soccerboy1288@hotmail.com essays

soccerboy1288@hotmail.com essays Have you ever tried to launch 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers off the flight deck of the USS Hornet? Colonel James H. Doolittle did. On April 18 1942 he led those planes into an attack on four cities in Japan. This attack was known as the Doolittle Raid. Careful planning and execution were used to pull this raid off. Although the damage was minimal it gave the US its pride back. In January of 1942 Admiral Ernest J. King and Air Forces leader General Henry H. Arnold were told about the idea of the raid. They assigned Doolittle and Captain Duncan to command the raid. Known only as the Tokyo Project Doolittle and Duncan gathered volunteer aircrews for an unknown mission (Naval Historical Center, Internet). In all 80 men were chosen (Joyce, Internet). Doolittle and his crew started on the long and hard special training and modifications for their normally land based planes, to make them fit for the carrier (Goldberg, 52). The raid was going to be made at low-level flight so the retractable ventral turret was removed for the mission, saving about 600 pounds. More gas was given to the plane giving it a total of 1141 gallons. Each plane was also given four 500-pound bombs. To fool any Japanese fighter planes, a pair of dummy guns, actually wooden sticks painted black, were put on the back of the plane. Special training was also required to teach pilots to take off on a smaller runway. The planes takeoff weight was 31,000-pounds (Pettypiece, Internet). When the training was finished, the crews left Eglin Field for McClellan Field in California. On April 1, the pilots left McClellan for Alameda Naval Base near San Francisco. Although all of the crewmen were loaded onto the carrier, only 16 B-25s were able to be loaded, not enough to fit all of the crewmen that had trained on. The carrier headed toward Japan on April 2 (Pettypiece, Internet). ...