4.18.42
4.18.42
doolittle
8:18 A.M. 4.18.42. 800 miles out in the open Pacific ocean the U.S.S. Hornet carries 16 medium range B-25 bombers toward Japan. Led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, these planes were about to do the impossible. They were about to fly 150 miles past their maximum range and on into China...by way of Tokyo.
The B-25 of 1942 carried a crew of six, five machine guns, and 3,000 lbs. of bombs. Contrast this with the B-29 (the plane that would later drop hundreds of thousands of pounds of incendiary bombs all over Japan) which carried a crew of 10, 10 machine guns, one 20-mm. cannon, and 20,000 lbs. of bombs, and you'll quickly understand the weakness of Doolittle's raid on Tokyo.
It was an American attempt at giving the Japanese the finger. It worked.
Doolittle's planes spent barely thirty seconds over Tokyo, but those thirty seconds rallied a nation.
Later, Joseph Heller would make the B-25 famous in his novel Catch-22. Who can forget Snowden?
The question remains what has that got to do with this? This piece, this site. I've answered that once before, so I won't bother repeating myself.
The word of the day is Doolittle. The time is one of uncertainty, 56 years ago in a world without computers, or a cell phone, or a pager, or a global community, or...a holocaust. The different communities and peoples on the planet 56 years ago were doing their very best to kill each other in as little time as possible. They were too busy being praised for scaring children with planes crossing over their cities at a little over three hundred miles an hour dropping entire bomb loads weighing less than the average car of the time. Think about it.
Yeah, breathe real deep and think about it. Your parents or grandparents were there, or knew someone who was.
There's an old man up the street from me I got to talking to one day. Turns out he was a ball turret gunner on a B-17. I asked him was he scared. Of course he was, dumb question asked by someone who can't possibly know what it was like...and yet those of you who know me...
Point is, he was afraid of missing the war more than he was afraid of heights. He was afraid of missing his thirty seconds, and I ain't talking about fame. He wasn't worried about getting washed out of the belly of a bomber with a hose...
Hmmm.
So all I'm doing is pausing for a moment to think about thirty marked seconds in the history of this world. It just so happens the thirty I choose are of a sun-filled sky over Tokyo 56 years ago today.
goodnight 4.18.98