1942

Alexa took his hand and led him away. Several other people were about and trying not to look at them. When they were alone in the shadows, she turned and kissed him. “Then let’s spend what time we have together. I know a marvelous place in the bushes where we can make love. I find you very attractive now that you no longer smell like fish.”

Jake hesitated. “There’s a helluva lot to do between now and next Sunday.”

“An hour?” she teased. “You can’t spend an hour making love to the woman you love?”

Jake laughed and felt himself growing warm. “An hour I can spend.”

Admiral Nimitz had himself driven out to the isolated ocean cove where the five giant seaplanes bobbed at anchor. First there had been eight, and then six, and now another had fallen to mechanical problems.

Nimitz thought it was incredible that such massive and ungainly things could ever get airborne. However, once they did reach the skies, they became long-winged and as graceful as one of the great birds that flew the oceans.

“Colonel, you are either the bravest man I’ve ever known or the craziest.”

“Probably a little of both, sir.”

“You realize what we’re doing, don’t you?”

Doolittle’s orders were to be over Pearl Harbor at just before dawn on the morning of Sunday, August 2, 1942. Exactly how he would do that without proper navigating equipment and in the face of possibly contrary winds was his problem. He had five massive flying boats all reconfigured to carry bombs. They could make it to Hawaii and, just maybe, all the way back. There was no other plane on the face of the earth that could do that.

It was presumed that some planes would be lost in the raid, and that the remaining planes would be damaged, perhaps severely. The cripples were to fly as far as possible toward the United States and then land in the ocean. Ships would try to find them and pluck them to safety. It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was something.

Doolittle’s men were willing to put themselves at risk, but not to commit suicide. There had to be at least the ghost of a chance of survival. Of course, no one wanted to be captured by the Japanese. A fast death would be the best that could happen in that case.

“Yes, sir, I understand fully, and so will my men,” Doolittle said. “We’re going to do unto the Japs as they did unto us. We’re going to hit them just before first light, when their slanty little eyes are fast asleep. I do have a question, though.”

“Go ahead.”

“My five planes aren’t all that’s involved in this, are we?”

Nimitz smiled. “If I recall, you were more than willing to take a flight of B-25s over Tokyo without any assistance, weren’t you?”

Doolittle winced and grinned. “Sorry, Admiral. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

“Colonel, let’s just say that you shouldn’t be surprised at anything that happens. Like I told you so long ago, people say you’re the right man for this mission because you are so flexible in your thinking. That’s why you’ve been given carte blanche regarding the choice of targets.”

There was, however, a priority to the targets. First, he was to attack any carriers in the harbor. Second, he was to hit the fuel storage depots. Battleships were a very low priority. Not only were his bombs too small to do much damage to them but the huge battlewagons just weren’t all that important anymore.

The great unspoken fear was that Doolittle’s planes would make it through Japanese defenses only to find that the carriers were no longer in the harbor. It wouldn’t take them long at all to sortie into the open ocean once the alarm was sounded.

The second fear was that his planes would waste their bombs on empty storage tanks. Intelligence sources said that only half the depot’s tanks were full, but they didn’t say which half.

There were twelve men on each of the five planes: a pilot, copilot, navigator, radioman, bombardier, and gunners to fire the machine guns that had been installed as defenses against the Zeros that were sure to swarm them. It had been hoped that the guns would provide a disconcerting sting and help the seaplanes get through.

Doolittle thought they were a waste of time and men. He had sixty men with which to take on the Jap navy and the defenses of Pearl Harbor.

Why the hell, he thought wryly, hadn’t he stuck with something simple? Like bombing Tokyo.

CHAPTER 21

Lieutenant Ernie Magruder paced the distance from the cliff to where the planes would commence their runoffs. In a few days he would launch eleven Grumman Wildcats against the might of Japan. The Wildcat was a good, solid plane, although obsolescent and due to be replaced by a newer Grumman model. The newer plane was not going to be risked in an operation as chancy as this. There was too much possibility of it falling into Japanese hands.