Read Online Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott - Free Book Online

years later when he worked on engines and airplanes. Doolittle joined his father in the summer of 1904 on a six-week trip to Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles that turned out to be transformative. “The sights and sounds in the three big cities were strange and exciting to me at age seven, since I had forgotten everything of what I had seen before we went to Nome,” Doolittle later wrote. “I saw my first automobile, train, and trolley car. There were modern houses and stores with paint on them. My values changed right then and there. I saw everything in a new perspective and I wanted very much to be a part of the exciting life I saw all too briefly during that trip.”
    His mother, Rosa, agreed and packed up and returned to California in 1908 with her then eleven-year-old son, leaving his quixotic father behind in Alaska. Rather than return to Doolittle’s native Alameda, she settled near family in Los Angeles. The schoolyard brawls that had helped shape Doolittle’s time in Alaska continued. One such fight caught the attention of an English teacher and boxing instructor, Forest Bailey. “You’re going to get hurt badly fighting the way you do,” Bailey told Doolittle. “You get mad when you fight. If you lose your temper, you’re eventually going to lose a fight because you let your emotions instead of your head rule your body.” Bailey stripped Doolittle of his roughstreet-fighting form and coached him instead on how to bob and weave as well as target his blows with greater power to compensate for his short arms. These skills helped the fifteen-year-old Doolittle, fighting as a 105-pound flyweight, win the Amateur Boxing Championship of the Pacific Coast in 1912.
    But the teenage hothead continued to battle outside the ring as well, landing in jail one Saturday night on a charge of disturbing the peace. The police phoned Doolittle’s mother to come retrieve him. Never a fan of his boxing, she had finally had enough. “She wants you to stay here until Monday morning,” the officer told Doolittle. “She’ll drop by then and get you out in time for school.” The adolescent was stunned that his mother would leave him in jail for the weekend, but the experience taught him an invaluable lesson. “Being incarcerated in a cold, unheated cell for two nights and being totally deprived of the right to leave was a shocking experience for me,” Doolittle later wrote. “I vowed never again to let my emotions overcome reason.” His mother tried to bribe him with a motorcycle to quit boxing, but the crafty teen instead adopted the pseudonym Jim Pierce and used his new bike to motor up and down the West Coast, earning as much as thirty dollars a bout boxing professionally in various clubs.
    Doolittle let his emotions overcome him again when he met Josephine Daniels, a classmate at Los Angeles Manual Arts High School who went by the nickname Joe. The pretty young woman with long dark hair rebuffed her cocky suitor for several years until, like a boxer, he finally wore her down. The two of them could not have been more different. “She was a very good little girl. I was a very naughty little boy,” Doolittle recalled. “She got all A’s; I had a hard time getting C’s.” Joe came from a cultured family, who had moved to California from Louisiana. Her parents frowned on Doolittle, a roughneck who cared little for academics and often sported bruises and a split lip from his battles in the ring. Even Doolittle’s own mother warned Joe that she could do better than her troublesome son. “There’s no doubt that Joe changed my life,” he later said. “I began to comb my hair, wear a tie, look after my clothes, and watch my language around her.” During his senior year of high school he asked her to marry him.
    “You must think I am out of my mind,” she answered. “I could never marry a man who wants to fight all the time.”
    “I’ll give up fighting,”he argued, telling her of his plans to return to