David Thatcher, an Army Air Force gunner who was decorated for helping to save the lives of four severely wounded fellow crewmen in the Doolittle Raid on Japan of April 1942, America’s first strike against the Japanese homeland in World War II, died on Wednesday in Missoula, Mont. He was 94 and the next-to-last survivor among the mission’s 80 airmen.

His death, announced by his family through the Garden City Funeral Home in Missoula, leaves Richard Cole, age 100, as the last surviving veteran of a legendary chapter in Air Force history. Mr. Cole was a co-pilot alongside Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle, the raid’s commander and pilot of its lead plane.

Corporal Thatcher, a 20-year-old from Montana, manned a pair of .50-caliber guns in the raid, retaliating for Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.

He rode in the rear of the Mitchell B-25 medium bomber christened the Ruptured Duck, the seventh of 16 planes launched from the aircraft carrier Hornet about 650 miles from Japan.