Aircraft #1

On April 18, 1942 — just 132 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor — sixteen B-25B Mitchell bombers launched from the flight deck of USS Hornet on a mission that everyone involved knew was one-way. No B-25 had ever taken off from an aircraft carrier before. No B-25 could land on one. The plan was to bomb Tokyo and fly on to China. There was no Plan B.

Aircraft #1, serial number 40-2344, sat at the forward edge of Hornet’s flight deck with Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle at the controls. The deck was pitching in heavy Pacific seas. He had 467 feet of runway — a B-25 normally needed 1,500. The Navy had painted a white line on the deck showing where to put his left wheel so his right wing wouldn’t hit the carrier’s island.

At 0620, with the carrier heading into a 30-knot headwind, Doolittle pushed the throttles forward. The bomber staggered off the deck, dropped toward the waves, then clawed for altitude. Fifteen more followed. Every one made it off. The Navy sailors on Hornet’s deck cheered until they were hoarse.

The original plan called for a nighttime launch 400 miles from Japan. But Japanese picket boats spotted the task force that morning at 650 miles out. Admiral Halsey had a choice: abort or launch early. Doolittle chose to go — knowing the extra distance meant his crews almost certainly wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach the Chinese airfields.

Aircraft #1 crossed the Japanese coast at wave-top level, then climbed to 1,200 feet over Tokyo. Doolittle’s bombardier, Captain Fred Braemer, toggled four incendiary clusters onto factory targets. Japanese anti-aircraft fire erupted too late and too low. Not a single Raider was shot down over Japan.

The flight to China was a nightmare. Headwinds ate the remaining fuel. Night fell. Rain and clouds made navigation impossible. One by one, all sixteen crews either bailed out, crash-landed, or ditched. Aircraft #1 ran dry over Zhejiang Province. Doolittle ordered his crew to jump. He landed in a rice paddy and spent the night sitting on a wooden box in a Chinese farmer’s shed, convinced he had killed all his men and lost all sixteen bombers for minimal damage. He told his co-pilot, “I’m going to be court-martialed.”

Instead, he received the Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt. All five of Aircraft #1’s crew survived. Of the 80 Doolittle Raiders, 73 survived the mission. Three were killed, three were executed by the Japanese, and one died in captivity. The physical damage to Japan was minimal. The psychological damage was enormous. The Doolittle Raid proved Japan was not invulnerable — and it goaded Admiral Yamamoto into the disastrous attack on Midway two months later, the turning point of the Pacific War.

The North American B-25 Mitchell was the most-produced American medium bomber of World War II, with 9,816 built between 1941 and 1945. Named after Brigadier General Billy Mitchell — the controversial aviation pioneer who was court-martialed in 1925 for insisting that air power would dominate future wars (he was right) — the B-25 served in every theater of the war with nearly every Allied air force.

The B-25 was not the fastest bomber, nor the most heavily armed, nor the longest-ranged. What it was: reliable, tough, versatile, and available in enormous numbers. It could be modified for almost anything — level bombing, skip bombing, strafing, anti-shipping, photo reconnaissance, and, famously, launching from aircraft carriers that it had no business being anywhere near.

Later variants became terrifyingly lethal ground-attack platforms. The B-25H “Strafer” packed a 75mm cannon in the nose — essentially a tank gun mounted in an airplane — along with fourteen .50-caliber machine guns. It was used to devastating effect against Japanese shipping in the Pacific, with pilots skip-bombing at mast height.

The B-25’s most famous moment will always be the Doolittle Raid. No medium bomber was designed to take off from a carrier deck. The fact that all sixteen did — overloaded, in heavy seas, with 467 feet of runway — remains one of the most remarkable feats in aviation history. The B-25 Mitchell will forever be the bomber that hit Tokyo when no one thought it was possible.