Frontispiece: Sailors look on as sixteen Army B-25 bombers, tied down and with wheels chocked, crowd the deck of the carrier Hornet en route to bomb Japan. (National Archives)
FOR THE MEN
FROM SHANGRI-LA
His deeds are in sharp contrast to his name.
—MIAMI DAILY NEWS,
OCTOBER 4, 1929
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
PROLOGUE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTE ON SOURCES
ARCHIVES AND LIBRARIES
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
ILLUSTRATIONS
INDEX
INTRODUCTION
THE DOOLITTLE RAID IS one of the most iconic stories of World War II. Even before rescuers could pluck all the dead from the oily Hawaiian waters following Japan’s December 7, 1941, surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, American war planners started work on an ambitious counterassault, a strike not against an outlying enemy base in the far-flung Pacific islands but against the heart of the Japanese Empire: Tokyo. That April 1942 raid led by famed stunt and racing pilot Jimmy Doolittle would test American ingenuity, gamble the precious few flattops and warships left in the Pacific Fleet’s battered arsenal, and jump-start Japan on the road to ruin.
Sixteen Army bombers crewed by eighty volunteers specially trained in carrier takeoffs would thunder into the skies over the enemy’s capital and key industrial cities, pummel factories, refineries, and dockyards and then escape to Free China. At home in the United States the mission would derail questions over the government’s failure to guard against Japanese aggression in the Pacific and buoy the morale of a shell-shocked nation. The forty-five-year-old Doolittle would come to personify the raid’s success, his grinning image would be plastered around the nation on war bond posters, and strangers would write him poems and songs. A Missouri town would even take his name.
Postwar interviews and records would reveal that Doolittle’s brazen raid had accomplished far more, convincing Japan’s reluctant military leaders of the need to extend the nation’s defensive perimeter and annihilate America’s aircraft carriers to prevent possible future strikes. That plan would center on the capture of a tiny wind-ravaged atoll in the middle of the Pacific, one Japanese war planners knew America would risk its prized few flattops to protect. The June 1942 Battle of Midway would end in crushing defeat for Japan—America would sink four of its best aircraft carriers—and prove the pivotal turning point of the war, setting the stage for the Navy’s offensive drive across the Pacific that would ravage Emperor Hirohito’s empire.
But declassified records in both nations coupled with long-forgotten missionary files reveal a more nuanced story. Japanese documents show that the raiders—albeit unintentionally—destroyed private homes and killed civilians, including women and children. One of the bombers mistakenly strafed a school. Records likewise illustrate how the Roosevelt administration, desperate for positive press, deliberately deceived the American people about the mission’s actual losses and even the capture of some of the airmen to elevate the public relations value of the raid, sparking a propaganda battle between the United States and Japan. In one of the story’s uglier chapters, General Douglas MacArthur’s chief of intelligence secretly protected the Japanese general who allegedly signed the death order of some of the captured raiders, believing him too valuable a postwar asset to be prosecuted in the war crimes trials.
More importantly, the audacious raid that had so humiliated Japan’s leaders triggered a retaliatory campaign of rape and murder against the Chinese that reduced villages, towns, and cities to rubble. Enemy troops cut the ears and noses off of villagers, set others on fire, and drowned entire families in wells. The Japanese not only used incendiary squads to systematically torch entire towns but unleashed bacteriological warfare in the form of plague, anthrax, cholera, and typhoid. The brutal campaign that killed as many as a quarter million Chinese—and prompted comparisons to the “Rape of Nanking”—was a slaughter senior American leaders anticipated and judged a worthwhile risk long before Doolittle’s bombers ever lifted off from the flight deck.
None of these facts undermine the bravery of the eighty volunteers at the heart of this story who climbed inside those bombers that cold wet morning of April 18, 1942. Those young men from small towns and cities across America, knowing that the odds of survival were against them, suppressed their own personal fears and set out to accomplish the impossible—and did. Rather, these important new elements of the story help frame the political and wartime context of an embattled America, a nation fighting for its very survival. Senior leaders calculated that victory would carry consequences and chose to deemphasize or cover up the negative aspects of Doolittle’s campaign in order to enhance the rightful accounts of the heroism of American airmen.
TARGET
TOKYO
PROLOGUE
Hawaii is just like a rat in a trap. Enjoy your dream of peace just one more day!
—REAR ADMIRAL MATOME UGAKI, DECEMBER 6, 1941, DIARY ENTRY
VICE ADMIRAL CHUICHI NAGUMO stared at the dark sea that spread out before him from the bridge of the aircraft carrier Akagi as it steamed north of Hawaii in the predawn hours of December 7, 1941. The fifty-four-year-old admiral, whose bald head, furrowed brow, and square jaw gave him the appearance of a bulldog, brooded over his mission. The sullen humor that had haunted him for months was in stark contrast to the otherwise arrogant demeanor of a man who, with a puffed chest and a peacock’s swagger, had once disrupted a royal garden party by threatening to gut a fellow officer with a dagger. Months of stress had robbed Nagumo of his trademark bravado, prompting some senior leaders to question whether he might fail. “I hope he will not fall into nervous prostration beforehand,” Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki, the Combined Fleet’s chief of staff, confided in his diary. “Life and death are according to the will of heaven. If only he can obtain a glorious result in the coming fight, he may rest in peace.”
Nagumo’s anxiety had not abated once he had put to sea. If anything, his fears increased. He seemed to draw little comfort from the fact that he commanded the most powerful carrier task force the world had ever seen. More than fifteen thousand officers and enlisted men stoked boilers, manned guns, and stood lookout across some thirty-one ships, from submarines and oilers to battlewagons and flattops. The nineteen-day-old moon occasionally punched through the storm clouds to silhouette this forbidding armada. The last of the strike force’s eight oilers had turned back only hours earlier, leaving the combatants to make the final charge south through the swells toward Oahu at twenty-four knots. An arrow formation of battleships, cruisers, and destroyers shielded Nagumo’s flagship, the Akagi, and
five other first-line carriers that steamed in two parallel columns. Some 350 fighters and dive and torpedo bombers crowded the flattops, ready to roar down the wooden flight decks at dawn.
Nagumo’s fears were not wholly unfounded. His orders stipulated he execute the dramatic opening act of war against the United States, a surgical strike that would mortally wound America’s powerful Pacific Fleet, anchored in the cool waters of Pearl Harbor. Even if he could make it 3,500 miles across the Pacific without running into a submarine, merchant ship, or patrol plane, Nagumo understood that an attack on Pearl Harbor was like kicking a hornet’s nest. Shore batteries along with battleships, cruisers, and destroyers boasted 993 antiaircraft guns that could shred Japanese pilots. Army and Navy airfields scattered around Oahu could throw up another four hundred fighters and bombers. Those planes could devastate Nagumo’s carriers and doom Japan before the sun set on the first day of war. The incredible risks of the mission were reflected in Nagumo’s final message from the Combined Fleet commander. “The fate of our empire,” Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto warned, “depends upon this expedition.”
These worries had kept the husky admiral awake at night, even though he knew strategists had perfected the plan down to the wooden torpedo fins needed to run in Pearl Harbor’s shallow waters. On the eve of the task force’s departure sailors had stripped the warships of all flammable and unnecessary equipment, from gangways and practice weapons to the paintings and flower vases that enlivened the destroyer Akigumo’s wardroom. To increase the task force’s range, workers had pumped extra fuel into trimming tanks, while sailors bedded down next to oil drums. Fuel conservation demanded that the ships dim lights, forgo heat, and limit bathing for the duration of the mission. One by one the warships had slipped port, rendezvousing in Hitokappu Bay off Etorofu Island, a desolate outpost a thousand miles north of Tokyo in the Kuril Islands that was home only to a handful of fishermen. A gunboat had arrived in advance of the force, shutting down the town’s wireless station and post office.
To throw off American eavesdroppers, the task force operated in radio silence. The chief communications officer went so far as to pluck out an essential component of his transmitter, hiding it in a wooden box that doubled as his pillow. The Japanese flooded the airwaves with dummy messages to disguise the task force’s departure, while busloads of sailors from the Yokosuka naval barracks arrived daily in Tokyo, paraded around the city on sightseeing tours for American diplomats to see. This charade had allowed Nagumo’s task force to depart undetected from Hitokappu Bay soon after daybreak on November 26. War planners had consulted a decade of weather data before setting a course across the stormy northern Pacific, one that promised a December average of just seven days of clear weather. Few ships would risk such turbulent seas. Those that did, orders demanded, should be destroyed: “Sink anything flying any flag.”
Those orders had so far proven unnecessary. Despite the task force’s good fortune, Nagumo couldn’t shake his fears, refusing to change out of his uniform even as he lay awake at night in bed. The graduate of Japan’s prestigious Eta Jima Naval Academy summoned subordinates at all hours to hash over trivial matters. Was his staff certain that the American ships would be in Pearl Harbor and not at the Lahaina anchorage off Maui? He dragged his flight commander from bed one night distressed over his unfounded suspicion that an American submarine was shadowing the force. To his chief of staff, Rear Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka, the nervous Nagumo confided his true concerns. He felt he had overreached, taking on a mission that was too risky. If only he had been strong enough to refuse the operation. Now that the task force was at sea—each day steaming closer and closer to Hawaii—the admiral droned on about the mission’s chances for success. “I wonder if it will go well.”
“Daijobu,” his patient chief of staff repeated. “Don’t worry.”
But Nagumo did.
THE JAPANESE ADMIRAL wasn’t the only anxious one. The breakdown in relations between America and Japan had left little doubt that the two nations were marching toward war. The questions seemed more about when and where the conflict would begin. The Navy only nine days earlier had ordered Pacific Fleet commander Admiral Husband Kimmel to take defensive measures. “This despatch is to be considered a war warning,” cabled Admiral Harold Stark, the chief of naval operations in Washington. “Negotiations with Japan looking toward stabilization of conditions in the Pacific have ceased and an aggressive move by Japan is expected within the next few days.” His Army counterpart Lieutenant General Walter Short, who commanded a garrison of 42,959 officers and men trusted to protect Pearl Harbor, had received a similar alert that same day from Army chief of staff General George Marshall. “Japanese future action unpredictable,” Marshall warned, “but hostile action possible at any moment.”
Most expected the first punch to land in the Far East—Thailand, Malaysia, or perhaps the Philippines or Guam—but not Hawaii. Not the Paradise of the Pacific. That Saturday night as Nagumo’s carriers charged through the swells toward Oahu, Admiral Kimmel dined at the Halekulani Hotel while General Short attended a charity dance at Schofield Barracks officers club. Off-duty troops cruised down Honolulu’s famous Hotel Street, lined with tattoo parlors, pinball joints, and shooting galleries. Others laughed through the variety show “Tantalizing Tootsies” at the Princess Theater or danced to jukebox tunes at favorite watering holes, like Two Jacks, New Emma Café, and the Mint. Airmen over at Hickam could catch Clark Gable as a frontier conman in Honky Tonk, while the new Bloch Recreation Center at Pearl Harbor hosted the finals in a battle of the bands that pitted the ships in the fleet against one another. The battleship Pennsylvania’s band claimed victory that night before everyone sang “God Bless America.”
The waters of Pearl Harbor that Saturday night resembled a parking lot. The bustling port just a short drive from Oahu’s famed Waikiki Beach counted ninety-four ships, almost half of the entire Pacific Fleet. Eight of the fleet’s nine battleships were in port along with eight heavy and light cruisers, twenty-nine destroyers, and five submarines. The Pacific Fleet’s three carriers, which the Japanese so hungered to destroy, were absent. The Lexington steamed to Midway to deliver a squadron of scout bombers, while the Enterprise sliced trough the swells a few hundred miles west of Oahu after ferrying fighters to Wake. The Saratoga had returned to the West Coast for repairs. General Short on his drive home that evening at nine thirty looked down upon the lit-up battlewagons, most moored side by side along the southeast shore of Ford Island, the view interrupted only by the occasional searchlight. “Isn’t that a beautiful sight?” the general said, “and what a target they would make.”
Pacific Fleet intelligence officer Lieutenant Commander Edwin Layton tried to shake his fears that Saturday night as he dined and danced on the terrace of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, just down from where Admiral Kimmel finished his dinner. When the evening ended at midnight with the familiar refrain of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Layton stood at attention and fought the urge to shout, “Wake up, America!” Earlier that day the veteran intelligence officer learned that the Japanese consulate had begun torching official records and codes; this came on top of the sudden increased radio security. The Japanese used multiple addresses and blanket coverage—messages sent from nobody to nobody, but that copied everyone—that seemed designed to muddy the waters, measures Layton feared masked an offensive operation. His concerns deepened when the Japanese changed naval call signs on November 1 and then again one month later. Analysts realized in the shuffle that Japan’s main carriers had vanished.
Where were Japan’s flattops?
Layton had struggled to answer that question a few days earlier when he prepared the December 2 intelligence sheet. Trusted to keep Admiral Kimmel informed of when, where, and how the Japanese might strike, Layton could only guess the location of the Imperial Navy’s carriers, writing simply, “Unknown—home waters?”
“What?” Kimmel had erupted. “You don’t know where the carriers are?”
“No, sir,” Layton had answered, pointing out that he had only guessed homeland waters.
“You mean to say that you, the intelligence officer, don’t know where the carriers are?” the admiral pressed.
“No, sir,” Layton replied. “I don’t.”
“You mean they could be coming around Diamond Head, and you wouldn’t know it?”
“Yes, sir,” Layton answered, “but I hope they’d have been sighted before now.”
But no one had spotted Nagumo’s forces.
NOW AFTER MONTHS of worry—and just hours before his planes would lift off—a calm washed over Nagumo. No patrol plane had appeared overhead, nor an enemy armada on the horizon. The gentle Hawaiian tunes from Honolulu’s KGMB radio station that emanated from the Akagi’s receivers only confirmed that the Americans on that volcanic archipelago a few hundred miles south had no clue of the steel typhoon that bore down on them; pilots would go so far as to dance clumsy hulas that mocked America’s ignorance.
Aircrews on the Japanese task force’s six carriers rose as early as three thirty this first Sunday morning in December. Many had spent the journey east across the Pacific studying silhouettes of American carriers, battleships, and cruisers along with detailed maps, including a six-square-foot scale model of Oahu and one of Pearl Harbor. Others had climbed into the cockpit to grip the controls or peered through the bombardier’s sight so as not to forget the feel of combat. Fighter pilot Yoshio Shiga had painted eight watercolors of a temple. Certain he would not survive the attack, Shiga arranged a private showing for his fellow officers on the carrier Kaga. That same fear no doubt triggered the destroyer Akigumo’s executive officer to close his eyes night after night and to dream about his wife, Fumiko, and the couple’s children. Many of the airmen spent the final hours before the dawn attack penning letters home to wives and parents, enclosing fingernail trimmings and clips of hair.
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 1
