In addition to the distance, there was the weather. “The Hornet navigation room passed out the latest weather information on Japan and China, which included more bad news: The Doolittle men would face a twenty-four-knot headwind all the way to Honshu.” The wind would be blowing against their noses from carrier takeoff to China.
“Now hear this! Now hear this!” The Klaxon horn sounded. “Army pilots, man your planes.”
Navy crew and army pilots slipped, slid, and crawled across the heaving, drenched deck to the planes. The Hornet was being tossed about in thirty-foot swells, rocking and rolling up and down and from side to side. Gale-force winds made it difficult to stand on deck. The blowing kaze tore off the tops of the huge waves and flung heavy salt spray across the ships, soaking the shivering crew.
“This was zero weather conditions. . . . Zero! That means you can’t see across the table,” recalled Bob Bourgeois. “Have you ever seen a thirty-foot sea? I never had. It’s seventy feet from the water to the top of the ship. And the bow of the ship was going down and picking up water and throwing it over the deck. I have never been in worse weather in my life. The rain! Oh, the rain! I’ve been in a bunch of hurricanes right here in Louisiana. And they were tame compared to this thing.”
As if rain squalls, gale-force winds, and thirty-foot waves weren’t enough, the Flyboys were forced to take off by speeding down the deck directly into the trough of a huge wave. The Hornet was bobbing up and down like a cork. The trick was to time the launch so that the Billys reached the end of the deck as the carrier peaked in its upward movement. Each pilot would get the go signal as the front of the ship tilted into the churning foam. Then he would speed down the deck, seemingly headed into the bowels of a howling sea.
As Jimmy prepared to launch, John Ford, the Oscar-winning director of Stagecoach and The Grapes of Wrath, captured the moment on film. The confident Dutchman back in the White House planned to delight movie audiences with the trophy film footage.
“I knew hundreds of eyes were on me,” Jimmy remembered, “especially those of the B-25 crews who were to follow. If I didn’t get off successfully, I’m sure many thought they wouldn’t be able to make it either.”
Sailor Alvin Kernan wondered: “Could the heavy planes with a bomb load of two thousand pounds get to Japan and then make it to the nearest safe landing point in China? Even before that, could such heavy planes designed for long landing strips get off a short carrier deck? Sailors, like stockbrokers, work everything out by betting, and there was soon heavy money down on both sides: Would they make it, would they not? . . . I put down ten dollars at even money that less than half of them would get off.”
Jimmy Doolittle would later be awarded the Medal of Honor by Franklin Roosevelt and a knighthood by the king of England. All American presidents up to and including President Bush in 1989 would shower him with all the honors the country can bestow, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Great universities from New York to Alaska would grant him honorary degrees, and nine nations would bestow their highest honors. But at this moment, Jimmy was just a lone Flyboy whose mission was to do the impossible.
Jimmy’s roaring engines pulled at his brakes “like circus elephants against their chains.” The signalman watching the pitch of the carrier signaled “Now!” The king of the air began his roll. “A navy pilot shouted to anyone within earshot: ‘He won’t make it! He can’t make it!’” But as Jimmy’s navigator, Hank Potter, later recalled, “We were particularly confident since we had the best pilot in the Air Force flying with us.”
“We watched him like hawks,” pilot Ted Lawson remembered. And the boys on deck saw America’s premier Flyboy take off with yards to spare. As the Los Angeles Times later blared in a headline, “DOOLITTLE DID IT!”
“The entire convoy shouted in a surge of relief, a cheer so loud and throaty and ecstatic that the crewmen could even hear it above the roar of their props.” Harry Johnson, though, remembered different feelings: “I doubt if one man expected to return alive. I felt so badly about what I thought was certain death that I could not say good-bye to anyone—just a thumbs-up as each took off.”
Jimmy circled around behind the carrier and roared above the flight deck as members of the crew pumped their fists in the air and shouted themselves hoarse. Next stop, Tokyo.
Following Jimmy’s lead, the other Flyboys wrestled their fifteen Billys up. Now that they had mastered their dangerous takeoff, they flew for hours just above the angry waves as they contemplated the wiles of the wind. The kaze blew steadily against their noses and then alternately buffeted them from each side. The winds slowed the Raiders down, consumed their fuel, and messed with their follow-the-leader flight plan.
As they had feared, their gas gauges confirmed they were on a suicide mission. “We were over six hundred miles [away from Japan] when we launched, so it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t going to fit,” said pilot Davey Jones. “At the time we just accepted the fact that we weren’t going to have enough juice to get to our destinations in China. Putting it in real terms to yourself, that was just a statement and knowledge, and you did your best anyway. It didn’t really enter your mind. To me that’s the only thing that distinguishes this trip from the thousand other sorties that were flown during the war. We knew when we started that it wasn’t going to fit.”
The opposing winds meant the Raiders would have to ditch in the cold ocean. This willingness of American boys to risk their lives for their country was not what the Boy Soldier in Tokyo had expected. Rather than stay home in their shells like cowed “merchants,” these Americans had as much “fighting spirit” as the Japanese. But they didn’t call it that. The Flyboys called it “balls.”
When Jimmy made landfall over the Chiba peninsula north of Tokyo, picnickers waved and smiled, believing they were witnessing Japanese maneuvers. Jimmy skimmed the treetops and rooftops and headed for Tokyo. Earlier, aboard the Hornet, a pilot had asked him what they should do in case of trouble. “Each pilot is in command of his own plane when we leave the carrier,” Jimmy had answered. “He is responsible for the decision he makes for his own plane and his own crew. If you’re separated, each one of you will have to decide for yourself what you will do. Personally, I know exactly what I’m going to do.”
The room was silent. Doolittle didn’t go any further, so a Flyboy asked, “Sir, what will you do?”
“I don’t intend to be taken prisoner,” he had answered. “If my plane is crippled beyond any possibility of fighting or escaping, I’m going to bail my crew out and then drive it, full throttle, into any target I can find where the crash will do the most damage. I’m forty-five years old and have lived a full life. Most of you are in your twenties and if I were you, I’m not sure I would make the same decision. In the final analysis, it’s up to each pilot and, in turn, each man to decide what he will do.”
For Japanese on the ground there seemed little to worry about. “It looks real, doesn’t it?” said a businessman waiting at a Tokyo railway platform to a fellow passenger as he watched a Billy grazing the treetops. “Just like a foreign aircraft bursting through Japanese air defenses. I guess the Imperial forces want to impress the people that they are fully prepared.”
At 12:30 P.M., Jimmy pulled up to twelve hundred feet over Tokyo and released four incendiaries—magnesium firebombs—in rapid succession. Then, as he later wrote, “I dropped down to rooftop level again and slid over the western outskirts of the city into low haze and smoke, then turned south and out to sea.” Immediately, he ran into a small black cloud of exploding antiaircraft fire.
“They’re missing us by a mile, Paul,” Jimmy said to his gunner, Paul Leonard, just as a shell burst, this one close enough to splatter the fuselage. “Colonel,” Leonard said, “that was no mile.”
“Our fondest wish had come true,” remembered Tokyo-based British attaché Frank Moysey. “I saw a black cloud of smoke belch suddenly from behind a hill to the northwest. I ran into a building and climbed to the roof;
it was a beautiful sight. There, surging up from Tokyo’s heavy industrial district, were six enormous columns of smoke, dense and black. While we watched the smoke increase and spread with the wind, a big twin-engined bomber suddenly roared across the sky a half-mile away.” A Japanese woman who worked at the British embassy complained to Moysey, “It is so unfair that you should bomb us. Our houses are only made of wood, while yours are of stone.”
Jimmy’s raiders dropped their bombs in the Tokyo-Yokohama megalopolis, which included a number of industrial cities like Kawasaki. The Japanese did not zone their urban areas, so military-industrial plants existed side by side with residential neighborhoods. Civilian casualties were inevitable. Just four years earlier, when Japan bombed civilians in China, the United States president, State Department, Congress, media, and the vast majority of the American populace considered the bombing of civilian centers “barbarous.” But now the shoe was on the other foot.
Katsuzo Yoshida heard the roar of low-flying planes and looked up just in time to see an incendiary fall on Okasaki Hospital. “The building exploded in flames and smoke. Yoshida helped the orderlies and neighborhood volunteers move the patients out of harm’s way, flabbergasted at the Americans’ barbaric act.”
Schoolboy Kikujiro Suzuki was playing with school chums on the playground of Waseda Middle School when a Flyboy’s incendiary bomb struck and killed one of his buddies.
Shinmin ran for their lives as fire rained from the sky. Their faces registered shock and horror. Both Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid were surprise attacks, but the Japanese had targeted a military installation. Now the Americans bombed and strafed hospital patients, children, women, farmers, and fishermen. “We sighted several small fishing craft about five miles offshore, so I machine-gunned them with the .30 caliber in the nose,” gunner Bill Birch said. “The tracers put me on target, and I raked the length of the deck from stern to bow.”
Gunner Jake DeShazer revealed how easily the thin moral veneer regarding the killing of civilians can be overcome in the heat of battle. “I had read in the newspapers one time about a German aviator shooting at French people,” he remembered, “and I thought it was a mean thing to do. I made up my mind while on the Hornet that I would not shoot at civilians. But after they shot at us, I changed my mind.”
As the Flyboys fled Japan in their desperate attempt to land in China, the headwind that had bedeviled them earlier continued to slow them down. This was no surprise: American intelligence had earlier warned Jimmy that the winds always blew from west to east over the China Sea at this time of year. Jimmy’s navigator informed him that “we would run out of gas about 135 miles from the Chinese coast,” Doolittle later recalled. “We began to make preparations for ditching. I saw sharks basking in the water below and didn’t think ditching among them would be very appealing.”
But then the remarkable happened: The gods changed their minds—the kami switched sides. The headwind that had condemned the eighty Flyboys changed unexpectedly into a savior tailwind. Even hard-nosed Jimmy remembered the sudden switch as divine intervention: “Fortunately, the Lord was with us. What had been a headwind slowly turned into a tailwind of about 25 miles per hour and eased our minds about ditching.”
Later, Jimmy and his boys realized the gods had actually shepherded their mission from the beginning. The storms that had lashed the Hornet had also provided cloud cover that rendered the carrier force invisible to Japanese search planes. And the clouds and squalls had also served as a benevolent screen for the task force as it made its way to Japan. Indeed, the kaze had dispersed the Billys and forced them to arrive over Japan at different points, which turned out to be the perfect “strategy” to thwart the antiaircraft gunners, who could not anticipate the direction from which the next plane would come. It was as if Japan’s divine protectors no longer wished to shield the marauding Spirit Warriors who had betrayed Bushido’s true spirit.
At the time, of course, the Flyboys knew none of this, and simply flew on into the darkness and rain. “We tried to contact the field at Chuchow on 4495 kilocycles,” Jimmy remembered. “No answer. This meant that the chance of any of us getting to the destination safely was just about nil.” With no homing beacons and inaccurate maps, Jimmy could only fly until his fuel tanks were nearly empty and then bail out into the blackness. Falling from 8,000 feet over enemy territory in the liquid darkness, he and his crew would just have to wait for the earth to slam up below their feet. “It was impossible to see anything below, so all I could do was wait until I hit the ground,” Jimmy recalled. “My concern as I floated down was about my ankles, which had been broken in South America in 1926. Anticipating a sudden encounter with the ground, I bent my knees to take the shock.”
But it was as if Billy Mitchell, looking down from on high, had decided to cushion his fellow Flyboy’s fall and at the same time play a practical joke. Jimmy Doolittle landed softly in a heap of Chinese night soil, human manure. At 9:30 P.M. on April 18, 1942, after thirteen hours in the air, America’s Flyboy-hero of the moment found himself neck-deep in a pile of shit.
The Doolittle Raid, like the attack on Pearl Harbor, had a profound impact on the conduct of the Pacific war. The Japanese itemized the actual damage as
fifty dead, 252 wounded, ninety buildings damaged or destroyed, including the Japanese Diesel Manufacturing Company, the Japanese Steel Corporation’s Factory Number One, the Mitsubishi Heavy Industrial Corporation, the Communication Ministry’s transformer station, the National Hemp and Dressing Company, the Yokohama Manufacturing Company warehouse, the Nagoya Aircraft Factory, an army arsenal, a naval laboratory, an airfield, an ammunitions dump, nine electric power buildings, six gas tanks, a garment factory, a food storage warehouse, a gas company, two miscellaneous factories, six wards of the Nagoya Second Temporary Army Hospital, six elementary or secondary schools, and innumerable nonmilitary residences.
All the Doolittle Raiders escaped Japan’s airspace without a scratch.
Although Japan could easily repair the slight physical damage, the psychological shock remained. One Tokyo resident wrote, “The bombing of Tokyo and several other cities has brought about a tremendous change in the attitude of our people toward the war. Now things are different. The bombs have dropped here on our homes. It does not seem any more that there is such a great difference between the battle front and the home front.” Another who experienced the raid remembered, “My people had always placed emphasis on spiritual strength and the medieval belief that Japan would never be attacked. As children we had been taught to believe what the emperor and his advisors told us. It was a severe psychological shock to even the most ardent believer when it was officially announced that we had been attacked. We finally began to realize that all we were told was not true—that the government had lied when it said we were invulnerable. We then began to doubt that we were also invincible.”
Japanese belief in their invincibility had been rudely shaken, but “the feat lifted the morale of Americans as nothing else had during five months of bitter defeats. It seemed a promise that America was now going on the attack and had avenged the raid on Pearl Harbor.” On April 21, President Roosevelt called a press conference in the Oval Office. With reporters gathered around his desk, FDR confirmed the bare outline of the raid as reported by Japanese sources. But when asked where the Billys had originated, the Dutchman smiled broadly and announced that the American planes had attacked “from our new base in Shangri-La”—a witty reference to the fictional Himalayan land depicted in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon.
FDR’s lighthearted answer delighted Americans and confounded the Japanese. “The Shangri-La remark added the exact psychological note that the nation had been wanting to hear. It proved that the United States could strike back. The boast that Premier Hideki Tojo had made that ‘Japan has never lost a war in all the 2,600 years of her glorious history’ was going to be destroyed.”
Americans were not told that their Flyboys had killed civilians. The str
afing of innocent schoolchildren, the intentional murder of innocent farmers and fishermen, and the shocking bombing of hospitals were not mentioned in the American press.
A day before FDR’s press conference, Emperor Hirohito signed an order for his army in China “to destroy the air bases from which the enemy might conduct air raids on the Japanese homeland. The captured areas will be occupied for a period estimated at approximately one month. Air fields, military installations, and important lines of communication would be totally destroyed . . . the Commander-in-Chief of the China Expeditionary army will begin the operation as soon as possible.”
The Spirit Warriors followed their emperor’s orders to a T. To wreak revenge, more than 100,000 Japanese soldiers in 53 battalions drove 200 miles into East China, murdering everyone and burning all villages over an area of 20,000 square miles. Rape and pillage became the order of the day. Soldiers chopped off so many heads that their arms grew weak. For three gruesome months, Chinese men were machine-gunned, the women raped and skewered, and children were thrown down wells. Houses, temples, and shops were reduced to ash.
When the Doolittle crew members parachuted into East China, many Chinese civilians and guerrillas gave them food and shelter. In gratitude, the Flyboys had given their new friends trinkets. “Little did the Doolittle men realize,” a Belgian missionary later recalled, “that those same little gifts, which they gave their rescuers in grateful acknowledgment of their hospitality—the parachutes, gloves, nickels, and dimes—would, a few weeks later, become the telltale evidence of their presence and lead to the torture and death of their friends.”
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