WHAT I’M READING – The First Heroes by Craig Nelson

I first became aware of this book late one night while working on servers. While the scripts ran, and I just kept an eye on things, I surfed the Internet. The Doolittle Raid has always been a source of fascination for me. Ted Larsen’s book, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, is one of my favorite reads.

So I was looking up stuff on the raid when I stumbled over a talk that the author, Craig Nelson, had given. He talked about research, and how he’d interviewed surviving raiders, looked at items not covered in Larsen’s book, and so on.  He was so engrossed with the idea of taking Larsen’s book and building on it, that he even bought the rights to the books so he could quote from it liberally.

But it’s a lot more than mere repetition. It goes deep into the people who conducted the raid. Along the way, he exposes funny and terrifying tales I’d never heard. For instance, in the book he shows the human side of Jimmy Doolittle. I know pilots, and many of them have an eye for the ladies. Apparently, Doolittle was the same. It seemed he had a girlfriend who threatened to expose their affair to his wife unless he gave her a fur coat. He decides to come clean with his wife. His wife then wrote the girl and told her that after Jimmy gives her (the wife) a fur coat, she could expect hers, but not a moment before.

It seems Jimmy cooled his engines a bit after that.

Then there’s the rather trivial fact that Doolittle had never flown a B-25. He learned by watching those assigned to him and by doing.

He also relates an interesting little-known aspect of our preparedness to fight a war at the time. Even the most casual student of the raid knows that they were discovered by a Japanese picket boat. We know from history that the boat was sunk. What he reveals is that it took a long time to sink it (several minutes). The gunnery on the cruiser that engaged it was so terrible that there was more than enough time to get a warning off. There were so many misses that after the raid, the cruiser and its gun crews had to go for more training to get them up to snuff.

He spends some time talking about different perspectives while the raid was going on, as well as different things that happened in China.

And then he tracks what happened to everyone involved after the raid. How some got through with few issues, while others became POWs of the Japanese. Some were executed, others simply starved till they were walking skeletons. One would find God and return to Japan as a missionary to share the pulpit with the man who led the Pearl Harbor attack.  Others would land in Russia and eventually be smuggled out. One would even become a POW of the Germans.

One of the most heartbreaking parts of the book concerned one raider who had been captured. While in the Japanese camps, he lost his mind. When released, he became lost in the Army hospital system. No one would believe him when he said that he was one of the Tokyo Raiders. He was just a sick man like so many, lost and alone. Until Jimmy Doolittle caught wind of this crazy man who said he was one of the Tokyo Raiders,  showed up, and . . .

But no, I’m not giving it all away. Buy the book. It’s awesome, well researched, and with a plot that not even Tom Clancy could have dreamed up. Maybe that’s because it all really happened.

The First Heroes has most certainly taken its place on my “Favorites” shelf.