On Such Decisions Can History Pivot

*run a year early, and now on the 7oth anniversary, worthy of being remembered once more*

70 years ago, 80 men and sixteen airplanes changed the course of history and human events.

Six months prior, Pearl Harbor had been savaged. The Imperial Japanese Navy, Army and Air Force, reigned supreme across the Pacific immediately thereafter.

A desire to make some symbolic gesture of defiance -- for at this stage, symbolic is all it could be -- gave birth to a plan. A plan never before tried. A plan that was beyond a long shot. A plan that, in and of itself, could not hope to level the playing field immediately after Pearl Harbor, Wake Island, Guam, and the Philippines.

But it was meant to be a message, to both foe and friend alike. It was a symbolic plan. A daring plan. And one an American president believed would shed a ray of hopeful light on a nation that needed such a light at a dark time in its history.

80 men -- volunteers all -- and sixteen airplanes. They were the plan. They were prepared to risk all, without at the time they volunteered, knowing what they were going to be asked to do. But it didn't matter: it was war. And they, and more, answered the call.

The cream of the surviving US Pacific Fleet was committed and tasked thus: bring those 80 men and sixteen aircraft within range of the Empire of Japan. The men and planes would do the rest.

On April 18, 1942, those 80 men and sixteen planes set forth from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet. Due to encountering an unsuspected 'picket' line of Japanese trawlers, the planes were launched earlier and further out than planned on. But launch they did.

Fifteen of the sixteen planes delivered their bomb loads on Tokyo and other nearby Japanese cities. One plane and crew was interned in Russia; the other fifteen planes crashed in or along the coast of China. Several men died; eight were captured by the Japanese. Four of those eight would die (three by execution, one by maltreatment). The rest made it back home, to fight another day.

Their commander -- Lt. Colonel Jimmy Doolittle -- considered the mission a failure in the immediate aftermath, having lost all sixteen planes. His commanders and his president did not; he was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

But more than that: this symbolic, pin-prick of a bombing mission, a mission that could hurt the mighty Japanese Empire not a material whit, changed the whole course of the Pacific War. It changed the course of the war, because this materially insignificant raid caused the Japanese to change their long-term strategy.

It caused them to overreach.

An overreach that resulted in the climatic Battle of Midway, less than two months hence, and signaled the beginning of the end for Imperial Japanese dreams of dominance of the Pacific.

70 years ago, 80 men and sixteen planes changed the course of history and human events.

A dwindling few of them remain with us. Remember them.