It had never been done. American military leaders began looking for someone to lead the attack. They chose Jimmy Doolittle.

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH:The chosen airplane was called the B-Twenty-Five Mitchell. It carried five men. From the beginning, Jimmy Doolittle knew the airplanes might be able to take off from a carrier. But he knew they could never land there. They were too big. The planes would have to fly from the carrier to Japan and then land in China.

Jimmy Doolittle once held the record for flying faster than any other person.

The attack plan was a carefully guarded secret. The airplane crews did not know anything about it. They were only told the flight would be extremely dangerous. The sixteen airplanes and their crews were placed on the aircraft carrier Hornet near San Francisco. Jimmy Doolittle told his crews where they were going only after the carrier was at sea.

FRANK OLIVER: The plan was simple. The carrier would sail to within six hundred fifty kilometers of the Japanese coast. The planes would take off from the carrier, bomb Japan at night, and land in China in the morning.

But problems sometimes develop, with even the best made plans. At seven-thirty on the morning of April eighteenth, nineteen forty-two, Japanese patrol boats saw the carrier. It was still one thousand fifty kilometers from the Japanese coast.

(SOUND)

SHIRLEY GRIFFITH: The plans changed immediately. Orders were given to launch the planes. The bombing would be done during the day. The pilots started the engines.