Posted on 06/23/2016 2:54:05 PM PDT by lowbridge
David Thatcher, an Army Air Force gunner who was decorated for helping to save the lives of four severely wounded fellow crewmen in the Doolittle Raid on Japan of April 1942, America’s first strike against the Japanese homeland in World War II, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 94 and the next-to-last survivor among the mission’s 80 airmen.
His death, announced by his family through the Garden City Funeral Home in Missoula, leaves Richard Cole, age 100, as the last surviving veteran of a legendary chapter in Air Force history. Mr. Cole was a co-pilot alongside Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, the raid’s commander and pilot of its lead plane.
Corporal Thatcher, a 20-year-old from Montana, manned a pair of .50-caliber guns in the raid, retaliating for Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
He rode in the rear of the Mitchell B-25 medium bomber christened the Ruptured Duck, the seventh of 16 planes launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet about 650 miles from Japan.
The Ruptured Duck, encountering sporadic antiaircraft fire that missed its mark, dropped four bombs over Tokyo, including an incendiary device that struck a steel mill.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
We are losing the truly great ones and replacing them with the millenium pansies.
A reminder how hard we have to fight to keep the country Thatcher and his comrades fought to preserve.
Rest in peace, Corporal Thatcher. May your family be comforted at this time of loss by the long time you spent with them, by the knowledge that you were a decent and patriotic citizen who measurably contributed to the well-being of this country, and by the millions who silently mourn your passing.
I met the daughter of one of the Raiders. She swam in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico city. Her father had wrestled in the 1934 Olympics in Berlin. Many of these people had gone on to other accomplishments.
R I P
There has to be a very special place in Heaven for men such as this.
Looking back, I would imagine the Japanese press probably never printed the story, kind of like our media today in America.
I wonder how today’s news media would have played off the bombing of Pearl Harbor. yea, fighting off American imperialism, that would be it. We deserved it doncha know.
The media today is so discussing, I am so happy I don’t even have a TV and have to see or hear their propaganda anymore.
“He was all the way in the back, with those twins guns. ...”
No he wasn’t.
The Doolittle Raiders flew B-25Bs, which were painted olive drab, had a red dot in the center of the white star on the national insignia, had no square windows for waist guns, had their dorsal turret farther back (about even with the rear tips of the nacelles - would be visible in this rear quartering view from below), and did not have cheek guns.
Not sure which version this is, but the first to mount cheek guns was the B-25H.
From the article: Corporal Thatcher, a 20-year-old from Montana, manned a pair of .50-caliber guns in the raid... He rode in the rear of the Mitchell B-25 medium bomber...
Maybe you should let the family know great-grampa was a liar.
Two or three years ago at the air museum next to John Wayne airport, there was a B-17 and a B-24 outside. We got to crawl through the planes fuselage. Tight fit, and I’m just average build guy. I got to see cockpit, gun turrets including belly turret, and imagined flying in those planes with the enemy firing at you. Anyway, lots of respect and honor for those WW2 guys.
They’d cover it. The video would be too good.
” ‘ ... Corporal Thatcher, a 20-year-old from Montana, manned a pair of .50-caliber guns in the raid... He rode in the rear of the Mitchell B-25 medium bomber... ‘
Maybe you should let the family know great-grampa was a liar.”
If Talisker and other forum members had any knowledge of the B-25 (numerous variants over a long production run and a very extended service life), and the Doolittle Raid, they would know that “riding in the tail” meant manning the dorsal turret (the ventral turret was removed from the 34 BMS aircraft used on the raid, to save weight, given the low-level penetration tactic greatly reduced the chances of attack from below). This is explained in detail in _30 Seconds Over Tokyo_, the book by Ted Lawson, one of the 16 pilots on the raid, commanding the crew of Ruptured Duck.
Tail-stinger positions were just then being developed; neither the first four B-17 variants had any, nor the first three or four B-25 variants.
The Raider aircraft mounted broomsticks painted black, to simulate guns. Nobody aviated “all the way back there” until later in the B-25’s combat activities.
Great-grampa wasn’t lying on purpose. I’ve heard hundreds of stories about such exploits, and people remember spottily. Sometimes they change stories and insist they have not.
More likely: his posterity heard it wrong - if they knew what they were hearing at all. And never underestimate the ability of authors and editors to scramble technical details; they are always certain they know better.
As a last resort, check the interior views at the USAF Museum link.
Fair enough. Good defense.
RIP.
RIP Sgt Thatcher
And another view of a B-25B, this one flown in North Africa:
http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/worldwariiaircraft/p/b-25-mitchell.htm
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