But where was Meagher? With him gone and radio silence still unbroken, the five planes were now four. A 20 percent reduction in their small force and nothing had happened yet. He had no idea where Meagher was, but they couldn’t wait for him. Any second now and they’d be spotted and Zeros would be all over their butts. No, Meagher would have to take care of himself. Maybe he’d had an engine malfunction and had turned back? It didn’t matter. They were going to go straight in, drop their bombs, and fly out the back door.
The four planes went in side by side, low and as fast as they could, which caused the surface to race by. Finally, puffs of smoke in the air said that antiaircraft gunners had spotted them. Uncertain exactly which Japanese ships were where in the harbor; Doolittle’s planes broke in pairs, with two on each side of Ford Island. South of Ford Island, along Battleship Row, where so many American battleships had been sunk, six carriers were anchored. Doolittle noted that one of them seemed to be making for the entrance, while smoke came from another.
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.
Tomanelli was knocked unconscious by the blast and the impact of Meagher’s body parts striking him. The copilot’s body slumped forward on the controls, and the plane dropped more sharply as it rapidly approached the carrier.
At first, it looked like the crippled flying boat would pass over the Akagi, but then it dropped more quickly and fell onto the flight deck, about a hundred feet from the stern. To the astonished Japanese, it looked like the flying boat had attempted a landing on the carrier.
Still moving forward, the massive Boeing plowed through the parked planes, knocking several of them overboard like they were toys. The flying boat was slowed by the wreckage and finally stopped as its massive wing collided with the carrier’s superstructure. For a second, it sat there, a dead plane on the flight deck of a Japanese carrier. Then the fuel exploded, and, an instant later, that set off the bombs still in its hull. The crash landing on the Akagi had ruptured fuel tanks on the Japanese planes, and they too exploded almost immediately. In seconds, the carrier’s entire flight deck and superstructure were engulfed in a cloud of flames that was punctuated by explosions as Japanese bombs and shells were lit off.
The Akagi was now a moving torch, with torrents of flame dripping down her sides and crewmen hurling themselves off her and into the safety of the harbor. Without apparent guidance, she continued inexorably on in the last direction that had been ordered. There was no one alive on her decks or on the bridge to order a change of course as she headed toward the side of the channel.
The officers and men in the Monkfish had spent a restless night. The explosions in the harbor resonated through the water and caused the sub to vibrate. Despite the obvious danger, Lieutenant Commander Fargo had recognized the necessity to keep the air changed and the electric engines charged. Thus, they had spent a good deal of the night with the conning tower barely visible.