Thirty Seconds, Seventy Years

The Grog News website reminds us that today is the 70th anniversary of the Doolittle Raid, the USA's first real chance to hit back at Japan in the Pacific War.



If you are, like me, fond of doing the odd bit of painting while watching an old war film, this would be a good evening to watch Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, with Spencer Tracy as Doolittle. That's my plan at any rate.

I totally agree with this chap, who rates Tracy's performance as being streets ahead of Alec Baldwin's in the 2001 film Pearl Harbour.

Fun fact department: between the wars, Doolittle earned an MA and PhD in aernoautics from MIT, and in WW2 was the only reservist to hold a numbered air force command. How cool is that?