DAYTON — The Dayton man who sat next to Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle on the first Army Air Force bombing raid into Tokyo after the attack on Pearl Harbor didn’t know what he volunteered for until he was at sea steaming on an aircraft carrier aiming toward Japan.

“About two days out at sea, they told us the force was bound for Tokyo,” Lt. Col. Richard E. Cole, 96, said in a telephone interview with the Dayton Daily News.

“Everybody had mixed feelings. They were glad to be part of a task force getting back at the enemy. But it also affected the other side of the coin, kind of like, ‘What am I doing here?’ ”

Japanese military had swept through the Pacific Ocean conquering islands and territory, and inflicted a punishing carrier-based bombing run on American Army air and Navy forces stationed at Pearl Harbor and Hickman Field, where more than 2,400 Americans were killed and 1,200 injured.

Eighty Army airmen and Navy sailors were united for the first time in a joint combat mission with high stakes during the April 18, 1942 raid.

Cole, Doolittle and three crewmen were in the first of 16 B-25s to launch off the pitching deck of the USS Hornet a little more than four months after Pearl Harbor. It was only the second time Army bombers had lifted off from a Navy carrier. The Army planes were so large for the ship, they had to be lashed to the flight deck instead of stored below in a hangar bay, shortening the distance even more to launch over the choppy Pacific Ocean.

“These were the first people to attack the Japanese mainland, that’s absolutely the most daring,” said Jeff Underwood, the Air Force museum historian. “Taking off a pitching deck of a carrier in an aircraft that wasn’t designed to take off from carriers that’s pretty impressive, too.”

C.V. Glines, the official historian for the Doolittle Raiders and himself a World War II aviator, said the raid “greatly humiliated” Japanese military leaders who assured their the nation’s population they would not be attacked.

Once the Army Air Force men learned of their harrowing mission, no one backed out.

“We were doing what we were in the (Army) Air Force to do, to fight a war,” Thomas Griffin, 95, of Cincinnati, and one of the five surviving Doolittle Raiders, said of his fellow volunteers.

The air raid launched hours earlier than planned when a Japanese picket boat spotted the naval armada carrying the bombers on deck. With the early liftoff, the air crews didn’t know if they would have enough fuel for a return trip to China.

“That’s pretty heroic to still go ahead and do it to take off and not turn back,” Underwood said. “And they don’t know what’s really waiting for them.”

Cole and his crew dropped incendiary bombs on a Tokyo factory about four hours after the morning takeoff.

The pop of anti-aircraft artillery pummeled the air.

“I don’t know if you call it stressful,” Cole said. “As far as our particular flight went, we were able to fly into Japan and drop our bombs and fly out of Japan and make it to China without anything that was dangerous except over Japan we were jostled around by ack-ack.”

The crew wasn’t scared, he said. “We were just trying to get out of Japan.”

The airmen faced another adversary on the way to China: Lightning and rain roiled the sky as they maneuvered through thunderstorms.

“All the ingredients you don’t want to see as an aviator,” he said. “The weather was so bad you couldn’t land or make any kind of approach to an airport.”

Doolittle ordered his crew to bail out. The plane crashed into the side of a mountain.

“We all bailed out successfully, that was the main part,” Cole said. “All the airplanes were lost except for one. It went to Russia.

“Our crew was all together the next day and through the help of Chinese friendly guerillas,” he said.

Two crewmen drowned off the coast of China. One airmen died when he bailed out. The Japanese captured eight of the raiders and, months later, executed three. Another died in captivity, according to the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders history.

The plane lthat anded in Russia and the crew was held in house arrest for more than a year.

Griffin and his crew parachuted from their bomber, which was nearly out of fuel.

“It was about 10,000 or 11,000 feet in a storm at night. I could hardly see my chute,” he said. As he descended, the parachute caught on tree branches. “Branches of trees hit my face first. Then the next thing I knew, I was hanging on branches of trees, out from a cliff. That was quite a wild night.”

He worked his way to the ground, and waited for morning light as he eventually met with at least two of his fellow crewmen. Chinese residents offered shelter and food. The Americans eventually met Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, Griffin recalled. Some of the Americans remained in China to work with the Chinese air force in the war with Japan.

But the Chinese paid a heavy price for helping the Americans. Japanese troops killed 250,000 people in China after the Doolittle raid, eliminating entire villages in retaliation for helping the Americans, Underwood said.

Doolittle feared he would be court martialed, Underwood said. Instead, the raid’s leader was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military award.

Seventy years later, Cole said “We were just bit players like millions of people in the war and that’s the way we like to think about it.”

But historians see it differently.

“For the American people and for the allies all together, this was a major shot in the arm,” Underwood said. “This gave them the confidence these Japanese forces were not undefeatable. They could be defeated. Up to that point, the Japanese had been winning everything.”

Staff Writer John Nolan contributed to this report.