The Doolittle Raider Who Went Back in Love

The smell of raw potato skins clings to fingers no matter how many times you wash them, and that is what I remember most about the morning the world changed — not the words on the radio, but the smell on my hands as I stood next to Jake DeShazer at the long steel sink, both of us on kitchen duty, both of us twenty-some years old and certain the worst thing that would happen to us that day was another hour of KP.

Then the voice on the radio said Pearl Harbor, said attack, said Japanese planes, and the peeling knife in Jake’s hand stopped moving. He didn’t say much at first. Then he picked up a potato, whole, unpeeled, and threw it against the wall so hard it burst apart at the seam. “Japan is going to pay for this,” he said, and it wasn’t a shout so much as a vow spoken low, the kind men make to themselves more than to anyone listening.

I believed him. Half the mess hall believed him, because half the mess hall was saying some version of the same thing that morning, fists closing around spoons and ladles like they wished they were something else. Jake had grown up in an Oregon farm family that raised him on scripture and hard work, but by the time I knew him the churchgoing had thinned out of him the way it does for a lot of young men who go looking for the world instead. What Pearl Harbor gave him back, at least at first, wasn’t faith. It was purpose, sharpened into something that looked a great deal like hatred.

He had wanted to fly since before any of us knew him, wanted it enough to enlist at Fort McDowell nearly two years before the war reached us, but the Army took one look at his age and told him twenty-seven was too old to start pilot training. So they made him a mechanic instead, and he learned the guts of the B-25 Mitchell bomber from the inside out at McChord Field in Washington, hands black with grease, before word came down that they needed men to sit in the nose and drop the bombs. Bombardier school took him in. It gave him, finally, a seat in the sky.

By the winter after Pearl Harbor we were all together at Pendleton Field in eastern Oregon, flying B-25s with the 34th Bomb Squadron of the 17th Bombardment Group, doing ordinary training in a war that had stopped feeling ordinary the day it started. Nobody told us anything about what came next until the morning the commanding officer stood us up in a line and asked, plain as that, for volunteers for an extremely dangerous mission. Most of you won’t come back, he told us. That was the whole pitch. No embellishment, no promise of glory, just the arithmetic of the thing laid bare in front of men who had families and girls and unfinished lives.

I watched the line. Every man in it stepped forward at once, like the ground had tilted and we’d all slid the same direction. Jake told me later he’d thought about staying still, just for a second, thought about letting the wonderful opportunity pass him by and let somebody braver take it. Then he looked left and right and saw that stepping back would have meant standing alone in a room where everyone else had already said yes, and there are things a man will do out of pride that he might never do out of courage alone. So he stepped forward too, and that was that.

They put him on Crew 16, in a B-25 they’d painted with the name Bat Out of Hell, serial number 40-2268, and somewhere in the naming of it I think all of us understood exactly what kind of prayer that name was.

We didn’t know yet whose command we were under until the man himself came to brief us — Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, already a name in aviation before the war made him a legend in it, a man who looked at the impossible idea of launching heavy bombers off a carrier deck and treated it like a scheduling problem rather than a physical one. Sixteen B-25s, stripped down and modified, were going to fly off the deck of the USS Hornet, hit targets inside Japan itself, and then keep flying west into China, because there was no fuel in the world that would get them back to a carrier that couldn’t risk waiting for them.

We loaded those bombers aboard the Hornet in the middle of April 1942, lashed to the deck like something borrowed that didn’t belong there, and the ship turned her nose toward the Pacific and toward a shoreline none of us had ever seen except in photographs. The plan called for launching close enough to Japan to give the crews a fighting chance at the fuel math on the far side. The Japanese Navy had other ideas. Their patrol boats spotted the task force earlier than anyone wanted, and word came down through the ship that surprise was already half gone, that we would be launching hours before plan and hundreds of miles farther out than any of the fuel tables liked.