Doolittle Raid

• 1. Introduction

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  The Doolittle Raid on the 18th of April 1942 sent 16 Army bombers off the deck of a Navy aircraft carrier to strike the Japanese capital of Tokyo and other cities on Honshu. No American aircraft had ever attacked the Japanese archipelago before that morning. The planes carried no fighter escort, had never been designed to fly from a carrier, and their pilots had never taken off from one. The whole operation rested on a single observation by a Navy captain who noticed something unusual while visiting an airfield in Norfolk, Virginia. What did 80 men in 16 medium bombers actually accomplish against one of the most heavily defended nations on earth? Why did President Franklin D. Roosevelt publicly claim the raid had been launched from a place called Shangri-La? And why did the Japanese response to the raid kill an estimated 250,000 civilians who had nothing to do with it?

• 2. A Borrowed Idea

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  Navy Captain Francis S. Low, the Assistant Chief of Staff for antisubmarine warfare, reported to Admiral Ernest J. King on the 10th of January 1942 that twin-engined Army bombers might be launched from a carrier deck. He had reached this conclusion after watching bombers at Naval Station Norfolk Chambers Field, where a carrier deck outline had been painted on the runway for landing practice. The idea went up the chain quickly. Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, already famous as a military test pilot, civilian aviator, and aeronautical engineer before the war, was assigned to Army Air Forces Headquarters to plan the raid.

  Doolittle's first preference was to fly the bombers to Vladivostok after the attack and hand them to the Soviet Union under the Lend-Lease program. That stratagem was meant to sidestep Moscow's April 1941 neutrality pact with Japan, but Soviet officials refused. The backup plan aimed the mission at China instead, adding roughly 600 nautical miles to the route. Despite real fears about Japanese reprisals, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to provide five refueling sites and a final destination at Chongqing.

  Selecting the right aircraft took careful analysis. Doolittle weighed the B-25B Mitchell, the Martin B-26 Marauder, the Douglas B-18 Bolo, and the Douglas B-23 Dragon. The B-26 had uncertain takeoff characteristics from a short carrier deck. The B-18 and B-23 had wingspans too wide to fit enough aircraft on a carrier without threatening the ship's superstructure. The B-25 had a range of about 1,300 miles and had not yet seen combat, but tests showed it could meet the mission if modified to carry nearly twice its normal fuel load. Two B-25s were loaded onto a carrier at Norfolk and flew off the deck without difficulty on the 3rd of February 1942. The raid was approved immediately.

• 3. Ingenious Modifications

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  Twenty-four B-25B bombers were diverted to the Mid-Continent Airlines modification center at Wold-Chamberlain Field in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with security provided by the 710th Military Police Battalion from nearby Fort Snelling. The changes to each aircraft were extensive. The lower gun turret was removed. De-icers and anti-icers were installed. Steel blast plates were mounted around the upper turret. The liaison radio set was pulled out to save weight. Most consequentially, fuel capacity was expanded from 646 to 1,141 U.S. gallons by adding a collapsible neoprene auxiliary tank in the bomb bay along with additional fuel cells throughout the fuselage.

  Two of the more unusual modifications went unnoticed by Japanese observers. Broomsticks were mounted in the tail cones to pass as gun barrels. The standard Norden bombsight was replaced with a makeshift aiming device invented by pilot Captain C. Ross Greening and nicknamed the "Mark Twain"; its materials cost just 20 cents. Doolittle later reported that the fake tail guns were effective, noting that no aircraft was attacked directly from behind during the mission.

  The 24 selected crews, drawn from the 17th Bombardment Group (Medium), trained for three weeks at Eglin Field, Florida, starting on the 1st of March 1942. Lieutenant Henry L. Miller, a Navy flight instructor from Naval Air Station Pensacola, supervised carrier deck takeoff training. One aircraft was written off in a landing accident on the 10th of March; another was heavily damaged in a takeoff accident on the 23rd of March; a third was removed because of an unresolvable nose wheel problem. By the end of March, 16 B-25s had been flown to Naval Air Station Alameda in California.

• 4. Launch and Strike

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  On the 1st of April 1942, the 16 bombers, their five-man crews, and Army maintenance personnel totaling 71 officers and 130 enlisted men were loaded onto the carrier Hornet at Alameda. Each aircraft carried four specially constructed bombs: three high-explosive munitions and one bundle of incendiaries. Five of the bombs had Japanese friendship medals wired to them, medals the Japanese government had previously awarded to American servicemen.

  Hornet and Task Force 18 left San Francisco Bay at 08:48 on the 2nd of April with the bombers in plain view on the flight deck. Several days later the task force joined Vice Admiral William Halsey Jr.'s Task Force 16 in the mid-Pacific north of Hawaii. At 07:38 on the morning of the 18th, while the combined force was still farther from Japan than planned, the Japanese picket boat No. 23 Nitto Maru, a 70-ton patrol craft, spotted the ships and radioed a warning. The boat was sunk by gunfire from Nashville. Its captain killed himself rather than be captured, though five of the 11 crew were pulled from the water.

  Doolittle and Hornet's captain, Marc Mitscher, decided to launch immediately, 10 hours early and at greater distance than planned. Although none of the B-25 pilots, including Doolittle himself, had ever taken off from a carrier before, all 16 aircraft launched safely between 08:20 and 09:19. Doolittle's own bomber nearly struck the water before pulling up at the last second. The planes then flew toward Japan mostly in groups of two to four before dropping to wave-top level to avoid detection.

  The aircraft arrived over Japan around noon Tokyo time, six hours after launch. They bombed 10 military and industrial targets in Tokyo, two in Yokohama, and one each in Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka. No bomber was shot down. Only the B-25 of 1st Lieutenant Richard O. Joyce received any battle damage, minor hits from antiaircraft fire. In Yokosuka, at least one bomb from 1st Lieutenant Edgar E. McElroy's aircraft struck a nearly completed light carrier, delaying her launch until November.

• 5. Flight to Nowhere

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  Fifteen of the 16 aircraft turned southwest after the bombing and flew across the East China Sea toward eastern China. Captain Edward J. York's B-25 was so low on fuel that it headed for the Soviet Union instead, landing beyond Vladivostok at Vozdvizhenka. The other 15 crews faced compounding problems: night was closing in, fuel was running low, and the weather was deteriorating fast. Several fields in Zhejiang province were supposed to guide them in using homing beacons, but Halsey never sent the planned signal to alert the Chinese airfields, apparently out of concern for the task force. Chinese airfield crews, fearing Japanese air attack based on prior experience, had not lit the homing beacons or runway torch lights.

  None of the 15 aircraft would have reached China without an unexpected tailwind off the Japanese coast that added speed for seven hours. All 15 made the Chinese coast after 13 hours of flight, then crash-landed or had their crews bail out. Twenty-year-old Corporal Leland D. Faktor, the flight engineer and gunner for 1st Lieutenant Robert M. Gray, was killed during his bailout, the only fatality in that crew.

  York and his crew in the Soviet Union were interned under international law, since the USSR was not at war with Japan. Their B-25 was confiscated. Several months later they were moved to Ashgabat, in what was then the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic. In mid-1943 they crossed into Allied-occupied Iran and presented themselves to a British consulate on the 11th of May 1943. A cover story claimed York had bribed a smuggler to escape, but declassified Soviet archives later confirmed the "smuggling" had been staged by the NKVD.

  Doolittle landed in a paddy near Quzhou after parachuting into China, where he received help from Chinese soldiers, civilians, and John Birch, an American missionary. He landed in a heap of dung, which his own account credited with saving a previously injured ankle from breaking.

• 6. The Costs Paid by Others

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  The eight captured raiders were tried and sentenced to death at a military trial in China, then transported to Tokyo, where the Army Ministry reviewed their cases. Five sentences were commuted; three men were executed. The surviving five remained in military confinement on a starvation diet. In April 1943 they were moved to Nanjing, where Lieutenant Robert J. Meder died on the 1st of December 1943. The four remaining prisoners, Chase Nielsen, Robert L. Hite, George Barr, and Corporal Jacob DeShazer, were eventually given slightly better conditions and access to a copy of the Bible. American troops freed them in August 1945.

  George Barr had been near death when liberated and remained in China until October recuperating. Transferred to Letterman Army Hospital and then to a military hospital in Clinton, Iowa, Barr became suicidal and was held virtually incommunicado until November, when Doolittle's personal intervention secured treatment that led to his recovery. DeShazer graduated from Seattle Pacific University in 1948 and returned to Japan as a missionary, serving there for over 30 years. Four Japanese officers were tried for war crimes against the captured raiders, found guilty, and sentenced to hard labor, three for five years and one for nine years.

  The deepest price was paid in China. The Japanese Imperial Army launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign, also known as Operation Sei-go, to prevent the eastern coastal provinces from being used again as a staging ground. Father Wendelin Dunker, an eyewitness, described the Japanese sweep as leaving behind nothing but destruction. On the 11th of June, Japanese forces entered Nancheng, population 50,000, beginning what missionaries would later call "the Rape of Nancheng." The city was burned for three days. The Imperial Japanese Army also deployed Unit 731, which brought contaminated food and poisoned wells near Yushan, Kinhwa, and Futsin. Around 1,700 Japanese troops died from disease when their biological weapons rebounded on their own forces. Chinese estimates put the total civilian death toll from the campaign at 250,000. Shunroku Hata, who commanded the Japanese forces involved, was sentenced in 1948 in part for failure to prevent atrocities; he was paroled in 1954.

• 7. What the Raid Moved

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  Doolittle believed the loss of all 16 aircraft and the minor damage to targets had made the mission a failure, and he expected a court-martial on his return. Instead he was promoted two grades to brigadier general on the 28th of April while still in China, skipping the rank of colonel entirely. Roosevelt presented him with the Medal of Honor in June. All 80 raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross; those killed or wounded also received the Purple Heart; and every raider was decorated by the Chinese government.

  In Tokyo, interned Allied embassy staff reacted with open celebration. Sir Robert Craigie, the British Ambassador, noted that Japanese guards had previously found the idea of an attack on Tokyo laughable, but after the raid they showed considerable excitement and disturbance. The Japanese press was instructed to describe the bombing as a cruel attack on civilians. Japanese officials reported that nine aircraft had been shot down, but there were no photographs of wreckage to support the claim.

  The strategic consequences extended well beyond the damage on the ground. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto's resolve to destroy the American carrier fleet was strengthened by the humiliation of allowing land-based bombers to reach the home islands. Japan launched the Aleutian Islands campaign to deny the U.S. a potential bomber base, committing two carriers that would otherwise have been available at Midway. The raid also pulled substantial Japanese air force resources away from offensive operations and into home island defense. Japanese high command's fear of further attacks drove a series of poor strategic decisions that persisted for the remainder of the war, with the Battle of Midway in June 1942 proving the most consequential result.