A B-25 takes off from Hornet. The Doolittle Raid on Tokyo.

Watch the movie: 30 Seconds Over Tokyo.
2 hours 18 minutes

During the period before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hornet trained out of Norfolk. A hint of a future mission occurred on 2 February 1942, when Hornet departed Norfolk with two Army Air Forces B-25 Mitchell medium bombers on deck. Once at sea, the planes were launched to the surprise and amazement of Hornet's crew. Her men were unaware of the meaning of this experiment, as Hornet returned to Norfolk, prepared to leave for combat, and on 4 March sailed for the West Coast via the Panama Canal . Hornet arrived at Naval Air Station Alameda, California on 20 March 1942.[9] With her own planes on the hangar deck, by midafternoon on 1 April she loaded 16 B-25s on the flight deck. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, 70 United States Army Air Corps officers and 64 enlisted men reported aboard. In company of her escort, Hornet departed Alameda on 2 April under sealed orders. That afternoon, Captain Mitscher informed his men of their mission: a bombing raid on Japan. Eleven days later, Hornet joined the aircraft carrier Enterprise off Midway, and Task Force 16 turned toward Japan. With Enterprise providing combat air patrol cover, Hornet was to steam deep into enemy waters. Originally, the task force intended to proceed to within 400 nmi (460 mi; 740 km) of the Japanese coast; however, on the morning of 18 April, a Japanese patrol boat, No. 23 Nitto Maru, sighted the American task force. Nashville sank the patrol boat. Amid concerns that the Japanese had been made aware of their presence, Doolittle and his raiders were forced to launch prematurely from 600 nmi (690 mi; 1,100 km) out instead of the planned 400 nmi (460 mi; 740 km). Because of this decision, none of the 16 planes made it to their designated landing strip in China. After the war, it was found that Tokyo received the Nitto Maru's message in a garbled form and that the Japanese ship was sunk before it could get a clear message through to the Japanese mainland. As Hornet came about and prepared to launch the bombers which had been readied for take-off the previous day, a gale of more than 40 kn (46 mph; 74 km/h) churned the sea with 30 ft (9.1 m) crests; heavy swells, which caused the ship to pitch violently, shipped sea and spray over the bow, wet the flight deck and drenched the deck crews. The lead plane, commanded by Colonel Doolittle, had only 467 ft (142 m) of flight deck, while the last B-25 hung its twin rudders far out over the fantail. Doolittle, timing himself against the rise and fall of the ship's bow, lumbered down the flight deck, circled Hornet after take-off, and set course for Japan. By 09:20, all 16 were airborne, heading for the first American air strike against the Japanese home islands.[12] Hornet brought her own planes on deck as Task Force 16 steamed at full speed for Pearl Harbor. Intercepted broadcasts, both in Japanese and English, confirmed at 14:46 the success of the raids. Exactly one week to the hour after launching the B-25s, Hornet sailed into Pearl Harbor. That the Tokyo raid was the Hornet's mission was kept an official secret for a year; until then President Roosevelt referred to the ship from which the bombers were launched only as "Shangri-La". Two years later, the Navy would give this name to an aircraft carrier. Hornet steamed from Pearl Harbor on 30 April to aid Yorktown and Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea, but the battle ended before she reached the scene. On 4 May Task Force 16 crossed the equator, the first time ever for Hornet. After executing, with Enterprise, a feint towards Nauru and Banaba (Ocean) islands which caused the Japanese to cancel their operation to seize the two islands, she returned to Hawaii on 26 May, and sailed two days later to help repulse an expected Japanese assault on Midway.

USS Hornet and USS Nashville War Diary's