Doolittle raider dies

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SEATTLE — Edward J. Saylor, one of the last surviving members of the Doolittle Raiders, a band of World War II airmen who bombed Japan in early 1942, stunning the Japanese at a time when their army and navy were racking up victories across Asia, died on Wednesday at his home near here. He was 94.His death was announced by the Doolittle Raiders, a group organized to honor the airmen.
Only three of the original 80 men in the squadron remain alive, the group said. The team’s leader, James H. Doolittle, who was awarded the Medal of Honor after the raid and retired as a general in the Air Force, died in 1993.
Mr. Saylor, who enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1939 and stayed in the military for 28 years, retiring as a lieutenant colonel, was stoic and understated in talking about the raid, which many believed would be a suicide mission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/31/us...bituaries&_r=0

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In some ways, the real test for Sergeant Saylor, who turned 22 the month before the raid, on April 18, 1942, came before takeoff, when an engine of his plane malfunctioned in testing on the carrier Hornet as the squadron sailed west toward Japan.The task of finding the trouble and fixing it fell to him as the plane’s engineer gunner, he said. Disassembling a bomber engine on the heaving deck of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Pacific, he said, had never been done, and it meant carrying every loose part into the fuselage as he worked, for fear that pieces would roll off the deck into the sea. On a coffee table in his house, he kept a replica of the gear arm that was at the heart of his, and his engine’s, trouble that day.

amazing what ordinary people can do in extraordinary circumstances