THE INSTITUTE OF TEXAN CULTURES
ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM
INTERVIEW WITH: Brig. General Richard A. Knobloch
DATE : April 21, 1986
PLACE:
INTERVIEWER:
Airforce Village, San Antonio , Texas
Col . Maurice Dillingham
D: General Knobloch, I unde rstand you were a graduate of
the class of '41-E a t Kelly Airforce Base and not long after
that, were chosen to be a member of General James Doolittle's
mission t o bomb Japan . Would you mind telling a little of
tha t experience and something of your life prior to enter­ing
the flying school.
K: I was born in Wisconsin and raised in Illinois and
then went to the University o f Wisconsin. Always with an
interest in aviation.
I think the thing that rea lly triggered it a ll was in
1927, when Charles Lindberg came t o Milwaukee on a t our
after he had made his f light to Paris. Following that,
according to my mother and my dad, I really was interested
in aviation .
Finally , I was accepted for aviation cadets in November
KNOBLOCH Page 2
K: of 1940 a nd g r aduated i n J uly of 1941. It seems just
a few months after that , when we only had about sixty
hours in the B 25 , 'til April of 1942 , when the Raid took
place . They selected the people to go on the raid from
volunteers . We were all part of the 17th Bomb Group , which
was the only organization in the Uni ted States that had
B 25 ' s.
We had a bout thr ee week s training down at Eglin
Air Force Base in Fl orida and t hen one morning were called
about 4 or 5 in the morning and told , "Pack your bags - - -
we're going to Alameda , California" . Not yet knowing we
were going to raid Japan . It was kept highly classified
and we didn 't even discuss i t among our selves . Only one
person beside General Doolittle in our group knew what
our target was . And that was Jack Hilger. He was the
deputy commander of our little group .
We started with about 22 crews and of these , 16 were
finally selected as the ones to go. We went o ut to t he
West coast to the Sacramento Air Depot firs t a nd spent a
couple of days there , where they did some work on the
aircraft . Then moved on down to Alameda Naval Air Station
and were loaded on board the U. S . S . Hornet. When we
were loaded on the carrier , we were still not sure of
our target . There was a littl e bit of guessing whether
we were going to Japan or maybe we would be going around
KNOBLOCH Page 3
K: the end of South America and attack Rome, Berlin, or
whatever . We really had no idea .
After loading . . . they towed the aircr aft carrier
out into the middle of San Francisco Bay and gave us shore
leave . We could see the carrier from the shore s itting
out there with the B 25 's on the deck. There wer e some
pretty wild parties that night because we knew we were
leaving the next day. We were all aboard by 8 o'clock the
next morning. It was a beautiful day. We sailed out under
the Golden Gate Bridge heading due west . It was pretty
obvious where we were going!
Shortly after we lost sight of land , the captain of
the shi p , Mark Mitscher , came on the P A System and announced
to a ll of us, ''Our destination is Tokyo! " He further sai d
Admiral Bull Ha lsey with an addit ional number of ships
would meet us somewhere north o f Hawaii, and that Bull
Halsey had decl ared he ' d take us righ t i n to Tokyo Bay if
possibl e .
We spent our time on the a ircraf t carrier working on
the aircraft making sure the guns fired properly , checking
bomb shackles , tuning up the engines , and getting everything
ready . We had a whole series of targets that we l ooked at.
They were pretty lenient , permitted us to select the ones
we thought would do the most damage . They were listed in
order of priority .
KNOBLOCH Page 4
K: I forget the date we were met by Bull Halsey ' s task
force, but it was about the 7th of April . We ended up
with two aircraft carriers , four cruisers, eight destroyers
and two tankers. Still heading almost due west toward
Japan.
Finally on the morning of April 18, about five in the
morning, there was a call to General Quarters . And for us,
the Army Air Corps crews, our combat post was our aircraft .
So we rushed to the flight deck and when we got there , were
told to go back down and get our B-4 bags and come back as
soon as we could because we were going to be launched. At
that time while on deck, we could hear and see one of the
cruisers had dropped out of the task force and was shelling
a picket ship , a Japanese picket ship sitting not too far
away. It looked like a small fishing boat. Also some air-cra
ft had been launched from the other carrier in the task
force and they were dive bombing. The reason we had to
be launched is because the Japanese would know where we
were and they would send out aircraft to attack the task
force. It was just about all the naval forces we had, the
United States had, in the Pacific, because most of our
naval power had been lost at Pearl Harbor.
There was much scrambling and getting ready. The seas
were pretty rough; in fact we were taking water over the
bow occasionally when the carrier would get in proper sync
with the waves. It wasn't raining and the base of the
KNOBLOCH Page 5
K: clouds were not too high. The carrier was cruising
at about 20 knots and we probably had about 45 to 50
knots of wind across the deck.
The first aircraft to take off was General Doolittle,
at 8:20. He had no problem getting airborne . The other
aircraft followed in about 3 to 5 minute intervals behind
him . We couldn't use the whole deck because the Navy
didn't want us taking off aft of the superstructure of the
carrier for fear we'd blow a tire or lose an engine and
the aircraft would fly into the superstructure and set the
whole carrier on fire. So we each had the same distance
for our takeoff roll. We taxied to a position just even
with the superstructure and there waited f or the launch
signal.
One of the fellows had a little problem. That was
Ted Lawson. His flaps milked up somehow and instead of
taking off at full fl aps , he took off with zero flaps and
rolled off the end of the deck and we thought, oh, oh, there
goes the first one into the ocean. But he finally pulled up
and recovered and there was no problem. Ted was a damn good
pilot and saved t he airplane.
Trav Hoover also had a problem for he hadn 't rolled
the stabilizer t ab to the proper position. Ted Lawson and
his crew later had a movie made about them and it was
called THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO.
KNOBLOCH Page 6
K: After bombing our targets Ted was hoping that instead of
bailing out, as most of us did, he would try to land on the
beach . The weather turned very bad after we left the target.
And I 'll go back to the target shortly. Most of us went up
into the clouds on instruments but Ted stayed below, right
on the wave tops. He finally hit the coast of China , saw a
stretch of beach and put his gear down, started to land and
miscalculated and hit the water. It makes quite an interesting
story. If you ever get a c hance, see the movie. Thirty Seconds
over Tokyo. Spencer Tracey is Doolittle, and it has many other
stars.
We approached Japan about 1 o ' clock, I ' m going back now
to the bombing of Japan itself. The sixteen airplanes had
s ixteen individual targets . Doolittle had a ll incendiaries on
his aircraft because we had hoped to get off a t dusk and hit
Japan at night . Doolittle being fi rst would set f ires. If
the city was blacked out as we fully expected it to be, we
would have been abl e to use the fires that he started with
his incendiaries to help us find our own individual targets .
However , it was bright daylight and the weather con-stantly
improved as we got closer to Japan and as I said, it
was about 1:00 or 1:30, when we started to bomb . Most of us
were, I won't say lost, because a pilot is never los~but maybe,
a little disoriented as we hit the coast of Japan. So it took
a little flying around until we found some good check points
and could make our runs.
KNOBLOCH Page 7
K: Our particular target was the naval base at the entrance
of Tokyo Bay : Yokosaka. I f you ' ve ever been to a naval yard,
I'm sure you ' re aware of how compact everything is and you
can ' t miss with bombs . We had three 500 pound demolit ion and
one 500 pound incendiary. It was an incendiary cluster of about
125 little individual bomblets . When t he casing hit the air
stream, it broke up into these 125 littl e bomblets and scatter­ed
across the naval yard . You couldn ' t miss . The 300 bombs
came down right on target. I was co-pilot . As a l l pilots
know, a co- pilot doesn ' t really have much to do, just to get
his hands slapped now and then and told to serve the coffee
and that sort of thing.
One thing I did do, I took some pictures over the target.
They happen to be the only pictures that came out of t he
Tokyo raid . I took one out of the right side and one o ut of
the left . We all had cameras in our aircraft but we l ost all
the a ircraft so we l ost all the cameras except mine which I
b a iled out with. So any pictures you see taken over Japan,
were mine . I guess that makes me the official photographer .
So I was doing somethi ng over the target!
Left Japan and headed back out to sea to confuse the
J a panese. All the time we were flying as l ow as we possi bly
could . In fact, we had to pull up to about a thousand feet
to drop our bombs so the demolition wouldn ' t blow us out of
the sky . We headed out to sea to confuse the Japanese for
KNOBLOCH Page 8
K: they would think we were going to some secret base out
1n the ocean. When we lost sight of land, we headed back
around the tip of Japan and across the Yellow Sea into China.
The weather, which had been good over Japan, steadily got
worse. Most of the aircraft climbed up into the weather and
we had automatic pilots and it was something . it wasn't
the type they have now, they called it AFCE, Automatic Flight
Control Equipment. It was electrical, not very good, but
you didn't have t o work too hard.
We flew about fourteen hours and then the gauges started
to look pretty empty on all the tanks. The indicator was
flickering against the empty. We knew it was time to get out.
The pilot, McElroy put it on AFCE, and we gathered around the
escape hatch, which didn't look very interesting because it's
only about two feet square and it's in the bottom of t he B 25.
You just lifted up a little f loor and then you pulled the
l ever and kicked the hatch out. And here was this black hole
with rain seeping up in, it sort of reminded me of the black
hole of Calcutta, which I saw later. The crew chief was
supposed to go first so Adam Williams started to get out and
then crawled back in. He got his l egs out and he crawled
back up in . . . and he shook hands with all of us ...
and he said, "Wel ~ so long fellows." Then he started to go
out again and then he started to crawl back up again and I
put my foot on his head and pushed him out and said, "See
KNOBLOCH Page 9
K: you on the ground!" The bombardier , who was a sergeant,
went next , then the navigator , then myself, then the pilot .
I was scared only one time on that raid. And that ' s when
my parachute opened. I had never bailed out before . In fact,
none of us had except Doolittle. All the people that were on
t he raid , 16 a i rpl anes, 5 men to a plane , 80 men, only one
man had ever bailed out. It was Doolittle ' s t hird jump.
When that parachute opened, there was a jerk and I
thought to myself, oh, oh, your parachute canopy is tangled
i n the empennage (tail assembly). So I was frightened . But
then the next thing I knew, I was swinging gently down through
the clouds. So I got over that and right away thinking, what
am I going to do when I hit the ground? Because we didn't
know where we were over China. We didn ' t know whether we were
over l and or Japanese- occupied China or free China. It was a
little interesting thinking , "What are you going to do to
evade the Japanese?" And if you come down in the water , are
you going to survive?
But then I b roke out of the overcast and in spite of the
fact that it was pitch black, I saw what looked like a road
and a river down below. I thought , gee , that ' s great. I'll
be able to come down near a hamburger stand and get a hamburger
and a glass of milk. But I hit the ground about that time
without any warning. It was wet . Landed in a rice paddy!
KNOBLOCH Page 10
K: wasn ' t hurt; took my parachute, rolled it up in a ball
and tucked it under a bush alongside the rice paddy and then
started to walk. I had a little t iny compass they ' d given
us and we had agreed that we would all walk on the heading
that the airplane was on when we bailed out, hoping that we
could assemble .
I walked a little way and I had a flashli ght along with
my camera in a pocke t of my flying suit. I had a couple of
cans of C rations. I took the flashlight out and flashed it
around the sky a little bit and got seven answers. Or seven
l ights also flashing. I thought to mys e l f well t here 's only
five of us in the crew and seven lights . Gosh, it didn' t take
much of a mathematician to figure there was somebody else out
there . I put that flashlight away and didn't use it.
Well, anyway, walked a ways and got to a river , a creek ,
and started to wade across it and got up to about my waist
and decided it was goi ng to be too deep. So went back and
found a stack of rice straw and crawled into it to keep warm
for it was raining. Pretty soon I saw a light coming toward
me . It was the pilot who was walking in a reciprocal course
of the airplane. I didn ' t know that. I could just see
somebody's legs and he got to the other side of t he water
and t he light went out . I sat t here a while and finally said ,
"Hey" and didn't get any answer. Tried it again a little
louder : "Hey!" Still no answer . And finally , r eal loud ,
KNOBLOCH Page 11
K: yelled , "Hey Mac." A voice carne back , "I s that you Knobby? "
So I knew it was McElroy . We chatted a while across this
water and I told h im it was too deep to wade. He said, "O . K.
I'll stay over here , you stay over there 'til dawn and we ' ll
see if we can get together. " It was about eleven , twelve
o'clock , at night.
I went back to the stack of rice s t raw t hen and curled up .
It was nice a nd warm in t here and I must have fa llen asleep
because first thing I knew , it was daylight . We were able
to get together the next morning. We found a little . .. you
wouldn ' t really call it a boat ... it resembled one ... and
I paddled across to Mac ' s side and took him back to the side
of the river I was on . I ' d lost my 45 , when I bailed out .
Very foolishly had put my cartridge belt on over my parachute
harness so when t h e chute opened , the 45 flew off . So I lost it .
Mac said , "You don ' t have to worry , I ' ll prot ect you ."
We still didn ' t know where we were. We started walking on
the aircraft reciprocal he ading , saw a couple of people and
they avoided us, made big circles a round us . They were
obviously peasants , Chinese farmers . We headed toward a
village , and then people carne out of the v illage and started
to g ather . Mac says , "I'll stay out here and protect you and
you go in there and see if you can find out where we are ."
I went into the village and they t ook me to one of t he mud
houses and gave me some hot water with an egg in it; food .
KNOBLOCH Page 12
K: I kept trying to talk to them but couldn't. I knew they
were Chinese. They knew no English. Finally I heard a voice
say, "Do you speak English or American?" It shocked me. I
was so surprised that I looked all around, but couldn't find
the source. Pretty soon this voice says, "Are you English
or American?" And here was a guy right in front of me . I
said, " Oh , boy, you speak English!" But that ' s all he knew.
He knew no other word. He didn't know thanks, please , yes,
goodbye, north, south, east or west. Knew no other words.
I went back out to M.ac and said, "They don't know a
thing in that village!" So we started to walk again . Pretty
soon we came across the other crew members . Our crew chief,
Adam Williams , had bailed out with two 45's on his cartridge
belt . He gave me one so I was finally armed again .
We started going through the country side. A boy about
fourteen or sixteen years old ran in front of us , and made
noises like a gun and made believe he was shooting. Then
got in fron t of us and pushed us. So we decided that was n ' t
the right way so we just headed off in another direction . Then
he smiled and it was all right.
We walked a while and pretty soon, came upon a man with
a weapon; a rifle . He stopped and presented arms type of
thing with his gun a t the ready. We kept trying to talk t o
him. He had no uniform but he had a little button with the
flag of China on it. So we f i gured , well, he ' s Chinese.
KNOBLOCH Page 13
K: And then as we got c l oser, I jumped him and took his gun
away . It almost came apart in my hands. I found i t was tied
together with rice straw. I opened it and there was no bullet
in it. Thi s Chinese lacked everything but courage. He didn ' t
know who we were. But anyway he was a guerilla , fighting
behind the lines and without weapons as obviously his gun was
no good . He took us to a command post and there we found a
captain who spoke a little English. He took us to another place
and we f inally assembled with the oth ers .
There were eighty men on that raid and so there are eighty
d i fferent stories. And the way I have described what happened
to me , in short , because I haven't really gone into detail ,
is just my version . And you must r emember t hat this is 44
years later . And as one gets older , one is inclined to forget .
And I won't say you lie a little bit but maybe your stories
are embelli s hed a little to make it more interesting .
D: Did all of your crew members survive the bail-out and
return to the States?
K: All five of our crew survived the bail out. The e ngineer
sprained an ankle a little but it didn ' t interfere too much
with h i s walking .
Today , out of the sixteen crews our crew is the only
crew with all five crew members still a live . All the other
crews have lost one , two , three or four of the five t hat were
in each crew.
KNOBLOCH Page 14
D: I k now t hat all of your gr oup have kept in very close
touch with each other through the years. I understand you
have another reunion very soon.
K: Yes. We're going out to the Gathering of Eagles in Las
Vegas , this coming week . Get there the 27th of April through
the 1 s t of May. Of the 46 that a r e surviving today out of
the original 80, there will be 36 of us present.
I should mention t his. There were eleven c rews that
bailed out . Four either ditched or crash landed. One crew
went to Vladivostok.* [see interview with Col. Edward J .
York* EGMJ
President Roosevelt had asked Joseph Stalin, the Soviet
leader , if all the airplanes could go to Russia because it
would have saved all the airplanes . The distance to Vladivostok
was not very far . But St a l in was busy on t he western fron t
with t he Germans. And he said , "Under no circumstances. No
airplanes can come." But this f e l low had excessive gas
consumption and it was the onl y thing he could do was to head
up to Vladivostok and land wheels down . So his crew became
guests of the Kremli n , if you will. They were interned and
f inally, f i fteen months later , tl~y escaped from Russia acr oss
the Iranian border and turned thems e lves in to the American
consul.
K: I didn ' t menti on the results of t he raid and I think I
shoul d . Everyone says , "How coul d you do any damage with four
KNOBLOCH Page 15
K: 500 pound bombs?" And in these days of nuclear weapons,
aircraft that carry sophisticated weapons and tons of high
explosives-- Our material damage , although not substantial,
was considerable. So firs t of course, was the materiel damage.
Secondly was the morale impact. It was good for the morale
of the U.S. and its Allies and bad for the morale of the Japanese
and the Axis powers. It was obvious that Japan could be attacked.
This was just the first strike of many others t o follow .
Third , another effect of the raid was the Japanese had
expanded their perimeter into China; they were making attacks
on Australia; they had sunk two British battle s hips the
Repulse and the Prince of Wales in the Indian Ocean . They
had taken Indonesia. As a result of our attack on the homeland,
sea, and air forces back to Japan to protect the Emperor and
their home islands.
Also, number four, they got the forces back to Japan and
then said, "O.K. now in order t o prevent another attack like
this, we are going to have to go for the United States." So
they assembled a fleet, a very large task force, and headed
east towards the United States. They were intercepted and
as a result, they were intercepted near Midway, the Battle of
Midway occurred. There was a large Japanese fleet and a very
small U.S. fleet. The U.S. navy , was very much outnumber ed
but they whipped the pants off the Japanese and that stopped
the movement towards the western coast of the United States.
That was strategically the biggest impact of the Tokyo raid.
KNOBLOCH Page 16
D: Thank you, General Knobloch. I appreciate this inside
information. I know it will be valuable in the library of
The Institute of Texan Cultures.
K: You're quite welcome; it's a pleasure to tell my story.
D: I should menti on that this interview took place within a
few day s of the forty-fourth anniversary date of the Tokyo
raid. ( 18 Apri 1 1942)
END OF TAPE I, Side 1, 27 minutes
END OF INTERVIEW
GENERAL RICHARD A. KNOBLOCH
Tokyo
General James Doolittle's raid on~Japan, April, 22, 1942
General Knobloch recounts the secrecy surrounding the preparations,
the rather brief training and equipping period, the departure from San
Francisco and the meeting rnidway with Admiral Bull Halsey's naval escort.
The actual bombing of Tokyo and the forced bail out over China.
The raid's impact on the Japanese and Axis as well on our Allies.