The Doolittle Raid

At around midday on 18 April 1942 low-flying twin-engined bombers with white stars on their wings appeared over Tokyo. Many residents took them for Japanese aircraft, since an air-raid drill was being held in the capital that morning. They were a group of sixteen North American B-25 Mitchell bombers of the US Army Air Forces, which had taken off a few hours earlier from the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet. They were led by Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, one of the most famous American aviators of the interwar years. Bombs fell on Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. Popular summaries often name only Nagoya, Tokyo and Yokohama; in fact there were more targets, and sixteen aircraft flew over Japan.

In material terms the raid achieved little: a few dozen dead, a few damaged factories and a warship in dock. But it was the first attack on the Japanese home islands in this war, and four months after Pearl Harbor it lifted American spirits, shook the Japanese high command and hastened the decisions that in June led to Japan’s defeat at Midway. The highest price for it was paid by the Chinese.

The President wants to strike at Japan

After 7 December 1941 the United States suffered nothing but defeats in the Pacific. Guam, Wake and Hong Kong fell, in February 1942 Singapore surrendered, in March Java, and on 9 April the forces on Bataan surrendered. As early as a meeting with the Chiefs of Staff on 21 December 1941, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt demanded that Japan be bombed as soon as possible to raise the country’s morale. He returned to the idea again and again.

The problem was distance. The Americans had no airfields from which bombers could reach Japan. The Soviet government, bound by its neutrality pact with Japan, would not have agreed to take-offs from Vladivostok, and the airfields in China were too far away. Navy carrier aircraft had a short range: a carrier would have had to approach within two to three hundred miles of the Japanese coast and wait there for them to return, and after the losses at Pearl Harbor and the torpedoing of Saratoga the fleet could not risk its few carriers.

The idea came from Captain Francis Low, on the staff of Admiral Ernest King, Commander in Chief of the United States Fleet. At the airfield of the Norfolk base he saw the outline of a carrier deck painted on the runway, on which navy pilots practised, and concluded that twin-engined army bombers could take off from such a deck. Their range would be great enough for the carrier to launch them far from Japan, and the aircraft would not return to the ship but, after bombing their targets, fly on to China. On 10 January 1942 Low put the concept to King, who contacted the commander of the Army Air Forces, General Henry H. Arnold. Arnold entrusted the preparation of the operation to Doolittle, who had returned to active duty in January as a lieutenant colonel and was working on his staff. Doolittle soon volunteered to lead the attack in person as well.

Preparations

Of the bombers available, Doolittle chose the B-25B Mitchell: it had sufficient bomb load and a wingspan small enough for more than a dozen to fit on a carrier’s deck. On 2 February 1942 two B-25s were loaded aboard the new carrier Hornet at Norfolk, and the next day they took off from her at sea without difficulty. The plan was approved.

The crews were chosen from volunteers of the 17th Bombardment Group, which had the most experience with the B-25; no one knew the target, only that the mission was “extremely hazardous”. The bombers were modified at Minneapolis: extra fuel tanks were fitted in the bomb bay, in the crawlway and in place of the removed lower gun turret, almost doubling the fuel load; the long-range radio and the secret Norden bombsight were taken out, the latter replaced by a simple device costing a few dozen cents. Broomsticks painted black were mounted in the tail to look like machine-gun barrels. For three weeks in March the crews practised short take-offs at Eglin Field in Florida under a navy instructor, Lieutenant Henry Miller, as well as low-level flying and navigation over the sea.

Hornet, meanwhile, had passed through the Panama Canal into the Pacific. On 1 April, at the naval air station at Alameda on San Francisco Bay, cranes hoisted sixteen bombers on to her deck; fifteen had originally been planned, and the sixteenth was only to demonstrate a take-off to the pilots just beyond the Golden Gate, but in the end it too flew over Japan. Eighty army airmen in sixteen five-man crews came aboard, together with ground crew. Each aircraft was to carry four 500-pound bombs (about 225 kilograms): three high-explosive bombs and one cluster of incendiaries.

Across the Pacific

On 2 April Hornet, with cruisers and destroyers (Task Force 18), sailed from San Francisco. The carrier’s own aircraft were stowed below, since the flight deck was taken up by the bombers, so the ship was defenceless. Cover was provided by Vice Admiral William Halsey’s force with the carrier Enterprise, which joined up in the North Pacific on 13 April. The combined force, Task Force 16 under Halsey’s command, comprised two carriers, four cruisers, eight destroyers and two oilers. It sailed under radio silence. On 17 April the oilers refuelled the ships and then turned back with the destroyers, while the carriers and cruisers headed at 20 knots towards Japanese waters.

According to the plan, the bombers were to take off on the evening of 18 April some 400–450 nautical miles from Japan. Doolittle was to go first and at dusk drop incendiaries on Tokyo to light up the target for the others, who would arrive in darkness; at dawn the aircraft were to reach airfields in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, refuel and fly on to Chongqing, China’s wartime capital. Chiang Kai-shek agreed to make the airfields available, though he feared Japanese retaliation; the Chinese, however, were told little about the details of the operation.

An early launch

Early in the morning of 18 April, some 650 nautical miles (1,200 kilometres) from Japan, the force ran into a Japanese picket line of armed fishing boats. The picket boat Nittō Maru No. 23 managed to send a report of three carriers before the cruiser Nashville sank her by gunfire. Halsey and Hornet’s captain, Marc Mitscher, together with Doolittle, decided that they could not wait: the bombers would take off at once, some ten hours earlier and about 170 nautical miles farther out than planned. This meant attacking in broad daylight and flying on to China at night, with no certainty that the fuel would last.

The sea was rough and the wind strong. None of the pilots had ever taken off from a carrier before. Doolittle had less than 150 metres of deck in front of him; he took off at 8.20 a.m., and the last aircraft, Lieutenant William Farrow’s, at 9.19. All sixteen machines got into the air. Halsey’s force immediately turned back towards Hawaii.

Over Japan

The bombers flew singly or in small groups, just above the waves. They reached Japan around midday Tokyo time, climbed to about 450 metres and attacked their assigned targets: industrial plants, power stations, fuel depots and shipyards. According to American studies they hit ten targets in Tokyo, two in Yokohama and one each in Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. At Yokosuka a bomb damaged the light carrier Ryūhō, which was being converted in dock from a submarine tender, delaying her entry into service by several months. One of the bombers, attacked by fighters while its turret was out of action, jettisoned its bombs short of the target.

The defences were taken by surprise. Although the picket boat’s report had reached headquarters, the Japanese were expecting carrier aircraft, which would have had to come closer, and an attack only on the following day. Anti-aircraft fire was weak, and the few army fighters, among them Kawasaki Ki-45s and prototypes of the Ki-61, did not shoot down a single bomber. The Japanese press later announced that nine aircraft had been shot down, but showed no wreckage.

The bombs and the fire of the air gunners also killed civilians. Among the buildings hit were schools and a military hospital. According to the first Japanese figures a dozen or so people were killed, according to later tallies about 50, with several hundred wounded; post-war figures cited in the American literature speak of 87 dead, 151 seriously wounded and more than 300 slightly wounded. Children were among the dead. Japanese propaganda presented the raid as a barbaric attack on a defenceless population, and the press asked the parents of victims how the captured airmen should be dealt with.

The flight to China and to the USSR

After the attack fifteen aircraft turned south-west, out over the East China Sea. The sixteenth, Captain Edward York’s, was burning so much fuel that it had no chance of reaching China; York therefore flew north-west and landed at a military airfield near Vladivostok. The USSR was not at war with Japan, so the crew was interned and the aircraft impounded. A year later, in May 1943, the airmen “escaped” across the border into Iran; officially they were helped by a bribed smuggler, but in reality, as later Soviet documents confirmed, the escape had been arranged by the NKVD.

The remaining aircraft were saved by a strong tailwind, which increased their speed for several hours. They did not, however, reach the airfields. Night fell, the weather deteriorated, and the Chinese, not warned of the earlier arrival, did not switch on the radio beacons or lights for fear of a Japanese air raid; the take-off signal that was to have alerted them was never sent. After some thirteen hours in the air the crews bailed out over eastern China or crash-landed on the coast and in the sea. All fifteen bombers were wrecked. Doolittle bailed out near Quzhou and landed in a rice paddy. He was convinced that the mission had ended in failure and that a court martial awaited him at home.

Most of the airmen were helped by Chinese soldiers, guerrillas, peasants and missionaries, who guided them through Japanese-controlled territory to Chongqing. Of the 80 men on the raid, one was killed bailing out and two drowned when their aircraft ditched off the coast. Eight, from the crews of Lieutenant Dean Hallmark and Lieutenant Farrow, fell into Japanese hands.

The fate of the prisoners

The captured airmen were taken to Tokyo for interrogation and then to Shanghai. On 13 August 1942 the commander of Japanese forces in China, General Shunroku Hata, issued an order known as the Enemy Airmen’s Act, which allowed airmen accused of attacking civilians to be punished by death and was applied retroactively. At the end of August a military court in Shanghai sentenced all eight to death. Five had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment, while Hallmark, Farrow and Corporal Harold Spatz were shot near Shanghai on 15 October 1942. Lieutenant Robert Meder died in captivity in Nanjing in December 1943; the other four were freed by the Americans in August 1945. After the war four Japanese officers were convicted of these crimes and sentenced to five to nine years’ hard labour. In the end, then, seven of the 80 airmen were killed or died as a result of the raid.

Reprisals in China

The Japanese high command resolved not only to punish those who had helped the Americans but, above all, to deprive them of the airfields from which they might ever attack Japan. In mid-May 1942 Hata’s China Expeditionary Army launched Operation Sekkan, known as the Zhejiang–Jiangxi campaign. Japanese troops advanced along the railway through the provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi, destroyed the airfields at Quzhou, Lishui and Yushan, and then in August, as they withdrew, left burned towns and villages behind them. Whole families suspected of helping the airmen were murdered; missionaries described the destruction of the town of Nancheng in Jiangxi. Detachments of Unit 731, which worked on biological weapons, meanwhile spread cholera, typhoid and plague germs; according to the testimony of Japanese prisoners, many Japanese soldiers also died of the infections.

The number of victims is uncertain. The airman and adviser to Chiang Kai-shek Claire Chennault and Chinese government sources spoke of some 250,000 Chinese killed, most of them civilians; this figure is also cited by some American historians. Other studies, based on local Chinese data, give several tens of thousands killed and missing in the two provinces. Whatever the discrepancies, it was one of the worst reprisal crimes of the war in the Far East.

Shangri-La and morale

In the United States news of the raid came first from Japanese radio. The details were long kept secret. When reporters asked Roosevelt a few days later where the aircraft had taken off from, he replied that they had come from Shangri-La, the fictional Himalayan land of James Hilton’s popular novel. The full story of the raid was revealed only in April 1943, when Roosevelt also announced that the Japanese had executed three of the airmen. The navy later named one of its aircraft carriers Shangri-La.

The news that Tokyo had been bombed electrified American public opinion after months of defeats. Instead of facing a court martial, in May Doolittle stood in the White House, where Roosevelt presented him with the Medal of Honor, and he was promoted straight from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. All the participants in the raid received the Distinguished Flying Cross and Chinese decorations.

Shock in Japan and the decision on Midway

In Japan the raid caused alarm out of all proportion to the damage. The authorities, who had assured the public that the home islands were untouchable, had to admit that the enemy had appeared over the capital, and in broad daylight at that. The Combined Fleet sent Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo’s force, just returning from the Indian Ocean raid, in pursuit, but the Americans were already far away. Several fighter squadrons were kept at home for air defence. The Japanese navy, which in March had managed to drop only a few bombs on Oʻahu from two flying boats in Operation K, now had to admit that the enemy had brought carriers right up to the coast of Japan and sailed away unscathed.

The strategic consequences were the most important. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, had for weeks been pressing a plan to seize Midway Atoll, which was meant to lure the American carriers into a decisive battle. The Naval General Staff had agreed to it at the beginning of April, but reluctantly; the Doolittle Raid silenced the objections and, according to most historians, hastened the plan’s execution, and the army agreed to provide troops for it. In June 1942, at the Battle of Midway, Japan lost four carriers.

Significance

The Doolittle Raid was the sixth strike by American carriers in the first half of 1942, after the raids on the Marshall and Gilbert Islands, Wake, Marcus, and Lae and Salamaua in New Guinea, but the only one to reach Japan. As a military operation it was risky and costly: two of the Pacific Fleet’s four carriers were taken out of action for several weeks while the Japanese were preparing their offensive in the Coral Sea, and all the bombers were lost. As a psychological blow, however, it proved one of the most effective of the entire war. It showed the Americans that they could hit back and the Japanese that their islands were not safe, and it pushed the Japanese high command towards the decisions that at Midway turned the course of the Pacific war. Japan then remained beyond the reach of American bombers until mid-1944, when B-29s began flying against it from China and then from the Marianas. The reprisal campaign in Zhejiang and Jiangxi, for its part, showed how high a price the Chinese population paid for the war.