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

by Scott, James M.

  Roosevelt knew he needed all the support he could muster as the news worsened. The Japanese had not stopped at Pearl Harbor, but targeted American forces across the Pacific. Guam fell soon after the raid on Hawaii, and forces on Wake stood just hours before surrender. The enemy likewise had wiped out much of America’s airpower in the Philippines and would soon seize the capital of Manila. The British had suffered similar defeats. Hirohito’s forces sank the battleship Prince of Wales and the battle cruiser Repulse—important symbols of British naval power in the Pacific—and would soon capture Malaya. The Japanese onslaught appeared unstoppable. “I never wanted to have to fight this war on two fronts. We haven’t got the Navy to fight in both the Atlantic and the Pacific,” the president had confessed to his wife, Eleanor, soon after Pearl Harbor. “We will have to build up the Navy and the Air Force, and that will mean that we will have to take a good many defeats before we can have a victory.”

  The president understood that continued defeats would only demoralize the American public, already anxious now that sandbags crowded West Coast windows and blackout curtains dangled in the White House. Polls showed that one out of every two Americans now feared the enemy would bomb American cities. Those worries had even infected some of the president’s top advisers. “You are not only the most important man to the United States today, but to the world,” chief of naval operations Admiral Harold Stark warned in a letter five days after the attack. “If anything should happen to you, it would be a catastrophe.” The Secret Service aimed to prevent such a crisis, converting a vault under the Treasury Department into a bomb shelter. The president had bristled at the increased security, but consented to at least strap a gas mask to his wheelchair. “Henry,” he told Treasury Secretary Morgenthau, “I will not go down into the shelter unless you allow me to play poker with all the gold in your vaults.”

  Victory on the battlefield and at sea was the only way to allay the nation’s fears and nurture the vital patriotism that had arisen from the ashes of Pearl Harbor. Once that unity faded, the blame would begin. Already those resentments festered beneath the surface, as evidenced by a White House report days after the attack that had analyzed editorial opinions. “The shock and awareness of loss occasioned by the attack gave rise to the expression of certain resentments in the press,” warned the December 15 memo. “There was guarded criticism of the military and naval command in the Pacific.” Many Americans no doubt shared the private outrage Roosevelt’s close friend Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long captured in his diary the day after the attack. “Sick at heart,” Long wrote. “I am so damned mad at the Navy for being asleep at the switch at Honolulu. It is the worst day in American history. They spent their lives in preparation for a supreme moment—and then were asleep when it came.”

  These challenges confronted Roosevelt as he welcomed his military advisers into his cluttered study at 2:55 p.m. Despite the troubles in the Pacific, he had enjoyed a quiet Sunday. Eleanor had hopped the train to New York for the weekend, where she had seen the Cole Porter play Let’s Face It! on Broadway before traveling up to the family’s home in Hyde Park. Snow flurries fell and the pond showed signs of freezing as she marveled at the foothills of the Catskills, a welcome reprieve from the war that now dominated her husband’s life. “I wish I could tell you how clear and beautiful the stars were that twinkled through the windows of my porch Saturday night. I almost felt I could touch them,” she wrote. “They made the world of war and sorrow seem so very far away and unreal.” The president had eaten lunch with Harry Hopkins before meeting for twenty-five minutes with Ambassador Lord Halifax of Britain. Roosevelt had seen the diplomat out the door as he ushered in his war council.

  Around the study sat Hopkins, War Secretary Stimson, Knox, Admiral Stark, newly appointed U.S. Fleet commander Admiral Ernest King, Army chief of staff General Marshall, and Lieutenant General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces. Roosevelt opened with news that Prime Minister Churchill and his team of more than eighty advisers would arrive the next day in Washington. Marshall gave the president an estimate of the situation, before Roosevelt zeroed in on the Far East, demanding America build up forces in Australia, the East Indies, and the Philippines. The president, like most Americans, felt anxious to fight. He planned to press Churchill about sending American troops into battle in the Atlantic theater, a move he felt would not only deliver a blow to German morale but buoy domestic spirits. Roo-sevelt wanted to achieve the same goal in the Pacific, where a White House analysis of editorial opinion revealed “almost unanimous endorsement of forceful action against Japan.”

  The challenge Roosevelt faced was that America was in no position to go on the offensive. The president’s long struggle against isolationist lawmakers had handicapped America’s war preparation at the same time Japan had stockpiled raw materials and hammered out thousands of new tanks, planes, and warships. Roosevelt had witnessed firsthand the struggle of the Army when he inspected maneuvers in August 1940 in upstate New York, only to discover soldiers drilling with drainpipes in place of mortars and broomsticks for machine guns. Some had never even fired a rifle. The Air Forces suffered similar shortages. Of America’s three thousand combat planes, only about one-third were ready for war. So desperate was the Navy to recruit new sailors that it slashed standards for eyesight, height, and teeth; applicants needed as few as eighteen teeth, including just two molars. Even the president’s war council appeared to suffer from such disorganization—no one bothered to take formal meeting minutes—that it would only infuriate British military leaders scheduled to arrive within hours. “The whole organization,” one later griped, “belongs to the days of George Washington.”

  Roosevelt looked past these challenges and pressed his advisers: When could America operate from airfields in China? China appeared America’s only real option to take the fight to Japan. The fall of Guam coupled with the siege of Wake and the attack on the Philippines had robbed America of strategic air and naval bases in the region. The Russian port city of Vladivostok would have been preferable—it was only 675 miles from Tokyo—but the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact of April 1941 meant Premier Joseph Stalin would likely refuse such a request. Allowing American bombers to operate from Russia would only risk Japanese retaliation, a threat the beleaguered Soviets could not afford, given the war in the west against Germany. Marshall briefed Roosevelt on militarizing ex-Army officers who had volunteered to fly missions in China under Colonel Claire Chennault, a former fighter instructor who had passed on a quiet Louisiana retirement to advise the Chinese. The morning papers reported that Chennault’s fliers had shot down four Japanese planes only the day before.

  Though pleased with the news, the president wanted more. It was not enough to pick off a handful of enemy planes over the distant skies of China. Such a scuffle would hardly dent Japan’s powerful war machine, much less spark fear among the empire’s military leaders or civilian population. Likewise, such a small victory set against the continued defeats would have no real effect on the shell-shocked American public, particularly when compared with the spectacular raid on Pearl Harbor that had killed and injured thousands and crippled an entire fleet. The Japanese needed to experience the same shock, humiliation, and destruction that America had suffered. Roosevelt understood there was only one way to accomplish that lofty goal, a demand he would repeatedly press upon his advisers in the days and weeks to come. “The president was insistent,” Arnold recalled, “that we find ways and means of carrying home to Japan proper, in the form of a bombing raid, the real meaning of war.”

  ADMIRAL ERNEST KING RETIRED to his cabin after dinner on the evening of Saturday, January 10, 1942. Much to the frustration of the sixty-three-year-old Ohioan, who served as commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet, Christmas and New Year’s had passed without any reprieve from the bad news that dominated the Pacific. The admiral had spent the afternoon at a conference of two dozen senior American and British military leaders at the Federal Reserve
Building, downtown on Constitution Avenue, the eighth of twelve such war strategy sessions that would later be known as the Arcadia Conference. The two-and-a-half-hour meeting, which had focused on topics ranging from how to blunt Japan’s southward advance to immediate assistance for China, had adjourned with plans to meet again the following afternoon. King had hurried back to the Washington Navy Yard in time for dinner and an evening of work aboard his flagship, the Vixen, a 333-foot steel-hulled yacht moored in the frigid Anacostia River.

  King was no stranger to long hours. The six-foot-tall admiral, who always wore a hat to hide his baldness, had graduated fourth in the class of 1901 at the Naval Academy, where his rosy cheeks had earned him the nickname Dolly, which he despised, favoring instead the name Rey, the Spanish word for king. He had served aboard destroyers and battleships and later commanded submarine divisions and even the sub base in New London, Connecticut. Recognizing the importance of naval aviation, King had earned his wings at forty-eight and later commanded the carrier Lexington. But the admiral wasn’t without his flaws, from his wandering hands, which left women afraid to sit next to him at dinner parties, to the thirst for booze that had prompted him to invent his own cocktail, a mix of brandy and champagne that he dubbed “the King’s Peg.” The admiral’s biggest fault, however, was his volcanic wrath, best described by one of his daughters: “He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy. He is always in a rage.”

  Despite his personal failings King had passion for military history and proved a brilliant strategist. A crossword puzzle addict, he admired Napoleon and walked the Civil War battlefields of Antietam and Gettysburg. His appreciation of history had led King—appointed by the president on December 20—to try to stall the official date he would take command until January 1, a move he felt would prevent the calamitous losses of 1941 from staining the legacy he hoped to create. Though America’s war plan called largely for playing defense in the Pacific until the defeat of Hitler, King planned to seize every opportunity to go after the Japanese. That was the best way to keep the enemy off guard and unable to strike, a philosophy he outlined in a memo to fellow senior military leaders. “No fighter ever won his fight by covering up—by merely fending off the other fellow’s blows,” King wrote. “The winner hits and keeps on hitting even though he has to take some stiff blows in order to be able to keep on hitting.”

  Captain Francis Low appeared at the admiral’s door on the Vixen. The forty-seven-year-old New York native, who served as King’s operations officer, had graduated in 1915 from the Naval Academy. The son of a retired Navy commander, Low captained the academy’s swim team, setting the school’s 220-yard record and earning the nickname Frog. He had spent much of his career in the submarine service, commanding five boats and later a squadron before he landed on the admiral’s staff. If anyone was used to King’s tirades it was Low, who viewed his boss at times as both “rather cruel and unusual” and a “little understood and immensely complicated individual.” “He was difficult to work for,” Low later wrote in his unpublished memoir, “but serving with him was a liberal education—if one survived.” Low had suffered one such blowup a year earlier on the battleship Texas when he was executing a routine course change in the middle of the night. The admiral appeared on the bridge within minutes.

  “Who made that signal?” King barked.

  “I did,” Low answered.

  King exploded, accusing Low of usurping power and undermining his authority. The shocked subordinate escaped to a wing of the bridge, his pride wounded. King cooled down and tried to apologize. “Low,” the admiral began, putting his hand on his shoulder. “Don’t feel too badly about this.”

  But Low turned on his boss.

  “Admiral,” he fired back, “aside from asking for my immediate detachment, there is not one goddamn thing that you can do to me that I can’t take.”

  That bold move had earned King’s respect.

  “What is it, Low?” the admiral asked this January evening.

  Low had what he later described as a “foolish idea,” but given the dark early days of the war felt it was at least worth a mention.

  “I’ve been to the Norfolk yard, as you know sir, to see the progress made on the Hornet,” the captain began. “At the airfield they have marked out a strip about the size of a carrier deck, and they practice take-offs constantly.”

  “Well,” King replied, baffled by the direction of Low’s comments. “That’s a routine operation for training carrier-based pilots.”

  “If the Army has some plane that could take off in that short distance,” Low continued. “I mean a plane capable of carrying a bomb load, why couldn’t we put a few of them on a carrier and bomb the mainland of Japan? Might even bomb Tokyo.”

  Low waited for the irascible admiral to brush him off—or worse—but to his surprise King leaned back in his chair. This was precisely the bold concept that appealed to the admiral’s desire to go on the offensive. “Low,” King answered, “that might be a good idea. Discuss it with Duncan and tell him to report to me.”

  Low phoned Captain Donald Duncan, King’s air operations officer. The forty-five-year-old Michigan native, who still answered to his Naval Academy nickname Wu, had graduated just two years behind Low. A trained naval aviator with a master’s degree from Harvard, Duncan had served as navigator on the carrier Saratoga, as the executive officer of the Pensacola Naval Air Station, and later as commander of the first aircraft carrier escort, Long Island. He was also politically connected. His sister Barbara, before her 1937 death of cancer, was married to Harry Hopkins. “One thing I’ll say about you,” King once told Duncan, “you’re no yes-man.” Duncan would never forget that comment: “I always thought that, coming from Admiral King, was a very great compliment.”

  “This better be important,” Duncan warned Low when the two met that Sunday morning at the Navy Department on Constitution Avenue.

  “How would you like to plan a carrier-based strike against Tokyo?”

  Low had piqued Duncan’s interest.

  “As I see it,” Low explained, “there are two big questions that have to be answered first: Can an Army medium bomber land aboard a carrier? Can a land-based bomber loaded down with bombs, gas, and crew take off from a carrier deck?”

  Duncan considered the questions, explaining that a carrier deck was too short for a bomber to land on. Even if it could, the fragile tail would never handle the shock of the arresting gear. Furthermore, a bomber would not fit in the aircraft elevator, making it impossible to stow the plane below to allow others to land.

  “And my second question?” Low pressed.

  “I’ll have to get back to you.”

  Duncan started right away, drafting a preliminary plan. The main question was what, if any, plane could handle such a mission. Low had initially suggested the bombers might return to the carrier and ditch in the water, though Duncan’s study showed it would be better if the planes could fly on to airfields in China. Since intelligence indicated that Japanese patrol planes flew as far as three hundred miles offshore, America would need a bomber that could launch well outside that range, strike Tokyo, and still have enough fuel to reach the mainland. Duncan reviewed the performance data of various Army planes. The Martin B-26 could cover the distance and carry a large bomb load, but it was questionable whether the bomber could lift off from a carrier’s deck. Likewise, the B-23 could handle the demands of the mission, but the plane’s larger wingspan risked a collision with the carrier’s superstructure and limited how many bombers would fit on deck. Duncan realized that the twin-engine North American B-25 appeared best suited for the mission. Not only would its wings likely clear the island, but with modified fuel tanks the B-25 could handle the range and still carry a large bomb load.

  Duncan next turned to ships. The Pacific Fleet had just four flattops, the Saratoga, Enterprise, Lexington, and Yorktown, the latter reassigned from the Atlantic after the attack on Pearl Harbor. But Duncan had another carrier in mind—the new 19,800
-ton Hornet, undergoing shakedown in Virginia. Duncan knew the Hornet would report to the Pacific about the time it would take to finalize such an operation. Low had recommended the use of a single carrier, but Duncan realized the mission would require two. With the cumbersome bombers crowding the Hornet’s flight deck, a second flattop would have to accompany the task force to provide fighter coverage along with more than a dozen other cruisers, destroyers, and oilers. Lastly, a check of historical data revealed a likely window of favorable weather over Tokyo from mid-April to mid-May.

  When Duncan concluded his preliminary study, he and Low presented the results to King. The aggressive admiral liked what he heard.

  “Go see General Arnold about it, and if he agrees with you, ask him to get in touch with me,” King ordered. “And don’t you two mention this to another soul!”

  The men agreed.

  King then turned to Duncan. “If this plan gets the green light from General Arnold,” he said, “I want you to handle the Navy end of it.”

  GENERAL ARNOLD HAD FOR weeks mulled over the president’s demand that America bomb Japan, struggling to determine how the Army Air Forces might best execute such a bold mission. Few people in the nation could top the airpower expertise of the fifty-five-year-old Arnold, whose trademark grin had long ago earned him the nickname Hap, short for “happy.” A 1907 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he had learned to fly from none other than Orville and Wilbur Wright, taking to the skies in a primitive biplane that lacked safety belts and whose sole instrumentation consisted of a simple string that fluttered in the wind to indicate the aircraft’s skid. Only after a bug hit Arnold in the eye one day while landing did pilots adopt the trademark goggles. The six-foot-tall Arnold had completed his aviation course in just ten days in May 1911—his total flight time amounted to less than four hours—to become one of only two qualified pilots in the Army.

  An avid prankster who once rolled cannonballs down a dormitory stairwell at West Point, Arnold was one of aviation’s leading pioneers. He not only earned the distinction of being the first military man to fly more than a mile high, but he was the first pilot to carry the mail and even buzz the nation’s Capitol, a stunt he joked in a letter to his mother prompted lawmakers “to adjourn.” But the two-time recipient of aviation’s prestigious Mackay Trophy nearly suffered tragedy in the fall of 1912 on an experimental flight in Kansas designed to observe artillery fire. Arnold’s plane suddenly spun around, stalled, and dove. Only seconds before his plane would have hit, Arnold pulled the aircraft out of the dive and landed. The near crash so rattled him that he refused to fly. “At the present time,” Arnold wrote to his commanding officer, “my nervous system is in such a condition that I will not get in any machine.” To a fellow flier he was more blunt. “That’s it,” he confessed. “A man doesn’t face death twice.”