Meeting the Doolittle Raiders

I was lucky enough yesterday to have attended the Chino Air Museum's monthly lecture, which this month was about aerial gunners. I became a member of the museum during my dad's visit in December, mainly because I wanted to be able to attend these lectures each month; they're always on some aspect of air power history that is interesting.

The first half-hour of the presentation, a sergeant from the Army Air Corps who volunteers at the museum as they work to fix up their B-17, gave a talk about what it was like to be a ball turret gunner on said plane. Sgt Wilbur told an audience of perhaps 200+ about four of his 30 missions flown during WW2, including his last mission, during which he was wounded. Fascinating stories, and thank God people have begun realizing in the past several years that these stories need to be taped or written down. As one presenter put it, "write them down so that we have them, otherwise Hollywood will write them for us." How true that is (and how awful that today we have to worry about the leftists in Hollywood).

After the aerial gunnery presentation, which was worth the price of admission already, the audience sat with rapt attention as two very old men, Colonel Richard Cole and Major Thomas Griffin, described their time as members of the world famous "Doolittle Raiders". Most everyone has heard of the American bombing raid on Tokyo, Japan in February 1942, just a couple of months after Pearl Harbor. Then-Colonel Jimmy Doolittle planned it out and led 15 planes, 80 crew members, on the raid. Ever since, it has been the stuff of legend; immortalized on film with Spencer Tracy in the lead in "30 Seconds Over Tokyo", and it even made it into the recent "Pearl Harbor" movie, this time with Doolittle played by Alec Baldwin.

The two members of the raiders, sitting alongside an "honorary Raider", Jimmy Doolittle's son John, discussed the preparation and execution of the raid, and fielded questions from the large audience packed standing-room only into the hangar that houses the Museum's Navy planes exhibits. It was riveting, and a couple of the people I spoke to while there had the same star-struck feeling that I did: "These are the actual guys who were there. This one guy was Doolittle's co-pilot. What a treat to be able to listen to these men give first-hand accounts of this very famous event, answer our questions afterward, and shake our hands and greet us individually after that. What a blessing that we still have these men with us, in their 90's (they were born in 1915 and 1916), as well as Sgt Wilbur, to tell us their stories and remind us not to forget the contributions of this great generation 60+ years ago.

In this age of liberal hatred of our military, all of us at the presentation went out of our way to thank these fine men for their contributions to our country. One young man, in his Army uniform, took the microphone during Q&A to do nothing more than thank them explicitly, and salute them. He stood there in salute, rock-rigid, as those around the raiders leaned over to them quickly and explained (they are hard of hearing) what the young man had said, and they then happily returned his salute. One volunteer at the museum, a custom airplane model-builder, presented them with replicas of each of their planes that he had made just for them, mounted and painted with the proper insignias, etc. It seemed we couldn't do enough to thank them. One older man remarked to his friend with a smile, "they're just as popular today as they were in the 40's."