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

by Scott, James M.

  Copilot Richard Knobloch spotted several cruisers anchored in the harbor, but the real prize, the airmen soon realized, was in the dry docks, where Japanese workers were converting the former submarine tender Taigei into a new 16,700-ton carrier, Ryuho. Bourgeois couldn’t believe how accurate his preparation was. “I had looked at the pictures on board the carrier so much that I knew where every shop was located at this naval base,” he later wrote. “It was as if it were my own backyard.”

  McElroy pulled back on the controls and climbed to thirteen hundred feet, his speed two hundred miles per hour. “There were furious black bursts of antiaircraft fire all around us,” the pilot later wrote, “but I flew straight on through them, spotting our target, the torpedo works and the dry docks.”

  “Get ready!” McElroy shouted.

  Bourgeois opened the bomb bay doors as McElroy lined up for his east-to-west run over the base’s shops and building slips. Bourgeois stared down the rudimentary sight, knowing that the low altitude combined with the large target guaranteed success. “A blind man,” he later joked, “could have hit my target.”

  The red light flashed again and again as Bourgeois dropped his three demolition bombs, followed by his single incendiary.

  “Bombs away!” he shouted.

  Knobloch had picked up a candid camera at the Sacramento Air Depot’s base exchange. He and Campbell now snapped pictures out of the cockpit and navigator’s side window, the only ones that would survive the raid.

  “We got an aircraft carrier!” shouted engineer and gunner Adam Williams, who manned the turret. “The whole dock is burning!”

  The bomb had ripped a massive hole twenty-six feet tall and fifty feet wide, through the port side of the Taigei, damage that would set back its conversion to an aircraft carrier by four months. Another thirty incendiary bomblets came down inside dock no. 4, igniting a fire that burned five crew members, carnage McElroy would capture in his report of the attack. “The large crane was seen to be blown up and a ship in the building slips was seen to burst into flames,” he wrote. “When some 30 miles to sea, we could see huge billows of black smoke rising from target.”

  The view looked much worse to Kazuei Koiwa, a nineteen-year-old civilian who worked out of the Yokosuka naval arsenal. He was on the phone with the staff of the Sasebo naval arsenal when the air raid alert sounded and explosions shook the building. “I looked out the window and saw a ferocious cloud of black smoke rising rapidly,” he recalled, charging out onto the roof for a better view. “Large numbers of wounded were being carried on stretchers to the infirmary next to the docks.”

  Vice Admiral Ishichi Tsuzuki, chief of the arsenal, appeared behind him, a mournful smile on his face. “The enemy,” the admiral said, “is quite something.”

  MAJOR JACK HILGER MADE LANDFALL on the cliffs just north of the Katsura lighthouse, a point almost due east of Yokosuka. Doolittle’s second-in-command led the fifth and final wave of attacks, aimed at the industrial cities of Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka. For Hilger the mission was personal: the Navy had just announced that his younger brother was lost when the Japanese sank the destroyer Pillsbury off Java.

  Hilger banked southwest and paralleled the coast toward Nagoya Bay, buzzing over dozens of fishermen, many of whom waved. Donald Smith, in the fifteenth bomber, flew on Hilger’s wing, finally separating to make his run on Kobe. Hilger never saw Billy Farrow, in the sixteenth bomber, who should have been on his other wing.

  South of Nagoya, Hilger turned inland and at a hundred feet zoomed north up Chita Wan, a narrow inlet crowded with industrial installations that paralleled the much larger Nagoya Bay.

  Hilger planned to skirt the east side of Nagoya, a move that would allow him to circle back and make a north-to-south run over the city. Herb Macia scanned the empty skies for any sign of enemy opposition. “Where are those fighters?” the navigator wondered with relief. “Thank God, we’re not going to be shot down.”

  The aircrew marveled at the landscape. “It was a beautiful spring day with not a cloud in the sky,” Hilger wrote in his diary. “The Japanese country is beautiful and their towns look like children’s play gardens. It is a shame to bomb them but they asked for it.” Macia agreed. “We climbed over some low-lying, beautifully cultivated country; very green, spotless,” he recalled. “Every inch of land seemed to be fully utilized.”

  “Look, they’ve got a ball game on over there,” Hilger announced to his crew. “I wonder what the score is.”

  No one suspected an air raid.

  Macia noted that some people even stood up and waved.

  The city of Nagoya defied the aircrew’s expectations. Most thought the industrial powerhouse—Japan’s third-largest city, with about 1.3 million residents—would be much larger than it actually was. Viewed from an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the city’s canals proved tough to spot and the waterfront area poorly defined. “While over Japan our entire crew was impressed with the drabness of the cities and the difficulty of picking out targets,” Hilger later noted in his report. “All buildings were grey and very much the same in appearance. The cities did not look at all the way we expected them to look from the information in our objective folders and on our maps.”

  Hilger thundered in over the city. His orders were to target the barracks of the Third Division Military Headquarters adjacent to the Nagoya castle, Matsuhigecho oil storage northwest of the business district, the Atsuta factory of the Nagoya arsenal in the city’s center, and the Mitsubishi aircraft works along the waterfront. Two minutes before Hilger lined up for his run, the antiaircraft batteries opened fire, filling the empty skies above and behind the bomber with puffs of black smoke.

  “Major Hilger, sir,” Bain called over the interphone, his voice filled with indignation. “Those guys are shooting at us!”

  Engineer Jacob Eierman spotted one antiaircraft battery of four guns on a parade ground of the army barracks, which was the target. He saw a second battery on the side of the Mitsubishi aircraft factory. “Some of the stuff was so far off it didn’t seem that they were really trying,” Eierman later wrote. “I saw only one mark on the plane—a little hole near the running light on the left wing tip.”

  Hilger leveled off for his run at a speed of 220 miles per hour. Copilot Jack Sims asked him whether he was hot.

  “No,” Hilger replied.

  “Then what the hell are you sweating so for?”

  Hilger carried four incendiary bombs, hoping to do as much damage as possible. Macia sited the army barracks on the ground below. The red light flashed as the first incendiary dropped, the individual bomblets spreading out over several rows. Bain watched the destruction from the rear gun turret: “I saw some ten to fifteen fires in this area and another twenty or more columns of greenish smoke.”

  Macia prepared next to bomb the oil and gasoline storage warehouses. He selected the largest building in the cluster, which resembled a massive college gymnasium, complete with a curved roof.

  Hilger bore down on his third target, the arsenal. “A tremendous building,” he noted in his diary. “Macia could have hit it with his eyes shut.” The bombardier agreed. “All I had to do was just drop the bomb,” he recalled. “I couldn’t have missed.”

  Antiaircraft batteries continued to roar, throwing up flak and filling the skies with dark puffs of smoke. “Our fourth and last target was one that I had been waiting to take a crack at ever since this war started,” Hilger later wrote. “It was the Mitsubishi Aircraft Works. It turns out a bimotored medium bomber very similar to a B-25. The main building was about 250 yd. square and Macia hit it dead center.”

  Others agreed. “That was a beautiful hit,” Eierman wrote. “I could see the bombs strike and flames burst up all over it.” He spied something else. “As we passed over, a cleaning woman rushed out of one door and shook a mop at us!”

  Hilger dove the bomber, buzzing past two oil storage tanks. “I fired a burst of some thirty to fifty rounds but did not set fire to the tanks,” Bai
n noted in his report. “From the tracers I am certain the tanks were hit.”

  Hilger’s attack destroyed twenty-three buildings and damaged six others. He had missed the army barracks and instead hit the Nagoya army hospital, destroying eighteen buildings; among the burned structures were six wards, but orderlies were able to evacuate the patients. Unable to put out the blaze, Army firefighters called in civilian assistance. Even then the inferno burned until the next day. The raid likewise burned up a food storage warehouse and Army arsenal, and destroyed five buildings at the Nagoya engine depot and damaged five others. No one was killed or injured.

  Eierman looked at Bain and couldn’t contain his laughter. “His left fist was clenched tight and his fingers were oozing peanut butter and jelly from that sandwich he had started to eat as we swept in over Japan,” the engineer later wrote. “The whole raid had taken us about eight minutes, and he had never let go.”

  The bomber buzzed just a few feet above the bay and headed back out to sea. A mushroom-shaped column of heavy black smoke rose as much as six thousand feet above the city, visible to the airmen at a distance of thirty miles. Sources picked up in China would later confirm that fires raged for the next forty-eight hours.

  “Boy,” Bain called out. “You ought to see that place burn.”

  FIRST LIEUTENANT DONALD SMITH piloted the fifteenth bomber off the Hornet, staying off Hilger’s wing as he listened to radio station JOAK. An alarm interrupted the regular broadcast at about 1:25 p.m., consisting of a forty-five second bell followed by what sounded like someone shouting three words. “This took place about 10 times,” Smith logged in his report. “That was the last we heard of the station.”

  There was little doubt the raid had begun.

  “Oh-oh!” copilot Griffith Williams called out. “There’s the land.”

  “We ought to be seeing some action pretty soon,” added Doc White.

  Smith banked south for the hour-and-fifteen-minute run down the coast, flying barely a hundred feet over the heads of the fishermen.

  “Here’s a good chance to sink some of these ships, Smitty,” Howard Sessler called out from the bomber’s nose. “Fly over them and I’ll give a few bursts.”

  “Better not,” Smith replied. “They may think we’re friendly aircraft if we don’t fire. This is supposed to be a surprise.”

  “Guess I’ll unbutton my collar,” engineer Edward Saylor announced, the tension rising. “Getting a little tight.”

  Smith turned into Nagoya Bay, zooming past lighthouses and coastal defense batteries without drawing any fire. “The only person we bothered,” White wrote in his diary, “was one fisherman who jumped into the water!”

  Hilger waggled his wings at about 2:30 p.m. and headed for Nagoya. Smith pressed on toward Kobe, piloting the TNT just a few feet over the waters crowded with small and colorful boats. “We had our first opposition as we zoomed over the beach heading inland,” White later wrote. “Four small boys who were playing along the shore threw rocks at us as we skimmed by a few feet over their heads.”

  Smith pulled back on the yoke and started to climb up to several thousand feet to cross the mountains. “Say, Saylor, start pushing,” copilot Griffith Williams joked. “Seems like we’re stopped up here.”

  The airmen scanned the skies and the ground below. “Very pretty and interesting countryside, rice paddies terraced clear to the tops of the hills,” White wrote in his diary. “Only airplane seen was a commercial airliner which flew by overhead. No pursuit seen though we flew by several airfields.”

  The bomber passed just north of Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, with almost two million residents. The airmen saw no evidence that the nation’s largest commercial center had been bombed, but instead marveled at the congestion. No line appeared to mark where Osaka ended and Kobe began, while the city’s factories belched a heavy smoke that left a thick haze in the air, slashing visibility and prompting White in his diary to label the city the “Pittsburgh of Japan.”

  Smith followed the Shinyodo River as White snapped photos of the industry that crowded the banks. “Trains, streetcars and buses were still running on the streets, people were out walking about,” he later wrote. “We even passed a commercial airliner heading in the other direction,” the Greater Japan Airlines daily round-trip flight from Fukuoka to Tokyo, carrying twenty-one passengers that afternoon and bound to arrive in the capital at 4:40 p.m. The sea breeze blew back some of the haze as the bomber neared Kobe, the nation’s sixth-largest city, with a population of about a million. The airmen spotted Koshien stadium, the largest ballpark in Asia, able to seat some fifty thousand fans and even boasting flush toilets. On the same field where Nankai battled Taiyo this afternoon, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played during a 1934 visit, later commemorated on a plaque at the stadium’s entrance. “Everything looked very much as the objective folder had shown, and we had no trouble in finding our targets,” Smith wrote in his report. “No anti-aircraft fire was encountered, and nothing hindered us from completing the mission.”

  Japan’s confidence that America would never raid its cities was on display in Kobe, where the airmen observed no effort to camouflage important factories and plants. The skies likewise proved empty of any fighter opposition, barrage balloons, or even antiaircraft fire as the TNT droned toward its targets, carrying four incendiary bombs to use against the city’s warehouses, shipping docks, and aircraft factories.

  “There’s the steel foundries straight ahead, Smitty,” Sessler said. “That’s where we’ll start our bombing run from.”

  “I see it,” Smith replied. “Give ’em hell!”

  Smith lined up for his run at two thousand feet and 240 miles per hour.

  “Bomb bay doors open,” Sessler announced.

  “Okay.”

  Sessler stared down the Mark Twain sight, dropping the first bomb immediately west of the Uyenoshita Steelworks and aiming the second at the Kawasaki Dockyard Company. The third fell west of the Electric Machinery Works, an area populated by small factories, machine shops, and residences. Sessler aimed the fourth at the Kawasaki aircraft factory and the Kawasaki Dockyard Company aircraft works. Only then did antiaircraft batteries open fire, from positions near the mouth of Shinminato River.

  “Hey, when you going to start dropping those things,” Smith blurted out, unaware that the red light on his cockpit instrument panel had burned out. “It’s getting kind of hot up here and I’m starting to sweat.”

  “I’ve already dropped them,” Sessler called back.

  “Bet they got a bang out of that!” Saylor quipped.

  “Hope they don’t lose their heads over it,” added Smith.

  A postwar analysis showed that the TNT largely missed its intended targets. One of the bombs destroyed eighteen homes in the Nishide neighborhood and damaged eleven others, killing one person, who was hit by an incendiary bomblet. Another bomb burned up three homes and damaged two others in the neighborhood of Minami Sakasegawa, while most of the final incendiary bomblets came down harmlessly in a canal alongside the Kawasaki aircraft factory. All told, Smith’s attack killed one person and injured five others, while destroying twenty-one homes and damaging fourteen others.

  White took photographs throughout the attack, spotting the aircraft carrier Hiyo under construction at the Kawasaki dockyard. When he shot all thirty-two frames, the doctor removed the film, slipped it in a canister, and taped the edges.

  Smith swooped down over the bay and headed back out to sea as the airmen marveled at how easy the mission was. “Nobody realized we were enemies until the bombs dropped,” Saylor later said. “The Japs simply didn’t think it could be done.” Smith agreed. “It was like the old sleeper play in football,” the pilot recalled. “We caught them napping and got away with it.”

  SECOND LIEUTENANT BILLY FARROW roared in last, in the Bat out of Hell, the encore of America’s first attack against Japan. Farrow’s orders allowed him to target either Osaka or Nagoya; he chose the latter. “We came i
n over the Japanese mainland at hedgehopping height,” recalled navigator George Barr. “The sun was shining and the people in the streets below were all waving. They’d been so indoctrinated that Japan would never be bombed that they couldn’t imagine it could really happen.”

  When enemy fighters appeared in the skies, Farrow increased speed and pulled back on the controls, climbing up to seven thousand feet and vanishing in the clouds. The airmen flew dead reckoning toward Nagoya, diving through a hole in the clouds over the city.

  “Get set to drop bombs at five hundred feet,” Farrow ordered bombardier Jacob DeShazer. “There is the first target.”

  The Bat out of Hell carried four incendiary bombs to target an oil refinery and an aircraft factory. Farrow lined up his run as DeShazer looked down the sight.

  “See that gasoline tank?”

  DeShazer did.

  The red light flashed on the cockpit instrument panel as the first three bombs dropped. Farrow banked the plane. DeShazer smelled smoke and wanted to see the refinery burn. “To the left of us I saw where the first bombs had dropped. There was fire all over the tank, but it had not blown up yet,” he recalled. “What I was smelling, however, was powder of the shells that were being shot at us instead of the bombs I had dropped. I had noticed a little black smoke cloud right in front of us, and evidently the hole in the nose of our airplane allowed the smoke to come inside.”

  Farrow pressed on toward the next target, a long flat building that the pilot suspected was an aircraft factory.

  “Let your bombs go,” he ordered DeShazer.

  The red light flashed a final time.

  The Bat out of Hell hit the Toho Gas Company’s no. 3 tank, sparking a massive fire. Japanese workers rushed to prevent an explosion by releasing gas throughout the city. Farrow’s final attack hit Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ Nagoya Aeronautical Manufacturing, a plant that produced the famed Zero fighter. Damage was light, but the attack killed five people and injured eleven others, two seriously.