The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid--America's First World War II Victory
Planned in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor at the behest of President Roosevelt, the U.S. bombing raids on Japan in spring 1942 were the first U.S. strikes of the war. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle of the Army Air Force, in consultation with the U.S. Navy, planned for B-25 medium bombers to take off from the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Hornet, hit targets including Tokyo and land at airfields in unoccupied China. The project was innovative and risky, as no medium bomber had ever taken off from an aircraft carrier, and at the time, Allied forces were being constantly beaten by the Japanese. Nelson (Let's Get Lost), whose father was a WWII Air Force pilot in New Guinea and whose mother served as a wartime air traffic controller in Atlanta, digs deeply into the planning, training and carrying out of the mission, sometimes awkwardly employing military slang, but infusing the account with infectious enthusiasm and numerous engaging first-person accounts. All the planes successfully took off and bombed their targets, but a last-minute hitch left them without enough fuel; most reached Allied lines, but eight crew members were captured by the Japanese and tried as war criminals: three were executed. The fates and subsequent careers of all the veterans quoted in the book are warmly detailed, making this an involving account of a lesser known period of the war.Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.