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

by Scott, James M.

  Richard Knobloch returned to base after visiting his girlfriend to learn the news of the mission. “Knobby, you should have been here,” one of his friends told him. “They want volunteers to fly with Jimmy Doolittle.”

  The opportunity to fly with such a famous aviator thrilled Knobloch. “Boy, here’s a chance for a great adventure,” the pilot thought. “I’m going to be a hero.”

  “How about me?” Knobloch asked. “Didn’t anybody put my name in?”

  “No,” someone told him. “Too late now.”

  Knobloch went to his boss, the squadron ops officer, and begged to go.

  “It’s too late,” he told him.

  So Knobloch hurried to see Captain Baumeister, the squadron commander. “Sir,” he pleaded. “I want to go on this operation.”

  “It’s too late,” Baumeister said.

  Knobloch pleaded his case all the way up to group commander Mills, who only echoed the others.

  “Will you at least put me on the alternate list? I want to go,” he begged. “Here’s an opportunity to fly with a great aviator, Doolittle.”

  JAPAN’S RAMPAGE ACROSS ASIA and the Pacific had left Roosevelt exhausted and irritable with Congress, the media, and even the American public. The news had grown so bad in recent weeks that Secretary of State Hull had begun cleaning out his desk and the perennially sick Hopkins landed in the hospital. Isolationist newspapers, from the New York Daily News and the Washington Times Herald to the Chicago Tribune, once critical of the president’s foreign policy now targeted his handling of the war. Editorials argued that Japan was the real menace and that America should concentrate its strength in the Pacific, not in Europe, while others even criticized military sales and loans to Allies as weakening American power. “There is a prevailing desire in the press for offensive warfare,” noted one White House analysis of the editorial opinion. “It appears to be motivated, not merely by an eagerness for revenge against the Japanese, but also by a recognition that only offensive strategy can bring the war to a successful conclusion.”

  America’s efforts to rebuff the Japanese had met disaster in December when the Navy attempted to relieve Wake, a remote outpost built on the 2.5-square-mile rim of a submerged volcano. More than five hundred marines and sailors—aided by about twelve hundred civilian construction workers—repelled the Japanese for fifteen days, a story that gripped the American public. The carriers Saratoga and Lexington rushed toward Wake as the Japanese charged ashore. “The enemy is on the island,” Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham, the garrison’s senior officer, signaled on December 23. “The issue is in doubt.” With the Saratoga just 425 miles away, the Navy aborted the operation, afraid to risk the loss of a carrier or trigger another attack on Hawaii. Wake fell that afternoon. Some on board the Saratoga wept, while Enterprise aviators vented in an unofficial log: “Everyone seems to feel that it’s the war between the two yellow races.” Even Roosevelt felt Wake’s loss “a worse blow than Pearl Harbor.”

  The British had proven equally impotent seven weeks later to stop the fall of Singapore, a far greater strategic loss than Wake. Constructed atop a mangrove swamp over some two decades—and at a price of some $400,000,000—the equatorial fortress had served to check Japanese expansion into the Indian Ocean. Singapore’s fall opened the doors for the Japanese to cut off lifelines to Russia and China, target India, and possibly link up with German forces in the Middle East. The loss put the oil-rich Dutch East Indies and even Australia in the Japanese crosshairs. Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, whom Roosevelt tapped to serve as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China, captured his shock over Singapore’s loss in his diary. “Christ,” he wrote. “What the hell is the matter?” For the first time the press speculated that the United States might lose the war. “There can now be no doubt,” observed a reporter in the New York Times, “that we are facing perhaps the blackest period in our history.”

  Attention next focused on the Philippines, where some 110,000 American and Filipino troops under the command of General Douglas MacArthur had retreated to the Bataan Peninsula and the fortified island of Corregidor. The Japanese had entered Manila on January 2 and cut off any hope of reinforcement. Despite the media’s lionized coverage of the gallant stand, Roosevelt knew MacArthur’s forces were doomed. During a February news conference, when pressed about America’s inability to supply more planes, Roosevelt barked at a reporter, “If you will tell me how to get a bomber in there, they can have a bomber.” The Germans and Japanese mocked MacArthur in shortwave broadcasts, paying tribute to his struggle as a way to embarrass the United States. “In the name of fair play and chivalry,” one broadcast trumpeted, “the Japanese nation demands that the United States give General MacArthur the reinforcements he needs, so he will be able to wage a war that would be to his satisfaction, win or lose.”

  The unity that had enveloped the nation in the wake of Pearl Harbor had now vanished, replaced by fear, hostility, and racism directed at many of Japanese descent. Long-simmering jealousy along the West Coast over the economic success of many immigrants fueled public pressure to relocate families to internment camps in the nation’s interior; the proponents of such action ranged from the governor of California to the entire West Coast congressional delegation. “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched,” declared an editorial in the Los Angeles Times. “Herd ’em up, pack ’em off and give ’em the inside room of the badlands,” wrote syndicated columnist Henry McLemore. “Personally, I hate the Japanese. And that goes for all of them.” Some senior military leaders also championed the idea. “A Jap’s a Jap—it makes no difference whether he is an American citizen or not,” announced Lieutenant General John DeWitt, head of the Army’s Western Defense Force. “I don’t want any of them.”

  Roosevelt felt pressure even from members of his own cabinet. “It looks to me like it will explode any day now,” warned Assistant to the Attorney General James Rowe Jr. in early February, one of the few who argued against such a move. “If it happens, it will be one of the great mass exoduses of history.” Roosevelt viewed the issue as one of military necessity, a step that had to be taken to protect the country. He signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, relocating more than 100,000 citizens and aliens to internment camps. “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step,” Attorney General Francis Biddle later wrote. “Nor do I think that the constitutional difficulty plagued him—the Constitution has never greatly bothered any wartime president.” But the decision bothered Eleanor. “These people were not convicted of any crime, but emotions ran too high,” she wrote in Collier’s in 1943. “Too many people wanted to wreak vengeance on Oriental-looking people.”

  Social tensions spread beyond those of Japanese descent. A White House public opinion analysis revealed how in the black community the war had triggered a “deep undercurrent of bitterness and resentment.” Many begrudged the Marine Corps’ refusal to admit blacks and the Army’s policy of segregation. Others complained that the Navy accepted blacks only for menial jobs, such as that of mess attendants. “The Navy has a woeful need of men, but it doesn’t need us,” wrote Pittsburgh Courier columnist Marjorie McKenzie. “Can we honestly feel like strong, courageous, loyal Americans in the face of that?” Another flashpoint of tension centered on the refusal of the American Red Cross at the war’s outbreak to accept blood from blacks. The organization agreed under pressure to reverse the policy, though it still segregated blood by race. “It is a matter of the deepest resentment,” noted an administration report, “that White men who ask Negroes to sacrifice their lives refuse to have Negro blood mingled with their own.”

  Roosevelt understood that the continued defeats and the growing social tensions threatened the war effort. As the news deteriorated, his demands for an attack on Japan increased. Roosevelt hammered that point home in a January 28 White House conference, questioning whether the United States could even set up bomber bases in Mongolia, a discu
ssion Arnold captured in his notes: “The president stated that, from a psychological standpoint, both of Japan and the United States, it was most important to bomb Japan as soon as possible.” Arnold cautioned Roosevelt afterward in a memo that Mongolia—far outside the control of the Chinese government—was not a safe option. Roosevelt needed to be patient. “For this reason I feel that the plan, which is now in progress, for carrying out an attack upon the Japanese enemy’s center of gravity, by making use of facilities for which the Chinese Government can guarantee us a reasonable degree of security on the Eastern Asiatic mainland, is the logical and most effective plan.”

  The president in the short term would have to look elsewhere for ways to distract the American public. Eleanor used her daily newspaper column to try to buoy public morale after the fall of Singapore. “Perhaps it is good for us to have to face disaster, because we have been so optimistic and almost arrogant in our expectation of constant success,” she wrote. “Now we shall have to find within us the courage to meet defeat and fight right on to victory.” The president took to the airwaves in a fireside chat on February 23, echoing his wife in an effort to dispel growing public apathy. What America needed, he knew, was a victory. “Let me say once and for all to the people of the world: We Americans have been compelled to yield ground, but we will regain it,” Roosevelt told an estimated audience of sixty-two million. “We are daily increasing our strength. Soon, we and not our enemies will have the offensive; we, not they, will win the final battles; and we, not they, will make the final peace.”

  CHAPTER 5

  For a while we’ll have everything our own way, stretching out in every direction like an octopus spreading its tentacles. But it’ll last for a year and a half at the most.

  —ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO, SEPTEMBER 1941

  ADMIRAL ISOROKU YAMAMOTO STEWED aboard his flagship, the Yamato, safely anchored off the island of Hashirajima in Japan’s Inland Sea. The fifty-seven-year-old commander of the Combined Fleet—and architect of the surprise attack on Hawaii—understood the danger the United States still posed to Japan, even as much of the Pacific Fleet now rusted on the muddy bottom of Pearl Harbor. Yamamoto had long warned his superiors about the industrial power of the United States. The victories Japan now enjoyed, he knew, were merely the prelude to the war’s main act. “Britain and America may have underestimated Japan somewhat, but from their point of view it’s like having one’s hand bitten rather badly by a dog one was feeding. It seems that America in particular is determined before long to embark on full-scale operations against Japan,” he wrote a colleague. “The mindless rejoicing at home is really deplorable; it makes me fear that the first blow at Tokyo will make them wilt on the spot.”

  Yamamoto was unique among the empire’s senior leaders. The son of a former samurai warrior, he stood just five feet three inches tall, one inch shorter than Jimmy Doolittle. A graduate of Japan’s renowned Eta Jima Naval Academy, he shunned alcohol even as he nursed a lifelong love of gambling. Yamamoto had fought as a young ensign in the Russo-Japanese War. A gun explosion aboard the armored cruiser Nisshin in the 1905 Battle of Tsushima Strait robbed him of the index and middle finger of his left hand, earning him the nickname “eighty sen” from the geishas in Tokyo’s Shimbashi district who charged one yen for a ten-finger manicure. The explosion had peppered Yamamoto’s lower body with more than a hundred pieces of shrapnel, leaving the paunchy admiral forever scarred and self-conscious. “Whenever I go into a public bath,” he used to quip, “people think I’m a gangster.”

  Yamamoto twice lived in the United States, where he studied at Harvard and later served as naval attaché at the embassy in Washington. An avid admirer of Abraham Lincoln, he devoured biographies of America’s sixteenth president, demanding that his subordinates read them. Visits to the Detroit auto plants and the oil fields of Texas convinced him that the world was moving away from a dependency on iron and coal and more toward oil, gasoline, and light metals better suited for planes. When his superiors shot down his request for cash to tour Mexico, the dedicated officer opted to pay for the trip on his own meager salary, ultimately drawing the scrutiny of Mexican authorities. “A man who claims to be Yamamoto Isoroku, a commander in the Japanese navy, is traveling around the country inspecting oil fields. He stays in the meanest attics in third-rate hotels and never eats the hotel food, subsisting instead on bread, water, and bananas,” Mexican authorities cabled the embassy. “Please confirm his identity.”

  These experiences had convinced Yamamoto of the United States’ raw industrial might, even as isolationist policies in the wake of World War I had stunted America’s military growth. Yamamoto opposed Japan’s alliance with Germany and Italy and long resisted war with the United States, arguing that his nation’s limited resources would run out in eighteen months. His dissent had led some in Japan’s militaristic right wing to threaten to assassinate him, forcing the military police to guard him. One of Yamamoto’s top aides even slept each night with a sword. But the admiral refused to back down, voicing his concerns in 1940 to the then prime minister, Fumimaro Konoye, when pressed on Japan’s chances of success. “If we are ordered to do it,” Yamamoto had answered, “then I can guarantee to put up a tough fight for the first six months, but I have absolutely no confidence as to what would happen if it went on for two or three years.”

  Despite Yamamoto’s protestations, Japan had continued the march toward war, leaving the admiral in the awkward position of planning an operation he opposed, a predicament he captured in an October 1941 letter to a friend. “My present situation is very strange. Because I have been assigned the mission, entirely against my private opinion, and also I am expected to do my best,” he wrote. “Alas, maybe, this is my fate.” In past war games the Japanese Navy had never won an overwhelming victory against the United States, leading to the maneuvers’ suspension for fear the Navy would be dragged into gradual defeat. The best way to improve Japan’s chances, Yamamoto realized, was a surprise strike against American forces in Hawaii. “The most important thing we have to do first of all in a war with the U.S., I firmly believe, is to fiercely attack and destroy the U.S. main fleet at the outset of the war,” he wrote. “Only then shall we be able to secure an invincible stand in key positions in East Asia.”

  The success of the attack on Pearl Harbor had made Yamamoto a national celebrity, a status he despised even as a stack of new fan mail nearly a foot high landed daily on his desk. A request by famed painter Yasuda Yukihiko to paint his portrait only outraged the admiral, who remained troubled by Japan’s failure to sink any of America’s powerful aircraft carriers in the raid on Hawaii. “As I see it,” Yamamoto wrote a friend, “portraits are vulgarities to be shunned only less rigorously than bronze statues.” Likewise, he rejected an offer to write the original calligraphy for a new monument in central Tokyo’s Hibiya Park. When presented with two military decorations, he refused to accept them, burdened by a sense of guilt that, even though he commanded sailors, he had yet to see an enemy warship or plane. “I could never wear them,” Yamamoto said. “I’d be ashamed.” In a personal letter he was more blunt: “I wonder how the men who’ve seen action in the front line would feel about it?”

  Underlying Yamamoto’s unease was his fear that Japan’s euphoria over the attack on Pearl Harbor was premature. After more than four years of war with China—and with Japan already devouring its stockpiles of raw materials—Yamamoto knew the nation now lived on borrowed time. In his first wartime State of the Union address only weeks earlier, President Roosevelt had demanded that America produce 60,000 bombers, fighters, and cargo planes, 45,000 tanks, and 20,000 antiaircraft guns that year, along with eight million tons of ships. The Pearl Harbor attack was only the opening salvo of what promised to be a long and hard war, a view Yamamoto captured best in a letter to a colleague. “A military man can scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’; it is more a matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten,” he wrote. “I would rather you made
your appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.”

  Yamamoto’s fears ran counter to the views of his fellow military leaders, the press, and general public. In the weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, newspapers printed photos and dramatic accounts of the raid, described by the Osaka Mainichi newspaper as “the brilliant curtain raiser for the destruction of the United States and Britain.” Other papers published poems celebrating the attack, while a motion picture compiled of edited assault footage played for packed theaters nationwide. With each passing day—and as Japan’s victories mounted—the national ego swelled. The press began to refer to Japanese forces as “superhuman” and even celebrated them as gods. One newspaper article went so far as to proclaim that Japan’s conquest of the oil-rich Dutch East Indies fulfilled a centuries-old prophecy of the deity Boyo Moyo. “As our country was founded by God,” declared planning board president Lieutenant General Teiichi Suzuki, “so our men in the fighting forces are God’s troops.”

  Yamamoto watched as this national fervor reached a climax with the February fall of Singapore. Members of the House of Representatives erupted in shouts of “Banzai.” Schools suspended class, while newspapers published special “Victory Supplements.” Despite rationing, the government announced each family would be given two bottles of beer, rubber goods, and red beans; children under thirteen would receive caramel drops. Even Emperor Hirohito put in a special public appearance—dressed in his military uniform and mounted on his favorite horse, White Snow—to accept the banzais of the adoring crowd of thousands gathered in front of the Imperial Palace. “The downfall of Singapore,” the Osaka Mainichi wrote, “has definitely decided the history of the world.” The Japan Times & Advertiser compared the victory to Hannibal’s legendary crossing of the Alps and Genghis Khan’s passage through the Hindu Kush. “Our men,” the paper declared, “are now among the world’s immortals.”