L to R: Lt. Charles McClure - Navigator; Lt. Ted Lawson - Pilot; Lt. Robert Clever - Bombardier; Lt. Dean Davenport - Co-Pilot; Sgt. David Thatcher - Flight Engineer/Gunner
I thought it appropriate to remember some very brave men who fought in a war long ago, when the future of the world hung in the balance. On April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 Mitchell medium bombers took off from the 500 foot long deck of the Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Hornet. That feat, with a plane of that size and weight, was thought to be impossible at the time. Their mission was to bomb Japan. Lt. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle planned and led the raid. It was the first offensive strike against the Japanese Empire following the Pearl Harbor attack and a series of crushing defeats for the U.S. Armed Forces.
The men pictured above comprised crew number 7. Their plane was named the Ruptured Duck. The pilot, Ted Lawson, lost a leg as the result of a crash landing in China after the raid. He later wrote a book that was made into a movie, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. It won an Academy Award in 1944.
Look into the eyes of these men. They were warriors, one and all. It was a very different nation then.
(Photo-U.S. Air Force)
