A fifty-seven-year-old Texas native—and 1905 graduate of the Naval Academy—Nimitz had spent much of his career in the undersea service. The laconic four-star admiral had assumed command of the battered Pacific Fleet just three weeks after the Japanese attack. “May the good Lord help and advise me,” he had written to his wife that day, “and may I have all the support I can get for I will need it!” The deteriorating situation in the Pacific depressed Nimitz, who lay awake long hours each night. The Pacific Fleet had so far executed several carrier raids against outlying Japanese bases, hoping to relieve the pressure on forces fighting in the southwest Pacific, but without any real luck. “The Japs didn’t mind them,” one officer quipped, “any more than a dog minds fleas.” The lack of success made Nimitz doubt he would survive long in his new job. “I will be lucky to last six months,” he wrote to his wife that month. “The public may demand action and results faster than I can produce.”
Duncan only promised to increase Nimitz’s stress. The sole record of the captain’s secret visit was the terse notation in Nimitz’s unofficial war diary: “arrived for conference.” Nimitz summoned Vice Admiral William “Bull” Halsey Jr. and his chief of staff, Captain Miles Browning. The audacious operation to raid the Japanese capital existed only in the form of a handwritten plan, one so secretive that Duncan refused to allow even his trusted secretary to type it. The roughly thirty-page outline boasted a weather annex, a breakdown of the proposed ships, and the route across the Pacific, all the logistical details Duncan believed he needed to share with Nimitz. “I had been told by Admiral King to tell Admiral Nimitz that this was not a proposal made for him to consider but a plan to be carried out by him,” Duncan recalled. “So that cleared up any matter of whether we should do it or not; it was on the books by then.”
Nimitz listened as Duncan outlined his proposal. The admiral was guarded in how he chose to commit his forces, a caution that had led him to clash with Admiral King after barely a month on the job. King had pressed Nimitz to execute aggressive carrier raids that would rattle the Japanese and inspire the American public. Nimitz had felt more reluctant, afraid to risk his precious carriers. “Pacific Fleet markedly inferior in all types to enemy,” Nimitz had cabled King in early February. “Cannot conduct aggressive action Pacific except raids of hit-and-run character.” Nimitz’s message had drawn a stern rebuke. “Pacific Fleet not repeat not markedly inferior in all types to forces enemy can bring to bear within operating radius of Hawaii,” King countered. “Your forces will however be markedly inferior from Australia to Alaska when the enemy has gained objectives in Southwest Pacific unless every effort is continuously made to damage his ships and bases.”
A raid against Tokyo certainly qualified as aggressive.
Nimitz’s orders were to guard Hawaii and Midway and protect the sea-lanes to Australia. The Pacific Fleet commander understood the incredible risk involved in a raid against Tokyo—his own staff had even proposed and then nixed just such an idea in February. The Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines had wrecked two of America’s three fleets. Even with the addition of the Hornet the backbone of America’s Pacific defense rested on just five aircraft carriers, half the number of flattops Japan counted. The cumbersome B-25s were too large to fit inside a carrier’s aircraft elevator, forcing the Navy to crowd the bombers on the deck of the Hornet, a move that would render the carrier unable to launch fighters in an emergency. To protect the Hornet from surprise attack Nimitz would have to dispatch the carrier Enterprise. Two of America’s five Pacific carriers—the flattops Yamamoto so hungered to destroy in his quest for Pacific dominance—would steam to within four hundred miles of the enemy’s homeland.
The opportunities for disaster were numerous. Not only would America risk two of its prized carriers, but fourteen support ships, including four cruisers, eight destroyers, and two oilers as well as the lives of some ten thousand sailors. This strike force would have to thread its ways across the Pacific in complete radio silence, avoiding the constellations of Japanese bases that stretched from the Marianas to New Guinea. Enemy fighters, bombers, and reconnaissance planes crowded the skies, while warships, patrol craft, and submarines plowed the Pacific waters, any one of which could jeopardize the mission. Beyond the operation’s logistics loomed the larger question of what the Japanese would do in retaliation. Would such a raid invite a second attack against Pearl Harbor or possibly Midway? What about the West Coast? Would an outraged Yamamoto order his forces to attack Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles?
But as Duncan had made clear, Nimitz had no choice.
The mission was a go.
Duncan fired off a prearranged dispatch to Captain Francis Low, directing him to alert Doolittle that it was time to move his men west from Eglin Field to California. The coded message simply read, “Tell Jimmy to get on his horse.”
Nimitz conferred with Halsey.
“Do you believe it would work, Bill?” he asked.
“They’ll need a lot of luck,” Halsey answered.
“Are you willing to take them out there?” Nimitz pressed.
“Yes, I am.”
“Good,” Nimitz replied. “It’s all yours!”
PLANS PROGRESSED IN CHINA to prepare for the raiders. Doolittle in his initial handwritten outline of the mission had suggested coordinating with Colonel Claire Chennault, aviation adviser to the Chinese government and the commander of the American Volunteer Group, better known as the Flying Tigers. Chennault, however, was widely disliked; Arnold deemed him a mercenary and a “crackpot.” The chief of the Army Air Forces instead turned to Lieutenant General Joseph Stilwell, whom Roosevelt had recently tapped to serve as commander of American Army Forces in China, Burma, and India as well as chief of staff to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Few military leaders had as much experience in China as the fifty-nine-year-old Stilwell, a Florida native and 1904 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy. Able to speak Chinese as well as French and Spanish—he taught the latter two languages at West Point—Stilwell had served three tours in China between the wars, in posts ranging from language officer to military attaché.
Stilwell’s slender physique, gray hair, and wire-frame glasses—more befitting a college professor than a warrior—masked an acerbic personality that earned him the nickname Vinegar Joe. “Dour, belligerent, and weather beaten,” is how his colleague Lewis Brereton once characterized him in his diary. In an essay written for his own family even Stilwell described himself as “unreasonable, impatient, sour-balled, sullen, mad, hard, profane, vulgar.” The brilliant tactician had little use for social diplomacy. He referred to blacks as “niggers” or “coons,” Chinese as “chinks” or “chinos,” and the Germans as either “huns” or “squareheads.” Stilwell targeted the Japanese with special disdain. “When I think of how these bowlegged cockroaches have ruined our calm lives,” he once wrote, “it makes me want to wrap Jap guts around every lamppost in Asia.” Stilwell even disparaged his commander in chief, whom he viewed as a “rank amateur in all military matters,” after a meeting on the eve of his February departure. “Very unimpressive,” he wrote in his diary. “Just a lot of wind.”
Stilwell had the unenviable job of fighting a war in what amounted to a political, military, and economic backwater made all the more challenging by years of conflict and bloodshed. Spread across more than 4.2 million square miles, China had a population of almost 500 million people, 80 percent of them rural farmers. In addition to Manchuria and portions of Mongolia, Japan had wrestled away another 800,000 square miles, including coastal ports, railways, and industrial and commercial centers, effectively cutting China off from the outside world. One of Stilwell’s top aides, Frank “Pinkie” Dorn, would later summarize it best. “Our ally, China, was a place rather than a nation; a makeshift affair whose economy was wrecked and whose currency was bolstered by the simple expedient of printing more unbacked paper money,” Dorn wrote. “Tens of millions of its people had died from bullet, disease, or star
vation, been forced to flee their homes, or deserted to the ministrations of a ruthless enemy.”
Further complicating Stilwell’s job was his disgust with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the fifty-four-year-old head of the National People’s Party. The bespectacled Chinese leader spent most of his time battling the communists under Mao Zedong, while he populated his own government with cronies and family; his wife even served at one point as deputy chief of the air force. Stilwell viewed him as mentally unstable and arrogant. “He thinks he knows psychology,” he wrote in his diary. “In fact, he thinks he knows everything.” Stilwell often referred to the generalissimo by the diminutive name “Peanut” after an aide once described him as “a peanut perched on top of a dung heap.” Relations soured further because of Stilwell’s refusal to keep his views private. “The trouble in China is simple,” he once told a reporter for Time magazine. “We are allied to an ignorant, illiterate, superstitious, peasant son of a bitch.” When Roosevelt asked for his views of the generalissimo, Stilwell was equally crass and impolitic: “He’s a vacillating, tricky, undependable old scoundrel, who never keeps his word.”
Stilwell’s views stood in contrast to those of most Americans, thanks in part to the herculean public relations efforts of Henry Luce, the Time and Life magazine publisher. Luce had been born in China to missionary parents and lionized Chiang Kai-shek, whose Christianity made him popular in the religious community. In 1937 Time named Chiang and his attractive spouse as the “Man & Wife of the Year.” The Chinese leader’s image over the years would appear on the cover of Time no fewer than ten times—two more than either Roosevelt or Winston Churchill and three more than Adolf Hitler. The press proved equally adoring of his wife, describing her as a cross between Joan of Arc and Florence Nightingale, a carefully crafted image that infuriated Stilwell and his aides. Those views even percolated inside the White House, where presidential aide Laughlin Currie remarked after one visit, “Each night it was like being tucked into bed by an empress!” Such undeserving adoration only made Stilwell’s already tough task more unpalatable, a sentiment best captured by a reporter for Harper’s Magazine in 1944: “If St. Francis of Assisi were put in charge of the CBI theater, he would be known as ‘Vinegar Frank’ before his brass buttons had time to tarnish.”
American leaders had done little in recent years to earn Chinese goodwill, watching from the sidelines as Japan burned villages and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children. The United States instead had focused on defeating Germany, directing nine-tenths of its $13 billion lend-lease program to Britain, while China’s share of American ordnance, aircraft, and tanks amounted to $618 million, just 4.6 percent. Leaders often claimed that the United States’ meager war production meant it had little to offer, but an American intelligence report more accurately fingered the cause. “The true explanation for our ironic failure to give China more extensive support against our present enemy, Japan, seems rather to lie in an American attitude of mind,” the report noted. “We have feared Germany and have been contemptuous of Japan. We have indulged the persistent hope that we could patch things up with Japan, a fallacy which has had its roots in our intellectual absorption in the familiar problems of Europe rather than in the exotic far-off conflicts of Eastern Asia.”
Chiang Kai-shek may have been the son of a merchant, but he was savvy enough to understand that the attack on Pearl Harbor had transformed China’s strategic value. With American bases in Guam and Wake gone and the Philippines under siege, the United States had no toehold in Asia from which to attack Japan. Furthermore, if Chinese forces could tie down the Japanese, it would slow the empire’s progress elsewhere. But Stilwell feared that Chiang Kai-shek was more concerned with his own political self-interest and the struggle against Mao Zedong. That left the Chinese leader all too eager to exploit America’s weakened position. “The probabilities are that the CKS regime is playing the USA for a sucker; that it will stall and promise, but not do anything; that it is looking for an allied victory without making any further effort on its part to secure it; and that it expects to have piled up at the end of the war a supply of munitions that will allow it to perpetuate itself indefinitely,” Stilwell wrote in a 1942 memo. “They think we are dumb, easily fooled, and gullible, and that all they have to do to bring us to heel is to threaten to make a separate peace.”
This was the contemptuous political backdrop Hap Arnold and Jimmy Doolittle faced in planning the raid’s terminus. The war may have elevated China’s importance, but it did not eradicate America’s focus on its own self-interest. Preservation of those interests demanded the mission remain a secret from Chiang Kai-shek. On one level American officials knew that the generalissimo’s staff could not be trusted. General Marshall reminded Arnold of that in a February memo. “With relation to the highly confidential project you and King have on,” he wrote, “please read Magruder’s telegram of yesterday regarding lack of secrecy in all discussions at Chungking.” Marshall referred to Brigadier General John Magruder, the outgoing chief of the American military mission to China, who had shared an alarming personal experience. “Despite my request for confidential treatment of matter at height of interview an unexpectedly drawn curtain disclosed four servants absorbing the facts,” he wrote. “This is characteristic and indicates futility of efforts to maintain secrecy regarding any military matters.”
Beyond the fear of leaks American leaders had other more important reasons for keeping the mission a secret from Chiang Kai-shek. A raid against Tokyo—home of the emperor and the nerve center of the Japanese empire—promised to invite retaliation against the Chinese. That probability would likely trigger Chiang Kai-shek’s refusal to allow the bombers to land at Chinese airfields. American leaders, of course, knew all of this. Japanese atrocities against the Chinese had grown so notorious throughout the years that the State Department dedicated an entire report to them in February 1942. “Inhuman acts have been committed by Japanese armies on the civilian populations in varying degrees in every city or town captured by them, from one end of China to the other,” the report stated. “The entry of Japanese troops has repeatedly been accompanied by wholesale robbing, raping and butchery of innocent civilians.”
The thirteen-page, single-spaced report—later circulated at the highest levels of the government and military—offered American policy makers a horrific window into what Japanese forces might do to any captured airmen or local villagers who assisted them. In previous campaigns Japanese troops had used prisoners for bayonet practice, buried others alive, and set some on fire, forcing villagers to watch as a means to extract information. Soldiers formed rings around entire villages, torched them, and then machine-gunned the residents who tried to escape. Following the fall of Shanghai in 1937, Japanese newspapers chronicled a “murder race” between two junior officers, competing to see who would be the first to kill 100 Chinese with a sword. “There came a day when each of the men passed the 100 mark, but as there was some dispute as to who had first reached the number, it was decided to extend the contest to a new goal, variously reported as 150 to 250,” the report stated. “One of the officers interviewed in the field by a Japanese correspondent declared that the contest had been ‘fun.’”
These atrocities reached a climax when troops entered the Chinese capital of Nanking in December 1937. The Japanese coaxed many of the Chinese soldiers into surrender, luring them outside the city and slaughtering them by the thousands. Inside the city’s walls gangs of soldiers brutalized civilians. So vast was the slaughter that dead bodies piled along the banks of the Yangtze turned the mighty river red. As many as one thousand rapes occurred each night, many of the women killed afterwards to cover up the crime. “Perhaps when we were raping her, we looked at her as a woman,” one soldier wrote after the war, “but when we killed her, we just thought of her as something like a pig.” The war crimes tribunal would later estimate that the Rape of Nanking—as it became known—claimed more than 260,000 noncombatants, while some exper
ts would later push the total as high 350,000, horrors America knew of long before the war’s end. “The actions of the Japanese soldiery,” the State Department report concluded, “constitute the blackest, most shameful page in the military annals of modern times.”
With the Navy’s task force slated for departure, Arnold demanded an update from Stilwell on the raid’s preparations in China. The general had briefed Stilwell shortly before he left the United States, informing him only of the operation’s basic logistics while omitting that the planes would in fact bomb Tokyo en route to China. The plan demanded the use of five airfields at Chuchow, Kweilin, Lishui, Kian, and Yushan. Signal flares and radio beacons would guide the bombers in to these primitive airfields, where the crews could then take on fuel and oil before pressing on to Chungking, the new capital of China, some eight hundred miles farther inland. There the bombers would form a new squadron to attack the Japanese in China. Arnold had heard nothing from Stilwell since his departure, and time now ran short. “What progress is being made on laying down gasoline supplies and bomb supplies on airports in eastern China?” Arnold’s staff messaged Stilwell on March 16. “What progress on airports?” Stilwell failed to respond, prompting a follow-up message two days later. “Time is getting short for spotting gas at agreed points.”
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 13
