J. Royden Stork, who was the co-pilot of a B-25 bomber that took part in a daring raid on Tokyo on April 18, 1942, and later went on to become a Hollywood makeup artist, died Thursday in Century City Hospital. He was 85.
The 1942 raid, led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, was the first successful American retaliatory strike following Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into World War II.
Mr. Stork was co-pilot of the 10th of 16 land-based B-25s to take off from the deck of the USS Hornet, a feat never before attempted and considered by many a suicide mission for the 80 men aboard the planes.
Flying at tree-top level, Mr. Stork’s plane bombed its assigned chemical plant and flew on until, like the others, it ran out of gas over occupied China, where he parachuted and was rescued.
“The 16 planes didn’t do much damage, but we sure screwed up their war machine,” Mr. Stork told The Boston Herald last month at 60th anniversary observances of the raid. “They had to pull back some of their forces to protect their homeland, and some of their military leaders were so humiliated that they committed suicide.”
President Franklin Roosevelt orchestrated the raid to boost sagging American morale.
Not only had Japan sunk most of the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor but, in the intervening 132 days, it also had defeated American forces at Wake Island and in the Philippines.
None of Doolittle’s planes was lost to enemy fire. Of the 16, one crash-landed, three were ditched in coastal waters, one landed in Russia and the other 11 in China. Two of the 80 men drowned. Of eight captured, three were executed by the Japanese and one died in a prison camp.
Mr. Stork was among a dozen or so of the fewer than two dozen members of the Doolittle Raiders Association still living who met last month in Columbia, S.C., for the 60th anniversary.
After the raid, Mr. Stork was stationed in India with the Army’s 10th Air Force and flew missions for 16 months over Japanese-occupied territory in the China-Burma-India theater.
Mr. Stork was grounded from combat flying, along with the other 73 surviving Doolittle Raiders, when U.S. intelligence learned Japan had put a $5,000 bounty on each of their heads.
Mr. Stork returned to the U.S. and spent the remainder of the war flying for the Air Transport Command and evaluating equipment for use in the war.
He was discharged in early 1946 with the rank of captain after earning the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal.
After the war, he made his career in Hollywood as a makeup artist for Fox Studios. Among his credits were such feature films as “Twelve O’Clock High” (1949) starring Gregory Peck commanding American pilots in England during the war.
