Great story: worth the read. The greatest generation is just about gone. God bless them!
OregonMaule

Editor's note: CNN Contributor Bob Greene is a bestselling author whose 25 books include "Late Edition: A Love Story"; "Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War"; and "Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen."

(CNN) -- It's the cup of brandy that no one wants to drink.

On Tuesday, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, the surviving Doolittle Raiders will gather publicly for the last time.

They once were among the most universally admired and revered men in the United States. There were 80 of the Raiders in April 1942, when they carried out one of the most courageous and heart-stirring military operations in this nation's history. The mere mention of their unit's name, in those years, would bring tears to the eyes of grateful Americans.

Now only four survive.
Bob Greene

After Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, with the United States reeling and wounded, something dramatic was needed to turn the war effort around.

Even though there were no friendly airfields close enough to Japan for the United States to launch a retaliation, a daring plan was devised. Sixteen B-25s were modified so that they could take off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. This had never before been tried -- sending such big, heavy bombers from a carrier.

The 16 five-man crews, under the command of Lt. Col. James Doolittle, who himself flew the lead plane off the USS Hornet, knew that they would not be able to return to the carrier. They would have to hit Japan and then hope to make it to China for a safe landing.

But on the day of the raid, the Japanese military caught wind of the plan. The Raiders were told that they would have to take off from much farther out in the Pacific Ocean than they had counted on. They were told that because of this they would not have enough fuel to make it to safety.

And those men went anyway.
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They bombed Tokyo, and then flew as far as they could. Four planes crash-landed; 11 more crews bailed out, and three of the Raiders died. Eight more were captured; three were executed. Another died of starvation in a Japanese prison camp. One crew made it to Russia.

The Doolittle Raid sent a message from the United States to its enemies, and to the rest of the world:

We will fight.

And, no matter what it takes, we will win.

Of the 80 Raiders, 62 survived the war. They were celebrated as national heroes, models of bravery. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced a motion picture based on the raid; "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," starring Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson, was a patriotic and emotional box-office hit, and the phrase became part of the national lexicon. In the movie-theater previews for the film, MGM proclaimed that it was presenting the story "with supreme pride."

Beginning in 1946, the surviving Raiders have held a reunion each April, to commemorate the mission. The reunion is in a different city each year. In 1959, the city of Tucson, Arizona, as a gesture of respect and gratitude, presented the Doolittle Raiders with a set of 80 silver goblets. Each goblet was engraved with the name of a Raider.
Pearl Harbor attack 70th anniversary
Pearl Harbor, 70 years later
1941: Japan bombs Pearl Harbor

Every year, a wooden display case bearing all 80 goblets is transported to the reunion city. Each time a Raider passes away, his goblet is turned upside down in the case at the next reunion, as his old friends bear solemn witness.

Also in the wooden case is a bottle of 1896 Hennessy Very Special cognac. The year is not happenstance: 1896 was when Jimmy Doolittle was born.

There has always been a plan: When there are only two surviving Raiders, they would open the bottle, at last drink from it, and toast their comrades who preceded them in death.

As 2013 began, there were five living Raiders; then, in February, Tom Griffin passed away at age 96.

The name may be familiar to those of you who regularly read this column; in 2011, I wrote about the role Mr. Griffin played at his son's wedding.

What a man he was. After bailing out of his plane over a mountainous Chinese forest after the Tokyo raid, he became ill with malaria, and almost died. When he recovered, he was sent to Europe to fly more combat missions. He was shot down, captured, and spent 22 months in a German prisoner of war camp.

The selflessness of these men, the sheer guts ... there was a passage in the Cincinnati Enquirer obituary for Mr. Griffin that, on the surface, had nothing to do with the war, but that emblematizes the depth of his sense of duty and devotion:

"When his wife became ill and needed to go into a nursing home, he visited her every day. He walked from his house to the nursing home, fed his wife and at the end of the day brought home her clothes. At night, he washed and ironed her clothes. Then he walked them up to her room the next morning. He did that for three years until her death in 2005."

So now, out of the original 80, only four Raiders remain: Dick Cole (Doolittle's co-pilot on the Tokyo raid), Robert Hite, Edward Saylor and David Thatcher. All are in their 90s. They have decided that there are too few of them for the public reunions to continue.

The events in Fort Walton Beach this week will mark the end. It has come full circle; Florida's nearby Eglin Field was where the Raiders trained in secrecy for the Tokyo mission.

The town is planning to do all it can to honor the men: a six-day celebration of their valor, including luncheons, a dinner and a parade.

Do the men ever wonder if those of us for whom they helped save the country have tended to it in a way that is worthy of their sacrifice? They don't talk about that, at least not around other people. But if you find yourself near Fort Walton Beach this week, and if you should encounter any of the Raiders, you might want to offer them a word of thanks. I can tell you from firsthand observation that they appreciate hearing that they are remembered.

The men have decided that after this final public reunion they will wait until a later date -- some time this year -- to get together once more, informally and in absolute privacy. That is when they will open the bottle of brandy. The years are flowing by too swiftly now; they are not going to wait until there are only two of them.

They will fill the four remaining upturned goblets.

And raise them in a toast to those who are gone.

Thanks for posting this story. It is my hope that the "Greatest Generation" never becomes the "forgotten generation". The men and women of that (my grandparent's) generation made very significant sacrifices for the sake of our freedom, and faced down odds that were worse than we've ever seen since that time. In short, they truly helped put America on the path to greatness.

It's sad to see that so few of the "Raiders" are left alive. But, the clock never stops. I think it was just a year or so ago when the last surviving WWI veteran died. In another twenty or thirty years or so I imagine that we'll see the passing of the very last WWII veteran.

I'm in my mid-thirties, and have one surviving WWII veteran left in my family (my almost 90-year-old grandfather, who served in the south Pacific during the war). Things may have gone differently for him, and the future of my family, had it not been for a couple of noteworthy bombs that were developed and deployed at the end of the war.

My other grandfather died about 14 years ago... he wasn't able to fight in the war due to a doctor's belief that he had a heart condition that would kill him in a year or two (he lived until 80, then died peacefully in his sleep one night, having been in otherwise perfect health until that day -- not a bad way to go, really). Although he couldn't serve in the war as a soldier, he apparently spent the war years working as an engineer on some top secret missile and bomb guidance projects, and never spoke a word about these projects to the family for the rest of his life; he did his job during the war, and moved on with life afterwards. We only ever knew that he was a "civilian contractor" during the war, and a woodworker and engineer after the war. It actually wasn't until after his death that my grandmother learned that he had squirreled away a lot of money for her over the years, and left details of his now-declassified projects for her in a bank safety deposit box. He worked on some pretty wild stuff back then, but it wasn't his way to talk or brag about it.

Again, this generation truly earned the title of "The Greatest Generation". I only hope that my generation will someday earn a similar honor in the eyes of those who come after me!

There's an old saying, that "Vigilance is the price of freedom".

So in the same vein, the debt we owe to people like the Doolittle Raiders is that we can't forget them ourselves, and we can't allow future generations to forget their patriotism and sacrifice.

We also cannot short-change ourselves and our history by forgetting the "greatest generation" overall, or by allowing their contributions to be downplayed, or by lumping them all into one rosy picture for that matter.

We need to do more than just remember them... we need to continually study them, learn from their successes and failures, and make it so their actions 70 years ago matter tomorrow.

We were lucky enough to have one of them, Bill ?, gone now, speak twice at our antique meeting in Boulder-a great honor to hear him.