 Lieutenant Colonel retired Richard E. Dick Cole was born on September 7, 1915 in Dayton, Ohio and had an early interest in aviation. He would ride his bicycle to McCook Field to get a glimpse of famous aviators, Jimmy Doolittle among them. Cole enlisted in the Army on November 22, 1940. He was accepted into the Army Air Corps and graduated in 1941 from Advanced Flying Training at Kelly Field, Texas. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in July and assigned to the 17th Bombardment Group in Pendleton, Oregon. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the group began anti-submarine patrols off the coast of Oregon and Washington. In late January 1942, the group was transferred to Columbia, South Carolina. It was here that Cole volunteered for a top secret mission under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. Following intensive training at Eglin Field in Florida, the crews flew their North American B-25 Missiles to California in April 1942, where 16 aircraft were loaded onto the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. On April 18, only four months after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Doolittle Raiders accomplished the first air raid on Japan. Cole had the enormous responsibility of being the co-pilot of the number one B-25 piloted by Doolittle himself. Launching 250 miles earlier than planned because a Japanese fishing boat had spotted them, all 16 aircraft had to ditch or crash land after striking their targets. They did not have enough fuel to make it to their intended Chinese landing sites. Catching a rare tailwind blowing east to west, Cole's aircraft was able to make it overland. Bailing out over China into the pitch black void, Cole spent the remainder of the night sleeping in the tree where he landed. After return to U.S. control, Cole stayed in China and India flying cargo aircraft until he returned home in June 1943. By October that same year, Cole was back in the Pacific Theater with the first air commando group India Burma Sector, where he took part in Operation Thursday, the first Allied all aerial invasion. Cole landed soldiers more than 200 miles behind Japanese defenses to establish an airfield in the midst of enemy-held territory. Awarded three distinguished flying crosses, Cole retired in 1967. He is a command pilot with 5,078 hours and 30 aircraft, including 250 combat missions with 500 combat hours. Please join me in welcoming Lieutenant Colonel Dick Cole, interviewed by Major John Welch. Good afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel Cole. Thank you for being here with us today and we appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedule to spend this week with us. And I know everyone here in the audience is thrilled that you're able to be here to share your story with us. Before I get started, though, I do want to let everyone know that during this interview, really I'm just going to scratch the surface with Lieutenant Colonel Cole. He has a tremendous amount of stories to share with you about his time during World War II, but also in life in general. I wish I could get into his stories flying the hump or doing air commando operations during World War II. And I encourage each of you during the breaks to come up and chat with Lieutenant Colonel Cole and just talk with him. He's, during his 100 years here on Earth, he has done and seen a lot and he and I have spoken for several hours and he shared lots of stories with me. And I encourage you, if you have time, to come up and chat with him and he's thrilled to chat with all of you. So I encourage you to do that during the breaks this week. But Lieutenant Colonel Cole, we'll just go ahead and get started chatting about the do little raids. So I'd like to take you... Well, first off, I would like to thank the Air University for having me here. I'm very honored and very humbled about being invited. Now, I'd like to take you back to your childhood in Ohio and your early years in the Army Air Corps. Can you tell us a little bit about Jimmy Doolittle and your experiences with Jimmy Doolittle? As a young person, I was born and raised in Dayton, Ohio. And I also was a member of the airplane model League of America. And I was interested in... My mother and I kept the trap book on activities at what was the Army's first test base called McCook Field. It was a thin bicycle range of where we lived. And I had the privilege of being able to ride over to McCook Field, which was bordered on one side by a river. You could sit on the river in a levee and watch what was going on with all the old timers, including Doolittle, in testing what they were supposed to be testing. And that was my entry into wanting to be an aviator in the U.S. Army Air Corps. My goal wasn't too high because once a month when the payroll was due at Wright Field, they had Curtis Hawk fly over the armored truck from the bank to the field to the bank. And my goal was being able to become an aviator and go after the bad guys if they wanted to try and get something out of the armored vehicle. So moving forward to early 1942, just after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, at that time you had you and 79 other raiders and your B-25s bordered the U.S.S. Hornet in California, headed to Tokyo. So now those B-25s, I know you want to share with them a little bit about how the B-25s came to be involved with the Doolittle raid. Well, as it was, North American was in the process of manufacturing the B-25. And by then they called it a low-bid airplane. And I think maybe if North American had it to do over again, they were charging $200,000 for the airplane. After it performed so well during the war, they probably would have wanted more money. Yes, sir. And on that, on April 18, 1942, Jimmy Doolittle was the pilot of the aircraft you were in. How did it come to be that Colonel Doolittle was your pilot that day? We were stationed at Pendleton, Oregon. In January of 1942, the Seventh-East Bomb Group, which was made up of the 37th Squadron and the 34th Squadron and the 95th Squadron, and had an attached squadron called the 89th. We got orders to go to Columbia, South Carolina. We traveled there, and on the way to Columbia, the gentleman I was flying with an instructor pilot upgraded me to the first pilot because I had to plan the whole thing and arrive there safely without any hitches. After we were at Columbia for maybe a week or so, they put out the word where they were looking for volunteers to go on a very dangerous mission. In the meantime, Colonel Doolittle was busy looking around for an airplane to do that, and he ended up choosing the B-25. Since we were the only group that was operational at that time, it ended up that he chose our group. All this history and so forth about volunteering and so forth, you thought that you were going to be overlooked, maybe. But if you thought that it was going to catch the eye of Colonel Doolittle, we were going to go on the raids whether we wanted to or not. How did it make you feel having your boyhood hero, Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, be your pilot that day? I was very late and I wondered how lucky I could still be that it happened. But to tell you the real story was that his original pilot had some kind of a co-pilot, had some kind of an accident and couldn't go. The morning that he was supposed to come into England, the pilot that I had became ill, he got appendicitis. So the crew and I talked it over and they still wanted to go on the mission. So I went to the ops officer who was ski York and asked, told him that problem because there were already standby crews that were trained. He said, well, I'll crew you up with the old man and if you do okay, you've got yourself a pilot. It turned out that he didn't fire us and he took the seat of the previous pilot and we were the baggage that went along with the airplane. So tell us what it was like being at the controls of that B-25 on April the 18th, 1942. What was it like looking out the windshield of that B-25, looking at the flight deck of the USS Hornet that morning? Well, maybe I should say a little bit about how the B-25 had been involved. Being a little bit airplane, it was designed as a medium bomber which most operated about from 12,000 to about 18,000 feet. But in the meantime, the anti-aircraft industry became more competent and sophisticated. But being in a B-25 at 15,000 feet wasn't a very good idea. So it ended up mainly as a tank buster, a bridge buster, and it was, I feel, and I think a lot of people feel, that it was a credit to the aircraft industry of their abilities to produce a good, safe, solid airplane. Now you already said the B-25 was designed as a medium bomber. So this was, you had never taken off from an aircraft carrier before. Was it scary for you that morning being the very first fully loaded B-25 to take off from the USS Hornet? Well, to be honest, when they first told us that we were going to be taking off from a carrier, they said, well, I'm not so sure about that. But after we started training, and Lieutenant Hank Miller from Pensapola came down and showed us how to make a carrier take off. What he did was figure out right away that the B-25 had a negative angle of attack. And his objective right away was to get the pilots to pull back on the stick enough to get at least to the zero drag. And he was able to do that. And he rode with each pilot until he thought that they either up or down. The other thing was that we took off several times fully loaded as we would be loaded on the carrier. So we had at least a glimmer of confidence that it could be done. And considered the wind over the deck and the natural wind, we only needed about 20 knots of propellant to be airborne. One of the young pilots in a take off when we were practicing got off 278 feet. How long was that flight from the Hornet to Japan? It was about four hours. On the way there, I should say that for safety of not being seen and so forth, Colonel Dewey wanted to go low level. So we flew from the carrier to Japan about 200 feet. We had a bit of a shock on the way. We were supposed to have an automatic pilot to reduce the weight and not let the enemy get the northern bomb site. We took it out along with a lower turret and all the long range of communications. When they took out the northern bomb site, they took out part of the automatic pilot. That's when we discovered we didn't have an automatic pilot. There wasn't anything real exciting going into Japan. We passed underneath there over a Japanese four engines flying boat. They apparently didn't see us, which we were happy about. We veered course to avoid a couple of freighters. We arrived over Japan without any problem and drifted into about 15 miles north of Japan. Our target was the Bombardier's Dream. We had an incendiary bomb. The whole northwest part of Tokyo was our target. Our job was to try and set fire to Tokyo. We also set up some kind of reference for the planes that were following us and were going to Kobe and Nagoya. We were able to do that. I don't know. I've never heard how much damage we did to the fire around the line. On the way in, we weren't sited. We passed over the shore and so forth. For some reason I was very pleased to see how it was beautiful. Everything looked in order. People were on the shore waving at us. As we approached, Fred Bremer, the Bombardier, had picked out an IP point that he would use to drop the incendiary bombs. We turned south and went over the west side of Tokyo, which is pretty big. When Fred Bremer caught sight of the point that he picked out, he notified the Colonel over the microphone in order to know what it was. Colonel Bremer pulled up to 1,500 feet and dropped his bombs. On the way down from 1,500, there was a few anti-aircrafts that went off on the side. One went off above us. It didn't do any damage, but it did just check us up a little bit. There's a famous book and it turned into a movie called 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. How long were you actually over Tokyo on your bomb run? I thought about that clip pretty often, but I figured it was about seven or eight minutes. On the way out, we weren't jumped. One of my jobs was to keep the Paul Leonard Dugunner in the back of an airplane that I could see. I had 38 airplanes counted at one time, but they were all above, and apparently they didn't see us. Some of the following airplanes, like Brick Holtz, he was jumped by some, one, I don't know what airplane it was, but shooting a bullet that we figured out was probably like a 22, because he said they bounced off the wing. It didn't plan to work to you. No damage to any of the following airplanes. After the bomb run, you made it safely out of Japan. Now the plan was to go to China, fly to Air Base in China. Can you tell us a little bit about that? To try and not alert the Japanese that did see us, we flew on a course of about 180 degrees south for maybe 75 miles. It was far enough out where you could still see the island chain. There again, we were flying at an average height of about 200 feet. Without the autopilot, we had the manhands of the whole thing. One of us had to watch the tachometer, because we had the engines lean back so far that if one of the neighbors coughed, it was going to go dead, and that's not a very good place to be. Fortunately, nothing like that happened. When we made our turn toward China, Hank Potter, the navigator, was trying to take some kind of a position report. In flying so low, the drift meter was covered up with sea spray. There was a high overcast that he couldn't take a sun shot, so he just had to give us the magnetic heading to get to China. He did a heck of a job because he came out just about where we wanted to go. Now, on that flight to China, Hank Potter actually handed you a note. Do you remember that? Yes. Hank asked the note up to me and said, according to my figures, we were going to end up about 180 miles short of the Chinese coast. At that time, we had to use our ditching procedure. Nobody was interested in ditching because one of the things that added to making you more scared was you could see these big old sharks taking a sunbat on top of the water almost. We also talked about, Cornelius also talked about how if he had the ditch and the ocean was pretty calm, he was going to try to land in the smooth area between the moving waves. If it was fairly rough and so forth, he would have to try to land along with the waves. Unfortunately, we didn't have to worry about that. Because as we reached the point that Hank said that we would be out of fuel, we began to notice that the ocean was getting a little bit milky, a bit of mud-colored. It gave us the idea that maybe we had a tailwind. It turned out that we did have a good tailwind because the big storm that was over China developed a wind they called the Kamakaze wind that blows from east to west. That couple along with the point that the water was changing color, we thought maybe we were getting close to the land and that turned out to be true. Now were all of the planes able to make it to the Chinese coast? As we approached the Chinese coast, you could see this big wall. It was a warm front and we had to go on instruments. Colonel Luttrell climbed up to 9,000 feet and followed Hank's heading to go back a little bit. There was supposed to have been a Homer station at Chu Sin, which was the name of the place that we were to gas up and go on to Kunming, where the American Volunteer Group was stationed. The airplane carrying Homer that we were to use was set up on 4495 kilocycles, crashed on the way there. Consequently, we couldn't raise any kind of navigational aid. Colonel decided we'd just stay at 9,000 feet and run out of fuel, which we came pretty close to doing. Now you still had to bail out of the aircraft. What was it going through your mind as you stood at that door looking into the darkness and knowing that you had to jump out into the dark and into the rain that night? Well, first off, you're scared all the time anyway. You're wondering, number one, is the chutes going to work? And number two, are you going to be able to bail out successfully? And the next thing is that the big front was generated a lot of wind and rain, lightning. How are you going to be able to tell at night what you're going to hit when you bail out? So that all comes together. There's a lot of things going through your mind. For sure. But fortunately, we all bailed out successfully. And there was one self-infected injury in my case. I pulled the ripcord so hard I gave myself a black eye. And where did you end up landing that night? One of the good breaks that I had was that eased my biggest concern is what am I going to land on or how and where. As it turned out, my chute drifted over a pine tree and I ended up hanging off about 12 feet in the tree. And all my worries about hitting the ground were out of the way. I spent the night in the tree for a couple of reasons. There was a pretty mountainous territory. And the other was you couldn't see the ground because of all the fog and so forth. So I managed to pull my chute in and make a kind of a hammock affair for my legs because I wouldn't go to sleep. And I know I dozed off but I didn't sleep. The next morning the major part of the storm had passed and I was able to get an idea of my bearings and what I might have to do next. In the case of one gentleman, after he bailed out and hit the ground he sat down and lit a cigarette and when he was ready he flipped it out like that and he thought that he would see where the ground was. He saw it go out and he kept going. And he was on the very first part of a high part of a peak. There were several injuries, broken ankles and arms. One crew, they hit the water with their wheels down and it threw them a pilot and a co-pilot out through the windshield. And they were pretty bad hurt. But the Chinese medical people that they did run across were of great help. Yes, sir. And that next morning when you got out of the tree, what did you do? Well, after I climbed down I repacked chutes and made it into a backpack up there. And we all had compasses and we knew that if we walked west that we'd be headed toward unoccupied China. And you'd be headed in the right direction. So I started out walking west. And being really scared about what to do next, I decided that I wasn't going to look for a railroad or that I was going to stay to the high country to keep them being captured. And it turned out that after walking all day, I came out on a cliff. And down below was a little condolence that had the Chinese national flag flying above it. So I walked down there and it was accosted by a Chinese soldier. And he took me to a building that was empty except for a table. And on the table was a sketch that somebody had drawn with a two-tailed airplane with five parachutes coming out of it. So I finally got him to take me where he took the gentleman that drew the picture. So we went maybe a hundred yards or so and there was another building that we went in. And it was so foggy inside from candle smoke that you couldn't see hardly anything. And when I entered, I saw something out of the corner of my eye, another human. And about that time they lit a couple more candles and you could see through this little overcast that it was going to do to them. What other assistance did the Chinese provide to you and the Do Little Crew? What other kinds of assistance did the Chinese provide to you and the Do Little Crew? I'm not hearing you. The Chinese had been a big help up to that time and we were looking for something a little better. It was a great help. Colonel Do Little was very interesting in finding out where the rest of the crews were and how kind of conditioned they were in. And he got the leader of the place where we were to take us to another place where they had a telephone. And the telephone was very helpful because the American Volunteer Group had quartered off the country in a network that was very helpful to their fighter pilots. And they had it by telephone. And Colonel Do Little didn't want to leave the telephone until he knew to his satisfaction where everybody was and what kind of condition they were in. And I know for a fact that the 10th Air Force, which was in New Delhi, India, had sent teletypes to the embassy there in Chongqing, which was a provisional capital at that time for him to get on an airplane and come home. But he refused until he was satisfied that he could live with a number of people where they were and what they were doing. And how long was it before you finally returned to U.S. controlled territory? How long before you returned to U.S. controlled territory? To the States. In the effort to get people to go on a mission, we were told that if you survived the mission, you would get to come home. Well, it didn't work out that way. There were 26 of us that never received orders. And so we were kind of loose end. And when they started to warm up the airwaves for pilots to go on the hump, there were six of us that decided that was something they'd like to do. So it was 14 months before I got to come home. And how long was it before the Raiders got back together again? All the Raiders didn't get back together again until the party that Colonel Doodle had promised early on. He had said, when we all get back, I will give you the biggest party you ever had. Well, that was true in 1945. Everybody that could be there was at Miami, Florida. See, he had set up the thing with a friend of his who was the owner of the McFadden-Dovell Hotel at that time. So we ended up there. It was a very nice party. Somebody along said, we ought to do this again. Colonel Doodle said, wait a minute, fellas. He said, I'm paying for all this and I can't afford it. But anyway, it evolved into an annual meeting that we went to bases mainly. After that, when the money got a little scarce and the bases were closing and so forth, we ended up being invited to different cities. And to pay back the city for the privilege of having our reunion there, we awarded a traffic safety award. We did that for a few years. That got a little bit out of style and there were closing bases and so forth. So we decided that the best way to give something back to the city was to be a developer scholarship program, which we did and we still have today. The Doodle Raiders have a tradition of doing toast and you have your tradition of doing toast to the Raiders who've passed on and General Doodle purchased and donated a bottle of 1896 cognac. Do you remember that for the final toast? Can you explain to the students what the final toast is and what the significance of that is? Well, the Hennessy Company, their product especially is cognac, had laid down I guess you'd call it a batch or whatever in 1896, which was the birthday of Colonel Doodle. And well, through the years that we had the reunion, we had one at Tucson, Arizona. And Tucson presented us with 16 silver goblets that had the name written on one side straight up and he turned it over and it was written upside down so he turned it over. Anyway, we had a toast each time at the end. The bottle of cognac was taken along with it to the Air Force Academy. Colonel Doodle got permission to leave them there at the academy and give them to it. And after a while, when things got real security-minded, there was about an idea because nobody could get on the base, they had trouble getting on the base to see visiting the academy and along with the demonstration of the cups. And we finally moved the cups to the museum at Wright Patterson and that's where they are today. And along with the cups, there's a bottle that the Hennessy Company has given Colonel Doodle and it's there today. The ceremony that we had for the last toast, they opened the bottle and Dave Thatcher and Ed Taylor and I got to taste it. According to the Hennessy people, cognac doesn't age, it stays the same. We got a chance to taste it, but the only objection that we had was that it was kind of skimpy. But it was very smooth. Colonel Doodle, is there anything else you'd like the ACSE students to know about either the Do Little Raid or the Raiders themselves that we haven't already discussed today? Is there anything else you'd like to share with the students about the Do Little Raid or the Raiders themselves? I might talk about what happened to Colonel Doodle. After the raid, he was very dejected and the place where the airplane crashed was up on the mountainside and it didn't burn so we knew we were pretty close to being out of fuel when we had to bail out. But Colonel Doodle made a comment to Paul Leonard, the crew chief, that he was going to be cart-martialed. Paul Leonard was a very fatherly, like-type guy, a good guy. He said, Colonel, that's not going to happen. They're going to promote you to a general and award you the Medal of Honor. And Paul said, well, if you ever get another airplane, I want to be your crew chief. And Colonel Doodle said, that was the first time that tears came to my eyes and what Paul said came true. Well, Colonel Doodle... Unfortunately, Paul did become, or fortunately he did become Colonel Doodle's crew chief. But over in Africa, during a German air raid, Paul jumped into a bomb crater and a German bomb hit the same crater that Paul lost his life. Well, Lieutenant Colonel Cole, thank you for your comments this afternoon. Thank you for sharing your experiences from the Doodle Raid. We appreciate you sharing that with us. And I think I speak for everyone here that we all seek to live by the example that you and the World War II veterans sent for us. And thank you for all you've done for our country. Everyone, please join me in thanking Lieutenant Colonel Cole this morning.