News
PETREL FINDS U.S. CARRIER HORNET OF DOOLITTLE FAME
The research vessel Petrel [paulallen.com/InDepth/Petrel], funded by the estate of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, has pinpointed the wreck of the Yorktown-class aircraft carrier USS Hornet, noted for having launched the 1942 Doolittle Raid—the first Allied air strike against the Japanese Home Islands during World War II.
On April 18, 1942, in the Pacific Ocean some 650 nautical miles east of Japan, Lt. Col. James Doolittle and 79 other U.S. Army Air Forces aviators took off from in 16 modified North American B-25B Mitchell bombers bound for Tokyo and other targets on Honshu. Each aircraft carried five crewmen, four 500-pound bombs and, the men hoped, enough fuel to reach designated landing sites in China. Fifteen crews ditched at sea off China or bailed out over the mainland, while one landed in the Soviet Union and was interned. Sixty-nine crewmen escaped capture or death; of the 11 others, seven died, including three executed by the Japanese. (Only Doolittle’s copilot, Dick Cole, 103, survives today.) But the strike, coming four months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, delivered a blow
