Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor

Frontispiece: Sailors look on as sixteen Army B-25 bombers, tied down and with wheels chocked, crowd the deck of the carrier
Hornet
en route to bomb Japan. (National Archives)

FOR THE MEN
FROM SHANGRI-LA

His deeds are in sharp contrast to his name.

—
MIAMI DAILY NEWS
,
OCTOBER
4, 1929

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

PROLOGUE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

EPILOGUE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTE ON SOURCES

ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

ILLUSTRATIONS

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

THE DOOLITTLE RAID IS
one of the most iconic stories of World War II. Even before rescuers could pluck all the dead from the oily Hawaiian waters following Japan’s December 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, American war planners started work on an ambitious counterassault, a strike not against an outlying enemy base in the far-flung Pacific islands but against the heart of the Japanese Empire: Tokyo. That April 1942 raid led by famed stunt and racing pilot Jimmy Doolittle would test American ingenuity, gamble the precious few flattops and warships left in the Pacific Fleet’s battered arsenal, and jump-start Japan on the road to ruin.

Sixteen Army bombers crewed by eighty volunteers specially trained in carrier takeoffs would thunder into the skies over the enemy’s capital and key industrial cities, pummel factories, refineries, and dockyards and then escape to Free China. At home in the United States the mission would derail questions over the government’s failure to guard against Japanese aggression in the Pacific and buoy the morale of a shell-shocked nation. The forty-five-year-old Doolittle would come to personify the raid’s success, his grinning image would be plastered around the nation on war bond posters, and strangers would write him poems and songs. A Missouri town would even take his name.

Postwar interviews and records would reveal that Doolittle’s brazen raid had accomplished far more, convincing Japan’s reluctant military
leaders of the need to extend the nation’s defensive perimeter and annihilate America’s aircraft carriers to prevent possible future strikes. That plan would center on the capture of a tiny wind-ravaged atoll in the middle of the Pacific, one Japanese war planners knew America would risk its prized few flattops to protect. The June 1942 Battle of Midway would end in crushing defeat for Japan—America would sink four of its best aircraft carriers—and prove the pivotal turning point of the war, setting the stage for the Navy’s offensive drive across the Pacific that would ravage Emperor Hirohito’s empire.

But declassified records in both nations coupled with long-forgotten missionary files reveal a more nuanced story. Japanese documents show that the raiders—albeit unintentionally—destroyed private homes and killed civilians, including women and children. One of the bombers mistakenly strafed a school. Records likewise illustrate how the Roosevelt administration, desperate for positive press, deliberately deceived the American people about the mission’s actual losses and even the capture of some of the airmen to elevate the public relations value of the raid, sparking a propaganda battle between the United States and Japan. In one of the story’s uglier chapters, General Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence secretly protected the Japanese general who allegedly signed the death order of some of the captured raiders, believing him too valuable a postwar asset to be prosecuted in the war crimes trials.

More importantly, the audacious raid that had so humiliated Japan’s leaders triggered a retaliatory campaign of rape and murder against the Chinese that reduced villages, towns, and cities to rubble. Enemy troops cut the ears and noses off of villagers, set others on fire, and drowned entire families in wells. The Japanese not only used incendiary squads to systematically torch entire towns but unleashed bacteriological warfare in the form of plague, anthrax, cholera, and typhoid. The brutal campaign that killed as many as a quarter million Chinese—and prompted comparisons to the “Rape of Nanking”—was a slaughter senior American leaders anticipated and judged a worthwhile risk long before Doolittle’s bombers ever lifted off from the flight deck.

None of these facts undermine the bravery of the eighty volunteers at the heart of this story who climbed inside those bombers that cold wet morning of April 18, 1942. Those young men from small towns and cities across America, knowing that the odds of survival were against
them, suppressed their own personal fears and set out to accomplish the impossible—and did. Rather, these important new elements of the story help frame the political and wartime context of an embattled America, a nation fighting for its very survival. Senior leaders calculated that victory would carry consequences and chose to deemphasize or cover up the negative aspects of Doolittle’s campaign in order to enhance the rightful accounts of the heroism of American airmen.

TARGET
TOKYO

PROLOGUE

Hawaii is just like a rat in a trap. Enjoy your dream of peace just one more day!

—REAR ADMIRAL MATOME UGAKI, DECEMBER 6, 1941, DIARY ENTRY

VICE ADMIRAL CHUICHI NAGUMO
stared at the dark sea that spread out before him from the bridge of the aircraft carrier
Akagi
as it steamed north of Hawaii in the predawn hours of December 7, 1941. The fifty-four-year-old admiral, whose bald head, furrowed brow, and square jaw gave him the appearance of a bulldog, brooded over his mission. The sullen humor that had haunted him for months was in stark contrast to the otherwise arrogant demeanor of a man who, with a puffed chest and a peacock’s swagger, had once disrupted a royal garden party by threatening to gut a fellow officer with a dagger. Months of stress had robbed Nagumo of his trademark bravado, prompting some senior leaders to question whether he might fail. “I hope he will not fall into nervous prostration beforehand,” Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, the Combined Fleet’s chief of staff, confided in his diary. “Life and death are according to the will of heaven. If only he can obtain a glorious result in the coming fight, he may rest in peace.”