Before they had numbers, the “war to end wars” had Jackie the Baboon and Whiskey & Soda, the lion cub mascots of the Lafayette flying corps. World War II and Wild Bill Crump had Jeep, the only coyote and four-legged co-pilot to serve in the air war to retake Europe, from the Nazi occupier.
John William “Wild Bill” Crump was destined for the air. Born in 1924 in the Pacific Northwest village of Opportunity Washington, the boy’s first experience with the air came on a flight with his Dad, at the age of 5.
Attending nearby Edmonds High School and graduating in 1943, it is myedmondnews.com from which I have learned much of this story.
Hat tip Crump family, via myedmondsnews
The world was at war in 1944, and badly in need of pilots. Wild Bill Crump arrived at Harding Field, Nebraska at the age of 20 to complete pilot training.
While earning his wings, Crump found the most unlikely of co-pilots. Abandoned and alone, it was a two week old puppy. A young coyote, in need of a home.
“Eugene the Jeep” came to public attention eight years earlier, in the Popeye cartoon strip by E.C. Sugar (rhymes with cigar).
Eugene was a dog sort of character, with the magical power to go…anywhere.
In the early phase of World War II, military contractors labored to develop an off-road vehicle, capable of going anywhere, or close to it. Like Popeye’s sidekick Eugene, the General Purpose GP (“Jeep”) was just the thing. Eventually, the name stuck.
Of course, Crump named his new sidekick, “Jeep”.
Next came Baton Rouge and training on the iconic P-47, the high altitude fighter-bomber and foremost ground attack aircraft of the American war effort, in WW2.
The P-47 cockpit was built for only one pilot, but regulations said nothing about a coyote.
So it was that, here in Baton Rouge, the pair learned to work together. When orders came for England, there was little question of what was next. The luxury liner RMS Queen Elizabeth converted to a troop ship would hardly notice the small coyote, smuggled on-board.
Actual footage from Wild Bill’s P51 Squadron
Next came RAF Martlesham Heath Airfield in Ipswich, England and the 360th fighter squadron, 359th fighter group.
Jeep became the unit mascot with his own “dog tags” and vaccination records. He’d often entertain the airmen taking part in howling contests.
Curled up in the cockpit Jeep accompanied Crump on no fewer than five combat missions. One time, a series of sharp barks warned the pilot of incoming flak.
Crump logged 311 combat hours on 77 missions aboard the P51 Mustang “Jackie,” named after his high school sweetheart. Painted on the fuselage next to her name was the image of a coyote.
Wild Bill Crump survived the war. Sadly, his co-pilot, did not. On October 28, 1944, a group of children brought Jeep to school, to show the animal off. Tied to a tree in the rain he slipped his leash and was run over by a military vehicle, attempting to return to his base.
Jeep was buried with full military honors in a grave outside Playford Hall in Ipswich, England.
Before they had numbers, the “war to end wars” had Jackie the Baboon and Whiskey & Soda, the lion cub mascots of the Lafayette flying corps. World War II and Wild Bill Crump had Jeep, the only coyote and four-legged co-pilot to serve in the air war to retake Europe, from the Nazi occupier.
38 American pilots passed through the Lafayette Escadrille, “the Valiant 38”, eleven of whom were either killed in action or died later as the result of wounds received.
Norman Prince
Knowing that his father would never approve, Norman Prince of Beverly Massachusetts trained to fly, in secret. Using the name George Manor, Prince earned his wings in 1911 in the Quincy, Massachusetts neighborhood of Squantum.
A fluent French speaker with a family estate in Pau, France, Norman sailed in January 1915, to join the French war effort.
The earliest vestiges of the American Hospital of Paris and what would become the American Ambulance Field Service can be discovered five years earlier, in 1906. Long before the American entry in 1917, individual sympathies brought Americans into the war to fight for Britain and France. They traveled to Europe to fight the Axis Powers joining the Foreign Legion, the Flying Corps or, like Ernest Hemingway, the Ambulance Service.
Squadron Insignia pin
After 1915, American pilots volunteered for multiple “Escadrille” – flight squadrons of the French Air Service, the Aéronautique Militaire.
The March 7, 1918 Harvard Alumni Bulletin would give Norman Prince full credit for persuading the French government to form all-American flying squadrons.
Prince would not live to see the article, in print.
Sergeant Norman Prince caught a landing wheel on a telegraph wire after a bombing run on October 12, 1916, sustaining massive injuries when his plane flipped over and crashed. He was promoted to sous (2nd) lieutenant on his death bed and awarded the Legion of Honor. He died three days later, at the age of 29.
William Thaw II of Pittsburgh was the first pilot to fly up New York’s East River under all four bridges, the first American engaged in aerial combat in the war.
Lt. Col. William Thaw II with lion cub mascots Whiskey and Soda
Thaw pooled his money with three other pilots to purchase a male lion cub, the first of two such mascots kept by the Escadrille. He bought the lion from a Brazilian dentist for 500 francs and bought a dog ticket, walking the lion onto the train on a leash.
Explanations that this was an “African dog” proved less than persuasive. The pair was thrown off the train. The escadrille’s new mascot “Whiskey” would have to ride to his new home in a cage, stuck in cargo.
The unit purchased a female lion, “Soda”, sometime later. The lions were destined to spend their adult years in a Paris zoo but both remembered from whence they had come. Both animals recognized William Thaw on a later visit to the zoo, rolling onto their backs in expectation of a good belly rub.
French Lieutenant Colonel Georges Thenault owned a “splendid police dog” named Fram who was the best buddies with Whiskey, though he did learn to keep to himself at dinner time.
Originally authorized on March 21, 1916 as the Escadrille Américaine (Escadrille N.124), American pilots wore French uniforms and flew French aircraft. Germany was dismayed nevertheless at the existence of such a unit, complaining that the neutral United States appeared to be aligning with France.
Escadrille N.124 changed its name in December 1916, adopting that of a French hero of the American Revolution. Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette.
Five French officers commanded a core group of 38 American volunteers, supported by all-French mechanics and ground crew. Rounding out the Escadrille were the unit mascots, the African lions Whiskey and Soda.
This early in aviation history, flying duty was hazardous to say the least. Planes were flimsy and plagued with mechanical difficulties. Machine guns jammed and other parts failed when they were needed most. There were countless wounds in addition to fatal injuries. At least one man actually asked to be sent back to the trenches. He felt safer there.
Kiffin Rockwell
The first major action of the Escadrille Américaine took place at the Battle of Verdun on May 13, 1916.
Kiffin Rockwell of Newport Tennessee became the first American to shoot down an enemy aircraft on May 18, 1916. On September 23, Rockwell was engaged with a German Albatross observation aircraft when he received an explosive bullet to the chest. The first American aviator to shoot down an enemy aircraft was killed immediately and crashed between the first and second lines of French trenches, the second American aviator killed in the war to end all wars.
French born American citizen Raoul Lufbery became the squadron’s first Ace with 5 confirmed kills, and went on to be the highest scoring flying ace in the unit with 17 confirmed victories. He was killed on May 19, 1918 when his Nieuport 28 flipped over while he attempted to clear a jam in his machine gun.
The unit sustained its first fatality on June 24, 1916 when Victor Chapman was attacked by German flying ace Leutnant Kurt Wintgens, north of Douaumont. Chapman was carrying oranges at the time, intended for his buddy Clyde Balsley, who was in hospital recuperating from an earlier incident.
Edmond Genet
Ossining, New York native Edmond Genet was a bit of a celebrity among American expats, as the second-great grandson of Edmond-Charles Genêt, of the Founding-era Citizen Genêt Affair. Genet sailed for France at the end of January 1915, joining the French Foreign Legion, and finally the Lafayette Escadrille on January 22, 1917.
Genet had left while on leave from the US Navy, and was therefore classified as a deserter. The decision weighed heavily on him. Edmond Genet was shot down and killed by anti-aircraft artillery on April 17, eleven days after the American declaration of war, officially making him the first American fatality in the War to end all Wars. The war department sent his family a letter after his death, stating that his service was considered in all respects, honorable.
38 American pilots passed through the Lafayette Escadrille, “the Valiant 38”, eleven of whom were either killed in action or died later as the result of wounds received. The unit flew for the French Air Service until the US’ entry into the war, when it passed into the 103rd Aero Squadron, American Expeditionary Force.
Raoul Lufbery
The Lafayette Escadrille is often confused with the much larger Lafayette Flying Corps, and the movie “Flyboys” adds to the confusion. The Flying Corps was different from the Escadrille, the former coming about as the result of widespread interest in the exploits of the latter. American volunteers were assigned individually or in groups of two or three to fly in various French Aviation units, but, prior to US entry into the war. The Lafayette Escadrille was the only one to serve as a single organization.
All told, 267 American volunteers applied to serve in the Lafayette Flying Corps, credited with downing 199 German planes at the cost of 19 wounded, 15 captured, 11 dead of illness or accident, and 51 killed in action.
The Nazis called this new and terrifying weapon, “Vergeltungswaffe”, or “Vengeance weapon”. Finnish soldiers called the thing a flying torpedo. At over 27-feet long it was a flying bomb with a payload of nearly a ton of high explosive. Allies called this Nazi superweapon the “Buzz Bomb” or simply, “Doodlebug”.
In the early morning hours of June 13, 1944, a member of the Royal Observer Corps (ROC) spotted a bright yellow glow in the early morning darkness. The sentry was on the lookout for such a sight and immediately informed his superiors. The code word, “diver”.
The yellow glow went out within moments and plummeted to the earth, landing in the village of Swanscombe, some 20 miles east of the Tower of London. Other such devices were soon falling from the sky with terrible exclusive force. Cuckfield, West Sussex, London and Sevenoaks, in Kent. This time only six people died in a place called Bethnal Green. There would be more.
Most V1 rockets were launched from a simple rail system, others taken aloft attached to host aircraft
The Nazis called this new and terrifying weapon, “Vergeltungswaffe”, or “Vengeance weapon”. Finnish soldiers called the thing a flying torpedo. At over 27-feet long it was a flying bomb with a payload of nearly a ton of high explosive. Allies called this Nazi superweapon the “Buzz Bomb” or simply, “Doodlebug”.
Nazi Germany aimed as many as 10,492 of these Doodlebug rockets against England. Some 6,000 were killed in London alone, with another 18,000 serious injuries. The subsonic Doodlebug was an effective terror weapon but, bad as it was to be the target of one of these things, the “low and slow” trajectory and the weapon’s short range lacked the strategic punch Nazi Germany needed to win the war.
The next generation V2 missile was a different story. The V2 ushered in the era of the ballistic missile and Nazi Germany was the first off the starting line.
The Peenemünde Aggregat A4 V2 was an early predecessor of the Cruise Missile, delivering a 2,148 pound payload at 5 times the speed of sound over a 236-mile range. While you could hear the V1 coming and seek shelter, victims of the V2 didn’t know they were under attack, until the weapon had exploded.
When Wernher von Braun showed Adolf Hitler the launch of the V2 on color film, Hitler jumped from his seat and shook Braun’s hand with excitement. “This is the decisive weapon of the war. Humanity will never be able to endure it,” Hitler said, “If I had this weapon in 1939 we would not be at war now.”
Allies were anxious to get their hands on this new secret weapon. In early 1944 they had their chance when a V2 crashed into a muddy bank of the Bug River in Nazi-occupied Poland, without exploding. The Polish underground was waiting for such an opportunity and quickly descended on the rocket, disguising it with brush. Desperate to retrieve the weapon, Germans conducted a week long aerial and ground search for the V2, but failed find it under all that camouflage.
Polish Partisans preparing for battle, WW2
The search came to an end after what must have seemed an eternity, when partisans returned to the site. This time they brought four Polish scientists who carefully disassembled the weapon, packing the pieces in barrels. The parts were then shipped to a barn in Holowczyce, just a few miles away.
The allied effort to retrieve the stolen missile, code named “Most III”, got underway on this day in 1944, when Royal New Zealand Air Force 1st Lt Stanley George Culliford landed his Dakota C47 in the early morning darkness at a secret air strip near Tarnow.
Home Army intelligence on V1 & V2
The V2 chassis and several technical experts were loaded on board, but it was all too much. The overloaded C47 couldn’t move on the wet, muddy field – the port wheel stuck fast in the mud. Everything had to be offloaded, Polish partisans working desperately to free the aircraft as dawn approached. They stuffed the wheel track with straw, and then laid boards in the trench. Nothing worked.
Co-pilot Kazimierz “Paddy” Szrajer thought the parking brake must be stuck, so the hydraulic leads supplying the brake, were cut. That didn’t work, either. In the end, partisans were frantically digging trenches under the aircraft’s main wheel. Two attempts failed to get the aircraft off the ground, and Culliford was thinking about blowing up the plane and burning all the evidence. There could only be one more attempt.
The aircraft lumbered off the ground on the third try. The last of the partisans scattered into the night, even as the headlights of Nazi vehicles could be seen, approaching in the early morning darkness.
There would be 5 hours of unarmed, unescorted flight through Nazi-controlled air space and an emergency landing with no brakes, before those V2 rocket components finally made it to England.
Today, few remember the names of these heroes, struggling in the dark to defeat the forces of Tyranny. We are left only to imagine a world in which Nazis remained in sole possession of the game changing super weapons, of WWII
Only once during all of World War 2 did death result from enemy action, in the 48 contiguous United States. That of a Sunday School class out for a picnic, on May 5, 1945.
Following the 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, weather watchers described an eastbound, upper atmospheric air current described as the “equatorial smoke stream”.
In the 1920s, Japanese meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi tracked these upper level winds using pilot balloons from a site, near Mount Fuji. Oishi published his findings in Esperanto, dooming his work to international obscurity. Inside Japan there were those who took note, filing away this new-found knowledge of what we now call the “Jet Stream”.
During the latter half of WWII, Japanese military thinkers conceived a fūsen bakudan or “fire balloon”, a hydrogen filled balloon device designed to ride the jet stream using sand ballast and a valve system, to navigate its way to the North American continent.
With sandbags, explosives, and the device which made the thing work, the total payload was about a thousand pounds at liftoff. The first such device was released on November 3, 1944, beginning the crossing to the west coast of North America.
Between late 1944 and April 1945 some 9,300 such balloons were released, with military payloads.
Today, inter-continental ballistic missiles are an everyday if frightening reality, of our time. Such a long range attack was unheard of during World war 2 and would not be duplicated until the Falklands War, in 1982.
In 1945, intercontinental weapons existed only in the realm of science fiction. As these devices began to appear, American speculation ran wild. Authorities theorized that they originated with submarine-based beach assaults, German POW camps, even the internment camps into which the Roosevelt administration herded Japanese Americans.
These “washi” paper balloons flew at high altitude and surprisingly quickly, completing the Pacific crossing in only three days. Balloons came down from Alaska to Northern Mexico and as far east, as Detroit.
A P-38 Lightning fighter shot one down near Santa Rosa, California, while Yerington, Nevada cowboys cut one up to make hay tarps. Pieces of balloon were found in the streets of Los Angeles. A prospector near Elko Nevada delivered one to local authorities, on the back of a donkey.
Among US units assigned to fight fire balloons was the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, which suffered one fatality and 22 injuries fighting fires.
One of the last balloons came down on March 10 near Hanford Washington, shorting out power lines supplying electricity for Manhattan Project nuclear reactor cooling pumps. The war in the Pacific could have ended very differently had not backup safety devices restored power, almost immediately.
Colonel Sigmund Poole, head of the U.S. Geological Survey military geology unit, asked, “Where’d the damned sand come from?” Microscopic analysis of sand ballast identified diatoms and other microscopic sea life. This and the mineral content of the sand itself proved to be definitive. The stuff could only have come from the home islands of Japan, more specifically, one or two beaches on the island of Honshu.
American authorities were alarmed. Anti-personnel and incendiary bombs were relatively low grade threats. Not so the biological weapons Japanese military authorities were known to be developing at the infamous Unit 731, in northern China.
284 of these weapons are known to have completed the Pacific crossing to the United States, Mexico and Canada. Experts estimate as many as 1,000 may have made the crossing. Sightings were reported in seventeen US states. Pilots were ordered to shoot them down on sight, but many escaped detection, altogether.
In an effort to deny valuable intelligence to their Japanese adversary, US military and government authorities did everything they could to keep these “Fire Bombs” out of the media. Even while such secrecy put Americans at risk.
Japanese Authorities reported that the bombs were hitting key targets. Thousands were dead or injured they insisted, and American morale was low.
On the morning of May 5, 1945, Pastor Archie Mitchell and his wife Elsie took a Sunday school class of five on a picnic to a forest area near Bly, Oregon. As Pastor Mitchell parked the car, Elsie and the kids came upon a large balloon with a strange looking device, attached. There was no way they could have known, what they had found was a Japanese weapon of war. The device exploded killing all six, instantly.
Several such devices exploded, igniting wildfires in the forests of California, Oregon and Washington, but the site near Bly is the only one known to have resulted in American casualties.
Today there is a small picnic area located in the Fremont-Winema National Forest in Lake County, Oregon. It’s maintained by the US Forest Service, memorialized as the Mitchell Recreation Area and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. A small stone marker points the way to a shrapnel scarred tree.
A second monument bears the words cast in bronze: The “only place on the American continent where death resulted from enemy action during World War II”. There are six names above those words, those of five children and their teacher: Elsie Mitchell, age 26, Edward Engen, 13, Jay Gifford, 13, Joan Patzke, 13, Dick Patzke, 14 and Sherman Shoemaker, age 11.
Elsie Mitchell was pregnant at the time of her death. Her unborn child was the 7th albeit nameless victim, of one of the most bizarre weapon systems of WW2.
“It was soldiers saving soldiers. Soldiers putting out fires on other soldiers; soldiers dragging soldiers out of fires; resuscitating; giving soldiers CPR; putting tourniquets on limbs that had been severed; putting out fires on their bodies, sometimes with their own hands. Anything they could do to care for their buddies that were more seriously injured they were doing. They can’t do that without knowing how. They responded the way they would in combat”.
March 23, 1994 was a good day for a jump.. The skies were clear with moderate winds of 5 -7 MPH, temperatures a comfortable mid-sixties.
H/T History.army.mil
Some 500 paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division were assembled around the parking area known as “Green Ramp”, part of a joint exercise between Fort Bragg North Carolina, and nearby Pope Air Force base.
There were two parachute drops scheduled that day. The sky above was filled with aircraft, General Dynamics F-16 Fighting Falcons, Fairchild Republic A-10 Thunderbolts and C-130 aircraft, conducting training.
On the ground, paratroops of the First Brigade, 504th Infantry Regiment, and 505th Infantry Regiment prepared to board Lockheed C-130 Hercules and Lockheed C-141 Starlifter aircraft parked on Green Ramp, or practiced jumps from one of several concrete tail mock-ups or just waited, resting in a large personnel shed called the “PAX”, or surrounding lawns.
An F-16D Fighting Falcon was conducting a simulated flame-out on final approach to the runway, with two pilots at the stick. 300-feet above tree level, the giant four-engine turboprop military transport known as the C-130E Hercules, was making the same approach.
The Fighter’s nose struck the tail of the transport, severing the C-130E’s right elevator. F-16 pilots applied full after burner trying to recover the aircraft, as its frame began to disintegrate. The transport was able to recover, veering off to circle the air field and assess the damage. Meanwhile both F-16 pilots ejected with the fighter still on afterburner, hurtling toward Green Ramp.
H/T Fayettville Observer
The shattered wreckage of the F-16 hit the ground between two parked C-130s before striking the right wing of the C-141B Starlifter, puncturing 55,000 gallon fuel tanks. A great fireball of flaming wreckage some 75-feet in diameter ricocheted across the tarmac, hurtling toward 82nd Airborne personnel staging for that second jump.
“S. Sgt. Daniel E. Price of the 2d Battalion, 505th Infantry, sacrificed his life to save a female soldier he had never met before. Spc. Estella Wingfield, an information systems operator with Headquarters and Headquarters Detachment, 525th Military Intelligence Brigade, remembered:
He looked me in the eye, grabbed me by the shirt, threw me several feet in the air and jumped on top of me…. An instant later, I heard the blast, felt the extreme heat from the explosion and the debris falling on us…. After the explosion and the rounds stopped going off, he whispered in my ear, “Crawl out from underneath me.”” I did and took off running.
History.army.mil
Captain Gerald K. Bebber, Chaplain to the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade chaplain, remembers he:
“heard the high pitched screech of a jet fighter airplane at open throttle from beyond the pack shed [sic] suddenly give way to a deep reverberating thud and massive explosion. I recognized the sound from my experience in battle in Desert Storm. As soon as I could think this, a great roaring rush of fire entered my sight above and to the left of the pack shed. It was at tree-top level, slanting down as it gushed into the mockup area at terrific speed…. The flame came though the tops of the trees that stood in a small open area beside the pack shed. In the torrent of flame I saw pieces of wreckage and machinery hurling along. As the torrent rushed in I could hear cries of alarm, curses, and someone yelling “run” from the mock-ups. The fire blast crackled as it blasted in, and at its sides it curled outward as it went forward. I was standing perhaps thirty feet beside the edge of the blast, and could see eddies of the flame curling out toward me. I turned and ran from the flame, to just beyond the right end of the pack shed, where . . . I no longer felt the intense heat, so I stopped. To my left, out on the aircraft ramp, now in my line of sight I could see a parked C-141 engulfed in flames. It was the left one of a pair of C-141s parked there”.
H/T Fayetville Observer
Jump master Captain James B. Rich was conducting a pre-jump briefing by one of those concrete mock-ups, and remembers the “overwhelming understanding that there was no way in hell I could outrun the oncoming debris…” Captain Rich “felt fully exposed” as flaming chunks of white hot metal, rained down. It was like “heavy pipes clanging against each other, mixed with a handful of steel marbles thrown against a road sign“.
2d Battalion S. Sgt. Michael T. Kelley remembered nuclear event training and hit the ground as the fireball rolled over him. When he got up he was on fire. Sergeant Kelley dropped and rolled as a would-be rescuer jumped on his body, to put out the flames. A second beat back the fire with “a wrap of some kind” while a third came up with water. When the flames went out, Sgt. Kelly had severe burns over 70 per cent of his body, including the lower one-third of his face.
Sgt. Gregory Cowper of the 2d Battalion, 505th Infantry, began to roll when the fire caught up with him. “Ammunition was going off”, he said, “I couldn’t tell where it was. I looked to my left and there was a man on fire. I looked to my right and there was a man on fire.”
Rank held no distinction that day, Privates to Captains age eighteen to forty, pulling one another from the flames and shielding the wounded, with their bodies. Twenty three were killed outright, another eighty severely injured. One badly burned soldier survived nine agonizing months before succumbing, to his wounds.
82d Airborne commander Major General William M. Steele, remembered:
“It was soldiers saving soldiers. Soldiers putting out fires on other soldiers; soldiers dragging soldiers out of fires; resuscitating; giving soldiers CPR; putting tourniquets on limbs that had been severed; putting out fires on their bodies, sometimes with their own hands. Anything they could do to care for their buddies that were more seriously injured they were doing. They can’t do that without knowing how. They responded the way they would in combat”.
The Green Ramp disaster of March 23, 1994 was the greatest single-day loss of life suffered by the 82nd Airborne division, since the Battle of the Bulge.
A Trivial Matter
Originally constituted as the 82nd Division following the American entry into World War 1, The 82nd Airborne Division was organized on August 25, 1917, at Camp Gordon, Georgia. The “AA” on the arm patch stands for “All American”. Now based out of Fort Bragg North Carolina, the All Americans have participated in virtually every American conflict, of the last 100 years.
During three months of active operations inside Mexico, American forces killed or captured 292 Villistas. Pancho Villa remained elusive.
Porfirio Diaz
In thirty-five years as President of Mexico, the administration of José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori had yet to figure out the question of Presidential succession. Popular at first following his seizure of power in the coup of 1876, the Porfirian regime soon began to stagnate. Diaz’ policies benefitted ‘el jefe’ cronies and supporters, the wealthy estate-owning “haciendados”, while rural agricultural “campesinos” were unable to make a living.
Following the turn of the century, the aging President expressed support for a return to democracy and an intention to step down from office.
An unlikely opponent stepped forward in the person of UC-Berkeley educated lawyer and wealthy hacienda owner, Francisco Madero. Madero wanted a return to democratic elections, but Diaz would have none of it.
Francisco Madero
Perhaps the octogenarian President expected that his country would beg him to stay, or maybe he changed his mind, but anyone stepping into Diaz’ path, did so at his own risk. Madero fled to the United States, but later returned and faced arrest. Meanwhile, the 80-year old Porfirio Diaz won re-election to an eighth term by a margin that would make Saddam Hussein blush. Voters were outraged by what was clearly a massively corrupt election.
Madero escaped prison and produced the Plan de San Luis Potosí to nullify the elections and overthrow Díaz by force. The table was set for the Mexican Revolution.
Armed conflict ousted Diaz from office the following year, when a free and fair election put Francisco Madero into office. Opposition was quick to form, from both sides of the political spectrum. Conservatives and land owners saw Madero as too weak, his policies too liberal. Former revolutionary fighters and the economically dispossessed saw him as too conservative. In February 1913 both Madero and his vice president Pino Suárez were run out of office and murdered by order of military officer, Victoriano Huerta.
Pancho Villa
Francisco “Pancho” Villa was a Mexican constitutionalist and a Madero supporter. As commander of the División del Norte (Division of the North), Villa fought on behalf of Primer Jefe (“First Chief”) of the Constitutionalist army Venustiano Carranza, but later turned on his erstwhile leader.
American newspaperman and commentator Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil’s Dictionary and my favorite curmudgeon, joined Pancho Villa’s army in December 1913, as an observer. And then he vanished. Most likely the Hearst columnist faced a firing squad in Chihuahua but his story remains, unknown.
Trouble began between Villistas and the American government when the US declared its support for Villa’s former ally, providing rail transport from Texas to Arizona for 5,000 Carrancista forces.
In July 1915 the Division del Norte was badly defeated by forces loyal to Carranza, and again in November. Villa’s army ceased to exist as a military fighting force, reduced to foraging the countryside while conducting local skirmishes and cross-border raids.
A three-way fight broke out on November 26 when Villa’s forces attacked the border town of Nogales, Sonora, and fired across the border at American troops in Nogales, Arizona. On January 11, sixteen American employees of the American Smelting and Refining Company were taken from a train near Santa Isabel Chihuahua, stripped naked, and executed.
In early March, a force of some 1,500 Villistas were camped along the border three miles south of Columbus New Mexico, when Villa sent spies into Camp Columbus (later renamed Camp Furlong). Informed that Camp Columbus’ fighting strength numbered only thirty or so, a force of 600 crossed the border around midnight on March 8.
Villa divided his force into two columns, launching a two-pronged assault in the early morning darkness of March 9. Townspeople were asleep at first but soon awakened to the sounds of burning buildings, and shouts of “Viva Villa! Viva Mexico!”
What began as a pre-dawn raid soon erupted into full-scale battle, as residents poured from homes with hunting rifles and shotguns. The Camp Columbus garrison was taken by surprise but recovered quickly, as barefoot soldiers scrambled into position. Four Hotchkiss M1909 machine guns fired 5,000 rounds apiece before the shooting died down, joined by another 30 troopers with M1903 Springfield rifles.
Pancho Villa proclaimed the raid a success, having captured over 300 rifles and shotguns, 80 horses, and 30 mules. Strategically, the raid was a disaster. The Mexicans had lost 90 to 170 dead they could barely afford out of a raiding force, of 484 men. Official American reports indicate 8, 10 or 11 soldiers killed, plus another 7 or 8 civilians, depending on which report you choose to believe.
The United States government wasted no time in responding. That same day, the President who would win re-election in eight months on the slogan “He kept us out of war” appointed Newton Diehl Baker, Jr. to fill the previously vacant position of Secretary of War. The following day, Woodrow Wilson ordered General John Pershing to capture Pancho Villa, dead or alive.
7,000 American troops crossed into Mexico on March 13. It was the first American military expedition to employ mechanized vehicles including trucks and automobiles to carry supplies and personnel and Curtiss Jenny aircraft, used for reconnaissance.
On March 5, 1913, President William Howard Taft ordered the formation of the 1st Aero squadron, nine aircraft divided into two companies. ‘Aviation’ at that time was not what is, today. Aircraft were highly experimental, many built by the pilots themselves. Crashes were commonplace, and flight lessons all but unheard of. Frequently, general guidelines were given on the ground, and pilots were left to their own devices. One of the early pilots, Captain Benjamin D. Foulois, sent away and received written instruction from Orville Wright, by mail!
The 1st Aero Squadron arrived in New Mexico on March 15 with 8 aircraft, 11 pilots and 82 enlisted men. The first reconnaissance sortie was flown the following day, the first time that American aircraft were used in actual military operations.
Five aircraft departed on the evening of March 19 with orders to report ‘without delay’ to Pershing’s headquarters in Casas Grandes, Mexico. One made it that night, another two straggled in the next morning. One returned to Columbus and 2 others went missing. The problems, it turned out, were insurmountable. 90 HP engines were unable to bring them across 10,000 – 12,000’ mountain peaks, nor could they handle the turbulent winds of mountain passes. Dust storms wrought havoc with engines and, making things worse, the unrelenting heat of the Sonoran Desert de-laminated wooden propellers.
On May 14, a young 2nd Lieutenant in charge of a force of fifteen and three Dodge touring cars got into a running gunfight in Chihuahua, while foraging for corn,. It was the first motorized action in American military history. Three Villistas were killed and strapped to the hoods of the cars and driven back to General Pershing’s headquarters. General Pershing nicknamed that 2nd Lt. “The Bandito”. History remembers his name as George S. Patton.
During three months of active operations inside Mexico, American forces killed or captured 292 Villistas. Pancho Villa evaded capture. Pershing publicly proclaimed the operation a success, but privately complained that Wilson imposed too many restrictions, making it impossible to fulfill the mission. “Having dashed into Mexico with the intention of eating the Mexicans raw”, Pershing complained, “we turned back at the first repulse and are now sneaking home under cover, like a whipped cur with its tail between its legs.”
Pancho Villa Expedition, “Around the Campfire”
American forces were withdrawn by January 1917, as the European war loomed over American politics. German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann observed political opposition to American operations inside of Mexico, and concluded that a military alliance was possible between the two countries.
The ‘Zimmermann note‘ proposing such an alliance between Germany and Mexico and promising the “restoration of its former territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona“, may be seen as the ‘last straw’ that brought the United States into WW1.
In the months following the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor the US ramped up its war fighting capacity, significantly. Realizing this but having little idea of the specifics, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) determined to visit Pearl Harbor once again, to have a look around.
On December 7, 1941, forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the United States’ Pacific naval Anchorage, at Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a joint session of Congress the following day, requesting a declaration that, since the attack, a state of war had existed between the United States, and Japan. Three days later, Nazi Germany declared war on the United States, reciprocated by an American declaration against Nazi Germany, and its Italian allies. Two years of conflict in Europe, had become a World War.
In the following months, the United States ramped up its war capacity. Significantly. Realizing this but having little idea of the specifics, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) determined to visit Pearl Harbor once again, to have a look around.
For the IJN, this was an opportunity to test the new Kawanishi H8K1 “Emily” flying boat, an amphibious bomber designed to carry out long distance bombing raids. So it was that a second albeit smaller attack was launched against Pearl Harbor.
The IJN plan was complex. This, the first Kawanishi H8K1 operation in Japanese military service, involved a small formation of flying boats to be sent to Wotje Atoll in the Marshall Islands, from there to stage the long-range attack. The five flying boats would be loaded with four 550-pound bombs apiece and flown to French Frigate Shoals northwest of Oahu, there to refuel with the help of three Japanese submarines, already waiting.
Ten miles south of Oahu, the 356-foot diesel-powered submarine I-23 was to hold watch over the operation, reporting weather and acting as “lifeguard” in case any aircraft had to ditch in the ocean.
“A Kawanishi H8K1 of the 802nd Kokutai is lifted out of the water onto the decks of the HIJMS Akitsushima, 1942, off Shortland Island”. H/T fly.historicwings.com, for this image
After refueling, the bomber – reconnaissance mission would approach Pearl Harbor and attack the “10-10 dock”, so-called because it was 1,010 feet long and a key naval asset for the US Pacific Fleet.
If successful, this would be an endurance mission, one of the longest bombing raids ever attempted and carried out entirely without fighter escort. The mission was designated “Operation K” and scheduled for March 4, 1942.
As it turned out, the raid was a “comedy of errors”, on both sides.
Things began to go wrong, almost from the beginning. I-23 vanished. To this day nobody knows where the submarine went. American forces reported several engagements with possible subs during this time frame. Maybe one of those depth charges did its job. It’s also possible that, unknown to the Imperial Japanese Navy, I-23 was involved in an accident and lost at sea, with all hands.
As it was, only two of the new flying boats were ready for the operation, the lead plane (Y-71) flown by Lieutenant Hisao Hashizume with his “wingman” Ensign Shosuke Sasao flying the second aircraft, Y-72.
The staging and refueling parts of the operation were carried out but, absent weather intelligence from the missing I-23, the two-aircraft bombing formation was ignorant of weather conditions, over the target. As it was, a thick cloud cover would render the Japanese pilots all but blind.
Captain Joseph J. Rochefort, USN
On the American side, Captain Joseph J. Rochefort, USN, worked in the Combat Intelligence Unit, tasked with intercepting enemy communications and breaking Japanese codes. Four months earlier US code breakers had intercepted and decoded Japanese radio communications, but urgent warnings were ignored by naval authorities at Pearl Harbor.
As before, Rochefort’s team did its job. Urgent warnings were sent to Commander in Chief Pacific (CINCPAC) and to Com-14. Incredibly, these warnings too, fell on deaf ears. Captain Rochefort was incredulous. Years later, he would describe his reaction, at the time “I just threw up my hands and said it might be a good idea to remind everybody concerned that this nation was at war.”
American radar stations on Kauai picked up and tracked the incoming aircraft, but that same cloud cover prevented defenders from spotting them. Curtiss P-40 Warhawk fighters were scrambled to search for the attackers, while Consolidated PBY Catalina flying boats were sent to look for non-existent Japanese aircraft carriers, assumed to have launched the two bombers.
Meanwhile, the two Japanese pilots became confused, and separated. Hashizume dropped his bombs on the side of Mt. Tantalus, about 1,000 ft. from nearby Roosevelt High School. Hashizume’s bombs left craters 6-10 ft deep and 20-30 ft across on the side of the extinct volcano. Sasao is presumed to have dropped his bombs, over the ocean.
President Theodore Roosevelt High School, Honolulu
Ever anxious to rent a rapt audience to a sponsor the media, were off and running. One Los Angeles radio station reported “considerable damage to Pearl Harbor”, with 30 dead sailors and civilians, and 70 wounded. Japanese military authorities took the broadcast to heart and considered the operation to have been a great success. Talk about ‘fake news’. As it was, the damage was limited to those craters on Mt. Tantalus and a few broken windows, at Roosevelt High.
Th Army and the Navy blamed each other for the explosions, each accusing the other of jettisoning munitions over the volcano.
The IJN planned another such armed reconnaissance mission for the 6th or 7th of March, but rescheduled for the 10th due to damage to Hashizume’s aircraft, and exhaustion of the air crew. The second raid was carried out on March 10 but Hashizume was shot down and killed near Midway atoll, by Brewster F2A “Buffalo” fighters.
The results of the second Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor, carried out on March 4, 1942, were limited to four craters on the side of an extinct volcano.
A follow-up to Operation K was scheduled for May 30 but by that time, US military intelligence had gotten wise to the IJN meet-up point. Japanese submarines arriving at French Frigate Shoals found the place mined, and swarming with American warships.
In the end, the Imperial Japanese Navy was unable to observe US Navy activity, or to keep track of American aircraft carriers. Days later, this blindness would bring the Japanese war effort to a terrible crossroads at a place, called Midway.
Eddie was a mob lawyer who testified against his boss and paid for it, with his life. Eddie’s son Butch went on to be the first Ace of WW2 and recipient, of the Medal of Honor.
We’ve all heard the story of the mob lawyer who had everything but a good name, and gave it all up to show his son. That personal integrity is more important than all the riches of the underworld. His name was “Easy Eddie”. Eddie went on to testify against Al Capone, the most notorious gangster in the history of the underworld. Eddie paid for it with his life. Eddie’s son “Butch” learned the lesson his father taught from beyond the grave and went on to become a world War 2 WWII flying ace, and recipient of the Medal of Honor.
Eddie O’Hare
The story is true more or less, but it does lays on the morality, a little thick.
Edward Joseph O’Hare, “EJ” to friends and family, passed the Missouri bar exam in 1923 and joined a law firm. Operating dog tracks in Chicago, Boston and Miami, O’Hare made a considerable fortune working for Owen Smith, the high commissioner for the International Greyhound Racing Association. He’s the guy who patented the mechanical rabbit used in dog racing. EJ and Selma Anna (Lauth) O’Hare had three children together between 1914 and 1924, – Edward (“Butch”), Patricia, and Marilyn.
EJ developed an interest in flying in the 1920s, once even hitching a ride on Charles Lindbergh’s mail plane. For a time he worked as pilot for Robertson Aircraft, occasionally giving his teenage son a turn at the controls.
Eddie and Butch O’Hare
One day, EJ came home to find 13-year -old Butch sprawled on the couch, munching on donuts and banana layer cake. He enrolled the boy in the Western Military Academy in Alton, Illinois. The kid was getting way too lazy.
EJ and Selma divorced in 1927. Eddie left St. Louis for good moving to Chicago while Butch stayed with his mother, attending WMA. It was there the elder O’Hare met Al Capone and later earned his second fortune working as the gangster’s business manager and lawyer.
In 1930, O’Hare approached John Rogers, a reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, asking that he arrange a meeting with the Internal Revenue Service, then in pursuit of Capone on grounds of tax evasion.
It all could have been to restore his good name, or maybe Eddie saw the writing on the wall. Some will tell you he HAD to get right since no Congressman would nominate the son of a gangster, to the nation’s premier naval academy.
Who knows, maybe it’s all of the above. None of them are mutually exclusive. Whatever the motivation, IRS Agent Wilson later said of EJ “On the inside of the gang I had one of the best undercover men I have ever known: Eddie O’Hare.”
Al Capone was convicted of tax evasion in 1931 and sentenced to Alcatraz, becoming eligible for early release in 1939 due to syphilitic dementia. A week before the gangster’s release, EJ left his office at Sportsman’s Park racetrack in Cicero, driving his black ’39 Lincoln Zephyr. Two shotgun wielding gunmen pulled alongside, firing a volley of big game slugs and killing O’Hare, instantly. No arrest was ever made.
Butch had graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis by this time, receiving his duty assignment aboard the USS New Mexico. Shortly after his father’s assassination, the younger O’Hare began flight training at Naval Air Station in Pensacola.
Assigned to the USS Saratoga’s Fighting Squadron, Butch O’Hare made his first carrier landing in 1940, describing the experience as “just about the most exciting thing a pilot can do in peacetime.”
Butch O’Hare became the first American flying Ace of WWII on February 20, 1942.
The carrier Lexington was discovered by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft, 450 miles outside of Rabaul. Six Grumman F4F Wildcat fighters and Lexington’s anti-aircraft guns were engaged with an incoming formation of nine Japanese bombers when nine more bombers were reported incoming.
Six more Wildcats roared off the flight deck of the Lexington, one piloted by Butch O’Hare. He and his wingman Marion William “Duff” Dufilho were the first to spot the V formation, diving to the intercept and leaving the other four fighters too far away to affect the outcome. Dufilho’s guns jammed, leaving Butch O’Hare alone on the unprotected side of his flotilla. One fighter against nine enemy bombers flying in tight V formation, mutually protecting one another with rear-facing machine guns.
O’Hare’s Wildcat had four 50-caliber guns with 450 rounds apiece, enough to fire for about 34 seconds. What followed was so close to the Lexington, that pilots could hear the carrier’s AA guns. Full throttle and diving from the high side, O’Hare fired short, accurate bursts, the outermost bomber’s right-hand engine literally jumping from its mount. Ducking to the other side and smashing the port engine on another “Betty”, O’Hare’s Wildcat attacked one bomber after another, single handedly taking out five bombers with an average of only 60 rounds apiece.
O’Hare’s Medal of Honor citation calls the performance “…one of the most daring, if not the most daring, single action in the history of combat aviation…”
In a confused night action in the darkness of November 26, 1943, Butch O’Hare stepped from the pages of history. Some say he was cut down by friendly fire, mistakenly shot down by TBF Avenger gunner Alvin B. Kernan. Others say it was a lucky shot by a gunner aboard his old adversary, a Rikko (Betty) bomber. Yet another theory was that O’Hare’s Hellcat caught a wingtip on a wave and cartwheeled into the ocean.
On September 19, 1949, the Orchard Depot Airport in Chicago was renamed in tribute to the fallen Ace. O’Hare International Airport. Neither his body nor his aircraft were ever recovered.
“We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from”. Eyewitness to the firebombing at Dresden
The most destructive war in history entered its final, apocalyptic phase in January 1945, with another four months of hard fighting yet remaining before Allied forces could declare victory in Europe. In the west, the “Battle of the Bulge” was ended, the last great effort of German arms spent and driven back beyond original lines. In the east, the once mighty German military contracted in on itself, in the face of a massive Soviet advance.
Dozens of German divisions hurried east to meet the threat. Allied intelligence believed the war could be over in April if the major cities to the east, were destroyed. Dresden. Leipzig. Chemnitz. Letting these places stand to serve as bases for retreating German forces, could drag the war out until November.
German military equipment lies broken in Czechoslovakia, 1945
Sir Charles Portal, British Chief of the Air Staff, put the problem succinctly: “We should use available effort in one big attack on Berlin and attacks on Dresden, Leipzig, and Chemnitz, or any other cities where a severe blitz will not only cause confusion in the evacuation from the East, but will also hamper the movement of troops from the West.”
With its baroque and rococo city center, the capital city of Dresden was long described as the “Jewel Box” of the Free State of Saxony, family seat to the Polish monarchs and royal residence to the Electors and Kings of Saxony. Dresden was the seventh-largest city in Germany in 1945, home to 127 medium-to-large sized factories supplying the German war machine, and the largest built-up area in the “thousand-year Reich”, yet to be bombed.
Long described as “Florence on the Elbe” Dresden was considered one of the world’s most beautiful cities, a treasure of art and architecture.
For Victor Klemperer, the 13th of February, 1945, was the most terrifying and depressing experience of a lifetime. Once home to well over 6,000 Jews, Dresden now contained a mere forty-one. Klemperer’s marriage to an “Aryan” wife had thus far protected him from the “final solution”, despite the yellow Juden star he was forced to wear on his coat.
Now, the man witnessed notices for final “deportation” being delivered even to those last few. There wasn’t one who received such a notice who didn’t understand what it meant. Terrified that he might be next the process was interrupted by the coming firestorm. Three nights later Klemperer removed the yellow star, an act punishable by death at the time.
Three hundred miles away, bad weather hampered operations for the United States Army Air Force (USAAF). The first wave in the fire bombing of Dresden would be a Royal Air Force (RAF) operation.
The first group of Lancaster bombers arrived in the skies over Dresden two hours before midnight, February 13. These were the pathfinders, their job to find the place and drop magnesium parachute flares, to light up the target. Then came the marker planes, Mosquito bombers whose job it was to drop 1,000-pound target indicators whose red glare provided something to aim at. Then came the first wave, 254 Lancaster bombers dropping 500 tons of high explosives ranging from 500-pounders to massive, 4,000-pound “blockbusters”. Next came the incendiaries. The “fire bombs”. 200,000 of them.
For those caught on the ground like scared rabbits in oncoming headlights, the horrors had only begun.
The second wave came in the small hours of February 14, just as rescue operations were getting underway. By now thousands of fires were burning, with smoke rising 15,000 feet into the air. You could see it from the air, from five hundred miles.
Then came another 529 Lancasters, dropping another 1,800 tons of bombs.
Lancaster bomber
The USAAF arrived over the target on the afternoon of February 14, the 317 B-17 “Flying Fortresses” of the “Mighty 8th” delivering another 771 tons of bombs.
Fires enveloped the city by the tens of thousands growing into a great, howling firestorm. A shrieking, seemingly living demon beast from the blackest pits of hell, devouring all in its path.
A firestorm of this size develops its own weather, fire tornadoes reaching into the sky as pyrocumulonimbus clouds hurl lightning bolts back to earth, starting new fires. Gale force winds scream into the vortex from all points of the compass, powerful enough to hurl grown adults opening doors in an effort to flee, off their feet and into the flames.
Lothar Metzger brings us one of the few eyewitness accounts of the fire bombing of Dresden, as seen from the ground:
“It is not possible to describe! Explosion after explosion. It was beyond belief, worse than the blackest nightmare. So many people were horribly burnt and injured. It became more and more difficult to breathe. It was dark and all of us tried to leave this cellar with inconceivable panic. Dead and dying people were trampled upon, luggage was left or snatched up out of our hands by rescuers. The basket with our twins covered with wet cloths was snatched up out of my mother’s hands and we were pushed upstairs by the people behind us. We saw the burning street, the falling ruins and the terrible firestorm. My mother covered us with wet blankets and coats she found in a water tub.
We saw terrible things: cremated adults shrunk to the size of small children, pieces of arms and legs, dead people, whole families burnt to death, burning people ran to and fro, burnt coaches filled with civilian refugees, dead rescuers and soldiers, many were calling and looking for their children and families, and fire everywhere, everywhere fire, and all the time the hot wind of the firestorm threw people back into the burning houses they were trying to escape from.
I cannot forget these terrible details. I can never forget them”.
He was ten years old at the time.
For Victor Klemperer, the fire bombing of Dresden was a last minute reprieve. On the 19th he joined a refugee column fleeing the inferno, for American held territory. He would survive the attack, and live to see the end of the war.
Official death tolls from the burned out city are estimated at 18,500 to 25,000. The real number will never be known. At this point in the war refugees and military forces were streaming through the area by the tens of thousands. Estimates run as high as 200,000. That number if accurate, is more than death tolls resulting from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, combined.
On November 9, 2013, a company of heroes cracked open and enjoyed a 117-year-old bottle of rare and vintage cognac. If there can be a more magnificent act of tribute, I cannot at this moment think of what it might be.
On November 9, 2013, there occurred a gathering of four. A tribute to fallen heroes. These four were themselves heroes, and worthy of tribute. This was to be their last such gathering.
This story begins on April 18, 1942, when a flight of sixteen Mitchell B25 medium bombers launched from the deck of the carrier, USS Hornet. It was a retaliatory raid on Imperial Japan, planned and led by Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle of the United States Army Air Force. The raid was payback for the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, four months earlier. A demonstration that the Japanese home islands, were not immune from destruction.
Launching such massive aircraft from the decks of a carrier had never been attempted. There were no means of bringing them back. With extra gas tanks installed and machine guns removed to save the weight, this was to be a one-way mission, into territory occupied by a savage adversary.
Fearing that mission security was breached, the bomb run was forced to launch 200 miles before the intended departure spot. At this range the bombers themselves might not even make it. Fighter escort, impossible.
Japanese Premier Hideki Tojo was inspecting military bases, at the time of the raid. One B-25 came so close he could see the pilot, though the American bomber never fired a shot.
After dropping their bombs, fifteen continued west, toward Japanese occupied China. Unbeknownst at the time, carburetors bench-marked and calibrated for low level flight had been replaced in flight #8, which now had no chance of making it to the mainland. Twelve crash landed in the coastal provinces. Three more, ditched at sea. Pilot Captain Edward York pointed flight 8 toward Vladivostok, where he hoped to refuel. The pilot and crew were instead taken into captivity and held, for thirteen months.
Crew 3 Engineer-Gunner Corporal Leland Dale Faktor died in the fall after bailing out. Staff Sergeant Bombardier William Dieter and Sergeant Engineer-Gunner Donald Fitzmaurice bailed out of aircraft #6 off the China coast, and drowned.
The heroism of the indigenous people at this point, is a little-known part of this story. The massive sweep across the eastern coastal provinces, the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign, cost the lives of 250,000 Chinese. A quarter-million murdered by Japanese soldiers, in the hunt for Doolittle’s raiders. How many were in a position to betray the American flyers and refused, will never be known.
Amazingly, only eight were captured, out of seventy-seven survivors.
First Lieutenant Pilot “Bill” Farrow and Sergeant Engineer-Gunner Harold Spatz, both of Crew 16, and First Lieutenant Pilot Dean Edward Hallmark of Crew 6 were caught by the Japanese and executed by firing squad on October 15, 1942. Crew 6 Co-Pilot First Lieutenant Robert John Meder died in a Japanese prison camp, on December 11, 1943. Most of the 80 who began the mission, survived the war.
Jimmy Doolittle and his crew in China, after the raid
Thirteen targets were attacked, including an oil tank farm, a steel mill, and an aircraft carrier then under construction.. Fifty were killed and another 400 injured, but the mission had a decisive psychological effect. Japan withdrew its powerful aircraft carrier force to protect the home islands. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto attacked Midway, thinking that to have been the jump-off point for the raid. Described by military historian John Keegan as “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare”, the battle of Midway would be a major strategic defeat for Imperial Japan.
Ryozo Asano, left, spokesman for a group of diversified Japanese family enterprises called the Zaibatsu, inspects the wreckage of his Tokyo steel plant
Every year since the late 1940s, the surviving Doolittle raiders have held a reunion. In 1959, the city of Tucson presented them with 80 silver goblets, each engraved with a name. They are on display at the National Museum of the Air Force, in Dayton Ohio.
With those goblets is a fine bottle of vintage Cognac. Hennessy VS 1896, the year Jimmy Doolittle was born. For many years there a bargain between the survivors that, one day, the last two would open that bottle, and toast their comrades.
They changed that bargain in 2013. Just a little. Jimmy Doolittle himself passed away in 1993. Twenty years later, 76 goblets were turned over, each signifying a man who had passed on. Now, there were only four.
Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. Cole* of Dayton Ohio was co-pilot of crew No. 1. Remained in China after the Tokyo Raid until June 1943, and served in the China-Burma-India Theater from October, 1943 until June, 1944. Relieved from active duty in January, 1947 but returned to active duty in August 1947.
Lieutenant Colonel Robert L. Hite* of Odell Texas was co-pilot of crew No. 16. Captured by the Japanese and held prisoner for forty months, he watched his weight drop to eighty pounds.
Lieutenant Colonel Edward J. Saylor* of Brusett Montana was engineer-gunner of crew No. 15. Served throughout the duration of WW2 until March 1945, both Stateside, and overseas. Accepted a commission in October 1947 and served as Aircraft Maintenance Officer at bases in Iowa, Washington, Labrador and England.
Staff Sergeant David J. Thatcher* of Bridger Montana was engineer-gunner of crew No. 7. Served in England and Africa after the Tokyo raid until June 1944, and discharged in July 1945.
These four agreed to gather, one last time. It would be these four men who would finally open that bottle.
Robert Hite, 93, was too frail to travel in 2013. Wally Hite stood in for his father.
On November 9, 2013, that 117 year-old bottle of rare, vintage cognac was cracked open, and enjoyed among a company of heroes. If there is a more magnificent act of tribute, I cannot at this moment think of what it might be.
On April 18, 2015, Richard Cole and David Thatcher fulfilled their original bargain, as the last surviving members of the Doolittle raid. Staff Sergeant Thatcher passed away on June 23, 2016, at the age of 94. Today, not one of those eighty goblets remains upright. Lieutenant Colonel Richard Cole passed from this life on April 9, 2019, at the age of 103. There is no living man today who has so earned the right to open that rare and vintage cognac.
There would be 5 hours of unarmed, unescorted flight through Nazi-controlled air space and an emergency landing with no brakes, before those V2 rocket components finally made it to England.
Historical Easter Eggs - Today in History 
You must be logged in to post a comment.