The world found out last week who led the daring, destructive noonday air raid on Japan last month. To the White House, to receive a Congressional Medal of Honor, went pugnacious Brigadier General James Harold Doolittle, 45, speed flyer, engineer, scholar and man of action.
Standing at attention while Chief of Staff General George C. Marshall intoned the formal citation, lean-faced, balding Jimmy Doolittle bent forward while President Roosevelt pinned the gold, blue-ribboned medal above his left shirt pocket. Not even a columnist, chortled the President, had known the identity of the raid's leader.
Said the New York Daily News: "He should be named Doomuch."
With Both Feet. On the day of Pearl Harbor, Jimmy Doolittle, then a major, told friends at Los Angeles Municipal Airport: "I'm going to get in this thing with both feet. I'm going to Tokyo with a load of bombs." Doolittle, who once demonstrated a commercial plane with his two broken ankles in plaster casts, is no braggart. Now, having made good, he told Washington newsmen about his deed of derring-doolittle in formal Army lingo:
"The success of the raid exceeded our most optimistic expectations." South of Tokyo he left in flames a cruiser or battleship under construction at the Navy yard. At Nagoya he showered incendiary bombs on the Mitsubishi airplane factory and an oil-tank farm. "It appeared to us that practically every bomb reached the target for which it was intended. . . . About 25 or 30 miles to sea the rear gunners reported seeing columns of smoke rising thousands of feet in the air."
The twin-motored 6-25s were flown just over the housetops. It would have been no trick to hit Hirohito's palace, but Doolittle had given specific instructions: don't bomb it. "I think several of us dropped bombs within sight of it." The Doolittle plane was attacked by nine Jap fighters, but he rapidly outdistanced them all. Not an American plane was lost (the Japs claimed nine) and the 79 volunteers, along with Doolittle, were all nominated for the Distinguished Service Cross. Still undisclosed was the American planes's base. Unhumorously reporting a heavy Roosevelt jest, the Berlin radio solemnly announced: "Doolittle carried out the attack from the air base at Shangri-La, which was not otherwise described by Roosevelt."
Quiet Birdman. Stocky, nerveless Jimmy Doolittle set at least a dozen speed records, owns almost all the important aviation trophies. But he is far more than a speed and a stunt flyer. Doolittle has been a ceaseless air experimenter: in 1929 he made the first complete blind flight. A second lieutenant in World War I, he chafed at being kept at San Diego as an instructor. He was an early member of the Quiet Birdmen, the group of flyers who set themselves apart from the kiwi, an almost, extinct flightless bird, and from the "modock," legendary aviation term for a "bird that flies backwards to keep the dust out of its eyes."