Remembering the Doolittle Raiders: "We Thought We Had Really Messed It Up"

From the April 20th Vancouver (Wash) Columbian "Remembering the Doolittle Raiders" by Tom Vogt.

Staff Sgt. Wayne Bissell of Vancouver died in 1997.  The navigator of his plane, Tom Griffin is still alive and in Dayton for the 70th Reunion recently.

Bissell was a 1937 graduate of Vancouver High School and already a three-year veteran of the US  Army Air Corps at the time of the raid.  He said he could see the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and wouldn't have minded bombing it had they not had specific orders from Doolittle not to bomb it so they continued on their way to their target, Tokyo Gas & Electric.

One of Doolittle's planes landed in the Soviet Union's Siberia after the attack and its crew held by that country, even though an Ally, for a year before being released.

Bissell and Griffin were in the "Whirling Dervish" and made it 300 miles into China before the fuel ran out.  They bailed out in a storm right in the middle of some mountains.  Bissell was captured by a robber band of deserters from the Nationalist Chinese Army.

Griffin said they never felt like heroes, "We thought we had really messed it up.  When you lose all your planes, you don't think you're much of a hero."

The B-25s had originally been equipped with state of the art, top secret Norden Bombsights, but these were removed so they wouldn't fall into Japanese hands.  They replaced them with twenty cent bombsights built in a machine shop at their training base.

Yeah.  Those Weren't Heroes.  Right.  --GreGen