Lieutenant Nolan A. Herndon

Nolan, who was a navigator-bombardier in the U.S. Army Air Forces,  was born on 12 December 1918 in Greenville, Texas.

His father was James Thomas Herndon and his mother was Sarah Ethel Gregory Herndon. Nolan had at least two sisters. Nolan married  Julia Crouch Herndon. The couple had two children. Two sons. His wife Julia Crouch was a relative of Horrace Ellis Crouch of Crew 10.

Historians have called the April 18, 1942, attack a key event in World War II that pushed the Japanese to make strategic errors and lifted U.S. spirits when there had been little to cheer about during the early days of the conflict.

Nolan's plane was the only one of 16 B-25 bombers to stray from James H. Doolittle's orders to fly to China after striking Tokyo and other cities. Officially, the U.S. War Department blamed a shortage of fuel for the plane landing on a Soviet airstrip outside Vladivostok.

But late in life Nolan, by then the sole surviving member of his plane's crew, began sharing another theory: His plane had been on a classified mission to catalog airfields that might be used for attacks on Japan and to test the Soviet Union's resolve as an ally by seeing if the plane would be allowed to refuel and continue to China.

"We needed information about Russia to see what they would do," Nolan said in a 2001 story in the State, the daily morning newspaper in Columbia, S.C. "The whole thing was kept secret."

When the plane touched down, the Soviet Union - which had yet to go to war with Japan - held the five-man crew captive for more than 13 months. They escaped after paying an Afghan smuggler $250 to take them to a British Embassy in what is now Iran.

"I think I was hooked into something I didn't know about. I would have gone anyway. But it's always been a burr in my side," Nolan, who served as the flight's navigator and bombardier, told the State in 2002.

A number of unusual occurrences made Nolan conclude that his B-25 had a unique extra assignment.

They included the last-minute addition of a 16th plane - his - to the raid; the pilot and co-pilot later taking high-level positions in military intelligence, and the plane's carburetors being altered to burn more fuel than the other planes, providing a convenient cover story for the Soviet landing, Noman said in the 2002 story.

Upon leaving the aircraft, pilots Edward York and Robert Emmens both spoke fluent Russian, a curiosity "that always bothered" Nolan, said Tom Casey, manager of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders organization.

The pilots, who died years ago, never spoke about the issue, said Carroll V. Glines, the Raiders' historian who has written three books on the subject and co-wrote Doolittle's autobiography. "All I know is, Nolan was there, and I wasn't, but I could never find any clues to confirm that it happened that way," Glines said.

Calling it "a mystery," Casey said military officials never would confirm or deny Nolan's story.

None of the Raiders, who had launched their B-25s from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet, reached the airfields in China where they were supposed to land. The other 15 planes crash-landed in China or their crews bailed out. All but four of the 80 airmen survived the raid; three were captured and executed by the Japanese and one starved to death in a prison camp.

Nolan, who lived in  Edgefield, S.C,  died on 7 October 2007 of pneumonia at Dorn-VA Medical Center in Columbia, S.C.. Before he died he was the only survivor of his plane crew (Crew 08)

Nolan Anderson Herndon is inducted in the Texas Aviation Hall of Fame on 9 November 2001.

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