion. Their next reunion (their 63rd), at this writing, is scheduled in Mystic, Ct., April 15-17, 2005.
On the web:
Doolittle Raiders Online: http://www.doolittletokyoraiders.com/ (let the page load fully and listen to the purr of a B-25 bomber's engines)
Information on the 63rd Doolittle Raiders Reunion: http://www.doolittleraiders.com
If you get the chance, see the displays and virtually every American military aircraft every flown (the largest collection in existence, it includes foreign military planes of World War II, including early German jet fighters) at the United States Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio (most exhibits are free admission). I've been several times and it's an amazing place: http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/
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