Launching the Doolittle Raid on Japan, April 18, 1942

Abstract

Japan from the military than the naval side. Without denigrating the contributions of the Army Air Corps, the objective of this paper is to show that naval officers determined the feasibility of using aircraft carriers to launch army bombers, briefed their crews on carrier operations, taught them and helped them to take off from their extremely limited deck space, and brought them within range of their target-and that the U.S. Navy was willing to risk half of its carrier fleet in the Pacific to accomplish the mission. In early May 1941 Capt. Marc A. Mitscher, a naval aviator since 1915, received orders to command the new 20,000-ton aircraft carrier Hornet (CV-8), building at Newport News, Virginia. He went aboard to look about her in July, then took a month's leave. On October 1, 1941, with four thousand spectators assembled, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox welcomed the Hornet into the fleet. Mitscher's most important officers were George R. Henderson, his executive officer, a record-breaking seaplane and test pilot who had served in the Langley and Lexington and been with him on a pioneering patrol plane flight from San Diego to Hawaii in 1939. Apollo Sock 'em Soucek was his air officer; Frank Akers, a precise fussbudget, was his navigator; Stephen Jurika, who had spent years in the Philippines and Japan, his intelligence officer. Soucek had established a new altitude record in the 1930s and flown from the