Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on the balloons of World War Two, we talked about how Japan's development of balloon bombs was spurred on by wanting away to strike back at the United States after the Doolittle Raid. Our episode on Jimmy Doolittle and the Doolittle Raid came out on February tenth, twenty sixteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic. In this episode, I speculated on whether Jimmy Doolittle had ever met another figure from a long ago podcast episode, which was physicist Luis Alvarez. It seemed like they would have gotten along to me. It turns out yes they did. In Alvarez's memoir, he described Jimmy Doolittle as one of his two principal heroes of aviation, the other one being Chuck Yeager, and he said that those two men were the only two people he ever asked for an autograph in his adult life. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. In today's episode is a request from listener Laura and her son and I don't think she put her son's name in the email, but in truth, it's only sort of a request from them. Her son asked for the Doolittle Raid, which I was game to cover. But really what ended up happening was that as I was researching, I got really excited about Jimmy Doolittle himself, because he was pretty amazing and I certainly had no idea how much he contributed to the field of aviation. So I got really engulfed in that, really really enjoyed it. So we are going to talk about the Doolittle Raid, but it will definitely be like an abridged version. We're not gonna go into all of the many details. There have been plenty of books written about it, so don't worry because if you really want to dig deeper, there is a lot of good stuff out there, including James Doolittle's autobiography, which I really enjoyed and highly recommend. But first we have to do a little bit of historical housekeeping for context. So that historical housekeeping is the attack on Pearl Harbor. On December seventh, nineteen forty one, there was a two hour surprise attack on an American naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii. Japanese fighter pilots just wrought incredible damage on Pearl Harbor, both in terms of human life and lost military assets. By the time this short but extremely brutal attack had ended, more than two thousand American tapes were dead and a thousand were wounded, and the Japanese pilots had taken out eight battleships, almost a dozen other naval watercraft, and more than three hundred airplanes. This is the action that led the United States to enter World War Two, which had already been going on for two years, and at that point the United States formally declared war on Japan. So keep that in mind, and now we're going to talk for a little bit about James Doolittle. So he was really the he figure in the Doolittle Raid and the man it was eventually named after, Jimmy Doolittle. It was also called the Tokyo Raid before it kind of took on the nickname of the Doolittle Raid. Jimmy was born James Harold Doolittle on December fourteenth of eighteen ninety six in California, and his parents were Rose Shepherd Doolittle and Frank H. Doolittle, Frank chased gold. It's how he and Rose ended up in California, having moved there from New England in search of wealth. And when Jimmy was four, Frank once again moved the family in search of gold, but this time to Nome, Alaska. After seven years in Alaska, where he got into plenty of scraps with the other local kids, Jimmy was sent back to California by his parents so that he could go to school there. As he moved into his teenage years, he showed some talent in boxing, and he won a state boxing championship while he was in high school. While he considered going pro in the boxing ring, he enrolled at UCLA instead, and Doolittle was a junior in college when the US entered World War One. He immediately enlisted as an Army Signal Corps flying cadet. He worked as a flying instructor and he was never shipped overseas, and once the war was over, he went back and finished his undergraduate degree at University of California, Los Angeles, and then he went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of a select military group of enrollees to earn his master's degree and his PhD in aeronautical engineering. Jimmy Doolittle was a legend before the raid because his life was one of those that was really just filled with bravado and extraordinary feats. He worked as a stunt pilot and as a wing walker in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and he went on to work as a test pilot and an aviation engineer throughout he was still part of the United States Military. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross in nineteen twenty two for flying cross country with just one stop from Pablo Beach, Florida to Rockwell, California, over the course of twenty two and a half hours in a de Haviland aircraft. It was a flight that had been a ordered on his first attempt because as he was taking off, the left wheel of his plane hit a soft sand patch and the plane went off course and actually ended up flipped upside down in the water, and Doolittle was mortally embarrassed by this much publicized flop because there had been a lot of people on hand to witness this takeoff. But he did try again later, and this time he did it with no fanfare or press on hand. His second attempt was rough because a storm came up just as he took flight, but he powered through it. He struggled with sleepiness because after the thunderstorm things were so placid that he started to get sleepy, but the rain itself was what actually saved him. These rain drops that were hitting his propeller were being whipped back at him and ended up running down his back. The cold trickles of all this water were really annoying, but they also kept him from dozing off. And his award came because with this flight he had basically proven that it was possible to move an Army Air Corps unit anywhere within the US in less than twenty four hours, and this was just one of many awards that he would earn throughout his career in flight. In early nineteen twenty five, which was the same year that he earned his doctorate, he set a world record for a seaplane of two hundred thirty two miles an hour in the Schneider's Seaplane Race in Baltimore, Maryland. He had fitted an existing racing plane that had been developed cooperatively with the Army and the Navy with pontoons to enter the seaplane race. The day after the race, he took the craft out again and beat his own world record that he had just set, putting it pushing it up to two hundred forty five miles an hour. This turned out to cause some sour grapes that race had historically been dominated by Navy pilots, so they weren't really thrilled to lose the title to an army guy who would just decided on a whim that he wanted to fly seaplanes. Yeah, he was, you know, kind of one of those people that was extraordinary and that when he set his mind to do something, he was usually shockingly good at it. Later, in nineteen twenty five, he got permission for a six month long leave from his military career, and this was to work as an aircraft demonstrator in South America, showing off the quality and maneuverability of Curtis P one Hawk fighters. He headed first to Santiago, Chile in nineteen twenty six, so he gotten the permission in twenty five, but he actually left in twenty six, and there he got in a dog fight competition like a competition flight, not an actual dog fight, against German ace Ernst von Schonbeck of the Richtofen flying circus that name rings a bell. It was not actually a circus. It was a World War One German fightery unit, nicknamed for using very colorful airplanes. So Doolittle was going up against really stiff competition and he managed to win, which might be impressive enough on its own, but there's actually more to the story. Yeah, at the time of this competition, Doolittle was flying with two broken ankles. He had fallen from a window during a party, attempting to show off that he could do similar swashbuckling stunts to those of screen star Douglas Fairbanks. And if you're wondering, yes, alcohol was involved in this poor decision making. After the fall, Doolittle had attached his boots to the rudders of his plane so that he could continue to fly and do the job that he had traveled to South America for, and that was the state he was in when he was challenged by this German pilot. I kind of want to look into whether he and Luis Alvarez knew each other, because it seems like from our episode on him, which is long ago in the archive, at this point they probably would have gotten along. I would think so, yes, it sounds like lots of people got along with Jimmy Doolittle. He sounds like a fabulous and fascinating gent to know. So after he went back to the United States, the doctors at Walter Reed rounded him and really really grounded him. He wasn't allowed to do much of anything for six months because flying in casts using the workaround set up that he had figured out had really done serious damage to his legs. But being the man that he was, he did not just sit around doing nothing during that time. And we're going to talk about what he worked on while he was recuperating, but first let's pause and take a quick break to talk about one of our much loved sponsors. So, instead of sitting idle while on forced rest, Doolittle used his convalescence to return to the subject that he had written his dissertation on, which was pilots blacking out during extreme maneuvers, and he started to think specifically about stunt flying in blackouts. So prior to this time, and I really feel compelled to mention that at this point flying planes had only been happening for a little more than two decades. This was the mid twenties and the Wright Brothers and their Kill Devil Hills adventures. We're in the early nineteen hundreds, so it's a really tight timeframe. So he was thinking about stunt flying and the fact that only inside loops had been performed in flight up to this point, and an outside loop was considered too dangerous. So if you don't know what those are, an inside loop, if you were to draw a picture on a piece of paper of a plane doing a loop like a loop to loop, an inside loop, the pilot would always be inside the circle. That's where the cockpit is, always facing up into the circle, whereas an outside loop, the pilot would be on the outside of the plane or on the outside of the circle facing outward. He was really fascinated by the idea of an outside loop, and he took advantage of this forced downtime at while to read to speak with other pilots who were being treated there and get their thoughts on outside loops. He pondered the idea from an engineering standpoint, trying to figure out just what might happen to the human body during that kind of a stunt. So, of course, the minute he was cleared to fly again, he started testing out his ideas. He ran various partial loop tests before becoming the first known pilot to successfully complete an outside loop in nineteen to twenty seven. Never one to rest on his laurels, clearly, he continued to do some innovative and adventurous things, and two years later, on September twenty ninth of nineteen twenty nine, Jimmy Doolittle made the first blind flight using instruments only in Nassau County in New York. Prior to that, pilots were depending on visuals a great deal on what they could actually see out the cockpit window, but he had developed a beacon system to give pilots a sense of location when no visuals were possible, and with that he basically kicked off the development of the modern cockpit. He also received the Daniel Guggenheim Medal for Advancing Aeronautics and the Harmon Trophy for Outstanding Aviation as well for having done this amazing thing. The following year, which was nineteen thirty, Jimmy Doolittle retired from active duty with the Army Air Corps. He spent the next decade taking home trophies for winning speed races and working at Shell Oil while the company developed high octane fuel that would eventually become the standard for military aircraft. After ten years away from the military, James Doolittle was recalled for active duty in nineteen forty after Hitler invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium in France. He was forty three at the time, and he was tasked with fulfilling the Army Air Corps need to produce fifty thousand planes each year rather than the two thousand that they had been producing, because even though the US at this point had not joined the war, they wanted to be ready working with Detroit car manufacturers. Despite neither the auto industry nor the army being particularly keen on that kind of partnership, Doolittle was able to succeed in this mandate. By the end of nineteen forty one, Ford was producing the consolidated B twenty four bomber. But even though this was really a huge feather in his cap and he had performed above and beyond what had been expected or hoped for, Doolittle was pretty miserable. He just didn't like this. He didn't like a desk job, and he wanted to return to really active duty. And he made requests for a transfer to go to a combat unit through all of the appropriate channels, but he basically got turned down every time and got constant resistance. But then finally in January of nineteen forty two, he received a call and was tasked with a secret mission, and his job was to plan and execute an air raid against Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor that we talked about at the top of the show and the events that came after it set the United States on edge and the Pacific. US troops did not fare well against the Japanese and things weren't really going well in Europe either. Something had to be done to neutralize Japan's forces if the United States was going to make any headway in the Pacific. After several months of planning, Doolittle and his men were ready. On April eighteenth of nineteen forty two, sixteen B twenty five Mitchell bombers with a total of eighty volunteer crewmen launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet. Their flight began six hundred and twenty miles away from Japan, and the original plan had called for a takeoff from the Hornet at approximately four hundred miles from Japan's coast, but because a fishing boat spotted the carrier, things had to be revised at the last minute. Because their position had been called in, the B twenty fives had been fitted with extra fuel tanks, which meant that they lost armament in the process. Because the airplanes weren't originally intended to take off from an aircraft carrier, there also had to be really significant changes in the takeoff procedure. Pilots were trained to take off not at the usual ninety miles an hour, but it's sixty miles per hour. You know a lot about how planes take off. Speed is essential. This is tricky. They also had a lot less runway than would normally be available aboard each B twenty five or five men the pilot, the copilot, a bombardier, a navigator, and a gunner. And as a personal side note, the practice runs for these takeoffs were performed at an auxiliary field to Eggln Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, which is where my dad was stationed for a really long time, so I know that area well. The teams flew low on their approach. They were about two hundred feet over the water, and as they reached the Japanese coastline, they dropped very low, some of them coming in just a few dozen feet above the ground, and they made their way to their intended targets, which were military and industrial sites in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka. And as they rose into the air to about twelve hundred feet over their targets, they dropped their bombs and then they headed to air fields on the Chinese mainland to land. The wrap up of this mission, which was basically successful, didn't go as planned. We're going to talk about exactly what happened right after we pause for another reef word from one of our sponsors. So going back to the Doolittle raid. While this raid had the intended effect of scaring Japan and undermining their confidence, took its toll on Doolittle's team. The planes did not make it to the emergency airfields that they had been planned to land at because of their very early takeoff, they were all running out of fuel, and to make matters worse, a nasty bit of weather was moving in. Doolittle described in his autobiography actually seeing sharks in the water below as they were flying and thinking that that would be an absolutely terrible place to bail out, and eventually they got a little bit of tail win and they were able to get a little bit closer to their intended mark. Every one of the B twenty five's used in the raid was lost, the soldiers in them had to bail out over China. Three crews successfully crashed, landed in China and made their way to safety, but there were also a number of casualties. Before we go on, I want to have a brief side note on terminology. So my understanding about the word soldier is that it is usually used for army, whereas Air Force would normally be called airmen. And you could make the argument that these guys should be considered airmen because they were in the Army Air Corps before the Air Force was founded, But just for the sake of simplicity, we're sticking with soldiers here. So if you are an airman, please don't be offended. I'm not trying to do any dicey misnomering. But you know, we're in that weird phase where it's the Air Force doesn't exist yet, so that's the scoop. One soldier died during the bailout, and while swimming across a lake to evade Japanese occupation forces, two men drowned. Eight men were captured, and of those, three of them were executed. Another of the remaining five died of starvation while in custody of the Japanese. One plane landed in the Soviet Union, where their bomber was taken and the crew was interned. The Soviets eventually moved them to another location near the Iranian border and managed to bribe someone to smuggle them across the border to the British consulate. According to Soviet documents that were later declassified, this entire smuggling operation was actually the work of Soviet authorities. They wanted to move the United States soldiers out of the Soviet Union, but they couldn't violate the neutrality pack they had with Japan in order to do it. In fact, the United States military had originally tried to work out a deal with the Soviet Union to land there after the raid rather than in China, but again because of the relationship they had with the japan the request to do that had been denied. And as for Doolittle's immediate crew on his plane, after parachuting into China, they were assisted by American by an American missionary, and both Chinese military people and civilians, and they were able to get home. There's actually some very wacky stories in Doolittle's book about him convincing some of the Chinese people he was encountering that yes, he was an American soldier and he was who he said he was. But Doolittle thought when he got home he was actually going to face a court martial for losing all the aircraft. He would later write quote, I sat down beside a wing, and I looked at the thousands of pieces of shattered metal that had once been a beautiful airplane. I felt lower than a frog's posterior. This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last. As far as I was concerned, it was a failure, and I felt there could be no future for me in uniform. He was happy, though about his parachute landing. He had some real concerns about his ankles being injured again, because I mean, even though a parachute slows your fall down, you still land pretty hard. And his ankles had previously been broken. Fortunately slash, I was gonna say, but unfortunately, but it's all fortunate. He wound up landing in manure, which is not ideal, but is better than rebreaking his ankles. Yeah, he was very thankful to be smelly for a little while rather than have to be in casts again. So the Doolittle raid had two immediate effects. First, it was a huge morale boost for US troops, civilians at home, and the Allies. And second, as we mentioned, it really sent a shockwave through the Japanese military. The thought in Japan up to this point had been that the US lacked real firepower in the Pacific, since so many vessels and planes had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor and so many other assets were already deployed in Europe. As Doolittle wrote in his autobiography quote, the bombs could only do a fraction of the damage the Japanese had inflicted on US at Pearl Harbor. But the primary purpose of the raid against the main island of Japan was psychological, and immediately the Japanese forces scrambled to fortify their defenses in the Pacific. Their carrier fleet in the Indian Ocean was called Home to protect the islands of Japan. Aircraft that had been spread throughout the South Pacific by Japan were all recalled to patrols at home to defend against another possible attack from US bombers. This shift of Japan's military assets back to the Japanese islands, along with United States victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May nineteen forty two and the Battle of Midway in June of that year, enabled the United States to launch a campaign against Japan at Guadalcanal in August of nineteen forty two. This would have been impossible before the Japanese defensive stand in the Pacific had been crippled and immediately after the raid. Of course, Doolittle was not court martialed as he expected, and he was instead promoted. He had been a lieutenant colonel when he led the raid, but the very next day he was made a brigadier general, skipping over the rank of full colonel completely. Doolittle was also awarded the Medal of Honor for his efforts, an honor he was given a month after the raid. The citation stated the reason for his awards simply and clearly, and put into perspective just how dangerous the Doolittle Raid had been. It read quote with the apparent certainty of being forced to land in an enemy territory or to perish at sea. Colonel Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers manned by volunteer crews in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland. Doolittle would go on to command the Strategic Air Forces, the twelfth Air Force in Britain and the fifteenth Air Force in North Africa and Italy. He later commanded the Eighth Air Force, which was instrumental in forcing Nazi surrender at the end of World War Two, and after the war, James Doolittle returned to work at Shell Oyle. He was eventually named the president of the Institute of Aeronautical Science, and he served on the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. In nineteen eighty three, Doolittle was made the twenty fifth recipient of the United States Military Academy's Sylvanas Thayer Award, given for distinguished military service. Doolittle dine on September twenty seventh of nineteen ninety three at Pebble Beach, California, at the age of ninety six. He had had a stroke earlier in September, and he spent his last several weeks in his son's home before he passed, and I'm so awed by his life and what I really love. One of the things that came up when I was researching this was that at one point somebody had referred to him as the Da Vinci of flight, and he said, I think they mean or like I'm the Rube Goldberg. That's not the direct quote, but it was kind of like that, like he was just like, no, I'm just I'm just busy try and stuff awesome, which I sort of loved. It was so sort of humble and wonderful and witty at the same time. So that is the story of James Doolittle on The Doolittle Raid. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old health stuff works email address no longer works, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you miss in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. In our recent episode on the balloons of World War Two, we talked about how Japan's development of balloon bombs was spurred on by wanting away to strike back at the United States after the Doolittle Raid. Our episode on Jimmy Doolittle and the Doolittle Raid came out on February tenth, twenty sixteen, and it is Today's Saturday Classic. In this episode, I speculated on whether Jimmy Doolittle had ever met another figure from a long ago podcast episode, which was physicist Luis Alvarez. It seemed like they would have gotten along to me. It turns out yes they did. In Alvarez's memoir, he described Jimmy Doolittle as one of his two principal heroes of aviation, the other one being Chuck Yeager, and he said that those two men were the only two people he ever asked for an autograph in his adult life. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of My Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. In today's episode is a request from listener Laura and her son and I don't think she put her son's name in the email, but in truth, it's only sort of a request from them. Her son asked for the Doolittle Raid, which I was game to cover. But really what ended up happening was that as I was researching, I got really excited about Jimmy Doolittle himself, because he was pretty amazing and I certainly had no idea how much he contributed to the field of aviation. So I got really engulfed in that, really really enjoyed it. So we are going to talk about the Doolittle Raid, but it will definitely be like an abridged version. We're not gonna go into all of the many details. There have been plenty of books written about it, so don't worry because if you really want to dig deeper, there is a lot of good stuff out there, including James Doolittle's autobiography, which I really enjoyed and highly recommend. But first we have to do a little bit of historical housekeeping for context. So that historical housekeeping is the attack on Pearl Harbor. On December seventh, nineteen forty one, there was a two hour surprise attack on an American naval base near Honolulu, Hawaii. Japanese fighter pilots just wrought incredible damage on Pearl Harbor, both in terms of human life and lost military assets. By the time this short but extremely brutal attack had ended, more than two thousand American tapes were dead and a thousand were wounded, and the Japanese pilots had taken out eight battleships, almost a dozen other naval watercraft, and more than three hundred airplanes. This is the action that led the United States to enter World War Two, which had already been going on for two years, and at that point the United States formally declared war on Japan. So keep that in mind, and now we're going to talk for a little bit about James Doolittle. So he was really the he figure in the Doolittle Raid and the man it was eventually named after, Jimmy Doolittle. It was also called the Tokyo Raid before it kind of took on the nickname of the Doolittle Raid. Jimmy was born James Harold Doolittle on December fourteenth of eighteen ninety six in California, and his parents were Rose Shepherd Doolittle and Frank H. Doolittle, Frank chased gold. It's how he and Rose ended up in California, having moved there from New England in search of wealth. And when Jimmy was four, Frank once again moved the family in search of gold, but this time to Nome, Alaska. After seven years in Alaska, where he got into plenty of scraps with the other local kids, Jimmy was sent back to California by his parents so that he could go to school there. As he moved into his teenage years, he showed some talent in boxing, and he won a state boxing championship while he was in high school. While he considered going pro in the boxing ring, he enrolled at UCLA instead, and Doolittle was a junior in college when the US entered World War One. He immediately enlisted as an Army Signal Corps flying cadet. He worked as a flying instructor and he was never shipped overseas, and once the war was over, he went back and finished his undergraduate degree at University of California, Los Angeles, and then he went on to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as part of a select military group of enrollees to earn his master's degree and his PhD in aeronautical engineering. Jimmy Doolittle was a legend before the raid because his life was one of those that was really just filled with bravado and extraordinary feats. He worked as a stunt pilot and as a wing walker in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and he went on to work as a test pilot and an aviation engineer throughout he was still part of the United States Military. He won the Distinguished Flying Cross in nineteen twenty two for flying cross country with just one stop from Pablo Beach, Florida to Rockwell, California, over the course of twenty two and a half hours in a de Haviland aircraft. It was a flight that had been a ordered on his first attempt because as he was taking off, the left wheel of his plane hit a soft sand patch and the plane went off course and actually ended up flipped upside down in the water, and Doolittle was mortally embarrassed by this much publicized flop because there had been a lot of people on hand to witness this takeoff. But he did try again later, and this time he did it with no fanfare or press on hand. His second attempt was rough because a storm came up just as he took flight, but he powered through it. He struggled with sleepiness because after the thunderstorm things were so placid that he started to get sleepy, but the rain itself was what actually saved him. These rain drops that were hitting his propeller were being whipped back at him and ended up running down his back. The cold trickles of all this water were really annoying, but they also kept him from dozing off. And his award came because with this flight he had basically proven that it was possible to move an Army Air Corps unit anywhere within the US in less than twenty four hours, and this was just one of many awards that he would earn throughout his career in flight. In early nineteen twenty five, which was the same year that he earned his doctorate, he set a world record for a seaplane of two hundred thirty two miles an hour in the Schneider's Seaplane Race in Baltimore, Maryland. He had fitted an existing racing plane that had been developed cooperatively with the Army and the Navy with pontoons to enter the seaplane race. The day after the race, he took the craft out again and beat his own world record that he had just set, putting it pushing it up to two hundred forty five miles an hour. This turned out to cause some sour grapes that race had historically been dominated by Navy pilots, so they weren't really thrilled to lose the title to an army guy who would just decided on a whim that he wanted to fly seaplanes. Yeah, he was, you know, kind of one of those people that was extraordinary and that when he set his mind to do something, he was usually shockingly good at it. Later, in nineteen twenty five, he got permission for a six month long leave from his military career, and this was to work as an aircraft demonstrator in South America, showing off the quality and maneuverability of Curtis P one Hawk fighters. He headed first to Santiago, Chile in nineteen twenty six, so he gotten the permission in twenty five, but he actually left in twenty six, and there he got in a dog fight competition like a competition flight, not an actual dog fight, against German ace Ernst von Schonbeck of the Richtofen flying circus that name rings a bell. It was not actually a circus. It was a World War One German fightery unit, nicknamed for using very colorful airplanes. So Doolittle was going up against really stiff competition and he managed to win, which might be impressive enough on its own, but there's actually more to the story. Yeah, at the time of this competition, Doolittle was flying with two broken ankles. He had fallen from a window during a party, attempting to show off that he could do similar swashbuckling stunts to those of screen star Douglas Fairbanks. And if you're wondering, yes, alcohol was involved in this poor decision making. After the fall, Doolittle had attached his boots to the rudders of his plane so that he could continue to fly and do the job that he had traveled to South America for, and that was the state he was in when he was challenged by this German pilot. I kind of want to look into whether he and Luis Alvarez knew each other, because it seems like from our episode on him, which is long ago in the archive, at this point they probably would have gotten along. I would think so, yes, it sounds like lots of people got along with Jimmy Doolittle. He sounds like a fabulous and fascinating gent to know. So after he went back to the United States, the doctors at Walter Reed rounded him and really really grounded him. He wasn't allowed to do much of anything for six months because flying in casts using the workaround set up that he had figured out had really done serious damage to his legs. But being the man that he was, he did not just sit around doing nothing during that time. And we're going to talk about what he worked on while he was recuperating, but first let's pause and take a quick break to talk about one of our much loved sponsors. So, instead of sitting idle while on forced rest, Doolittle used his convalescence to return to the subject that he had written his dissertation on, which was pilots blacking out during extreme maneuvers, and he started to think specifically about stunt flying in blackouts. So prior to this time, and I really feel compelled to mention that at this point flying planes had only been happening for a little more than two decades. This was the mid twenties and the Wright Brothers and their Kill Devil Hills adventures. We're in the early nineteen hundreds, so it's a really tight timeframe. So he was thinking about stunt flying and the fact that only inside loops had been performed in flight up to this point, and an outside loop was considered too dangerous. So if you don't know what those are, an inside loop, if you were to draw a picture on a piece of paper of a plane doing a loop like a loop to loop, an inside loop, the pilot would always be inside the circle. That's where the cockpit is, always facing up into the circle, whereas an outside loop, the pilot would be on the outside of the plane or on the outside of the circle facing outward. He was really fascinated by the idea of an outside loop, and he took advantage of this forced downtime at while to read to speak with other pilots who were being treated there and get their thoughts on outside loops. He pondered the idea from an engineering standpoint, trying to figure out just what might happen to the human body during that kind of a stunt. So, of course, the minute he was cleared to fly again, he started testing out his ideas. He ran various partial loop tests before becoming the first known pilot to successfully complete an outside loop in nineteen to twenty seven. Never one to rest on his laurels, clearly, he continued to do some innovative and adventurous things, and two years later, on September twenty ninth of nineteen twenty nine, Jimmy Doolittle made the first blind flight using instruments only in Nassau County in New York. Prior to that, pilots were depending on visuals a great deal on what they could actually see out the cockpit window, but he had developed a beacon system to give pilots a sense of location when no visuals were possible, and with that he basically kicked off the development of the modern cockpit. He also received the Daniel Guggenheim Medal for Advancing Aeronautics and the Harmon Trophy for Outstanding Aviation as well for having done this amazing thing. The following year, which was nineteen thirty, Jimmy Doolittle retired from active duty with the Army Air Corps. He spent the next decade taking home trophies for winning speed races and working at Shell Oil while the company developed high octane fuel that would eventually become the standard for military aircraft. After ten years away from the military, James Doolittle was recalled for active duty in nineteen forty after Hitler invaded Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland, Belgium in France. He was forty three at the time, and he was tasked with fulfilling the Army Air Corps need to produce fifty thousand planes each year rather than the two thousand that they had been producing, because even though the US at this point had not joined the war, they wanted to be ready working with Detroit car manufacturers. Despite neither the auto industry nor the army being particularly keen on that kind of partnership, Doolittle was able to succeed in this mandate. By the end of nineteen forty one, Ford was producing the consolidated B twenty four bomber. But even though this was really a huge feather in his cap and he had performed above and beyond what had been expected or hoped for, Doolittle was pretty miserable. He just didn't like this. He didn't like a desk job, and he wanted to return to really active duty. And he made requests for a transfer to go to a combat unit through all of the appropriate channels, but he basically got turned down every time and got constant resistance. But then finally in January of nineteen forty two, he received a call and was tasked with a secret mission, and his job was to plan and execute an air raid against Japan. The attack on Pearl Harbor that we talked about at the top of the show and the events that came after it set the United States on edge and the Pacific. US troops did not fare well against the Japanese and things weren't really going well in Europe either. Something had to be done to neutralize Japan's forces if the United States was going to make any headway in the Pacific. After several months of planning, Doolittle and his men were ready. On April eighteenth of nineteen forty two, sixteen B twenty five Mitchell bombers with a total of eighty volunteer crewmen launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet. Their flight began six hundred and twenty miles away from Japan, and the original plan had called for a takeoff from the Hornet at approximately four hundred miles from Japan's coast, but because a fishing boat spotted the carrier, things had to be revised at the last minute. Because their position had been called in, the B twenty fives had been fitted with extra fuel tanks, which meant that they lost armament in the process. Because the airplanes weren't originally intended to take off from an aircraft carrier, there also had to be really significant changes in the takeoff procedure. Pilots were trained to take off not at the usual ninety miles an hour, but it's sixty miles per hour. You know a lot about how planes take off. Speed is essential. This is tricky. They also had a lot less runway than would normally be available aboard each B twenty five or five men the pilot, the copilot, a bombardier, a navigator, and a gunner. And as a personal side note, the practice runs for these takeoffs were performed at an auxiliary field to Eggln Field in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, which is where my dad was stationed for a really long time, so I know that area well. The teams flew low on their approach. They were about two hundred feet over the water, and as they reached the Japanese coastline, they dropped very low, some of them coming in just a few dozen feet above the ground, and they made their way to their intended targets, which were military and industrial sites in Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Nagoya, and Osaka. And as they rose into the air to about twelve hundred feet over their targets, they dropped their bombs and then they headed to air fields on the Chinese mainland to land. The wrap up of this mission, which was basically successful, didn't go as planned. We're going to talk about exactly what happened right after we pause for another reef word from one of our sponsors. So going back to the Doolittle raid. While this raid had the intended effect of scaring Japan and undermining their confidence, took its toll on Doolittle's team. The planes did not make it to the emergency airfields that they had been planned to land at because of their very early takeoff, they were all running out of fuel, and to make matters worse, a nasty bit of weather was moving in. Doolittle described in his autobiography actually seeing sharks in the water below as they were flying and thinking that that would be an absolutely terrible place to bail out, and eventually they got a little bit of tail win and they were able to get a little bit closer to their intended mark. Every one of the B twenty five's used in the raid was lost, the soldiers in them had to bail out over China. Three crews successfully crashed, landed in China and made their way to safety, but there were also a number of casualties. Before we go on, I want to have a brief side note on terminology. So my understanding about the word soldier is that it is usually used for army, whereas Air Force would normally be called airmen. And you could make the argument that these guys should be considered airmen because they were in the Army Air Corps before the Air Force was founded, But just for the sake of simplicity, we're sticking with soldiers here. So if you are an airman, please don't be offended. I'm not trying to do any dicey misnomering. But you know, we're in that weird phase where it's the Air Force doesn't exist yet, so that's the scoop. One soldier died during the bailout, and while swimming across a lake to evade Japanese occupation forces, two men drowned. Eight men were captured, and of those, three of them were executed. Another of the remaining five died of starvation while in custody of the Japanese. One plane landed in the Soviet Union, where their bomber was taken and the crew was interned. The Soviets eventually moved them to another location near the Iranian border and managed to bribe someone to smuggle them across the border to the British consulate. According to Soviet documents that were later declassified, this entire smuggling operation was actually the work of Soviet authorities. They wanted to move the United States soldiers out of the Soviet Union, but they couldn't violate the neutrality pack they had with Japan in order to do it. In fact, the United States military had originally tried to work out a deal with the Soviet Union to land there after the raid rather than in China, but again because of the relationship they had with the japan the request to do that had been denied. And as for Doolittle's immediate crew on his plane, after parachuting into China, they were assisted by American by an American missionary, and both Chinese military people and civilians, and they were able to get home. There's actually some very wacky stories in Doolittle's book about him convincing some of the Chinese people he was encountering that yes, he was an American soldier and he was who he said he was. But Doolittle thought when he got home he was actually going to face a court martial for losing all the aircraft. He would later write quote, I sat down beside a wing, and I looked at the thousands of pieces of shattered metal that had once been a beautiful airplane. I felt lower than a frog's posterior. This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last. As far as I was concerned, it was a failure, and I felt there could be no future for me in uniform. He was happy, though about his parachute landing. He had some real concerns about his ankles being injured again, because I mean, even though a parachute slows your fall down, you still land pretty hard. And his ankles had previously been broken. Fortunately slash, I was gonna say, but unfortunately, but it's all fortunate. He wound up landing in manure, which is not ideal, but is better than rebreaking his ankles. Yeah, he was very thankful to be smelly for a little while rather than have to be in casts again. So the Doolittle raid had two immediate effects. First, it was a huge morale boost for US troops, civilians at home, and the Allies. And second, as we mentioned, it really sent a shockwave through the Japanese military. The thought in Japan up to this point had been that the US lacked real firepower in the Pacific, since so many vessels and planes had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor and so many other assets were already deployed in Europe. As Doolittle wrote in his autobiography quote, the bombs could only do a fraction of the damage the Japanese had inflicted on US at Pearl Harbor. But the primary purpose of the raid against the main island of Japan was psychological, and immediately the Japanese forces scrambled to fortify their defenses in the Pacific. Their carrier fleet in the Indian Ocean was called Home to protect the islands of Japan. Aircraft that had been spread throughout the South Pacific by Japan were all recalled to patrols at home to defend against another possible attack from US bombers. This shift of Japan's military assets back to the Japanese islands, along with United States victories at the Battle of the Coral Sea in May nineteen forty two and the Battle of Midway in June of that year, enabled the United States to launch a campaign against Japan at Guadalcanal in August of nineteen forty two. This would have been impossible before the Japanese defensive stand in the Pacific had been crippled and immediately after the raid. Of course, Doolittle was not court martialed as he expected, and he was instead promoted. He had been a lieutenant colonel when he led the raid, but the very next day he was made a brigadier general, skipping over the rank of full colonel completely. Doolittle was also awarded the Medal of Honor for his efforts, an honor he was given a month after the raid. The citation stated the reason for his awards simply and clearly, and put into perspective just how dangerous the Doolittle Raid had been. It read quote with the apparent certainty of being forced to land in an enemy territory or to perish at sea. Colonel Doolittle personally led a squadron of Army bombers manned by volunteer crews in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland. Doolittle would go on to command the Strategic Air Forces, the twelfth Air Force in Britain and the fifteenth Air Force in North Africa and Italy. He later commanded the Eighth Air Force, which was instrumental in forcing Nazi surrender at the end of World War Two, and after the war, James Doolittle returned to work at Shell Oyle. He was eventually named the president of the Institute of Aeronautical Science, and he served on the President's Scientific Advisory Committee. In nineteen eighty three, Doolittle was made the twenty fifth recipient of the United States Military Academy's Sylvanas Thayer Award, given for distinguished military service. Doolittle dine on September twenty seventh of nineteen ninety three at Pebble Beach, California, at the age of ninety six. He had had a stroke earlier in September, and he spent his last several weeks in his son's home before he passed, and I'm so awed by his life and what I really love. One of the things that came up when I was researching this was that at one point somebody had referred to him as the Da Vinci of flight, and he said, I think they mean or like I'm the Rube Goldberg. That's not the direct quote, but it was kind of like that, like he was just like, no, I'm just I'm just busy try and stuff awesome, which I sort of loved. It was so sort of humble and wonderful and witty at the same time. So that is the story of James Doolittle on The Doolittle Raid. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. 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