Fri, Mar 01, 2013
Ranks Of 'Doolittle Raiders' Survivors Shrinks To Four
And then there were four. Tom Griffin, who until his death was one of five surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders, passed away Tuesday night at the Fort Thomas VA hospital in Cincinnati, OH.
Griffin was a navigator on one of 16 B-25 bombers that took off from an aircraft carrier for Doolittle's famous raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942. The website Cincinnati.com reports that Griffin's plane, nicknamed "Whirling Dervish", was responsible for knocking out the Tokyo Gas & Electric plant and shutting off the lights in the city.
The plan called for the air crews fly to bases in China after the raid, but those plans changed when the mission was forced to launch 170 nm further from Japan than originally intended. With the exception of one airplane which landed in the Soviet Union, the crews were forced to bail out of their planes over eastern China, and Griffin reportedly traveled thousands of miles behind enemy lines before returning to the U.S. He was re-deployed to North Africa and Europe after three weeks leave, and was shot down during a mission over Sicily on July 4th, 1943. He was a POW in a German camp for two years before the war ended. Griffin had said that the Germans planned to execute all of its POWs on April 30, 1945 ... the day the Allies liberated the camp.
Griffin once said "I'm no hero. I just did my job."
Of the 80 men who survived Doolittle's raid on Tokyo, only four remain. Griffin had hoped to attend the 71st reunion of the Doolittle Raiders, planned for Fort Walton Beach, FL, in April.
(Pictured: B-25 departing the USS Hornet April 18, 1942)
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