Saluting last of Doolittle Raiders
A crowd of more than 1,000 celebrated the life and service of Lt. Col. Richard “Dick” E. Cole during a memorial service Thursday at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph. Among the attendees were Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, center left, and Gen. David L. Goldfein, Air Force Chief of Staff.
The seas were heavy 77 years ago as the USS Hornet turned into the wind. Their B-25 Mitchell bomber shaking violently, Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle and his copilot, Lt. Dick Cole, revved up their engines with their feet hard against the brakes.
To make a surprise raid on Japan, they were about to do something no American aviator had done before in combat: launch bombers from an aircraft carrier. It was a chance for payback after the devastating attack on Pearl Harbor five months earlier.
“The two of them looked at each other and said, ‘What are we doing here?’ ” Gen. David Goldfein told a crowd of more than 1,000 on Thursday at a memorial service for Cole, who died April 9 at 103. “Then off they went.”
Standing in Hangar 41 at Joint Base San Antonio-Randolph, the Air Force’s chief of staff headlined Thursday’s farewell to the last of the Doolittle Raiders on the anniversary of the 1942 attack.
At least 300 airmen stood at attention at the base where Cole had spent time as a young Army Air Corps pilot long ago, saluting as Cole’s daughter, Cindy Cole Chal, his son, Rich, and other family members were driven past the “Taj Mahal,” Randolph’s architectural centerpiece.
At the hangar, Cole’s grandson, Aaron, sang the national anthem and Air Force Staff Sgt. Michelle Doolittle, Jimmy Doolit
tle’s great-niece, performed “America the Beautiful.”
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson and Rich Cole, a retired Air Force fighter pilot, were among those who made brief remarks.
Cole recalled his father’s reputation for having a firm handshake.
“He was gifted with his hands. In fact, he made much of the furniture that was in our home,” he said. “We weren’t big huggers in our family, so when I went off to college and I came home we had this little ritual that we did, where we would shake hands. But it wasn’t the ‘Hi! How are you doing?’ handshake. It was the, ‘Let’s see who can crush the other’s hand.’ ”
Fed up with losing that battle, the younger Cole worked on his grip.
“When I thought I was finally ready, I come home and I look him in the eye and he grasped me, and I crushed him,” he recalled. “I kicked his butt. I think he was 83.”
Tech Sgt. Adam Tianello performed “Amazing Grace” on the bagpipe while leading the crowd out of the hangar to watch a “missing man” flyover that involved an RC-135 reconnaissance plane, a pair of B-52 Stratofortress bombers, three T-38 Talon jets and two B-25s, named for the American aviation visionary Billy Mitchell.
Himself a veteran fighter pilot who has bailed out in combat, Goldfein told the crowd Doolittle’s mission, by combining Army and Navy resources, “cemented the very notion of joint air power, with the clear statement that America’s Air Force can hold any target at risk anywhere, anytime.”
Wilson, the Air Force’s top civilian, also described it as a masterpiece of vision and ingenuity crafted by Doolittle, whom she called “the master of calculation.”
The risky, one-way raid also was pure, unadulterated revenge for many Americans at the time. The first offensive strike against the Japanese home islands was born in the ashes of Pearl Harbor.
Wilson said President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered it, and Doolittle — who had a doctorate in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — did the math.
“Doolittle did the calculations, designed aircraft modifications and proposed the unimaginable: to strike Tokyo from an aircraft carrier with a land-based bomber,” Wilson said.
All the Raiders now are silenced with the death of Cole, who was 26 during the mission.
The crews took off a day earlier than planned after spotting a Japanese trawler 650 miles from their targets and at the edge of their fuel range. It guaranteed a nighttime arrival on the Chinese coast, requiring parachute landings and catastrophe for some of the crews.
The men, all volunteers, were given the chance to bow out, but none did. Cole himself said no one worried about anything going wrong.
“I had my own confidence, but we all had Jimmy Doolittle,” Cole once told the San Antonio ExpressNews. “His confidence flowed into us, and we would have followed him anywhere.”
As a boy, planes and pilots fascinated Cole, who rode his bicycle to watch them at McCook Field, the Army Air Corps’ first test base. He made model airplanes out of balsa wood and powered their propellers with rubber bands. He paid $1 for his first flight aboard a Ford Trimotor in Vandalia, Ohio.
When Cole took his seat with Doolittle in the cockpit of the Mitchell bomber, the wind and weather itself seemed an ill omen.
“‘The seas were heaving,’” Goldfein told the crowd, quoting Doolittle’s recollection of the takeoff. “‘We both had our hands on the throttles … our bottoms off the seats and our backs against the backing while standing on the brakes.
“‘The view kept shifting from blue sky to green water. The two of us looked at each other and said, “What in the heck are we doing here?” Then off we went!’ ”
Each plane was armed with four 500-pound bombs. They flew low over the water, often at just 200 feet, the pilots taking turns at the yoke.
Japanese waved to the passing crews. They made their targets without encountering any fighters and took flak only at the end of their bombing runs.
Word of the raid brought mass celebration to the United States and fury in Tokyo — and a series of decisions by Japanese commanders that led to the Battle of Midway, a pivotal American victory.
Cole remained in the China-India-Burma theater after bailing out at 9,000 feet and giving himself a black eye while pulling the ripcord. Once asked what the most significant event of his life was, Cole offered a line that was at once funny and true.
“My parachute opened,” he said.
Cole spent 14 months in China flying cargo planes before coming back to the United States. While testing new bombers in Tulsa, Okla., he met a woman who stowed away aboard his plane hoping to get flight lessons and married her two weeks later. He was back in China soon after.
Cole and Lucia Martha Harrell would have five children, grow produce in the Rio Grande Valley after his Air Force career and retire in the San Antonio area, ending his years at a home in rural Comfort.
His son Rich became an F-15 pilot. Two of Chal’s sons also served in the military, with Nathan entering the Air Force Academy and Elliott going to West Point.
Cole’s wife, who went by Marty, died in 2003. Two of their children, Andrew and Christina, died over the past decade. Andrew became permanently disabled after suffering spinal meningitis and lived with his parents.
Another son, Samuel, died just two days after his father in Brooke Army Medical Center.
Wilson, the Air Force secretary, called Dick Cole a “happy warrior.” Goldfein reflected on seeing him just two days before his death and encountering his famous handshake and big smile.
“I think that’s just indicative of the strength and courage with which he faced everything,” Goldfein said.
The day before he died, Cole asked his nurses at BAMC to give him a hand.
“The morning of the day before Dad passed, Cindy and I hadn’t arrived at the hospital yet, and Dad told the nurses that he wanted to get up and they thought that he wanted to go sit in the chair,” Rich Cole said.
“So they helped him up and they steered him over toward the chair and he said, ‘No, I want to stand up,’ ” he continued. “And they said, ‘OK,’ and they asked him, ‘Why do you want to stand up?’ He said, ‘Because I want to die standing up.’ ”