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RIP Lt. Col Richard Cole (the last Doolittle Raider)


Parliament

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https://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/last-doolittle-raider-dies-lt-col-richard-cole/

Col. Richard Cole was the co-pilot of "Crew 1," which means he sat alongside Col. Jimmy Doolittle at the tip of the tip of the American spear aimed at Imperial Japan. The Doolittle Raid on April 18, 1942, was a virtual suicide mission. It was a daring sea-launched bombing mission in the earliest days of World War II.

After Pearl Harbor, Americans were desperate to hit back, and that first hit was the Doolittle Raid. Sixteen Army Air Force B-25s took off from the USS Hornet to hit multiple Japanese cities. The plan was to fly to China because a B-25 could not land on an aircraft carrier. Only one of the 16 planes actually landed safely -- in the Soviet Union. The fate of the rest of the crews was a story of heroism and sacrifice.

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RIP.

I have the Doolittle Raid lead navigator’s autograph somewhere.

That daring attack, which caused relatively little physical damage, was a huge morale booster for America.... and put the shocked Japanese on notice of what was to come.

Fuck Tojo.

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RIP.
I have the Doolittle Raid lead navigator’s autograph somewhere.
That daring attack, which caused relatively little physical damage, was a huge morale booster for America.... and put the shocked Japanese on notice of what was to come.
Fuck Tojo.

Yes, and fuck many of the WWII jap soldiers. There were war crimes galore over there. That mother fucker The Bird should have hanged. I think we felt guilty after nuking the bastards that we intentionally let many war criminals go free.
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42 minutes ago, Parliament said:

AB. What was Doolittle like, in real life?

Don’t know, but another real hero was Major Webb, our next door neighbor at Camp Hood (now Fort Hood) in 1948-49. He survived the Bataan Death March and spent the rest of the war in a POW camp near Nagasaki. He never fully regained his health and died a few years later.  RIP.

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  • 1 month later...

"After attacking Japan, most of the aircrews flew on to Free China, where low on fuel, the men either bailed out or crash-landed along the coast and were rescued by local villagers, guerrillas and missionaries.  That generosity shown by the Chinese would trigger a horrific retaliation by the Japanese that claimed an estimated quarter-million lives and would prompt comparisons to the 1937-38 Rape of Nanking."

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/untold-story-vengeful-japanese-attack-doolittle-raid-180955001/

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9 minutes ago, Gil Bang said:

Good question.  IIRC, the story said "according to the Navajo Nation..." so I'm guessing Navajo only. 

It was an brilliant - albeit obvious - move to use people who spoke in languages that almost no one understood. And to top it off, some of those languages sound very similar to the untrained ear. 

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I think I have posted this before but the term "suicide mission" is not overused here.  They took off knowing they probably did not have enough fuel to make it to China because they had to take off 200 miles farther out than expected. Luckily they got a huge tailwind so most of them got there. Takes a lot of courage to do that take off pretty much knowing you will land somewhere in an ocean in enemy territory. 

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