Vets of WWII raid make their last toast with 117-year-old cognac

5 hrs ago

Only four of the 80 men who risked their lives on a mission to Japan to strike back after the bombing of Pearl Harbor remain. So before the ranks were thinned too much, the last of the famed Doolittle Raiders drank their final toast over Veterans Day weekend, raising silver goblets and drinking from the bottle of 1896 cognac passed down by their commander, Lt. Gen. James “Jimmy” Doolittle. Three men — Lt. Col. Richard Cole, 98;  Lt. Col. Edward Saylor, 93; and Staff Sgt. David Thatcher, 92 — gathered at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, while the fourth survivor, Lt. Col. Robert Hite, 93, made his toast from his home in Tennessee, unable to travel because of health reasons. More than 600 invitees joined them, among them 12-year-old Joseph John Castellano. “The odds of their survival were one in a million,”