In September of 1922, a young Army Air Corps lieutenant took off from Jacksonville Beach in an attempt to set a new cross-country flight record. At the time, Jacksonville Beach was called Pablo Beach. He took off in a De Havilland DH-4. Twenty-one hours and 19 minutes later he landed at Rockwell Field in San Diego, after making one refueling stop at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas. He was the first man to cross the country in an airplane in less than a day. His name was James “Jimmy” Doolittle. After his record breaking flight, he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. This was an era where record breaking aviators were celebrated by the public and press.

Doolittle competed in a number of races and in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, he won the Triple Crown of airplane racing, setting a world speed record of 296 miles per hour in the Shell Speed Dash. Having won all there was to win, Doolittle retired from racing.

“I have yet to hear anyone engaged in this work dying of old age,” he would say at the time. But Doolittle was no shrinking violet and his most famous flight was still ahead of him.

On April 18, 1942, Doolittle, now a lieutenant colonel, and 15 other crews took off from deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet. They were flying Mitchell B-25 two-engine bombers. Neither the planes nor the carrier were designed for this sort of operation and both required modifications to launch at all. Their plan was to fly to Tokyo and other cities and drop their bombs before proceeding to land in occupied China. It must have seemed like a suicide mission.

Six hours later, Doolittle and his raiders dropped their bombs on Tokyo. They proceeded, low on fuel, toward the Chinese mainland. Three planes crashed at sea. One landed in Russia and the crew was imprisoned. The remaining planes made crash landings in China.

The raid itself did little damage, but it caused a panic in Japan and euphoria here in the States. Finally, we were striking back! When asked where the planes had launched, President Roosevelt would respond “from Shangri-La,” a mythical valley mentioned in a book called “The Lost Horizon” by James Hilton. Afterwards, FDR would rename the presidential retreat we now call Camp David, “Shangri-La.”

What interests me most about this story was the effect the raid had on the stock market. The market had been plunging since it opened on Monday Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. All the war news was bad. We would have been hard pressed to find investors who were bullish on the market in April of 1942. Yet, 10 days later, the Dow would bottom at $92.69, before beginning a strong rally that would carry the market up 130 percent over the next four years.

The lesson here is that no matter how bad the news, never bet against the USA or the stock market.

Scott A. Grant is President of Standfast Asset Management in Ponte Vedra Beach. He welcomes your comments or questions at scottg@standfastic.com.