Eighteen April 1942: Sixteen bombers off a carrier deck

A new ship with an odd cargo

USS Hornet (CV-8) was commissioned at Norfolk, Virginia, on 20 October 1941, with Captain Marc A. Mitscher in command. On 20 October 2026 she would have been 85 years in commission. Seven weeks after commissioning, her deck log recorded the order that followed the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was still a new ship with a new crew.

Planners were already working on an unusual question: could an Army medium bomber take off from a carrier? Navy research picked the North American B-25 Mitchell as best suited. Asked whether it could be done with 15 of them, Mitscher said it could. In February 1942 Hornet took two B-25s aboard off the Virginia capes to test the idea.

On 1 April 1942, alongside Pier 1 at Naval Air Station Alameda, Hornet loaded 16 B-25s that had been stripped of everything not considered essential. Only then was her captain told the mission: carry the bombers within range of Japan.

Spotted at sea

Hornet and her escorts sailed into the Pacific and joined Enterprise, whose aircraft would cover the force. The plan called for launch about 500 miles off the Japanese coast. On the morning of 18 April, the picket boat No. 23 Nittō Maru sighted the task force. Commanders could not be sure a warning had not gone out, and the bombers were launched at once, about 650 miles out.

Hornet turned into the wind and worked up speed, to 22 knots by 0814. Minutes later, Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle's B-25 began rolling toward the bow. The launch took about an hour, with the deck pitching in heavy seas. Each bomber circled and passed over the carrier to set its course, then headed west.

The sailor at the propeller

The cost started on Hornet's own deck. At 0919, as the last bomber prepared to take off, Seaman First Class Robert W. Wall, one of the crew who had commissioned the ship, slipped on the wet flight deck in a gust of wind and fell toward a turning propeller. The blade struck his left arm at the shoulder, and the arm had to be amputated. Stories of the raid seldom mention the deck crews, but they did this work too.

What the raid did, and what it cost

The bombers struck targets in Tokyo, Yokosuka, Yokohama, Kobe and Nagoya. The physical damage was small. Doolittle later wrote that its effect "far exceeded our most optimistic expectations." The Navy's history describes how the raid removed the Japanese Naval General Staff's remaining doubts about a move against Midway, a decision that led to the battle less than seven weeks later.

The early launch left the bombers without the fuel to reach their planned airfields. Fifteen came down in occupied China or along its coast, their crews struggling ashore through surf or bailing out into the dark. One landed near Vladivostok, where the Soviet Union interned it and its crew. The Navy record also notes the brutal reprisals that followed against Chinese civilians in Chekiang province while Japanese forces searched for the airmen. That cost belongs in the story too.

Hornet's short life

Hornet served only about a year. She launched Torpedo Squadron 8 and her air group at Midway, and later fought in the Solomons. On 26 October 1942, at the Battle of the Santa Cruz Islands, she was lost after repeated air attacks. She received four battle stars for World War II service: the Doolittle Raid, Midway, the Buin–Faisi–Tonolei raid, and Santa Cruz. The Navy later gave her name to another carrier.

On 20 October we think of the crew who first brought her to life in Norfolk. For many of them, the raid was the first time they saw how much depended on them.

Our USS Hornet (CV-8) collection is made for those who keep that crew's story going.

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