Oral History with Col. Horace "Sally" Crouch

              Oral History with Horace Crouch 
Interviewee: Crouch, Horace, 1918-2005
Interviewer: Shaw, Sarah; Price, Ellen 
Date: June 12, 1997 
Location: 1431 Assembly Street, Columbia, S.C.

SHAW: Colonel Horace Crouch, who was a member of Doolittle's Raiders in World War II, and we're glad to have you here today and would like to ask you a few questions.  The first one that I have is for you just to tell us a little bit about your early life, for instance, where you were born, grew up, went to school, and your favorite activities.   
CROUCH: Well, I was born here in Columbia at 1511 McDuffie Street, which is across the street from what is now the Providence Hospital area there.  Then our family moved to 1611 Marion Street just a block above the Baptist Hospital, and that was where I spent my boyhood and high school heydays and so on.  I attended Taylor School, Wardlaw Junior High School and Columbia High School there and graduated in 1936, and then went to the Citadel in Charleston there.  I was in the class of '40 then at the Citadel.  Upon graduating from the Citadel, I immediately went into the Air Force and that was in August of 1940 there.  So that very quickly covers my boyhood and early school years.   
SHAW: What do you remember about growing up in Columbia?  What did you do as pastime activities or any graduate memories of Columbia, how it's different from today?   
CROUCH: Well I was raised virtually in the YMCA.  We lived only two blocks from the YMCA, and I participated in their activities all during those years.  As far as other landmarks and what not about the city, it's a little difficult there mostly in my memory because I have not been out, they've been taken up and put some place, I don't know, but one I remember here on Assembly Street just a block from here there was a watering fountain for horses a block up the way there.  I remember that very vividly, and of course I remember the old southern railroad station.  My father was an engineer with the Southern railroad at that time, and of course the Seaboard station there, all of which do not exist any longer.  However, we happened to make a trip to the holy land and we found over there that most all the landmarks of Jesus’s time were 30 feet underground there because of earthquakes and what have you.  That's pretty much my situation here in Columbia.  Most all of the landmarks and what not have been taken up and put some place else.   
SHAW: Not quite 30 feet underground now but --   
CROUCH: Yeah, not quite 30 feet as yet.  Of course that was some 1,900 years ago thereabouts.   
SHAW: Well the pace of life here, was it slower when you were growing up or how would you describe it?   
CROUCH: Oh yes, much slower indeed.  The incidents of somebody getting run over or something like that very seldom ever happened in those days.  Marion Street is just two blocks from Main Street as you know, and I can remember the time when they pulled the road scraper with a team of six horses in front there in order to keep the street smooth in front and -- 
SHAW: So they weren't paved.   
CROUCH: That's right, and Marion Street was not paved at that time, and Taylor Street also was not paved, and the nurse's home was a very large building, wooden structure building that faced Marion Street.  But its longest length was on Taylor Street there, and I remember on occasion it was quite frustrating going past that end because the nurses would always flirt with anybody that would go passed there.   
PRICE:  You tried to make your way to the YMCA.   
CROUCH: Pardon?   
PRICE: You tried to make your way to the YMCA.   
CROUCH: Yeah, quite true indeed.   
PRICE: Now what were social activities like in that time?  Were they very different from what we have now?   
CROUCH: Well, yes indeed they were.  We had the usual dances at the high school.  They had a band.  Being Baptist, we didn't have any dancing in connection with the Baptist activities, and then of course we had the run of intermural sports at Columbia High school, and that just about did it with of course having a debate club there and so on but they were not as much pursued as they are nowadays because many of our students lived too far away to commute and participate in some of the activities there; whereas today, the children have automobiles and they can participate in more activities than we did in those days.   
PRICE: How did your interest in flying develop? Was that an early interest or something that developed later in college?   
CROUCH: Well, it developed while I was in college.  Then, of course, attending a military school and then to at that time, Hitler was having considerable success in Europe and subduing battle, and it was rather evident that we were going to have trouble there, and being attending the Citadel they trained us as a soldier why more or less we had a soldier's attitude to serve the country, especially under such circumstances such as World War II and so on, but that's about the extent of it as I recalled it now. What was the rest of the question?   
PRICE: Did you actually take flying lessons through the Citadel?   
CROUCH: Oh yeah.  No, I didn't take flying lessons at the Citadel there.  They had the type of civilian military training for college students at that time, but I never did embrace that.  That happened about my senior year there, and I didn't take time to get it through that, but I did qualify for the Air Force physical in my junior year and of course it held on through my senior year, and my obligation to report for duty with the Air Force at that time.   
PRICE: So you did go immediately into the Air Force.   
CROUCH: Yes I did, but I was not successful in the pilot training program so I was reassigned to the navigation school, and so that's how I ended up as a crew member and navigator.  Basically that was my upgrading, and then later on I qualified as a bombardier so that it covered two stations as a navigator, directing the aircraft to the target and then bombardier, identifying the target together with the pilots and other crew members, and bombing the target, participating in whatever combat we needed going in or coming out there as I had a gun station as well so actually I was navigator bombardier and forward gunner and I say, it takes up the time and keeps you from being nervous there to have something else and something to do.   
SHAW: What tours of duty did you have?   
CROUCH: Well, my first Air Force training was at the Hicks Field, Fort Worth, Texas, where I accomplished only 19 hours and 45 minutes of pilot training before they decided that it was a little too dangerous for me to be in the air.  They told me that they had in mind flying more than one aircraft a day but they would prefer to reserve it all for me the day I had to fly in there, but I also held the speed record for landings there.  I approached the field 9 times and landed 3 times so that meant that I was going on a rather tight circle using bad judgment and so on, but anyway, from Hicks Field in November of 1940, I was transferred to Barksdale Field, Shreveport, Louisiana, and entered the 1st Army Aerial Navigation School there.  Our class there corresponded to the second Pan-American school which was located in Miami, Florida, and we were in training only for a little over three months in order to get our navigator's wings at that time there.  Things were beginning to speed up rather quickly in those days.  Then I was assigned to the 89th Recognizance Squadron which was a part of the 17th bomb group located at McChord Field in Tacoma, Washington, there, and I was with them up to the time that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and at that time, being in the Washington-Oregon area we mounted sea patrols against any invasion from the ocean side there, and on the 12th of December in 1941, one of our planes sank a Japanese sub off the Oregon Coast there, so the 7th of December wasn't too far behind them before they had submarines right at our front door.   
SHAW: That's hard to believe.   
CROUCH: Yes, and then in February of 1942, we moved on a security move, moved our entire group from Pendleton, Oregon, and our ultimate destination was not made known to us except from point to point as we proceeded across country.  They kept that a secret from us and we ended up here in Columbia, South Carolina, of all things.  Go back just a bit to December 7, 1941, my wife Mary and I, we were married on December 5, two days before Pearl Harbor, and we were located in our station at that time in Pendleton, Oregon, and so we have been pretty much together ever since.   
SHAW: So two momentous events right there close together.   
CROUCH: Yes indeed.   
SHAW: What kind of decorations did you receive through your military career?   
CROUCH: Decorations never did attract my attention during the mission.  My primary concern was doing the mission charged at hand.  However the headquarters set up certain standards and criteria.  For instance, in the European Theatre, you would get an air medal for every 5 missions you survived.  For us in China, we would get an air medal for 25 missions, so they considered the Japanese was not to be quite as dangerous as the Germans, something on that order.  But it all depends on whether they hit you there and so on, but for the raid on Japan, the generals in China had quite a bit of a fight as to whether they should give us anything or not, and as far as most of us were concerned, we had no ambition or thought about medals or awards, or anything like that.  We just thought we did the duty at hand and that was the end of it.  But General Stilwell was against giving us any award at all for it.  General Bissell and a few others, they were otherwise.  Of course it was the Army Air Corps back in those days and Stilwell carried quite a bit of weight there, and Bissell of course was Army Air Corps there, but of course didn't have the rank that he had.  What we received for that mission, a DFC, which is the same medal that was awarded to Charles Lindbergh when he made his flight across the ocean.  It was a medal which could be awarded during either peacetime or war time there, and then the Chinese Government gave us a medal.  It is the medal of the Army Navy Air Force Grade A Class 1.  Sounds like a bottle of milk, something of that sort there.  And that’s what happened for the raid on Japan, and then for the rest of my service, when we arrived in China, and eventually in India preparing to come back to the States there, some 20 or so of us were reassigned to units that were going to operate in China and then Burma there, we were affiliates.  The crews had lost members due to sickness or what have you on the way over there.  All basic orders when we left Columbia here was that we were to accomplish that one mission and return to our home units; that is leave Columbia, come back to Columbia.  I got back to Columbia 14 months later.   
PRICE: That was a long mission.   
CROUCH: That’s the way somehow to be prepared for most anything and something of that sort.   
PRICE: Was there any training that was particular to the Tokyo Raid?   
CROUCH: Well that comes back to here in Columbia.  This is basically where we received the invitation to join the mission that was to be led by then Lieutenant Colonel, Jimmy Doolittle, and of course everyone knew Jimmy Doolittle's expertise and they were more than willing to go on the mission that he would be directing.  And so we had no trouble there.  We took 25 groups from Columbia here.  We couldn't stay here because we didn't have the security we needed at the Columbia Air Base.  It was entirely too open there, so they assigned us to Eglin Field in Florida near Fort Walter, Florida, and however we did a lot of training, some of it even here in Columbia. But the training was done individually by crews, so I cannot vouch for what some of the other crews did and where they did it.  My own particular crew, we did most of our training on the Gulf Coast area there.  Eglin Field, long-range navigation was from there to Tampa to Houston, which according to the book now our aircraft could not accomplish.  However, they had developed certain throttle settings for our mission that enabled us to go that far, and the operations officers were supposed to authorize you to leave the field there and would frequently refuse to sign the release there.  But all our pilots had to do was to tell them that was General Doolittle's B-25 project detachment, and they simply turned the permission slip around and they could sign their own fate or what have you on that one.  They could sign, and we lost only one aircraft during our training and that was in a practice takeoff there.  He stalled out just shortly after a very short takeoff there.  Very fortunately, no one in that crew was injured.  They all walked away from it.   
SHAW: So you were getting prepared for what they call the Tokyo Raid?  Is that what they...  
CROUCH: Well, that we didn't know until much, much later there.   
SHAW: But you were a navigator?   
CROUCH: That's right.   
SHAW: For that?   
CROUCH: We, as I said, had the aircraft modified and had to add considerable fuel tanks to the aircraft.  They had to take out a lower turret, a gun turret, and put in a gas can there, and then they devised a balloon tank which they put over the bomb bay and the balloon tank was simply a balloon pretty much like you would blow up there.  Of course it was reinforced a little better than just that, but still it was a flexible and collapsible affair there.  And then on each aircraft they put two wooden guns out the tail end of our aircraft there; and I do believe that on one occasion in our mission that our aircraft was saved from being shot down because a Japanese pursuit plane came in close enough.  He first shot up the de-icing (inaudible) on our left wing tip and our antennas, and he came in so close that he could see these guns pointing at him and he broke off his approach from that direction in order to come in from another direction, and we were able to get into the clouds before he got back for the second pass, so I do believe that the wooden guns served their purpose indeed.   
SHAW: Sounds so.  What were the chief difficulties and challenges of navigating on that particular flight to Tokyo?   
CROUCH: Well, of course in all preparations and all types of military operations or government operations you might say, whatever you prepare for is going to turn out to be oddly the opposite path, so once we got aboard the carrier, and that was the first time it was known to us that we were going to attack the mainland in Japan, we had no idea prior to that time and that's because our people adhered to the instructions of keeping their mouths shut, not speculating sort of where we might be.  But anyway, where were we headed there?   
SHAW: Difficulties and challenges on this flight.   
CROUCH: And I was not to complain about the way government does its business and so on, but we did all of our training during daylight.  We didn't fly at night at all, and in the initial breaking to us concerning the mission as to what it's going to be, it was going to be a night mission.  So we prepared to go at night there.  General Doolittle was going to take off so as to arrive over Tokyo just at dusk, and he had all incendiaries, and he was to light up the target there so those of us going to Tokyo could come in there, see his fires and come in there.  Then the rest of us were supposed to proceed in at night in formations of three aircraft each, the 15 remaining aircraft that would be five elements going in, but as I said, the good Lord stepped in and saved the day.  He had us to take off 10 hours early and that robbed us in the neighborhood of around 250 miles travel as far as the aircraft was concerned, and when you brought that back from where we were supposed to land in China, that puts you about 25 to 50 miles at sea, and hard ground to walk on was not seen out there.  So that was something that faced us on the matter of taking off so early.  However, the good Lord gave us tail winds on the last two legs and 15 of us who turned south to go to China all reached China there.  Now some of them only got to the coast or what have you like that and so on and our particular aircraft, we bailed out of our aircraft about 25 miles due north of our rendezvous base.  We were in the clouds and I had no idea where in the world we were.  We did see the coastline as we went over that and so we knew that we were certainly over land, but as to where over land, that was something else; of course I simply had my map and I was doing what is known as dead reckoning.  That is simply that by your compass course, your deviation, and your drift and that's the end of it, you hope you will hit there.  But I had no navigation reference for some 600 miles across the East China Sea, and the good Lord guided our aircraft to such an extent that we missed our destination only 25 miles.   
SHAW: That's very close.   
CROUCH: And according to the statistics, that's not a bad effort there.  You should be able to find out where you are at that time.  And another thing, with our aircraft being aboard the carrier, they had an unknown deviation induced into their compasses.  A deviation is an error in your compass error in the installation, you see, and that was possibly due to the metal environment where they were, and also because we did some practice gunnery while we were aboard the carrier and that vibrated the ship quite a bit and as you know, it will change the magnetism if you strike a magnet like so.  It will cause the lines to take up a different orientation, and so virtually our own aircrafts had different types of deviation as they went in.  Basically, we were briefed into one point, we were supposed to go into a sync up point in Nomo-saki going into Tokyo, and some of the aircraft goes through north of the course, some south of it, and some of us were fortunate to fly in pretty much the brief course there.  So that gave some element of surprise to our attack ultimately.  There again the good Lord has been there with us you see.  And then the other part is we lost no personnel, no aircraft over Japan proper and the Japanese could not boast of having downed any of them at all, and we had only 16 aircraft but we did attack them with the 16 aircraft, we did go to targets, we believe military targets there.  We had an excellent intelligence to study.  We knew the appearance of the target on the ground or what have you.  Of course in all daylight photography there.  It would have looked different at night.  So again, the good Lord's plan to change it from a night attack to a day attack was indeed definitely in behalf of the success of the missions that we had.   
SHAW: And what kind of targets were you trying to hit?   
CROUCH: They went after strategic targets, installations where they fabricated war materials, and that was the type of targets that we had assigned to us.  We bombed a precision instrument factory just north of the Tama River, which is half way between Tokyo and Yokohama.  Tokyo and Yokohama is virtually one solid city from the north of the Bay to the south of the Bay there, and we were fortunate we didn't come under attack except as we were approaching our target, we received some fire from a ship that was leaving the bay there, but he was firing solid ammunition at us.  We had no bursts around us there.  We were able to bomb our target without any interference, and soon as we did why I closed bomb bay doors and gave my usual report “bomb bay doors bombs away.  Bomb bay doors closed” and I told him let's go to the ground because the idea was for us to be able to meet at treetop level.  We were supposed to come in treetop level, climb up when we saw a target, bomb and go back down again and so I told him let's go to the ground and the pilot says no, he says nobody's bothered us so far, he says if we started maneuvering around that would enable them to get suspicious and really get after us for sure, and he had no sooner got that out of his mouth, five zeros appeared right above us, five of them there, and at the same time flack from underneath us there.  Well of course those Japs are not going to fly down to us into that flack down below when they could stay out of the way of them, and so I was up in the nose and I had a ring-side seat as to the flack from down below us there, and it was very accurate, so I called to the pilot “left and down” meaning that what I wanted him to do was to take a left turn and then dive to the ground, but he interpreted “left and down” exactly as anyone would, the idea is drop your left wing and go to the ground, and he did that and we picked up a six inch hole which was two inches from our rudder cable pulley there, and had it broken our rudder cable there it would have been very difficult to come out of that dive for sure, but it being two inches away from it, why we were two inches safe side of it.  And we got away from the contested area there, but two of the Japs that were above us followed us there, and one of them came in close enough our pilot figured that he could not outrun him, so he pulled into him to fight him.  He didn't tell us anything about that.  Being up in the nose of that aircraft as soon as he, when he turned our aircraft directly into the Jap's face there, and that put me right out in the front, I could look right down that prop hub to see him there.  I looked down for just a minute to see how many holes I had in me there, and then I can't explain, but I was able to retrieve my gun from a lower nozzle, take it out of there, physically take it out of there, and put it out in the nozzle on the left hand side, and being for the grace of God because I had gun ports only forward, down and to the left, and those were the only holes that I had there.  I did not have a hole in the right side, so the good Lord brought him up on the left hand side over there, and I could bring my gun to bear on him.  So together with our rear turret guns there and my gun, why we sent him down in smoke there and got away from him.  And shortly thereafter, we got to the situation we were going to, the pilot just announced “I'm going to start climbing into the clouds” he said, and I wished he had kept his mouth shut because every time he opened his mouth we were in trouble.   
SHAW: And he didn't listen to you?   
CROUCH: But he said I'm going to climb to the clouds, just to let us know what he's going to do, and as he started into the clouds, that's when this Jap came up behind us there, and he was so close behind us that his guns were broadcast through the throat mics of our rear gunman.  I could hear him on my headset, and so the de-icer (inaudible) on the left wing dip got shot away and the antennas got shot away there, and that's when he came in and saw the wooden guns, dropped off, and we were able to get into the clouds and get away from them there.   
SHAW: So you went in one time and bombed your targets and then when you were empty of bombs you went away? 
CROUCH: Well of course the idea was it was a one-way trip.  You take off from the carriers, you go in, you attack your target, and then you continue on around to Japan into China there, and so that was it.  As a matter of fact, the pilot asked me after we took off from the carrier what time would we get to the target.  Well it's impossible for me to let him know that because I had no idea where we took off from.  All they gave us was a course to fly, not how far.  I had no idea how far we were going to have to fly to get there.  My job was to keep us on that course and hope that Japan was still there when we got there.   
SHAW: Do you know how many hours though, the total bombing raid took by the time, from the time you left to the time you got back to (inaudible)?   
CROUCH: I don't know, it was just slightly different between the different aircrafts there.  Our aircraft, we clocked in the neighborhood of 14 hours, and that aircraft normally you can only keep it aloft for four hours, normal cruising at 180 and so on you see.   
SHAW: You mean for gas?   
CROUCH: That's right.   
SHAW: And how did you extend it for 10 hours or so?   
CROUCH: Of course there was the additional gas cans we had and so on.  And that's something that aboard the carrier when they decided that they would put cans of gasoline into the rear of our aircraft there, and our engineer gunners and radio operators could fill the lower turret tank from those there, and they replenished those with in the neighborhood of around 50 or 60 gallons of gasoline re-fueling so to speak.  We refueled ourselves on the way in.  Another thing about the way we proceeded in, we did not proceed in with general lead all alone, because the surface wind was such that it was very rough and we had to wait between aircraft and in our particular case, once we took off we never saw another one of those aircrafts, never did, and we were by ourselves all the way through our mission there and so were a lot of the other aircrafts as well, and so that was another thing that together with the errors in navigation which caused us to go in too early.  Had we not had that error in navigation, if we had gone right straight down the one corridor, they certainly would have brought in… of course artillery tactics is that if an enemy comes at you from one direction, look for him to come the same direction the second time, and so they had in the Hornet’s ward room the mess area, a five-foot hornets’ nest… I don't know where in the world they got such a…but it was a natural nest there.  Every time they briefed us on, everybody going on the same route as we would leave the briefing room and you would thump that hornets’ nest indicating that somebody is going to get stung.   
SHAW: So you say you didn't see any of the other planes while you were on the mission, so each plane had a separate target?   
CROUCH: Well we had a target in the same area, but the other two aircrafts in our particular flight, where in the world they went I don't know.   
PRICE: So when you say you were flying alone, you actually didn't even see your two partners in that flight?   
CROUCH: That's right.   
PRICE: Entirely.   
CROUCH: Just like we were out there by ourselves.   
PRICE:  What happened to you after you made it to China and had -- 
CROUCH: Well they, the last encounter was where the, when the Jap came up behind us and shot the deicing (inaudible) there, we were west of Yokohama at the time, and we wanted to depart from an island south of Yokohama there, so I directed the aircraft to that particular point, and then we feinted back into the Pacific to give them the idea that we were going back into the Pacific to get our relief or what not in that direction there; rather than give them the idea that we were going to go to China because they gave us specific orders not to fly over Japan.  They figured that definitely we would get shot down if we were exposed so long.  Of course Japan is not that big, but anyway, all of us had to come back out to the East Coast and down the East Coast and then around the bottom tip of the southernmost island and across to our rendezvous base in China there.  The weather was beautiful over Japan as we got within, oh, 10-15 miles over Japan and our flight in, why it just opened up like a beautiful day there over Japan, so we were not hindered as far as not locating our targets were concerned.  We had some shelter from the clouds coming in and then as we were going out as well, we moved out of sight of land to go down the East Coast there, and then as we approached China, it began getting dark and also the clouds were forcing us down.  We flew at low altitudes because that's your best altitude for fuel conservation.  Your engine doesn't have to work as hard to give you the horsepower there.  You have atmospheric pressure for your engine, and that's what it needs to be sure to get its gasoline. But anyway, flying very low as we approached the China coast, and our engineer gunner had gone up to the nose and he was sitting up there and I just was messing around with my charts in the navigation compartment there, and he, I had just handed the pilot a note and giving him the next course to fly going in.  I told him in ten minutes, start climbing 300 feet a minute there, until we got over 4,000 feet and as soon as I handed him the note there, the engineer got up and said land ho.  It was an island we were passing over, but I could not, we couldn't see either way to get an idea of how many islands there were or what sort of area we were in at all.  So the pilot noticed ten minutes before my ETA, we were ten minutes early there.  He asked me, he says how much altitude do we need and how long?  I told him, I says we need over 4,000 feet in the next ten minutes so he need not call me again and so he circled just not gaining his altitude there.  He circled over there, the water area there, and so while he was doing that, that was the only coward incident that I can recall of myself at that time because while he was climbing up there, I was looking at my watch.  I had it covered with one hand and I would look at it and I was looking for the ten minutes to pass, I knew that if we lived after ten minutes we had a chance at getting through it.  But we had to live through the next ten minutes for sure and every now and then I would look and see how much time had passed and so on there.  But he was a clever fellow and he went to 8,000 feet rather than 4,000 feet because he figured if we had to bail out, we needed time to get out and so on, and so we continued on in and as I said, we bailed out approximately 25 miles north and a little west of the line directly through our rendezvous point there.  We made a mistake in our aircraft, we had an armament specialist in the rear of our aircraft, and in an effort to make sure that he got out for sure, we delayed in getting out in the other part of the aircraft, so we were separated on the ground.  We didn't meet up with each other until a couple of days later.   
BENSON: And you landed in on an island or on the mainland of China?   
CROUCH: Oh we were on the mainland, we were in the neighborhood of 150 so miles inland at that time.   
PRICE: Were you out in the woods or near a town or, what was it? 
CROUCH: Well in China there were very few woods.  They had already chopped it down and burned it up.  They do have some forest but not very much, not very much, and I landed over on the side of a rather steep hill there.  It was so steep that I had to crawl, I couldn't stand up there.  Once I landed with my ‘shute, my idea was that they had given us each case knives and basically the idea was if you landed in the water to use the case knives to cut yourself out a parachute.  Well I wasn't in the water but I was in my parachute, so for some reason I got my case knife and I started sawing on my harness there to get out of it, and after a few minutes, I realized that that wasn't necessary.  I could just unbuckle it and get out of it without all that trouble there, so I put my knife back in the case there and got out of the parachute and I climbed up the side of this hill.  I had to climb up 50 or 75 feet to get up to a saddle area that was level where I could lie down or stand up and so on.  And I attempted to go back down to get my parachute to make me a shelter and cover up with, you know, ten o'clock at night at that time, but it was so tangled up I couldn't get it out, so being small, it helped out in this particular case, because I took my Mae West off and I actually put my body completely in my Mae West and used that as a mattress, and then with my jacket covered myself there and so on.  So that was my night's lodging, my first night lodging.   
PRICE: What is a Mae West?   
CROUCH: Mae West is, that's your life preserver.  And why…pardon me if I don't go any further.   
BENSON: We know about the actress.  (laughter)   
CROUCH: But it was the type of Mae West that we had in those days.  It's a little bit different than the ones that they have nowadays.  So I doubt they use that expression too much nowadays I think.   
BENSON: So how far were you away from any town, or when did you come in contact with any other people?   
CROUCH: Oh that's another thing.  In Japan and China, that is, you are never far away from any town.  You can virtually throw a rock from one town to the next.  And they say in about 2050 the population of the United States will double, so you'll get the idea about this business of throwing a rock from Columbia to whatever towards Lexington, or this, that, and the other. Places have been so populated so long there. Of course, and it’s with the largest population, national population, in the planet there.  But the name of the cities and what not that I made contact with along the way I couldn't say because they didn't speak English that much.  I simply tried to show them on a map where I wanted to go and I was fortunate that they were friendly and guided me in the right direction there.   
BENSON: Did you ever meet any of these people again?  Have you come into contact with them since?   
CROUCH: No, no I have not, because that was pretty much up to the front lines where we bailed out, and then when I was with the bombers in China later on, we had to be further back, a little further back than that.  Now we have seen people from different areas who helped different ones of our people, but the ones that helped us, I've not seen them myself because our people have sponsored, they've been coming to the States for different celebrations and what not at.  So we have seen some of them but those that pertained particularly to our crew we have not seen them.   
PRICE: What was it like serving under General Doolittle?   
CROUCH: That was a very pleasant experience indeed so.  He's quite an easy person to know and to talk to and to be in his presence. Doesn't make any great effort at trying to put you at ease or what have you, you just have the feeling that you're in a friendly situation and that's it.  And so long as you don't get too stupid, why you won't have any trouble. But I never did see that.  He was always very patient and very understanding with any problems and so on there.  And of course we come in contact with General Doolittle only about once every year.  Of course that lasted almost 50 years after the raid.  But everything was very, very pleasant and so on.   
BENSON: What are your special memories of your fellow crew members during the raid, during training and afterwards?   
CROUCH: Well as best I can tell, everybody did their job and did their duty as they should have, and so that was one of the reasons we were able to get to have the fortune that we did have like so there.  So once we bailed out in China, four of us got together within a matter of two days.  Our pilot, he was held by bandits, they wanted to ransom him there, but they eventually got that ironed out and he came on in.  So we didn't have anyone seriously injured in our group either.  That's sort of bad because when they go to identify who it is that they're going to reassign, they're looking for those who are most physically fit, and so I happened to be in that category, and I got sent back to China right quick like.  And when I went back to China the second time in June of '42, with the 11th bomb squadron, we flew with the AVG, the American Volunteer Group under General Chennault.  We flew with them during the last month of their contract in June and July and that was it, a pleasure indeed.   
BENSON: Getting back to the raid, what kind of thoughts and feelings were going through you before, during, and after what were you thinking about?  You were so focused on what you were doing, were you thinking about family or what could happen to you, or what kind of thoughts were going through your head?   
CROUCH: They were strictly of the mission at hand.  I didn't get too far away from the business at hand there, and that's very much the best idea because in a situation like that, you could get diverted.   
BENSON: Start making mistakes.   
CROUCH: That's for sure.  You might forget to duck.  (laughter)   
BENSON: How did you get the nickname of Sally?   
CROUCH: That happened at a YMCA boys’ camp there.  From YMCA on Sumter Street, you’ll see here in Columbia.  When I was about ten years old, we had summer camp sponsored by the YMCA.  We used to go to Camp Mishemokwa which was just outside of Hendersonville. Near the little place called Bearwallow which is in between Hendersonville and Lake Lure, and Camp Mishemokwa was in the mountains behind Bearwallow, and we had an older fellow in our cabin who had read a book titled Sally Crouch’s Cozy Home Hotel, and so just as a lark he named our cabin Sally Crouch’s Cozy Home Hotel.  And that name has stuck with me ever since then for several reasons because that's what people hear most of the time.  My wife calls me Sally all the time now, and then correspondence, over half the correspondence I received from the General back whenever we had exchange Christmas cards or what not and so on, he would always write Dear Sally and so on.  And so it came from clear events.  Now the fellow that penned the name on me was Jake Pendland.  And Jake Penland was an ace sports reporter for the State and Record newspapers here.  He's dead now but he's the fellow that did that, and that's where it happened, now I say for two reasons, and one is because I think most of my friends are sort of dumb and they can't remember my name so they just are able to retain a nickname like so.  But all of my friends at college and high school and so on. I had at the Citadel a little fun on one occasion I was involved in a little hazing incident then, and so it took the Commandant some three months to find Cadet Sally because of course he's not…   
BENSON: Fortunate for you.   
CROUCH: He was not on their roster at all. So as a matter of fact he never did find Cadet Sally, he just found me.  He finally got around to calling two of us in his office there and he looked at the other fellow and looked at me and he pointed at me and he said you did it.  I told him I did and I didn't even ask him what.  I told him yes sir.  But the idea was an upperclassman instructed me to bring another freshmen in horizontally, so the idea was to have him lying down and we drag him into the room then, so I carried out their orders that were given then.  I wasn't punished quite as badly as the upperclassman was punished then.   
PRICE: Where did you go after the war?  Did you stay in the Air Force for a while or come out immediately?   
CROUCH: No, I came out of the Air Force in 1948 and I was out of the Air Force for a year and a half until the Korean situation came prominent, and I re-entered in active duty as Deputy State Director of Selective Service here in South Carolina.  So I was Deputy State Director of the draft you see, and of course we were not at war at that time, but as soon as war was declared, why I asked for my reaccrediting back to active duty and I was reassigned to the Strategic Air Command.  So in all of my service, I completed within a matter of some 24 years, and I retired from the service in 1962, and then I went into public school teaching and I taught at Dentsville for two years, Brookland-Cayce one year, and 15 years at Columbia High School which was my old alma mater, and I retired from there in 1982.   
BENSON: You taught history?   
CROUCH: No, I taught drafting and mathematics.   
BENSON: And why did you choose to return to Columbia?   
CROUCH: Of course Columbia is my home town, my parents were here, I wanted to be back to be with my parents to support them. And during those years, my father died while I was in the service.  I was in Okinawa participating in the Korean War when my father died, and then there was just my mother here so I was desirous of being back to assist her in any way possible and so on.   
PRICE: Did you find a lot of changes in the city when you first came back to settle in to teach?   
CROUCH: Oh yes.   
PRICE: I mean, you see more changes since then.   
CROUCH: Oh yes, indeed now.  Yes indeed, the students are much more rowdy and they were not…Very difficult to discipline in some instances, so that's something that you didn't see back in the days when I was going through my secondary days there and so on.  Of course we did have our bad boys back in those days as well, but we didn't have as many guns in the classroom or knives or what have you like so.   
BENSON: Could you show us some of the pictures that you brought today and briefly explain what they are? 
CROUCH: This of course is a picture of General Doolittle here at the age of about, 60 or so years of age there.  He's the gentleman that led and that we followed, and he eventually was awarded four stars, which made him the highest ranking Reserve Officer that has ever been so designated.  This is of a souvenir map that we most all of us subscribed to aboard the carrier, and we signed it for each other like so on.  The General signed on the compass rose down here, and my signature appears under the title East China Sea there.  Our fellow Noland Herndon who is the other South Carolinian who was on the raid and who still lives here in South Carolina, he signed right opposite Tokyo there.  This is a picture of I believe it is General Baldock and General Doolittle here at a time when the general came back to participate in the designation of a flight facility at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport out there.  The other gentleman with the whiskers I do not know him there.  This is a photograph of General and Mrs. Doolittle being greeted by the government at the time the General was back, and also in this picture is myself and Eston Marchant.  He and I lived in the same neighborhood at one time at 1611 Marion Street there, so I've known Eston for quite a few years, and of course at this time, he was the Adjutant General there.  This is a picture of a painting that was made by a fellow in Boston, Massachusetts.  It was designed by a fellow by the name of Joseph [Soucie?] and it carries the date of April 18, 1942, the date that we accomplished the particular mission, the aircraft flying in the foreground there is the General's aircraft and over here is our insignia of our organization.  The circle in the center carries the mascots of, that in the upper left hand corner is the flying flatiron as they call it or flying helmet that of Mercury of the 89th Reconnaissance Squadron is supposed to carry the intelligence back.  The phoenix bird is the 34th squadron, and the kicking mule is the 95th squadron and the lion is the 35th squadron there.  Those are the squadrons that provided the volunteers for the mission there.  This is the crew that I flew with, our pilot, Jay Royden Stork, that's our co-pilot who is Stork, our pilot Oliver Joyce here under my finger there, he has since died and this was our engineer gunner [G. E. Larkin] over here, he and I are the ones that shot down the aircraft that attacked us there.  But he was killed in a crash across the hump in October of that year.  The fellow in the middle, none of us know him.  He didn't go with us, he just happened to be out to cover up the spot that day.  And then this is myself with my head poking off to the side over here.  Jay Royden Stork over here was from Hollywood and had done the tour in the Merchant Marines and had carried scrap metal to Japan, and he almost cried during our attack because he was receiving someone's scrap metal that he had taken over there personally.  This is a picture of the historic marker at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport there and the fellow standing alone over here is Nolan Herndon from Edgefield, South Carolina.  He married a first cousin of mine and he was originally from Fort Worth, Texas, and he made his home here and raised his family here in Edgefield.  Then over on the other side there is the General and myself there.  Are we thinking too much with that?  Here's a picture also at that celebration.  Charles Hyatt who was an official with one of the local banks here, who was interested in our mission, and he was instrumental in having an island in Lake Murray designated the Doolittle Island there, and the General there and we were looking at that picture that I had showed just a moment ago of a take-off there.  This is a picture of the General and the other side of the historic marker and Clayton Kleckley over here, Clayton Kleckley is the curator, he was the curator of the museum in Fort Jackson for quite some time, and at the present time he went on to become curator of the museum in Lexington, and at the present time I think he is the curator of the Cayce Museum there.  He was very much instrumental in getting these markers put in place and so on.  The General on the right side and Clayton Kleckley on the left side there.  This is a picture taken of us at Haiyang China, which is after the raid, and we were proceeding through the country on our way to Chun King there.  There is the General in the center there and this is myself second kneeling in the front row at that point there.  This picture here has notably Ted Lawson on the left hand side here.  He's the first one to put anything in print concerning the mission, 30 Seconds Over Tokyo which they made the movie from this here, and Ben Johnson played his part so on.  Unfortunately Ted is now deceased.  This was his navigator, and the girl there and this gentleman in the center, he also was a prisoner of war of the Japanese, he was one that was captured after the raid.  He had a crew of his own, but he pulled rank and had the co-pilot moved out of the way so he could go in and serve as the co-pilot rather than the first pilot there, and he spent over four years as a Japanese prisoner there.  I was thinking maybe he'll tend to his own business next time.  This is a picture of us aboard the carrier The Hornet shortly after we had been informed of the fact that we were going to attack the mainland of Japan.  Standing there is Captain Mitchner and General Doolittle there, and that's myself squatting behind them there.  Captain Mitchner is the one who was responsible for us having this set of pictures here.  After the war was over, he was then the high-ranking general, or the high-ranking admiral.  But he had remembered our being aboard his carrier, and he had over 30 photographs of this size made and they were annotated along the way there, and he sent one to each of us who survived at that time, so that's the kind of fellow we associated with, Captain Mitchner.  Captain Mitchner is right there with the light cap on there.  This picture here depicts the general attaching some Japanese medals to a bomb.  Just after World War I when the Japanese turned from Sampans to metal ships, a lot of American Navy people had them in their transition there and the Japanese decorated them as medals and so on, and when they attacked Pearl Harbor, they sent those medals to Washington, the American Navy personnel sent them to Washington and asked that they be returned on the first bombs to go to Japan.  So the General is tying these medals to this bomb and they're going to be on their way to Japan very shortly thereafter.  That's a matter of saving the postage.   
BENSON: Neat way of sending them back.   
CROUCH: Now we didn't have many aircraft that had pictures on them there but this was one of them that belonged to Ross Green.  Ross Green was our armament pilot specialist there and this was his Hells Angel flying there.  He was quite an artist and he had drawn that particular picture.  Now Ross deserves the credit for making this 20-cent bombsite which we used on the mission there.  The Norden bombsite, which was the top secret bombsite, cost in those days in the neighborhood of some ten thousand dollars, and it was replaced by this particular unit here that was only 20 cents for the materials in it here, see?  It was much more effective because we were bombing below the altitude where the Norden would be effective, that Norden was effective from 4,000 feet on up above 30,000 feet, and our bombing altitude was briefed at 1,500 feet, you see?  So he designed this and it was so designed that it would fit in exactly the same place as the Norden bomb site, and we could actually steer the aircraft with this site here because of linkages connected from this site to the mechanism in the aircraft there.   
PRICE: Were those bombsites ever used again in any other raids?   
CROUCH: No.  As a matter of fact, we had none to survive.  I'm the only one who has bothered to make this site here, and I made about 10 or 15 of them and NASA bought one.  I charged them only $25.  It was quite a picture, I should have socked it to them because the Navy has bought wrenches that they paid $600 and $700 for and so on.  This is the Japanese picket ship that we didn't know about, and we had no idea he was out there some 600 miles from Japan.   
PRICE: Did he see the Hornet or did he see you all fly in?   
CROUCH: Oh, he…they just pounded him.  The Navy expended some 900 rounds of ML five inch cannon shells and bombs in a matter of sinking this particular Japanese, yeah, this particular Japanese picket boat is only 150 feet in length you see, and the story goes that the captain of the Japanese boat was asleep in his quarters when we ran across them there, and his Executive Officer went downstairs and told him to come up to see the wonderful Japanese Navy.  He thought it was the Japanese in there, and when the captain got up on the deck and looked them over, he judged them to be American at once, and he committed suicide, so he was not captured.  He committed hara-kiri.  And here we are getting ready to do our take-off from the carrier there. When we got to the middle of it, the Pacific, Admiral Halsey brought up another task force and he then assumed command at mid-Pacific and he and General Doolittle got together and they agreed that if they would get us within 1,000 miles of Japan, that we would attack our targets and do the best we could with what we had left.  Our best mission landing indicated that we had to be taken to within 400 miles of Tokyo in order to make the trip into Japan and around Japan there, and we would be landing with virtually empty tanks.  Once we got to China there, our instructions they told us in our briefing clause that when you get to China, they assumed that everything would go all right and we would be landing in daylight in China there.  He says have the pilot take his aircraft to a remote section of the field and have the co-pilot and the bombardier to get out and go over and talk with whoever is there in the field to find out if they are friendly or not.  Well that put me in a bad spot being navigator bombardier.  So I told him after we bombed that I resigned as bombardier.  I was going to be only the navigator so our co-pilot could go by himself you see.  And so...  Here's a picture of the success that we had in taking off the carrier.  Everybody was a little concerned about that, but then what our people didn't know was that you can take that carrier and head him into the wind.  We were not like, we were on land where you have to take your wind where ever it blows, so we could always head into the wind that's at sea there, and so we headed our 25 knots of surface wind and about 25 knots of speed of the ship and then we in our practice were able to stall the aircraft off at 65 miles per hour, thereabouts.  And so we all had to overcome the situation and gain some 15 miles in order to get into the air there, and you can see the plane is well into the air taking off there.  These pictures are just a little out of sequence here, but here is one of them, plane is just clearing the deck at that point there.  Everybody.  We had 16 aircrafts aboard and all 16 of them took off.  It wasn't absolutely perfect what have you, for instance, on my aircraft our pilot had to recycle his throttles in order to draw horsepower to take off.  And another man that I haven't mentioned thus far is William “Bill” Farrow of Darlington, South Carolina, he was the aircraft of the 16th aircraft take off from the carrier, and as he was, well, the Navy had put down a couple of friction plates at 480 feet from the end of the deck, from the front end of the deck, which put us right at the end of the island, and what they call the island aboard ship is your smoke stack and control rows and what not that come up above the flight deck there.  That's the island there.  But right at the end of the island, they put down some friction mats and all of us had to go up to the same friction mats to take off.  Everybody had the same 480 feet to take off from.  Nobody was going to get more space because they were further back.  And one of the reasons for that is that when there was an aircraft, especially the conventional aircraft, when you’re starting forward and there is a torque, your propellers spinning in one direction have a tendency to turn you in the other direction, you see, and there's always the business of your being able to ground loop or spin out on the ground at that point, and I do believe the Navy put it, they don't even let their Navy pilots take off except right close to the island.  So they'll have control during the slow movement of aircraft, and they will be clear of the island by the time they get into a situation where they might get in trouble or lose control of it, you see, at which time they want him to go over the side, they don't want it to bust into the island, and so everybody had the same distance to go with.  Well, Bill Farrow as he got ready to go up there, a sailor lost his balance and he almost cut the arm off the sailor there and so on, and also some debris blew through the front part of this aircraft and he had a heck of a whistle all the way through his mission there.  A persistent whistling through the great big hole in the front of his aircraft and so on.  Unfortunately, Bill Farrow and his crew were captured, and Bill Farrow and his engineer gunner [Spatz], were executed there.  They were executed in October of '42 there, absolutely no reason at all.  Yet no one has any reason or good reason as to why they were executed except that they were on this particular mission.  The take-off began with the flag man, flagging you there, and he is looking down at the front of the ship to watch.  The weather was so rough that the bow was oscillating some 30 feet there, almost twice as high as this ceiling here.  The front of the ship was oscillating there, and he would signal you to let your breaks go whenever you were at the upswing there.  That gives you a few more feet to fall if you needed to get there, and then once he has given you that signal for you to proceed, he drops down, like in this picture here, to hold on to some cables across the deck to keep from being blown over the side.  This is a picture of our aircraft in an early time where they are strung out along the deck there.  We were unable to take them down below the flight deck to the hanger deck because our aircraft were too big for the elevator there, and that was one thing that so worried us as we left San Francisco, because when 
BENSON: Oh my goodness, how many people can say that.   
CROUCH: This was at our rendezvous base in China.  The Japanese had gone up to this sandstone hill and cut a big room in it.  It must have been four times the size of this room here, and that was where we held up while we were trying to stay away from the Japanese there.  They came over and they didn't bomb at Zhejiang, but they came over every day to take a look around, so be it.  But then we proceeded in small groups.  We broke up into groups about half the size to go on into Chongqing where we had a luncheon that was hosted by Madam Chiang Kai-Shek, and Generalissimo came in towards the end. As you know, she was educated in this country and spoke English very well, but Generalissimo, he did not speak much English, but he came in and Madam Chiang Kai-Shek presided over the presentation of the Chinese Awards at the time, and we were not permitted to keep the American Award until it got through, it had to go through some Act of a Congressional committee and they then approved our being able to keep the Chinese medal.   
BENSON: Well we've enjoyed looking at those.  Any other thoughts on the raid that we haven't covered?   
CROUCH: No, except that my recollection is on this particular mission there were 80 mortals and one immortal; immortal being the good Lord indeed was with us, and of course I don't want to forget the Navy because they had quite a bit of risk out there.  We had almost the entire American fleet carrying us to there, and believe it or not, the entire mission was the brain child of a Navy captain, Captain Duncan was the one who actually put it on paper.  But there was another captain and the two of those captains on Admiral King's staff in Washington were the ones that conceived the idea of putting long range Army bombers aboard carrier and taking them where they could take off much further out than the Japanese could retaliate immediately there, attack them, and then of course the planes were to go on into China, like so.  So those are just, that's pretty much it.  There are many other little side stories here, there, and yonder about being with them.   
BENSON: Well we certainly enjoyed hearing about your life and about the raid and appreciate you coming and showing us the pictures.  Thank you so much.   
CROUCH: It's kind of y’all to invite us and kind of y’all to remember the [Raiders]– 
 
End - Colonel Horace Crouch