David Thatcher, airman who volunteered for Doolittle Raid after Pearl Harbor

Growing up during the Depression, one of 10 children born to a dairy farmer in southern Montana, David Thatcher dreamed of leaving home and seeing the Pacific Northwest. After seeing a plane fly high overhead one day, he decided that aviation was his ticket out of town.

Thatcher joined the Army Air Corps in 1940, fresh out of high school, and one year later, after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and pushed the US into World War II, he volunteered for a top-secret mission that sent him far past the Northwest – on an aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet, headed straight for the coast of Japan.

On April 18, 1942, then-Corporal Thatcher was one of 80 aviators who participated in a daring daylight air raid on Tokyo and other cities in an effort to retaliate for Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor. Led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, a former test pilot and engineer, the so-called Doolittle Raid brought Americans back from the brink of despair following four months of bitter defeats in Hawaii, Guam, Wake Island and the Philippines.

Thatcher, a gunner who was awarded the Silver Star for helping his four crewmates survive after their plane crash-landed off the coast of China following the Tokyo bombing run, died June 22 at a hospital in Montana. He was 94.

Staff Sergeant David Thatcher and Lieutenant Colonel Richard Cole, the last two survivors of the Doolittle Raid, were honoured with the Congressional Gold Medal in 2015 in a ceremony at the National Museum of the US Air Force.

Thatcher and his crewmates on the Ruptured Duck, as they nicknamed their plane, were supposed to drop their bombs on Tokyo and continue on to China, where they would land on a gravel runway in the mountains before regrouping with American forces.

Led by pilot Ted Lawson, the Ruptured Duck struck a steel mill and other factories before continuing on to China. Low on fuel, flying through rain and darkness, Lawson attempted an emergency beach landing on a Japanese-occupied island just off the Chinese coast.

The plane clipped a wave on its way down and flipped, throwing Thatcher's crewmates through the nose of the plane and onto the beach. All four were severely injured; Thatcher, stationed in the plane's rear, was briefly knocked unconscious and escaped with little more than a bump on the head.