Last of Doolittle's Raiders has passed....

[Ventucky Red]

Farewell to Richard "Dick" Cole, the last of Doolittle's Raiders who famously flew B-25s off an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo in 1942, providing a big morale boost to the US.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/last-wwii-doolittle-raider-dies-at-103

The last goblet is turned upside down:

http://www.doolittleraider.com/the_goblets.htm

 

[Piperonca]

In the annals of military aviation, few, if any, missions equaled General Doolittle's Tokyo Raid in scope and audacity. All those men were heroes of the highest order. May their honored memory endure always.

 

[Huckster79]

May he only have CAVU on his westward flight

 

[3393RP]

Farewell to Richard "Dick" Cole, the last of Doolittle's Raiders who famously flew B-25s off an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo in 1942, providing a big morale boost to the US.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/last-wwii-doolittle-raider-dies-at-103

The last goblet is turned upside down:

http://www.doolittleraider.com/the_goblets.htm

I've never seen this photo before. The colorization of the original black and white picture is awesome. It really makes the aircraft stand out.

Looking at the photo, one must wonder how in the world the Navy was able to cram the planes on to the rear of the flight deck and allow the B-25s enough space to take off. Records state that Doolittle's aircraft, the first to launch, had just 467 feet to do so.

The Hornet had been in commission just six months before the Doolittle operation, and was sunk after just one year and six days of active service.

I met and spoke with Lt Col Cole in 2017, it was a real honor.

Rest easy, sir.

 

[FlyingTiger]

Farewell to Richard "Dick" Cole, the last of Doolittle's Raiders who famously flew B-25s off an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo in 1942, providing a big morale boost to the US.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/last-wwii-doolittle-raider-dies-at-103

The last goblet is turned upside down:

http://www.doolittleraider.com/the_goblets.htm

Great photo! Surprised they departed during the day. Seems to me an aircraft carrier with a deck jammed with bombers might of attracted some attention.

 

[retpd2001]

I am so honored having been able to see him speak and get an autographed litho of his plane a few years ago. He was so remarkable.

 

[midwestpa24]

Great photo! Surprised they departed during the day. Seems to me an aircraft carrier with a deck jammed with bombers might of attracted some attention.

A. Pretty sure thats just a painting.

B. I was reading a discussion about this just recently. The government did make an effort to close the bridge and keep the public somewhat at bay when it left. However I'm also told it wasn't uncommon to see aircraft stacked on deck being shipped to islands like Hawaii, versus trying to fly them there. Taking off was another issue, one that a lot of people wouldn't have imagined possible.

 

[flyingcheesehead]

I've never seen this photo before. The colorization of the original black and white picture is awesome. It really makes the aircraft stand out.

Looking at the photo, one must wonder how in the world the Navy was able to cram the planes on to the rear of the flight deck and allow the B-25s enough space to take off. Records state that Doolittle's aircraft, the first to launch, had just 467 feet to do so.

And seeing what that actually looks like...

 

[Zeldman]

I can't imagine what these men thoughts were when sailing towards Japan, not knowing if they would ever make it back to the good ol' USA.

 

[3393RP]

A. Pretty sure thats just a painting.

B. I was reading a discussion about this just recently. The government did make an effort to close the bridge and keep the public somewhat at bay when it left. However I'm also told it wasn't uncommon to see aircraft stacked on deck being shipped to islands like Hawaii, versus trying to fly them there. Taking off was another issue, one that a lot of people wouldn't have imagined possible.

It's a black and white photo that's been colorized by hand. This technique had been used for decades before the use of color film became widespread.

The first film colorization methods were hand done by individuals. For example, at least 4% of George Méliès's output, including some prints of A Trip to the Moon from 1902 and other major films such as The Kingdom of the Fairies, The Impossible Voyage, and The Barber of Seville were individually hand-colored by Elisabeth Thuillier's coloring lab in Paris.[1] Thuillier, a former colorist of glass and celluloid products, directed a studio of two hundred people painting directly on film stock with brushes, in the colors she chose and specified; each worker was assigned a different color in assembly line style, with more than twenty separate colors often used for a single film. Thuillier's lab produced about sixty hand-colored copies of A Trip to the Moon, but only one copy is known to exist.[2] The first full-length feature film made by a hand-colored process was The Miracle of 1912.

The process was always done by hand, sometimes using a stencil cut from a second print of the film, such as the Pathécolor process. As late as the 1920s, hand coloring processes were used for individual shots in Greed (1924) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925) (both utilizing the Handschiegl color process); and rarely, an entire feature-length movie such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1925) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1926).

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_colorization


The Navy and Army Air Force planned to release stories saying the Hornet was delivering the bombers to forward areas if any questions arose.

The use of carriers to deliver aircraft was common in WWII. The USS Langley, America's first carrier, was sunk on a delivery mission. The USS Wasp was used to deliver British aircraft to Malta on two different occasions during the war.

 

[Van Johnston]

I watched a newsreel video on YT last night that included interviews with some of the other pilots right after they got back. They said their concern was the width of the deck, not the length. They had practiced enough that they knew they could get off in the length, but they only had 4’ clearance between the wingtip and the island.

 

[3393RP]

The Navy painted a line on the flight deck for the pilots to track with the nose wheel. It was a tight squeeze going past the island.

It's the line on the right in this photo.