Partial payback for Pearl Harbor.

• Author: Groom, Winston
• Position: The World Yesterday

IN THE WEEKS following the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941, everyone with authority, from Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt on down, was wracking their brains for some way to hit back at the Japanese. Plan after plan was rejected for one reason or another, most often (and most glaringly) because the U.S., in the early days of 1942, simply did not have the strength to go forward.

Then, one day, a bright idea suddenly popped into the head of Navy Capt. Francis "Frog" Low: use large Army bombers flying from Navy aircraft carriers to strike Japan. The idea, revolutionary at the time, was approved quickly and Air Force Cmdr. Hap Arnold tapped Jimmy Doolittle to oversee the job. Unbeknownst to Arnold, the 45-year-old Doolittle also would plan to lead the dangerous mission.

Sixteen days across the Pacific, the American carriers suddenly were spotted by a Japanese patrol boat and, in a desperate gambit, the planes were launched a full half-day before schedule.

The deck of the Hornet was pitching wildly in the mountainous waves and, inside their cockpits, the pilots only could hold their breaths and pray as their engines sputtered to life and props slowly began to turn. Everyone understood what would happen if the takeoff were unsuccessful and their planes stalled; they would plunge into the sea and the Hornet immediately would ran over them, sealing their fate. They looked down the flight deck in breathless consternation as the carrier's bow rose three stories or more on a swell, then came crashing down, only to rise up and plunge again, and again.

It was about nine o'clock when Doolittle's plane was towed to the starting point, where a white line track had been painted straight down the deck. The pilots had to use this guide because there was less than a six-foot clearance between the bombers' wings and the carrier's island. There could be no wobbling.

Doolittle gave his engines more and more throttle until Lt. Ted Lawson, of Los Angeles, piloting Ruptured Duck seven planes behind him, "thought he would burn them up. I saw that the [flight officer] was waiting, timing the dipping of the ship so that Doolittle's plane would get the benefit of a rising deck for his takeoff.... We watched him like hawks," Lawson remembered, "wondering what the wind would do to him, and whether he could get off in that little run toward the bow. If he couldn't, we couldn't." Then, "just as the Hornet lifted itself up and cut through the top of a wave, he took off. He...