On April 9, retired Air Force Lt. Col. Richard E. Cole, the last surviving member of the famed Doolittle Tokyo Raiders, died at age 103 in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas.

Seventy-seven years earlier, on April 18, 1942, Cole and 79 fellow Raiders had embarked on what became one of the most famous missions of World War II — the first bombing of Japan. Seventy-three eventually come home. Over the following seven decades, Dick Cole would attend multiple reunions with his fellow Raiders and in later years scores of funerals as, one by one, the Raiders drifted away, all felled by Lincoln’s “silent artillery of time.”