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

by Scott, James M.

  Admiral Stark continued to phone in updates from the Navy Department, at first to the president and then to Tully, who took the admiral’s calls in the second-floor hallway until the confusion and noise forced her to retreat to Roosevelt’s bedroom. Tully jotted down the details in shorthand, typed them up as several of the president’s men hovered over her, and then handed the reports to Roosevelt, each more horrendous than the one before. “The news was shattering,” Tully would later write. “I could hear the shocked unbelief in Admiral Stark’s voice as he talked to me. At first the men around the President were incredulous; that changed to angry acceptance as new messages supported and amplified the previous ones. The Boss maintained greater outward calm than anybody else but there was rage in his very calmness. With each new message he shook his head grimly and tightened the expression of his mouth.”

  The president continued to field calls, even as he met with his advisers. The White House switchboard connected Roosevelt at one point that afternoon with Joseph Poindexter, the governor of the territory of Hawaii. Poindexter told the president that the attack had killed at least fifty civilians and that Hawaii desperately needed food and planes. He asked permission to approve martial law, which Roosevelt granted. Poindexter interrupted his update with a sudden shriek, spooked by what was likely American planes in the skies over Oahu. “My God,” the president announced to his aides. “There’s another wave of Jap planes over Hawaii right this minute.”

  Roosevelt took another call, from Winston Churchill. The British prime minister had dined with American ambassador John Winant and special envoy Averell Harriman at Chequers, his country residence fifty miles northwest of London in Buckinghamshire. The beleaguered leader had moped through dinner—his head often in his hands—until news of the attack crackled over the portable radio. The shock revived Churchill, who slammed down the top of the radio.

  “We shall declare war on Japan,” the prime minister said.

  “Good God,” Winant said. “You can’t declare war on a radio announcement.”

  Churchill darted out the door to his office. Within three minutes he placed a call to Roosevelt. “Mr. President,” Churchill exclaimed. “What’s this about Japan?”

  “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor. We are all in the same boat now.”

  The confirmation thrilled Churchill, who had struggled through seventeen months of war as German submarines ravaged British merchant ships on the high seas and bombers reduced docks, power plants, and factories to rubble. America would now join the fight, promising England’s salvation and total Allied victory. “To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy,” Churchill later wrote. “Hitler’s fate was sealed. Mussolini’s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to powder.”

  “This certainly simplifies things,” Churchill told Roosevelt. “God be with you.”

  Reports continued to arrive in Washington, framing a portrait of the destruction in the Pacific that would take shape in the hours and days ahead.

  “The Oklahoma has capsized in Pearl Harbor,” stated one. “The Tennessee is on fire with a bad list.”

  “Three battleships sunk,” read another. “All others variously damaged.”

  “Heavy losses sustained Hawaii.”

  With each update, Roosevelt sank farther. “My God, how did it happen,” he muttered at one point. “I will go down in disgrace.”

  Still unaware of the war’s outbreak, many Americans were enjoying a few final moments of peace that Sunday afternoon, including 27,102 football fans crowded into the stands at Griffith Stadium to watch the Washington Redskins battle the Philadelphia Eagles.

  Up in the press box a Morse telegrapher passed Associated Press reporter Pat O’Brien a message from his office late in the first quarter.

  “Keep it short,” the note read.

  A second message followed minutes later, explaining why the wire service didn’t need much game coverage: “The Japanese have kicked off. War now!”

  The stadium loudspeaker began paging important military and civilian officials. “Admiral W. H. P. Bland is asked to report to his office at once!” demanded one announcement, summoning the chief of the Navy’s Bureau of Ordnance.

  “The Resident Commissioner of the Philippines, Mr. Joaquim Elizalde, is urged to report to his office immediately.”

  Other announcements followed, summoning federal agents, army officers, and newspaper reporters and editors. Fans began to buzz, though no general announcement of the war’s outbreak was made, because it would have violated the Redskins’ policy against broadcasting nonsports news over the address system. The mass exodus left only a single news photographer to cover the Redskins’ 20–14 victory.

  Similar scenes played out around the country. Crowds in Times Square read the bulletins in shock while the New York Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra burst into “The Star-Spangled Banner” as the audience of 2,200 sang. A man showed up at a recruiting station in Norfolk, Virginia. “I want to beat them Japs,” he declared, “with my own bare hands.” At the Majestic Theater in Dallas, when Sergeant York ended and news of the attack was announced, the crowd fell silent then broke out in a roaring applause. A steelworker captured the sentiment: “We’ll stamp their front teeth in.”

  Inside the White House, Roosevelt adjourned the conference with his advisers around 4:30 p.m. and summoned Tully. The secretary entered to find the president seated alone at his desk, the telephone close at hand and with several piles of afternoon notes stacked before him. Roosevelt lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

  “Sit down, Grace,” he said. “I’m going before Congress tomorrow. I’d like to dictate my message. It will be short.”

  Tully took a seat. Roosevelt normally depended on a team of several writers to help him draft major speeches, a process that could typically take up to ten days. Not only were two of those writers now in New York, but the president could spare at best just a few hours—if that—to craft what would prove to be one of the most important speeches of his career. Secretary of State Hull had pressed Roosevelt to deliver a long and detailed speech, examining the history of American and Japanese relations, but the president disagreed. The American people did not need a history lesson, but a rundown of the facts. Roosevelt took another long drag of his cigarette and began.

  “Yesterday, December seventh, 1941, a date which will live in world history,” he dictated, “the United States was simultaneously and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.”

  Tully jotted down each word, noting that the president’s voice was just as calm as when he dictated the mail, though he took care to pronounce each word and specify the precise punctuation and paragraph breaks. While the address lacked the “eloquent defiance” of Churchill’s and Hitler’s “hysterical bombast,” speechwriter Robert Sherwood later observed, it “represented Roosevelt at his simplest and most direct.”

  When the president finished his dictation, Tully typed a draft and returned it to Roosevelt to edit. Armed with a pencil, the president attacked the opening sentence, scratching out “world history” and writing above it “infamy,” the one word that his son James later noted “would forever describe what happened that day.” He likewise marked out “simultaneously” and substituted “suddenly.” The president made other tweaks as the speech went through two more drafts that evening and the next morning, including the insertion of news of Japan’s attacks elsewhere in the Pacific against Hong Kong, Guam, the Philippines, Wake, and Midway. His trusted aide Hopkins would make the only other major addition to the six-and-a-half-minute speech, adding a sentence to the closing. “With confidence in our armed forces—with the unbounding determination of our people—we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.”

  Reporters who had abandoned the Press Club bar and the afternoon Redskins game now flooded the downstairs press room, clamoring for information and littering the floor with cigaret
te butts. “No story at the White House ever brought out the crowd of reporters that Pearl Harbor did,” Merriman Smith, a reporter with United Press, later wrote. “There must have been one hundred reporters, radio men, newsreel and still photographers, assorted secretaries and Washington big shots trying to crowd into the press room where normally about a dozen men work.”

  At the same time the president dictated his speech, Press Secretary Steve Early stood up for another briefing with reporters. Early had met with the press and issued bulletins with the latest details on the attack throughout the afternoon, but America’s wartime reality meant new restrictions would now apply.

  “I want to ask you before you leave if there is any one of you reporting for Japanese agencies,” he said. “If there are, I am giving you no information and I have asked the Secret Service to take up the credentials of Japanese correspondents.”

  “Will they be put under arrest?” a reporter asked.

  “That is an activity of the Department of Justice.”

  People poured out of area movie houses—like the Metropolitan, where Errol Flynn starred in the western They Died with Their Boots On—and flocked toward the White House. Cars were backed up on Pennsylvania Avenue. As many as one thousand bystanders, according to press estimates, crowded inside Lafayette Park just across the street, braving a frigid Potomac wind. The shouts of newsboys crying “Extra” were soon overcome by the masses singing “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” and “God Bless America.” “Folks wanted to be together,” a reporter for the Evening Star newspaper observed. “Strangers spoke to strangers. A sense of comradeship of all the people was apparent.”

  Vice President Henry Wallace and members of the cabinet filed into the oval study at 8:30 p.m., many of whom had caught afternoon flights to Washington. Maps dangled from easels, and extra chairs ringed the president’s desk. Secretary of State Hull sulked up front in a Chippendale armchair, his fingers together amid an air of gloom. Navy Secretary Knox and Press Secretary Early continued to rush in and out with more updates. Roosevelt sat behind his desk, where he had been most of the day, a cigarette perched between his lips, nodding at each member who entered. “There was none of the usual cordial, personal greeting,” recalled Labor Secretary Frances Perkins, who had just arrived on a flight from New York City with the postmaster general and vice president. “This was one of the few occasions he couldn’t muster a smile.”

  “I’m thankful you all got here,” Roosevelt began, noting that this was the most important session of the cabinet since Abraham Lincoln met with his at the outbreak of the Civil War. “Of course, you all know what’s happened.”

  “Mr. President, several of us have just arrived by plane. We don’t know anything except a scare headline,” interrupted Attorney General Francis Biddle, who had rushed back to Washington from Detroit. “Could you tell us?”

  Roosevelt turned to Knox, who related the day’s events with occasional additions by Stimson, Hull, and the president. News that eight of the Pacific Fleet’s nine battleships had been damaged or destroyed shocked the cabinet. “The Secretary of the Navy had lost his air of bravado,” Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard noted in his diary. “Secretary Stimson was very sober.” Even Roosevelt, who had a few hours to adjust to the devastating news, struggled to comprehend how the Pacific Fleet had been caught so off guard. “His pride in the Navy was so terrific that he was having actual physical difficulty in getting out the words that bombs dropped on ships that were not in fighting shape and prepared to move, just tied up,” observed Perkins. Twice the president barked at Knox, “Find out, for God’s sake, why the ships were tied up in rows.”

  “That’s the way they berth them,” the Navy secretary replied.

  Roosevelt informed the cabinet that he planned to go before a joint session of Congress at noon the next day to deliver a speech and request a declaration of war. The president then read his remarks aloud. Afterward Hull interjected that the brief message was inadequate and again urged Roosevelt to deliver a more in-depth report. “The President disagreed,” Wickard recorded in his diary, “but Hull said he thought the most important war in 500 years deserved more than a short statement.”

  Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn of Texas accompanied by four congressmen and five senators joined the meeting at 9:45 p.m. Roosevelt again reviewed the latest damage reports. “The effect on the Congressmen was tremendous,” Stimson wrote in his diary. “They sat in dead silence and even after the recital was over they had very few words.” When the shock of the news faded, the search for blame began. While a few red-faced congressmen muttered profanities, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Connally of Texas exploded. “How did it happen that our warships were caught like tame ducks in Pearl Harbor?” Connally demanded, his face turning purple as he banged his fist on the desk. “I am amazed at the attack by Japan, but I am still more astounded at what happened to our Navy. They were all asleep.”

  “I don’t know, Tom,” the president answered, his head bowed. “I just don’t know.”

  CHAPTER 2

  To the enemy we answer—you have unsheathed the sword, and by it you shall die.

  —SENATOR ARTHUR VANDENBERG, DECEMBER 8, 1941

  PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT GATHERED IN the oval study with his advisers on the frigid afternoon of December 21, 1941, two weeks to the day after the Japanese pounded Pearl Harbor. The president had addressed Congress at 12:30 p.m. the day after the attack. Sixty-two million listeners—almost one out of every two Americans—tuned in to hear his 518-word speech, the largest daytime audience ever for a radio broadcast. Roosevelt followed those remarks a day later with a fireside chat designed to prepare the public for life at war, from the need for troops to fight on foreign shores to the material shortages, increased taxes, and long hours Americans would battle on the home front. “We are now in this war. We are all in it—all the way,” Roosevelt warned in the twenty-six-minute speech. “Every single man, woman, and child is a partner in the most tremendous undertaking of our American history. We must share together the bad news and the good news, the defeats and the victories—the changing fortunes of war.”

  Only days earlier Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who had flown to Pearl Harbor to survey the damage sustained in the 110-minute assault, submitted his nineteen-page report to the president. Of the eight battleships at Pearl Harbor that Sunday morning, the Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee had escaped serious damage. Knox estimated that the Nevada and the California—hit by a combined three torpedoes and six bombs—could both be refloated in a few months. The West Virginia in contrast had taken a much bigger beating, pounded by as many as nine torpedoes that ripped open the entire port side. Knox reported that the ship could be raised but would require two years to overhaul. The capsized Oklahoma likewise could be righted, but the Navy secretary questioned whether the aged battleship even warranted salvage. The worst damage centered on the Arizona, hit by aerial bombs that blew out the sides. Some eleven hundred sailors remained entombed inside. “The Arizona,” Knox reported, “is a total wreck.”

  The surprise attack had outraged the American public, a reaction reflected in newspaper editorials nationwide. “The battle is on,” declared the New York Herald Tribune, while the Los Angeles Times denounced the raid as the “act of a mad dog.” “Japan has asked for it,” the paper wrote. “Now she is going to get it.” “Do the war-mad officials of the Japanese Government honestly believe they can get away with a crime like this,” asked the Philadelphia Inquirer. “Or are they intent upon committing national hara-kiri?” Beneath the bluster and bravado many papers underlined the importance of national unity. “If we have not forgotten our differences before, we will forget them now,” observed the Palm Beach Post, while the Chicago Sun wrote that “the nation is one or it is nothing.” “‘Politics is adjourned,’ whether between parties, factions, or economics,” argued the San Francisco Chronicle. “From now on America is an army with every man, woman, and child a solider in it, all joined to
the one end of victory.”

  The president didn’t need the papers to read the nation’s mood. Thousands of telegrams and letters arrived daily at the White House, including messages of support from nearly three dozen of the nation’s forty-eight governors, many echoing New Mexico’s governor, John Miles. “This is the home of the Rough Riders,” Miles wrote. “You can depend on us.” Even Roosevelt’s former foe in the 1936 election, Governor Alf Landon of Kansas, vowed his support: “Please command me in any way I can be of service.” Dozens of mayors likewise wrote in support, from large cities such San Francisco, Atlanta, and New Orleans to small towns like Minnesota’s Anoka, home to just seven thousand residents. Diverse groups, from the Crow Indians of Montana to African Americans and even the Ku Klux Klan, cabled support. Many more letters and telegrams arrived from regular citizens, including a taxicab driver in Washington who had just paid off his car and offered to chauffeur government officials for free. Others offered up their children and husbands. Even four-year-old Ivor Ollivier of California vowed to fight: “I would like to kick every Jap into the middle of the Pacific and watch them sink.”