How I chanced to meet the living legend of the Second World War

By: Barnali Bose, Editor-ICN Group

NEW YORK: I,like everybody else have been listening to stories and reading of great war heroes  since childhood, but had never had the opportunity to meet any until last May,this year.

On Memorial Day (the day when Americans honour those who died  serving in the U.S army) the 28th May this year,I had a chance encounter with a real hero of the Second World War at the Intrepid, in New York.

An unexpected meeting with a war hero on Memorial day :

As we stepped into the aircraft carrier,U.S.S Intrepid, now renamed The Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum,New York, I stood transfixed as my eyes fell on the notice that read loud and clear.

My heart skipped a beat. “Who? A war hero? And that too….World War II…” stuttered I aloud. It seemed incredible,yet it was indubitably true. Those around me obviously seemed amused at my expression of surprise. A staff of the Intrepid quickly beckoned me to queue up.

Without wasting a  moment,I stood at the end of the serpentine queue with my family joining me.

I saw, a few yards away, seated on an arm chair was Lt.Col. Richard E. Cole ,a white centenarian in formal attire and a cap, serenity writ large on his face. Visitors were eagerly greeting him and posing to be photographed with him.

Not having read American History in detail,the name did not seem even remotely familiar. However, it was Google,the omniscient that came to my rescue. I conducted a search history of the war hero as the queue ahead diminished at a snail’s pace.

 

I was pleasantly surprised to know that he was none other than  the last of the surviving Doolittle Raiders,103-year old( born September 7,1915) World War II airman, Richard Cole of the famous April 18,1942 Tokyo Raid, a landmark in U.S military History.

The Tokyo Raid did ring a bell in my memory .I recollected having seen the movie,Pearl Harbour,a love story centred around the Doolittle Raid, a retaliation to the Japanese guerilla attack on Pearl Harbour.

Finally, we were face-to-face with the Doolittle raider. For a few moments,I was speechless. I stood as if in a trance, as I saw  my family members shaking hands with him and exchanging pleasantries.

I could hear Lt.Colonel Cole telling them, “I lived my dream.As a child, I watched in awe  the planes circle the sky.” Looking at my children with a smile, he said, “ The young must remember the key is freedom.”

My daughter nudged me and gestured to me to greet him. Quickly stepping forward, I uttered a hardly audible “Good Afternoon!” and stretched out my hand. Glancing at me, with a smile, he clasped it with his soft wrinkled palm that was mapped with the stories of his bravery and loyalty.

We were just about allowed to pose  for a photograph with the veteran airman and then had to  make way for those waiting for their turn.

However, with my curiosity having been enkindled by the brief meeting,I set out to  to find out more about him.

The story behind the veteran airman:

Lt.Colonel Richard E. Cole had spent his childhood outside Dayton, Ohio—hometown of the Wright Brothers. The skies  always beckoned him.

As a young boy, Cole pasted newspaper articles chronicling the exploits of pioneering aviators into his scrapbook.

He quite often took the 30-minute bike ride to McCook Field to watch in awe  daredevil pilots such as James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle.

Doolittle, in 1922  had made the first cross-country flight in under 24 hours which was considered to be quite a feat.

After graduating from high school, Cole took to the skies himself and became  a member of the U.S. Army Air Forces.

The event that led to the Doolittle Tokyo Raid:

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese launched a guerrilla  attack on the U.S fleet anchored in Pearl Harbour, Hawaii that killed more than 2,400 American soldiers and destroyed all the navy ships anchored there.

The then American President, Franklin D.Roosevelt felt that America had to strike back and that too really fast.

This was needed to boost the American morale and shatter the myth that the Japanese mainland was invincible and thereby immune to invasive forces.

The notice, “ Volunteers needed for dangerous secret mission,” got immediate response from 25 year old Lt.Col.Richard E.Cole who was   among 79 other airmen to join the historic raid.

General Doolittle said, “ There is nothing stronger than the heart of a volunteer.” The 80th in the group was Commander-in Chief, Lt.Col.James “Jimmy” Doolittle himself.

The suicide mission and Lt.Col. Cole’s  miraculous escape from Death:

On Saturday, April 18  Lt.Col Richard E. Cole was awakened with the news that the mission was commencing at once.

The airmen didn’t know whether they would have enough fuel to complete their mission. Still they did not raise questions at the unexpected  preponement of plans.

“What posed a real challenge was that the  ‘fly boys’ had been trained to take off from airfields, but the B-25 bombers would have to take off from the deck of USS Hornet in what was the first-ever joint mission between the Army and Navy.

“I had my own confidence, but we all had Jimmy Doolittle,” Cole told the San Antonio Express-News. His confidence flowed into us and we would have followed him anywhere.”

With Cole serving as Doolittle’s co-pilot, Crew Number 1 made the unnaturally short takeoff and was the first of the 16 bombers in the air.

In order to dodge the Japanese, the Doolittle Raiders flew in single file for hundreds of miles just 200 feet above the water.

Crew Number 1 bombed industrial and military targets in Tokyo, while other planes hit Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka and Nagoya.

In the face of a devastating thunderstorm and the nearly empty fuel gauges, the raiders realized  that the intended plan had gone haywire.

“Our only course of action was to climb up to what we thought was a safe altitude and fly until we ran out of fuel and bailed out,” Lt.Col.Cole said in an oral history interview posted on the National WWII Museum website.

All but one of the 16 planes in the Doolittle Raid crashed-landed on or near the Chinese coast.As the raging storm persisted, Cole jumped from the plane into a 9,000-foot abyss of darkness, broken by only the occasional lightning flash.

His parachute drifted over a tall pine tree and was left hanging about 10 feet off the ground. He didn’t know that until the fog cleared away and the rain stopped the next morning.

While the Japanese captured two of the American crews, Cole successfully reunited with Doolittle at a nearby Chinese  camp and was eventually rescued by an American aircraft.

Sixty-one of Doolittle’s men survived the raid of the World War II, and in December 1946 they reunited in Miami to celebrate the 50th birthday of their leader.

The significance of the Doolittle Raid:

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

There’s but to do and die

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred”

In the above quoted lines, Tennyson has described the frontal attack of the  British Light Brigade against a well-prepared combined Russian Artillery battery in the Crimean war. This, they did to follow orders despite being fully aware that the assault was doomed.

The country may be different.But the essence of bravery and sacrifice of war heroes are universal in nature.

The U.S raiders too  did not reason why; they simply plunged into the perilous mission without a second thought.

Unlike the English soldiers, they did not ride into the Valley of Death,they flew into the island of Death.

“All we have done is awaken a sleeping giant,”a Japanese army general is later said to have remarked.The Japanese military responded with the Battle of Midway in June 1942, which became a pivotal victory of U.S in World War II.

The bold  Doolittle raid is credited with having lifted American spirits and helping change the tide of the war in the Pacific.

Doolittle’s Tokyo Raid left a legacy of bravery that, even 70 years later, continues to inspire.

A new tradition emerged:

In 1959, a new tradition began after the city of Tucson, Arizona, presented the Doolittle Raiders with 80 silver goblets, one for each participant. Each man’s name was etched twice on his goblet—one right side up, the other upside down.

At each reunion, the raiders raised their goblets and toasted each other with a sip of 1896 Hennessy VS cognac, its vintage matching Doolittle’s birth year.

After that, they turned upside down the goblets of any men who had died since their last meeting. “ You realize you were lucky that you weren’t one of the victims in the war,” said Cole.

At a decades- old traditional ceremony to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid,Lt.Col E.Cole lifted a goblet of cognac aloft and toasted his 79 comrades that were lost on the mission or had passed away since.

With that, he turned over the goblet of Raider David J. Thatcher, who died of a stroke last year at the age of 94, leaving one silver cup still standing upright.

That one silver cup standing alone, symbolises  Lt.Col.Richard E.Cole’s life.

The war legend lives on:

Lt. Col.Richard E.Cole is the only American serviceman out of 16 million serving in World War 2 to have been a Doolittle raider,a Hump pilot and an Air Commando.

Cole retired from the Air Force in 1966 with various awards to his credit.

That in 2015, he received for the Doolittle Raiders,the Congressional Gold Medal,the highest civilian honour awarded by the Congress of the United States deserves special mention.

Cole had always dreamt of soaring high in the sky, steering his fighter airplane through the clouds to plunge into enemy land.

However,never had he, in his wildest imaginations, thought that one day he would fly into the pages of  History to leave an indelible mark alongside his boyhood idol, Jimmy Doolittle.

As we left the USS Intrepid, the image of the Second World War legend loomed large in my mind. I returned to India with  lingering flashes of memory from the brief meeting. Memorial Day indeed did turn out to be a memorable one for me.

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