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.
The Wildcat carried six machine guns but only two one-hundred-pound bombs. It had a range of just over seven hundred miles, which meant they would not have all that much time over Pearl during the raid. In and out, drop and run, shoot and scoot were his instructions. Even so, there probably wouldn’t be enough fuel to take them back to the Big Island if they had to do much fighting or high-speed maneuvering, so they were to land on abandoned strips on Molokai. From there, they were to run like hell and hide. Ironically, these now-abandoned fields were the ones that had first been used by the Japanese earlier in the year. Locals had helped repair them after the Japanese left.
The Wildcat was considered overmatched by the Zero, which was faster and more maneuverable. But Magruder knew that his plane could still cause a great deal of damage to the Zero, which had a wonderful propensity to blow up when hit, while his tough little plane could absorb punishment and get away.
His job wasn’t to take on the Zeros. His task was the carriers, if any, and the fuel. He had been told that his appearance over Pearl would be a complete surprise to the Japanese. Magruder sincerely hoped so. It was the Japs who had a death wish, not Ernie Magruder of Montgomery, Alabama.
Of course, that presumed he and his trusty planes got airborne in the first place.
“What’s the problem?” asked Captain Gustafson. “You take off from a little ship in the middle of an ocean, don’t you? So what’s wrong with jumping off a cliff?”
Magruder laughed nervously and conceded that the jut-jawed captain had a point. Launching from Hawaii was planned to be simplicity itself. Three abreast, planes were to taxi as fast as they could downhill toward the cliff, then launch themselves into space. According to Gustafson’s calculations, the planes would drop but a few feet before becoming stable flying machines. Magruder had his doubts and could visualize himself plummeting a thousand feet into the ocean. “Captain, I just want you to know that, if this doesn’t work, my last words will be ‘You fucked up, sir!’ “
Gustafson laughed hugely. “What’s the saying? If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have enlisted? Well, son, you’ve enlisted and here you are. Now, if you know a better way of getting your planes in the air without building an airfield that the Japs would spot, you tell me.”
Magruder didn’t. “Now that I think of it, getting in the air might just be the least of my problems,” he said. “I have to find Pearl Harbor at dawn and without attracting attention, blow up the place, and then get safely out of there. Jumping off a cliff is a piece of cake in comparison.”
Gustafson nodded sympathetically. Magruder was only half his age and had his whole life before him. In the short while they’d been together, he’d begun to think of Magruder as the son he and his wife never had.
Gustafson was an immigrant from Sweden who’d arrived as a teenager. Before coming, he’d been told that the United States was a land of soft and spineless people who would never fight and couldn’t bear to be uncomfortable. Novacek, Magruder, and so many others had shown that assessment to be a lie. He put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “You can do it, Ernest.”
Magruder laughed. Nobody called him Ernest. “Thanks, Pop.”
“Now,” Gustafson said, “let’s see if that still we rigged up is working all right. We have a couple of days to prepare for your mission, and I think we could all use a drink.”