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

by Scott, James M.

  “Well,” Commander Minoru Genda, the First Air Fleet’s operations officer, announced upon Fuchida’s arrival, “they’ve come at last!”

  The Japanese public had long braced for the possibility of air raids, given the nation’s proximity to the Soviet Union and China. Throughout the 1930s Japan held annual air-raid drills for the six major cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Kobe, emphasizing first aid, blackouts, and poisonous gas defense. Department stores and public buildings often displayed exhibits of World War I–era German bombs as well as mock-ups of miniature cities, complete with planes, bombs, and underground shelters. No less than 70 percent of Tokyo adults had invested in inexpensive gas masks. The war with China had only increased the importance of such precautions, prompting Japanese leaders to enlist Tokyo’s 140,955 neighborhood groups, a communal system made up of ten to twenty families whose roots stretched back to the feudal era. Armed with hand pumps, buckets, and shovels, these groups served on the front line of civilian defense in the event of an air raid.

  Though these precautions contrasted with the government’s boastful declarations that an enemy raid was impossible, Tokyo residents had learned to accept the drills as a normal inconvenience of wartime life, similar to rationing and the loss of imported foreign goods. Outside of these frustrations little else had changed for many residents. Just two weeks earlier several thousand people had turned out for the cherry blossom festival. Music lovers still chatted about the Wednesday and Thursday night performances of famed piano soloist Kazuko Kusama at the Hibiya Public Hall, while gadflies buzzed about the upcoming House elections in which a hundred candidates vied for just thirty-two Tokyo-area seats. No fewer than 230 campaign rallies had taken place the day before in the nation’s capital. The Tokyo university baseball spring league—made up of the teams of six rival schools—planned to kick off the new season at 1 p.m. with two games, Wasdea versus Tokyo Imperial and Keio versus Hosei.

  News of the war filtered out to the public through the government-controlled media, which painted a jingoistic picture of Japanese forces as great liberators throughout Asia and the Pacific, casting off the imperial chains of Europe and America. Articles in the press just that week claimed that Japanese textbooks already were bestsellers in recently captured Hong Kong. Other accounts stated that residents on Sumatra celebrated the two-month anniversary of the day Japanese forces parachuted onto the tropical island and that schoolchildren in Singapore were thrilled to learn to sing the “Kimigayo,” Japan’s national anthem. Closer to home the first of more than 30,000 families of the nation’s war dead had begun to pour into the capital for the Yasukuni Shrine Festival set to begin April 24, a four-day celebration that would include the enshrinement of 15,017 service members killed in the war with China. “I am overwhelmed with awe,” one widow told reporters, “that the spirit of my husband is going to be deified.”

  Editorials meanwhile gloated over the capture of Bataan. “With the imminent fall of Corregidor the entire waters of the Southwestern Pacific will become an exclusive lake for the Japanese Navy,” bragged an editorial that morning in the Japan Times & Advertiser. “Warships of the United States and Brittan have been made into inglorious, baseless vagabonds on high seas. But fortunately, the matter was much simplified inasmuch as most of them already have been sent down to the bottom by Japanese warships which have swept Anglo-American ships clean of these waters.” The editorial went on to ridicule rumors of a possible Allied offensive in the weeks ahead. “Without any base for their fleet to start out from, how can they carry out their plans?” the paper asked. “All their ballyhoo about a summer offensive is the wishful thinking of the desperate Allied leaders who hope to keep their people from dwelling upon the numerous disasters their army and navy have suffered at the hands of the Japanese.”

  The war would make a brief intrusion this morning into the otherwise busy weekend lives of many Tokyo-area residents. Newspapers two days earlier had alerted residents of a practice air-raid drill scheduled for the morning of April 18, a fact local police communicated just the night before to the detained diplomats at the American and British embassies. About the same time the last B-25 roared off the deck of the Hornet, Tokyo responded to what officials referred to as the “first alarm.” No sirens sounded, nor did the government mandate that residents seek shelter. Only the city’s firefighting companies and air-raid wardens participated. Two firefighting squadrons appeared that morning outside the British embassy, while the detained American diplomats simply tugged shut the blackout curtains in the embassy and the chancery. The drill, however, soon ended. By 9:30 a.m. the air-raid wardens at the British embassy had stood down, and by 11 a.m. the one from the American embassy had teed off for a round of golf.

  Air maneuvers over the capital were frequent, and this Saturday morning was no different. Tokyo residents enjoyed celebrations in advance of Emperor Hirohito’s forty-first birthday at the end of the month as well as the Yasukuni Shrine Festival, which would feature a flyover of five hundred Army airplanes. The press had announced the maneuvers several days earlier, and authorities had alerted diplomats at the American embassy that morning. Firefighters lingered on the streets to watch the maneuvers while detained diplomats with little else to do gazed skyward as Japanese fighters battled one another in mock dogfights. Troops along the city’s waterfront floated barrage balloons, large inflatables anchored with metal cables that proved hazardous to any low-flying enemy planes. These activities wound down around noon. One detained American official, who had received special permission to visit a doctor, caught a streetcar at 12:15 p.m. Others traded small talk. Across the sprawling city of Tokyo, life returned to normal, residents no doubt comforted that for 2,600 years no invader had ever touched Japan.

  CHAPTER 11

  Once off the carrier, everything was peaceful until we hit the coast.

  —CHARLES MCCLURE, NAVIGATOR ON PLANE NO. 7

  DOOLITTLE CLOSED IN ON Japan, the bomber skimming just two hundred feet above the blue Pacific swells. The weather had cleared seventy miles out, and numerous civilian and naval vessels crowded the seas. Second Lieutenant Hank Potter, the twenty-three-year-old navigator from South Dakota, had struggled to obtain an accurate fix ever since takeoff. The airmen sighted the shore ahead.

  “We’re either fifty miles north of Tokyo or fifty miles south of it, that’s the way I figure it,” Doolittle told Potter.

  “I think we’re about thirty miles north,” Potter replied.

  Doolittle’s bomber charged ashore about fifty miles north of Inubo Saki. “Was somewhat north of desired course but decided to take advantage of error and approach from a northerly direction,” he wrote in his report, “thus avoiding anticipated strong opposition to the west.” The sighting by the patrol boats coupled with other reports made Doolittle suspect that fighters and antiaircraft batteries would anticipate the bomber’s arrival from the west. Approaching from the north would throw them off.

  “We’ve got company, Colonel,” copilot Richard Cole interjected, motioning out the cockpit at a B-25 that dipped its wings.

  First Lieutenant Travis Hoover, lead pilot of the first flight of three bombers, cruised off of Doolittle’s port side.

  The two bombers roared in over airfields north of Tokyo. The fields and the skies above were full of planes, mostly small biplanes that appeared to be primary or basic trainers. Gunner Staff Sergeant Paul Leonard in the turret counted as many as forty. “Japan looked green, peaceful and picturesque,” Cole later wrote. “The people on the ground waved to us and it seemed everyone was playing baseball.” Braemer echoed him. “We looked down and saw the street cars running and people walking in the streets,” he recalled, “so we knew our little party was going to be a complete surprise.”

  Doolittle flew as low as the terrain would allow, heading due south over the capital’s outskirts. The bomber roared over Tega Numa, a large lake northeast of Tokyo, with the plane almost “on the water.” The awful weather that had pla
gued the mission for days had cleared, and the ceiling over Japan this Saturday was unlimited, though a haze reduced visibility to about twenty-five miles. The pilots and gunners scanned the skies for fighters, while Potter sought to orient the plane, a much greater challenge than he expected. The maps showed that mountains as high as five thousand feet ringed northwest Tokyo, but Potter looked down and saw only miles of flat lands. Furthermore, although highways did not stand out, he found that rivers, canals, and railroads did, including the gigantic Tobata railway yard. He picked up the Ara River, which sliced through the landscape north of Tokyo—and was crossed by large bridges—as well as the easily identifiable Tachikawa railroad, which started by the palace and ran due west out of Tokyo.

  About ten miles out, Doolittle spotted nine fighters in three flights of three. The planes charged through the skies as much as eight thousand feet above. Doolittle kept the bomber low, hoping to avoid being detected. As the fighters roared past, the airmen spotted five barrage balloons over east central Tokyo and more in the distance.

  Twenty minutes after crossing the coastline, the bombers reached the Sumida River, which wound through northern Tokyo. Hoover banked west in search of his target, while Doolittle pressed on into Tokyo. His primary target was the armory just a few miles north of the Imperial Palace. In the bomb bay sat four incendiary bombs, which he hoped would serve as the match for a much larger explosion. The airmen could now clearly see the high-rises that crowded Tokyo’s business district as well as the palace and even the muddy moat that encircled Emperor Hirohito’s home.

  Doolittle was now poised like a dagger to stab at the heart of the empire of Japan. He pulled up to twelve hundred feet and banked southwest to prepare to bomb.

  “Approaching target,” he told Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer, the twenty-four-year-old bombardier from Washington.

  Braemer mashed the button, and the bomb bay doors yawned open, the roar of the engines now loud inside the plane.

  “All ready, Colonel,” Braemer announced over the interphone.

  Antiaircraft fire thundered into the sky as Doolittle leveled off for the run, buzzing his target by less than a quarter mile. Braemer sighted the arsenal. A red light on the cockpit instrument panel blinked as the first bomb plummeted to the ground below. Braemer noted the time was 1:15 p.m., though the time on the ground was one hour behind. The red light on Doolittle’s instrument panel flashed again.

  Then again.

  And again.

  Four incendiary bombs—each packed with 128 four-pound bomblets—tumbled down to Tokyo.

  On the ground below, several teachers at the Tsurumaki national school looked up as Doolittle’s bomber roared overhead, low enough that the American insignia was clearly visible. “Bomb-like objects fell from the plane,” one recalled. “On their way down they opened up like umbrellas and came down like leaflets.”

  About thirty of the bomblets landed on the school, including fifteen in the yard near where some 150 students gathered on the playground after lunch before kendo class. Others came down on the street, killing a pedestrian and setting fire to several stores and homes. Startled resident Seikichi Honjo charged outside in such a rush that he didn’t put on his pants. Still other bomblets set fire to the nearby Okazaki Hospital, where orderlies rushed to carry out the sick.

  About two hundred yards beyond the hospital sat Waseda Middle School, where faculty discussed attending the funeral of a colleague as students played outside in the yard. One of the bomblets hit fourth-grader Shigeru Kojima in the shoulder; he collapsed and started convulsing. Seconds later he fell still and died.

  All told, Doolittle’s attack killed two people and injured nineteen others, four seriously. Japanese investigators would later recover 425 incendiary bomblets, including 31 unexploded ones. As many as 250 others set fire to homes; fire brigades extinguished another 150, which caused minor damage. Another 100 came down on area roads and fields. Firefighters hurried to extinguish the blazes, but not before thirty-six buildings containing forty-four homes burned to the ground. The attack partially destroyed six other buildings, which included a total of twenty homes.

  Antiaircraft fire thundered. With the bombing complete, Braemer slipped the .30-caliber nose gun in place and loaded it, only to suffer a jam at this most inopportune time. He discovered a round jammed in the T slot. He pulled back on the bolt handle and fished the round out with his finger and then reloaded the gun.

  Antiaircraft shells exploded in the skies around the bomber. The elevation of the fire was good, but most shells burst a hundred yards to the right or left of the bomber.

  “Everything okay back there, Paul?” Doolittle asked his gunner.

  “Everything’s fine,” he answered.

  “They’re missing us a mile,” Doolittle added.

  A shell burst shook the bomber.

  “Colonel,” Leonard replied, “that was no mile.”

  Doolittle dove the bomber down to the rooftop level and flew over the western outskirts into a low haze and smoke. Smoke from the fires tickled the sky. He then turned south and headed back out to sea, passing over a small aircraft factory with a dozen newly completed planes on the line.

  “Colonel, can’t we burn up some of those Jap planes?” Braemer asked.

  “It would only alert them down there,” Doolittle replied. “This would give them a chance to raise hell with any of the boys coming after us.”

  The anxious Braemer spotted what appeared to be either a tank or an armored car on a highway below, once again asking permission to fire.

  “Relax, Fred,” Doolittle said. “They probably think we are a friendly aircraft. Let them keep on thinking that. And knocking off one tank isn’t going to win this war.”

  FIRST LIEUTENANT TRAVIS HOOVER reached his target at almost the exact same time as Doolittle. The lead pilot in the first wave of three bombers, Hoover had scanned the skies all morning for First Lieutenants Robert Gray and Everett Holstrom, but had never spotted them. The only other bomber he had seen was Doolittle’s.

  First Lieutenant Carl Wildner, the navigator, had set a course upon takeoff of 272 degrees, virtually due west. Following that heading meant Hoover should have come ashore over a rocky promontory topped by the Inubo Saki lighthouse, but instead he looked down on white sandy beaches that stretched for miles. Wildner knew this was bad.

  Real Bad.

  So did Hoover.

  “What’ll I do?” the pilot asked.

  All Wildner could suggest was to follow Doolittle.

  Wildner scanned his maps and peered out the window, desperate for any clue of his location. He had ended up as a navigator only after he had washed out of pilot training. The experience had left him with a major inferiority complex. With each passing minute—and as the plane plunged blindly deeper into Japan—his fears mounted. “In all my life I have never felt so helpless,” he wrote. “We passed over rice paddies, streams and a few temples but I couldn’t identify a single landmark on my maps. I knew the maps had been made up from very poor information but it seemed to me that the maps I was holding were of another part of the world. Nothing matched.”

  Unsure of his position, Hoover opted to trail his commander, zigzagging west across the rural landscape at an altitude of barely a hundred feet. The airmen remained surprised at the lack of concern. Despite the battle with the Nitto Maru, coupled with sightings of various other ships and planes, Japan seemed oblivious to the inbound aerial armada. Even the military bases the bomber buzzed appeared not to be on alert.

  “There were no pursuit planes or anti-aircraft,” Wildner wrote in his report. “The populace had shown no alarm at our coming.”

  “The people that I observed on the ground,” added Richard Miller, the bombardier, “casually looked up and watched us go by.”

  His plane armed with three 500-pound demolition bombs and one incendiary, Hoover had orders to target a powder factory and magazines near a bend in the Sumida River. “Nothing of military importance was observe
d until we reached the outskirts of northern Tokyo,” he noted in his report. “I recognized the Sumida River and immediately turned west along it toward our target. We started the climb.”

  Hoover scanned the congested riverbanks below but failed to spot the powder factory where the map indicated it. He hustled to pick an alternative target, spotting two factory buildings and storehouses near the river. The entire area was congested with small buildings, which would no doubt burn.

  Perfect.

  “There’s our target,” Hoover shouted.

  Hoover didn’t have time to pull up to fifteen hundred feet, so he leveled off at nine hundred. Second Lieutenant Richard Miller raced to set up the shot, unaware Hoover had swapped out the targets. “I spotted a large factory with several small warehouses around it which fit the description of our target,” he wrote in his report. “I immediately opened the bomb-bay doors and took a very quick aim at the center of the large factory and released all four of my bombs at half-second intervals by means of the manual release switch.”

  “Bombs away,” Miller yelled as he closed the doors. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Hoover banked the plane just as the bombs detonated. At less than nine hundred feet, the explosions jolted the crew, hurling debris as much as one hundred feet above the low-flying plane. “The concussion of the three demolition bombs,” Wildner later noted in his report, “lifted us before I realized that they had been dropped.”

  Even Richard Cole, Doolittle’s copilot in the skies several miles away, saw debris cloud the air, while gunner Paul Leonard in the turret thought the blast would bring down Hoover’s plane.

  But Hoover survived, roaring through the smoke and debris. The massive explosions near an Asahi Electrical Manufacturing Corporation factory would level or set ablaze thirty-eight buildings, all but eight completely destroyed. Fifty-two homes were lost and fourteen others damaged. The blast blew one woman out of her second-floor; miraculously she landed unhurt in the street atop a tatami mat.