“There were a lot of close calls,” Mr. Saylor said.

He was a 22-year-old engineer-gunner in April 1942, when the raiders were ordered to fly much earlier than expected, hundreds of miles farther from Japan than planned. It seemed all but certain that they would run out of gas before reaching a safe place to land in China after the bombs were dropped.

As their plane bore down on the industrial waterfront at Kobe, their target, someone cracked open a bottle of whiskey to bolster their nerves, Mr. Saylor recalled. “Not enough to intoxicate,” he said. “But it calmed us.”

He and his crew had to ditch their B-25 off the Chinese coast after it ran out of gas a mile from a little island controlled by the Japanese. After reaching shore, on a life raft that had been partly punctured by their sinking plane, they found that their only Chinese phrase, “We’re Americans,” had been taught to them in the wrong dialect. A fisherman saved them, hiding them under mats on his boat, and a 14-year-old orphan became their guide and scrounger of food in the subsequent weeks as they evaded Japanese patrols on the mainland. The boy disappeared in the chaos of the war without a trace, Mr. Saylor said.

“I was going to bring him home with me,” he said. “We owed him.”

After the airmen made it to a safe area controlled by the Chinese military, they were reunited with some other crews from the raid. Mr. Saylor’s wife learned he was alive from watching a newsreel about the raiders that included scenes of him receiving a medal from Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of the Chinese leader.

Image “We just did what we had to do.” Edward J. Saylor, who keeps a gear arm, above, like the one on an engine he repaired in 1942 Credit... David Ryder for The New York Times

Until their mission, no big land-based bomber had ever taken off into combat from an aircraft carrier. Much of their training, led by Colonel Doolittle (later a lieutenant general), who also piloted the lead plane off the deck, was conducted on a tiny practice airstrip in Florida.

Mr. Saylor also had been forced to disassemble and rebuild one of his plane’s engines only days before on the pitching deck of the Hornet after he found trouble with the gear system. He had never rebuilt an aircraft engine before, and to his knowledge, no one had ever tried it on a flight deck, where every nut and bolt had to be carried into the plane’s body as he worked, to prevent parts from rolling into the ocean. He keeps a gear arm of the type that broke as a memento.