1942

North of the island were the battleships and heavy cruisers, and a couple of the cruisers were moving as well. Other, smaller ships were parked like trucks in a motor pool in the East and Middle Loch around Pearl City. They didn’t concern him. He wanted the carriers and the fuel tanks.

Doolittle broke radio silence and ordered the two planes north of Ford to ignore the giant battlewagons and swing south to attack either the carriers or the fuel.

There was a tremendous flash to Doolittle’s right. “What the hell was that?”

“Miller’s plane,” answered Floyd, one of his side gunners. His voice was shaky and difficult to hear over the chatter of the machine gun. The side and tail gunners were using their guns on anything in sight, and the din had become almost deafening. It might not have been useful, but damn, it felt good.

“It’s blowing up like the Fourth of July,” Floyd added.

Doolittle swallowed. With so many incendiaries and so much fuel onboard, a direct hit could turn them into a flying Roman candle like Miller’s.

The plane rocked from near misses, and debris from exploded shells rattled against the hull. They were so low, only five hundred feet, that the Japanese gunners were having a hard time tracking them. Then they were over a carrier, and the plane shuddered as the bomb load was released. They had done their job.

“Let’s go home,” Doolittle yelled. Another of his planes was burning and heading for the deck. She would not make it to California or anywhere else. Doolittle watched in horror as antiaircraft guns concentrated on the cripple, blowing hundreds of little pieces off her. Her only chance was a landing in the waters just outside Pearl. He prayed that some of her crew would survive.

At least, Doolittle thought grimly, she was distracting Jap guns from him.

The plane lurched violently. “What the hell?” he blurted out. They’d been hit. Haskins ran back to check on it. Seconds later, he reported over the intercom that the side gunner, Floyd, was dead and two others were wounded.

“Can we fly?” Doolittle asked.

Haskins’s voice trembled. “God, Colonel, Floyd’s all over the place. It’s awful.”

“But can we fly?” Doolittle repeated.

Haskins paused. This time his voice was a little firmer. “Yes, if you don’t mind a large hole in the fuselage. I would recommend flying slowly and at low altitude.”

“Okay,” Doolittle said gently, “now you take care of the wounded as best you can.”

“Yes, sir.”

Doolittle ordered his other surviving plane to head directly back to California. She too had been hit a number of times, and he wondered if she would make it. Then he gained altitude for a look at the damage they’d wrought and was dismayed. There were no large fires, and no explosions. There were several small ones, but they looked like they could be contained. He may have added a little to what damage had been done earlier, but it was hard to tell.

It was bravely done, he thought, but was it worth it? Assuming he made it home, he would get his brigadier’s star, but for what? He’d slapped the Japs across the face, but that was all.

“For Christ’s sake,” said Haskins through the intercom. “Will you look at that?”

Doolittle turned and looked out over the harbor. Meagher’s plane had arrived and was beginning its run. But he was high, much too high.

Without the others to guide him, Meagher had flown at a higher altitude than planned. This, he’d hoped, would make it easier to find the islands by widening his scope of vision. That and good navigation had worked. Oahu was dead ahead.

As he put the plane in a gentle dive toward optimum bombing height, he noted the absence of serious smoke and fire, the total lack of Japanese aircraft and antiaircraft fire. For a fleeting second he wondered if his was the first plane, but then he saw a few small fires burning and knew that the others had preceded him. They didn’t appear to have accomplished a lot, he thought.

But he wasn’t late by much, he exulted. And all the Jap gunners were tracking the two flying boats he could now see off in the distance. Nobody was looking for Tail-end Charlie.

“Pick a target,” he yelled at Tomanelli.

His copilot swallowed and tried to control his terror. The entire Jap navy was on review before them. “That carrier on the move,” he said. “Its decks are full of planes.”

“Good thinking,” Meagher responded. Most of the others had only a few planes on their decks, while this one was loaded for bear.

Meagher lined up his plane. He would cross the carrier on a stern-to-bow run and then fly out over the ocean and to safety.

Then the Jap gunners saw them and opened fire. The plane shuddered from minor hits and near misses as the Japanese frantically tried to get them in their sights.

Meagher was just about to order bombs away when a four-inch shell from a destroyer ripped through the front of the pilot’s cabin and blew him to bloody pieces before it exited the top of the plane.