Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle And The Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor - Plot & Excerpts
—COMMANDER RUSSELL IHRIG, APRIL 3, 1942 THE HORNET TOWERED OVER Pier One at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Alameda on the afternoon of April 1, 1942. The 19,800-ton carrier had departed Norfolk on March 4, transiting the Panama Canal en route to San Diego and then San Francisco, where it had arrived only the day before. Secured with its starboard side to the pier—by no fewer than a dozen manila lines and four wire hawsers—the $32 million Hornet made an impressive sight. Shipfitters, welders, and electricians at Virginia’s Newport News Shipbuilding and Dry Dock Company had labored for more than two years to hammer out the nation’s eighth aircraft carrier. Once completed, the Hornet stretched 809 feet, the length of more than two football fields. Nine Babcock and Wilcox boilers generated superheated steam to power the carrier’s four turbines at up to 120,000 horsepower. Four manganese bronze propellers—each weighing more than 27,000 pounds—drove the Hornet through the seas at thirty-three knots or about thirty-eight miles an hour.
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