During his time alone in the high country of California and Nevada, Jake had brought along and read several books on raising turkeys, and he was convinced that he could make money on such a venture. He quit his job supplying the Basque sheepherders, rented a small farm in Butte Falls, Oregon, and bought five hundred turkey chicks.
Keeping the young turkeys alive was a full-time commitment. The birds had to be constantly monitored to make sure they were not too hot or too cold and that they did not get wet. Jake continually adjusted their food intake until they were each gaining about one pound a week. Everything looked good—except for the economy. Instead of the price of turkey meat rising, as it usually did when Thanksgiving approached, the price fell dramatically. When Jake bought the turkey chicks, turkey meat had been fetching twenty-two cents per pound. But twenty-four weeks later, with Thanksgiving approaching, Jake sold the grown turkeys and received only fourteen cents per pound for them.
After settling up his account at the feedlot and paying his rent, Jake was broke. The thousand dollars he had saved, which represented two years of hard work, was gone. Jake was now a single, twenty-seven-year-old man with no money and a high school education. He wanted to settle into some kind of career, but what?
In 1940 Uncle Sam provided the answer. By now war had broken out in Europe, with Great Britain and France facing off against Nazi Germany, which was threatening to overrun the continent. And there was talk of the United States entering the war to assist Britain and France in the fight against Germany. Jake made a practical decision. He knew that if the United States entered the war, single men like him would be the first to be drafted into the military. He decided to sign up ahead of time. That way he could choose the branch of the military he wanted to serve in.
Jake chose the army. He wanted to become a pilot in the Army Air Corps program. He had no problems qualifying for enlistment; he was fit, healthy, and eager to put his brain to work. However, he was disappointed when he was told that he was too old to be a pilot. The army was training only men under the age of twenty-five for that position. Instead, Jake was assigned to the Seventeenth Bombardment Group and sent to newly opened McChord Field, south of Tacoma, Washington, to train as an aircraft mechanic and bombardier.
Jake spent his first year in the army stationed at McChord Field. To his surprise, he liked army life. Not only was he learning important and useful skills, but also he was now receiving a regular paycheck. And there was another thing he liked about army life: for once in his life, Jake had regular time off. Since he had spent most of his life working hard, it felt odd to him at first to be given regular time off with no requirements to do anything else but relax. Before long Jake was reading Westerns at his leisure and going to movies.
As his training time at McChord Field rolled on, Jake wondered when the United States would become involved in the war. Everyone told him that it was inevitable, but it had not yet happened. Jake knew that when the United States did enter the war, he would be ordered overseas to serve—but where?
Chapter 3
Secret Mission
Jake sat on an upturned bucket peeling potatoes and then tossing them into a bowl of cold water. It was December 7, 1941, and there was a chill in the morning air at March Field, just outside Los Angeles. The base was like so many others that Jake had passed through since being assigned to the Army Air Corps Seventeenth Bombardment Group almost two years before.
Jake was enjoying a joke with a fellow potato peeler when the loudspeaker system crackled to life. “Attention,” a voice said in a tone that Jake thought more fitting for a funeral than a basewide announcement. “We have just received word that the United States fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor has been attacked by the Japanese. Significant damage and loss of life has been reported. I repeat. We have just received word that the United States fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor has been attacked by the Japanese. Stand by for further information.”
Stunned, Jake hurled the potato in his hand at the corrugated iron wall of the mess hall. “Those Japanese are going to pay for this!” he yelled. All around him uniformed men were also shouting. The scene depicted a combination of frustration and anger. The Japanese military, under the control of the emperor, had dared to attack an American fleet in American waters. What would be next?
Over the next several days, more details of the attack and the full damage the Japanese had inflicted at Pearl Harbor were revealed. The attack had come in two waves. The first consisted of 189 Japanese aircraft, followed by another wave of 171 airplanes. When the attack was over, eight American battleships, three destroyers, and three cruisers had been sunk or severely damaged. As well, 188 aircraft were destroyed, 2,403 people had been killed, and another 1,178 were wounded. The Japanese losses during the attack had been minimal: twenty-nine Japanese aircraft had been shot down, five midget submarines had been sunk, and sixty-five Japanese sailors and airmen had been killed or wounded.
In addition, on the same day they attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese won battles in the Philippines, Wake Island, Guam, Midway Island, Malaya, Thailand, and Shanghai.
The attacks galvanized the United States into action, and the following day, December 8, 1941, the United States and Britain declared war on Japan. America could no longer claim that the war was “over there in Europe.” Japan had delivered war to the country’s doorstep.
As the United States entered the Second World War, Jake was not happy with the results as he watched the Japanese gain the upper hand in the Pacific region. Between the attack on Pearl Harbor and New Year’s Day 1942, the Japanese bombed Manila and invaded the Philippines. They also seized the island of Guam and invaded Burma, British Borneo, and Hong Kong. The Japanese seemed to be winning every battle they entered and were becoming more emboldened with each passing day.
Millions of Americans agreed with President Franklin D. Roosevelt that something monumental had to be done to stem Japanese aggression. The question was, what? It was impossible to strike Japan itself, since the Japanese occupied all of the land within air-striking distance of their island nation. An aircraft carrier would have to be within three hundred miles of Japan to launch a direct air strike on the country, and there was no way that the Japanese Navy was going to let any American warships get that close.
To make matters even worse, the Germans had launched an offensive against American ships, so that U.S. ships were being attacked in both the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. The American public was kept in the dark about most of the German U-boat attacks against civilian ships and their American naval escorts, but word of these attacks filtered through to the men in uniform.
With each enemy attack, Jake grew angrier, and more grateful that he had trained to be both an aircraft mechanic and a bombardier—a direct way for him to make a mark on the war.
By the end of January 1942, Jake had moved on from California. This time he had been assigned to an air base in Columbia, South Carolina. One morning, soon after arriving at his new posting, Jake was checking on a plane’s mechanical release arm when a fellow soldier informed him that he was to report to the captain.
As Jake walked across the tarmac, he searched his mind for anything that he had done wrong lately that would cause the captain to want to see him. He’d been to a few bars and dance halls, but he had done nothing out of the usual. He was a shy man and did not attract as much attention as some of the other men. Still, his heart skipped a beat as he stepped into the captain’s office.
To Jake’s surprise, fifteen or twenty other airmen already were inside the captain’s office. Jake inched his way inside the door and scanned the men quickly to see whether he could figure out what they might all have in common, but nothing came to him.
The captain appeared to be waiting for Jake to arrive before he began. “Men, there’s no way to lead up to this and no way to put a fine point on it. I have just been informed that we have a very dangerous mission coming up, and we need volunteers.” The captain paused and looked around the room. “That’s about all I can tell you. As I said, it’s volunteers, so if you don’t want to step up, that’s fine with me.”
“Where is the mission going?” one airman asked.
“How long will we be away?” another inquired.
“How many of us are needed?”
“Does this come from the top, or is it a local operation?”
The questions poured out until the captain lifted his hands. “Men, I’ve told you all I can. In fact, more than that, I’ve told you all I know. This mission has the highest rating for secrecy that the army gives. You might not know one more thing until you are under way.”
Jake stood quietly watching the situation unfold before him.
The men asked a few more questions but got the same answer: the assignment was top secret, and the captain had already told them everything he knew.
“Well, men, let’s have a show of hands,” the captain concluded. “I’ll go around the room, and you raise your hand if you’re in.”
The captain began with the airman nearest his desk, which meant that Jake would be the last person in the room to be reached. As the captain’s eyes fell on each airman in the room, the men raised their hands, until it was Jake’s turn. Jake’s stomach knotted. He wanted to walk out the door. He did not need to be a hero, not if there was the possibility that it would cost him his life. But every other man in the room had raised his hand, and Jake was too embarrassed to be the only standout. He raised his hand. For better or for worse, he knew that his life was about to be turned upside down.
Within a week the men who had been at the meeting, along with about 120 others, were flying into Eglin Field in the panhandle of Florida. The men still did not know any more about the mission than when they’d volunteered, but it didn’t take long before they began to put a few pieces of the puzzle together.
The men were divided into twenty-four crews, each crew consisting of a pilot, a copilot, a navigator, a bombardier, and a gunner/engineer. Jake liked the crew he was assigned to. Even though he was only twenty-nine years old, the other members made him feel like the old man of the group. The next oldest member of the crew was the navigator, twenty-five-year-old Lieutenant George Barr, followed by the twenty-three-year-old pilot, Lieutenant William Farrow; the twenty-two-year-old copilot, Lieutenant Robert Hite; and twenty-year-old Sergeant Harold Spatz, the gunner/engineer. The remainder of the men in the room who had not been assigned to a crew were told that they would be ground personnel for the mission.
On March 3, 1942, the men who had volunteered for the secret mission were called together in a briefing room at Eglin Field. Jake huddled in with the rest of the men. Moments later the door to the briefing room swung open and in strode a tall, middle-aged man with a cleft chin and receding hairline. Jake could see that the man wore the insignia of the rank of lieutenant colonel.
The room went quiet as the man walked to the podium at the front. “My name is Doolittle,” he said.
So this is the famous Jimmy Doolittle, Jake thought. He had heard much about Doolittle’s legendary flying achievements, but this was the first time he had ever seen the man in person. Doolittle had set all kinds of flight speed records, and in 1922 he had set a record flying from Florida to San Diego, California, in twenty-one hours, nineteen minutes, making one stop to refuel in Texas. Doolittle also had pioneered the development and deployment of instruments in aircraft. In 1929 he became the first pilot to take off, fly, and land blind (that is, using only his instruments and not his eyesight to guide him).
