In the first sentence of the first paragraph on the first page, Ted Lawson got to the point. “I helped bomb Tokyo on the Doolittle raid of April 18, 1942,” he wrote. The book was “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” and it was published just a year after the raid, in 1943. It was a best seller.
The Greater Fort Walton Beach Chamber of Commerce hopes “Thirty Seconds” still has drawing power. The chamber has given the name “Thirty Seconds Over the Emerald Coast” to a planned flyover of five vintage B-25 bombers on Friday, April 19, to mark a reunion of the surviving Doolittle raiders.
The raiders — all volunteers — trained secretly on similar B-25s while at Eglin Field in early 1942.
“This practicing was done at auxiliary fields away from all eyes,” Ted Lawson wrote. “Flags were placed along the white-lined runways of these fields at 200, 300 and 500 feet. The idea, we soon found out, was to get into the air in less space and time than we believed was possible for a B-25. We did this by dropping our landing flaps and pouring all the coal we could on the engines.”
The raiders didn’t know it at the time, but they were training to lift their B-25s off an aircraft carrier in the Pacific, fly them to Japan and deliver payback for Pearl Harbor.
Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle led the raid. It would become one of the legends of World War II.
When MGM turned “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” into a movie, Ted Lawson served as a technical adviser. Part of the movie was filmed at Eglin.
Lawson died in 1992. Time has claimed more of the raiders since then. A handful of these true American heroes will be at this week’s reunion in Fort Walton Beach, but it’s being billed as their final get-together.
The April 17-20 reunion will feature not only the Friday evening flyover but also a parade, a banquet, luncheons and autograph sessions. For full details, see the special section, “Doolittle Raiders: The Farewell Tribute,” in the Daily News this Tuesday.
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EDITORIAL: 'Thirty Seconds' over FWB
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