Henry Alphonse (Hank) Potter (1918-2002) First Raid On Japan After Pearl Harbor- Doolittle Raid!

Henry Alphonse (Hank) Potter (1918-2002). Four months after Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle raid, named for the pilot of the lead plane, Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, proved to a demoralized America that victories against Japan were possible. ''It was the first good news of the war for America,'' said Col. Carroll V. Glines, the historian for the Doolittle Raiders Association and author of three books about the raiders. ''We needed to offset the disaster at Pearl Harbor and the defeats that we had in the taking of Guam and the overrunning of the Philippines.'' One by one on the morning of April 18, 1942, 16 B-25 bombers took off from the Hornet, an aircraft carrier lying in rough seas about 800 miles off Japan. In the navigator's position on the first plane was Lieutenant Potter, who was 23. The planes were not able to return to the Hornet because its flight deck was too short to permit safe landing. The raiders were to take off 450 to 650 miles off Japan, bomb selected targets in and near Tokyo and fly to airfields in China, an ally.

But the Hornet was spotted by a Japanese patrol boat, and the raiders had to take off sooner than expected -- too far from the airfields in China to land as they had intended. ''We didn't plan it for a suicide mission,'' Colonel Potter, who was known as Hank, said in an interview with The Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1992, ''but we essentially had no hope of making it to a safe landing when we took off.''

Most of the men, including Lieutenant Potter, parachuted to safety in China. When Lieutenant Potter landed in a field, armed Chinese captured him and others from the plane and marched them along a road until a passing schoolteacher was able to speak to them in English. In 1990, Colonel Potter joined an expedition to the Zhejiang Province of China to search for wreckage of five Doolittle raid bombers that crashed there. The expedition was organized by Bryan Moon, a historian and an artist; two years later Mr. Moon reintroduced Colonel Potter to Zhu Xuesan, the schoolteacher who had translated for the young navigator 50 years earlier. ''It's a thing I never would have thought would happen,' Colonel Potter said at the time. ''To be able to meet the man who helped me so much when I was wandering and tired and cold. It's just amazing.'

A version of this article appears in print on June 4, 2002, Section C, Page 22 of the National edition with the headline: Col. Henry Potter, Navigator In Doolittle Raid, Dies at 83. The New York Times.

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Notes: As received from pilots. See images. Not graded.

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