Richard E. Cole  Richard Eugene Cole (September 7, 1915 – April 9, 2019) was an American career officer in the United States Air Force. He was one of the airmen who took part in the Doolittle Raid on April 18, 1942, serving as the co-pilot to Jimmy Doolittle in the lead airplane of the raid. He eventually reached the rank of lieutenant colonel. Cole remained in China after the raid until June 1943, and served again in the China Burma India Theater from October 1943 until June 1944. He later served as Operations Advisor to the Venezuelan Air Force from 1959 to 1962. He retired from the Air Force in 1966 and became the last living Doolittle Raider in 2016. Richard Eugene Cole was born on September 7, 1915, in Dayton, Ohio. He graduated from Marion L. Steele High School and went on to attend Ohio University for two years. He enlisted as an aviation cadet in the United States Army Air Forces on November 22, 1940, at Lubbock, Texas. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in July 1941 and rated as a pilot, when he was awarded his pilot wings at Randolph Field, Texas, on July 12, 1941. His first assignment was as a B-25 Mitchell pilot with the 34th Bomb Squadron of the 17th Bomb Group at Pendleton, Oregon, on July 1941. Cole was assigned as the co-pilot of the first aircraft, plane # 40-2344, for the famous "Doolittle Raid" in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor after two other pilots became ill. The raid was daring not only because of the intended targets, the Japanese homeland and its capital Tokyo, but because the pilots trained to take-off in a B-25 Mitchell bomber from the deck of an aircraft carrier, something neither the designers of the B-25, nor the aircraft carrier, ever envisioned. Cole was co-pilot in the first B-25 medium bomber to depart the deck of the USS "Hornet" during the mission, and it was piloted by the leader of the raid, then-Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, giving him, and the plane, the very least amount of runway available. On April 18, 1942, Doolittle and his B-25 crew took off from the "Hornet", reached Tokyo, Japan, bombed their target, then headed for their recovery airfield in China. Doolittle and his crew bailed out safely over China when their B-25 ran out of fuel after flying .