Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott Read Free Book Online

RETIRED to his cabin after dinner on the evening of Saturday, January 10, 1942. Much to the frustration of the sixty-three-year-old Ohioan, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, Christmas and New Year’s had passed without any reprieve from the bad news that dominated the Pacific. The admiral had spent the afternoon at a conference of two dozen senior American and British military leaders at the Federal Reserve Building, downtown on Constitution Avenue, the eighth of twelve such war strategy sessions that would later be known as the Arcadia Conference. The two-and-a-half-hour meeting, which had focused on topics ranging from how to blunt Japan’s southward advance to immediate assistance for China, had adjourned with plans to meet again the following afternoon. King had hurried back to the Washington Navy Yard in time for dinner and an evening of work aboard his flagship, the Vixen , a 333-foot steel-hulled yacht moored in the frigid Anacostia River.
    King was no stranger to long hours. The six-foot-tall admiral, who always wore a hat to hide his baldness, had graduated fourth in the class of 1901 at the Naval Academy, where his rosy cheeks had earned him the nickname Dolly, which he despised, favoring instead the name Rey, the Spanish word for king. He had served aboard destroyers and battleships and later commanded submarine divisions and even the sub base in New London, Connecticut. Recognizing the importance of naval aviation, King had earned his wings at forty-eight and later commanded the carrier Lexington . But the admiral wasn’t without his flaws, from his wandering hands, which left women afraid to sit next to him at dinner parties, to the thirst for booze that had prompted him to invent his own cocktail, a mix of brandy and champagne that he dubbed “the King’s Peg.” The admiral’s biggest fault, however, was his volcanic wrath, best described by one of his daughters: “He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy. He is always in a rage.”
    Despite his personal failings King had passion for military history and proved a brilliant strategist. A crossword puzzle addict, he admired Napoleon and walked the Civil War battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg. His appreciation of history had led King—appointed by the president on December 20—to try to stall the official date he would take command until January 1, a move he felt would prevent the calamitous losses of 1941 from staining the legacy he hoped to create. Though America’s war plan called largely for playing defense in the Pacific until the defeat of Hitler, King planned to seize every opportunity to go after the Japanese. That was the best way to keep the enemy off guard and unable to strike, a philosophy he outlined in a memo to fellow senior military leaders. “No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows,” King wrote. “The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”
    Captain Francis Low appeared at the admiral’s door on the Vixen . The forty-seven-year-old New York native, who served as King’s operations officer, had graduated in 1915 from the Naval Academy. The son of a retired Navy commander, Low captained the academy’s swim team, setting the school’s 220-yard record and earning the nickname Frog. He had spent much of his career in the submarine service, commanding five boats and later a squadron before he landed on the admiral’s staff. Ifanyone was used to King’s tirades it was Low, who viewed his boss at times as both “rather cruel and unusual” and a “little understood and immensely complicated individual.” “He was difficult to work for,” Low later wrote in his unpublished memoir, “but serving with him was a liberal education—if one survived.” Low had suffered one such blowup a year earlier on the battleship Texas when he was executing a routine course change in the