Spaatz then told Doolittle that if he wanted to get his Eighth Air Force in combat with the Japanese he had better organize an operation for the next day, for the war would soon be over. Doolittle had been assigned 720 B-29s and many of them were war-ready, but he stood them down. “If the war’s over,” he told Spaatz, “I will not risk one airplane nor a single bomber crew member just to be able to say the 8th Air Force had operated against the Japanese in the Pacific.” After Europe, his boys had nothing to prove.
