As another Lame Cherry exclusive in matter anti matter.
In the annals of war and life, the events overtake everyone and everything. What seems unimportant causes horrendous and horrific problems. I'm going to examine two flight crews on the raid which General Doolittle performed against Imperial Japan in a first strike from America in World War II. What my focus is the nameless people, as they are what is important to the examination of how people not doing their jobs cause problems for innocent people.
The examination is of the 16 planes which General Doolittle led. The flights will be of 8 and 16.
The planes were lined up, 1 through 16 with Doolittle in the lead. Two white stripes were painted on the deck of the USS HORNET, one for the front wheel and one for the left wheel, so that the B 25 would clear by a few feet the island tower of the carrier in taking off.
The seas were heavy and the launch had to be moved up, as the Japanese had discovered the task force of 16 ships, inclucing the USS ENTERPRISE.
Flight 16 though was doomed from the start, as General Doolittle stated.
The focus of this flight is not the crew, who had to bail out over Japanese occupied China, were captured and vanished in Japanese torture and murder in Japan, but the focus is on the rough seas, where when the B 25's engines were firing up, the carrier was rolling, that a seaman aboard the Hornet doing his job, slipped and a prop on the engine cut the arm off of him.
There is no recorded history of who this heroic sailor was. He was though crippled in the early days of the war and only his family knows who this American was. It was men like that who made the Doolittle Raid a success. They volunteered, they were facing impossible odds agaimst the Japanese, they were doing thousands of mundane jobs well which kept the Raiders alive.
They receive no Medals of Honor and no one makes movies about them. They are like bullets and potatoes, just one of the many expendable commodities in the military. They are there doing their job, they go down and are replaced and no one thinks about them again. No one like the shiftless officers and deadbeats in uniform or the civilians whoring around and making money off of war.
Accidents happen. The Japanese knew the carriers were coming. The weather was bad. 4 inches one way and this guy would have probably been a casualty later when the Hornet was sunk at the Coral Sea. 4 inches the other way and he would have been cut in half.
That is the story of Flight 16.
agtG
