THE RAIDERS REMEMBER

摘要

Dick Cole is Still amazed that the first US. combat mission in World War II—a daring daytime raid to bomb Japan using Army Air Forces B-25B Mitchell bombers flying off a Navy carrier—was assembled, trained for, and flown in less than 90 days. "You could never get that done now. It was one of the marvels of Jimmy Doolittle," says Cole, 96, who was Doolittle's copilot in the first of 16 B-25s that bombed Japan on April 18,1942. Though Doolittle, a well-known air racer and accomplished engineer, had a fun side, "he was all business" en route, Cole recalls. "There was no chitchat." One reason may have been that all 80 volunteers on the raid knew a crash landing or bailout somewhere in the Far East awaited them at mission's end: Because a Japanese patrol boat spotted the carrier, the bombers were forced to take off from the Hornet about 250 miles farther back from their intended departure point. There was no guarantee they'd have enough fuel to reach the landing strips in China they had counted on.