Take Off from USS Hornet

On April 18, 1942, sixteen Army B-25 bombers took off one at a time from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. The B-25 was too big to land on a carrier, so every crew knew there was no coming back to the ship: they would strike Tokyo and other targets and fly on toward China. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle flew the first plane off, with 467 feet of deck to use.

A Japanese picket boat spotted the task force that morning, and the order went out to launch roughly 170 nautical miles farther from Japan than planned. Fifteen planes reached the Chinese coast after about thirteen hours in the air, and their crews crash-landed or bailed out; the sixteenth landed in the Soviet Union. The raid did little physical damage. It showed that Japan's home islands could be reached, four months after Pearl Harbor.

The picture stops the moment the first bomber leaves the deck. A twin-engine B-25 fills the upper left, wing tilted, propellers blurred, wheels still hanging, a white star on its wing. Two more bombers wait along the flight deck, which runs away in long planks toward the sea, and a tower with a tall mast stands at left. A sailor at the right raises a hand to his cap, under heavy storm cloud lit gold.