The Doolittle Raid Hit Tokyo Four Months After Pearl Harbor From a Carrier Deck

Let me describe an idea that sounds like it was dreamed up by a man who had been staring at the ceiling for too long. Take a medium bomber, the B-25, an Army Air Forces machine that was built to take off from a long concrete runway. Strap on extra gas tanks until it can barely fly. Put it on the deck of an aircraft carrier, which is a Navy ship about the size of a very short runway that is also rolling up and down in the Pacific. Now fly it off the deck, with no practice at sea, no way to land back on the ship, to bomb the capital of the empire that just humiliated you.

If you pitched that to a committee, the committee would form a subcommittee, and the subcommittee would commission a study. In the spring of 1942 the country did not have the time for that. It had a President who wanted a response, a lieutenant colonel with a doctorate and a reputation for nerve, and eighty volunteers. They did it. Let me tell you how, and let me tell you why it mattered a good deal more than the damage it caused.

The mood in the spring of 1942

You have to remember the country's state of mind. Pearl Harbor had happened on December 7, 1941. In the weeks after, the news kept getting worse. Japan took Guam, Wake Island and Hong Kong. The Philippines were under siege, and in February, Singapore fell, and the American and Filipino defenders on Bataan were running out of food and hope. Every headline was a defeat. If you want a picture of a country in a trough, that was it.

Franklin Roosevelt wanted, and the military leaders in Washington wanted, some way of striking back at Japan itself, to show the Japanese that their home islands were not beyond reach and to show Americans that the war was not just a retreat. The trouble was geography. American bases in the Pacific were too far away from Japan for bombers to reach it, and the Navy's carriers could not get close enough with their own fighters and bombers without exposing themselves to land-based attack. A Navy officer, Captain Francis Low, is credited with the notion that Army bombers might be launched from a carrier. Nobody had done it before. The planners looked at the numbers and found that the B-25 might just do it.

Jimmy Doolittle

The man chosen to lead was Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, known to everyone as Jimmy. He was in his mid-forties, which in a world of twenty-two-year-old pilots made him something of a grandfather, and he was one of the most famous aviators in America. He had been a racing pilot, a test pilot and an aeronautical engineer. In 1922 he had flown across the country in a single day, and in 1929 he demonstrated blind flying, taking off, flying and landing a plane entirely by instruments. He also held a doctorate in aeronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I mention it because the next time someone tells you that the men who run the military are blockheaded, you can ask them how many were doing doctoral work on aerodynamics.

Doolittle's brief was to organise a volunteer force and figure out how to get the planes off a carrier. He asked for volunteers for "a dangerous mission", without telling them what it was. Crews from the 17th Bomb Group and other units stepped forward. Altogether there were sixteen planes and eighty men, five to a crew, and they went to Eglin Field in Florida to train.

The training

The problem was the takeoff. A B-25 is a big airplane. Normally it needs a long runway. On a carrier, the pilot has a few hundred feet of deck. The crews trained at Eglin by practising short takeoffs from a marked strip on the ground, with a Navy flight instructor, Lieutenant Henry Miller, showing them how to do it: flaps down, full power against the brakes, release, hold the stick back, and lift off as the strip runs out. The planes were stripped of heavy equipment, including the secret Norden bombsight, which was replaced by a simple homemade sight a few cents' worth of metal, and fitted with extra fuel tanks. The crews practised on the ground until the pilots could get into the air in about 500 feet or less.

What you should notice here is the sheer improvisation. The Army had its pilots and its planes and the Navy had its deck, and the two services, normally busy with their rivalry, put their heads together to solve a problem nobody had solved. It is, in its own way, an argument for competence: when the government wants a thing badly and has the right people, it can do the thing. That is a fine reason to be skeptical of the claim that government is always bloated. Government in wartime, with a clear goal and an accountable leader, does remarkable things. Government in peacetime, with no goal and no accountability, is another animal.

The voyage

In early April 1942 the sixteen B-25s were loaded aboard the carrier USS Hornet at Alameda, California. The bombers were too big to go down the elevators, so they were tied down on the flight deck, which meant the Hornet could not launch its own aircraft for the rest of the trip. The Hornet left San Francisco on April 2 and steamed westward. Admiral William Halsey's task force, built around the carrier USS Enterprise, met her at sea and provided the escort and the fighter cover. At that point, with the Hornet's own fighters stowed, the raid depended on the Enterprise's planes to keep watch.

Let me stop and say something about the sailors. The captain of the Hornet, Marc Mitscher, and the crew had a ship full of Army planes and a mission they were not permitted to talk about. The ship's company watched the strange bombers sit on the deck for sixteen days and knew that the airmen were going to Tokyo. They kept their mouths shut. They had no newspaper reporters, no leaks and no live updates, and the secret held. It is nearly impossible to imagine that today. I note it with something like wonder.

The picket boat and the early launch

The plan was to approach to within roughly 400 to 500 miles of Japan, launch in the evening so that the bombers would reach Tokyo at night and set fires, and then fly on to land at Chinese airfields in the dark, with the fire-starters having lit the way for the rest. On the morning of April 18, the plan fell apart.

On the morning of April 18, American ships spotted a Japanese patrol boat, one of a line of small armed fishing vessels that Japan used as a picket line to watch for approaching ships. It had probably seen the task force, and it radioed a report. American cruisers sank the boat, but there was no doubt that the alarm was out. Halsey and the Hornet's officers had a decision to make. The task force was about 650 nautical miles from Japan, much farther than planned. To wait was to risk the carriers themselves. To launch now meant the bombers would use their fuel and might not make the coast of China.

Doolittle took the call. He and Captain Mitscher agreed: go now. The word went out. The pilots ran to their planes in heavy seas, with spray coming over the bow. Doolittle himself went first, at about 8:20 in the morning, and, as he lifted off with only a few feet of deck to spare, he showed the others it could be done. One after another, all sixteen planes made it into the air.

I will give you that sentence again, because it still amazes me. They had practised from a painted line on the ground. They had never done it from a moving ship. Sixteen out of sixteen got off the deck.

Over Japan

The bombers flew low across the waves, to avoid radar and detection, and then climbed to a few thousand feet over the Japanese home islands. They struck Tokyo and targets in Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Osaka and Kobe, hitting factories, oil storage, naval yards and military installations. The Japanese had been told for years that their islands could not be reached. They had not prepared for the possibility, and the response was feeble. All sixteen bombers passed through. The physical damage was modest. This was not a raid meant to destroy an industrial base, and it did not.

What it did was announce, from the sky over Tokyo, that the home islands were not safe.

Out of fuel in China

Then came the hard part. The bombers had not launched where the plan said, and the fuel was low. The crews flew on toward China, where they hoped to land at friendly airfields. They ran into darkness and a storm over China. Most of the crews bailed out or crash-landed along the coast and the interior, in the dark, in the rain, over unfamiliar country. One plane, with a low fuel state, diverted and landed in the Soviet Union near Vladivostok, where the crew was interned. Of the eighty airmen, most made it back to the United States by various routes, but three died during the raid or in the bail-out, and eight were captured by the Japanese in China.

The fate of the captured was grim. They were tried by a military tribunal, and three of them, Lieutenants Dean Hallmark and William Farrow and Sergeant Harold Spatz, were executed by firing squad in October 1942. Another of the prisoners died in captivity of malnutrition and disease. The remaining four survived the war and came home. The courage of the men who endured that captivity has been recognised ever since.

The Chinese who paid the price

There is a part of this story that deserves more attention than it usually gets. The airmen who came down in China were found and sheltered by Chinese civilians, villagers, farmers and missionaries, who took tremendous risks to hide them and help them travel toward Allied lines. They fed the Americans and moved them along. Many of the American crewmen would not have survived without that help.

Japan took revenge. In the months after the raid, the Japanese army carried out a ferocious campaign through the coastal provinces of China where the airmen had come down, hunting for the bombers' crews and punishing the villages that had helped them. Estimates of the number of Chinese civilians killed begin around ten thousand, and Chinese records give higher totals. I do not have a figure I can swear to, and the historical literature debates it. But no honest account of the raid can leave that out. The Doolittle Raid was a strategic gamble that other people paid for, and it is part of our obligation to remember them with gratitude.

What the raid changed

Here is the argument I promised, in numbered form.

One: the raid lifted a nation. The American public, in the spring of 1942, was hungry for any sign that the country could hit back. In the days after, when reporters asked Roosevelt where the bombers had come from, he said, with a smile, that they had come from "Shangri-La," the imaginary hidden kingdom of a popular novel. The country roared. A raid with small physical results delivered a very large morale effect. Morale is a real thing in a war, as any soldier will tell you, and a democracy needs it more than a dictatorship does, since its citizens have the right to quit.

Two: the raid shook the Japanese command. The Japanese military had promised the emperor that the home islands were safe. The raid shattered that promise, and the high command reacted. The Imperial Navy became even more determined to bring the American carriers to battle and destroy them, and to push the defensive perimeter out. That determination led to the operation against Midway Island in June 1942, the one that ended in disaster for Japan. Midway and the Codebreakers Who Let the Navy Set an Ambush gives the next chapter. To be careful: the raid was one of several factors in the Japanese decision, along with the desire of Admiral Yamamoto to finish off the American fleet, but it is generally counted as an important push.

Three: the raid showed the military's gift for improvisation. The country that would build nearly 300,000 aircraft in the war was doing something similar on the small scale: letting a few creative people solve a problem. That is the same instinct that had Americans building ships in days, as told in The Home Front Built Ships in Days and Became the Arsenal of Democracy.

Four: the heroism was voluntary. Eighty men volunteered for a mission that they knew was dangerous, without knowing the details. The Declaration of Independence ends with a pledge: "we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor." That is what free men do. Nobody drafted these men for the raid. They raised their hands.

The rebuttal: was it worth the cost?

A fair critic would say this. The raid did little damage. Sixteen valuable bombers were lost, all of them. Some airmen died and others were tortured. Chinese civilians suffered enormously in the reprisals. If the goal was military, the cost was out of proportion to the benefit. A stunt, however brave, is still a stunt.

That is the strongest form of the case, and the answer has to reckon with it honestly.

First, it is true that the raid's physical damage was small, and no defender of the raid should pretend otherwise. As a military operation measured by tons of bombs, it was a footnote.

Second, wars are fought on more than one scoreboard. A nation fighting for its life needs victories of the spirit as well as the factory. In the spring of 1942, with the Philippines about to fall, the American public needed evidence that its military could take the initiative. The raid supplied it. A cost that was bearable in airplanes was repaid in morale and in the way it changed Japanese planning.

Third, the cost to Chinese civilians is the hardest point, and I will not wave it away. The planners knew that the airmen would have to come down in China, and that Japan might retaliate. The Chinese who helped chose to do so, and they should be honoured. The fact that a cost is borne by others, and cannot be undone, is a reason for gratitude and humility. It is not, by itself, proof that the decision was wrong in the context of a war that Japan had started and that Japan was winning.

Doolittle returned home, and Roosevelt gave him the Medal of Honor and promoted him two grades, from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. I think the president judged the thing about right.

What it asks of us

Every few years, someone suggests that the country has lost its ability to do hard things quickly. Maybe. But the record shows that when Americans have a clear goal and good leaders, they are capable of great improvisation. The raid is one of those proofs. It was a bold idea, carried out by volunteers, aided by the generosity of strangers, and paid for in blood by more people than we can count. The right response is gratitude and a decision to deserve it. For a related story about a surprise stroke that lifted a nation, Crossing the Delaware on Christmas Night and the Ten Days That Saved the Cause is a good pairing, and for the day that started it all, Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 Hour by Hour From Radar Blip to Declaration.

The case in brief

1. On April 18, 1942, sixteen Army B-25 bombers under Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle took off from the carrier USS Hornet, a feat never before tried in combat, after training at Eglin Field.
2. A Japanese picket boat forced an early launch about 650 nautical miles from Japan, and the crews struck Tokyo and other cities, then ran short of fuel and came down in China.
3. Chinese civilians sheltered the airmen at enormous cost when Japan retaliated, and eight airmen were captured, three of them executed in October 1942.
4. The raid did little physical damage but lifted American morale and shook the Japanese high command, which pressed on toward Midway.
5. Doolittle received the Medal of Honor, and the raid stands as proof of American improvisation and voluntary courage.

What you can do: thank a living veteran in your family or congregation by name this week, and ask the one question that matters: what did they volunteer for?