Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor
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Ten others would not be so lucky, including several who burned to death in collapsing houses. The attack injured another forty-eight people, thirty-four seriously. Ruptured water lines hindered efforts to fight the fires, as did the low tide of the Sumida River, which made it difficult for firefighters to pump water. Investigators would later measure two bomb craters thirty feet wide and fifteen feet deep.
“I looked back and saw about half of our target covered with black smoke,” Staff Sergeant Douglas Radney, who manned the .50-caliber machine-gun turret, wrote in his report. “Near the base of the target there were flames and smoke.”
The anxious airmen in the front of the bomber asked Radney whether he had seen the explosions.
“Yes, sir,” the gunner informed Hoover. “All four hit close together and there’s smoke all over the area. We got it all right!”
“OK, gang, hold your hats,” Hoover announced over the interphone. “We’re going down.”
The pilot pushed the bomber into such a steep dive that loose items floated upward, along with Wildner’s stomach. “I glanced at the airspeed indicator and saw that it was close to the redline,” the navigator later wrote. “Outside all I could see were rooftops—millions of them.”
The bomber skimmed barely thirty feet above the city’s rooftops until Hoover spied a power line dead ahead.
“Over or under it?” he asked
“You better not go under,” Wildner shot back, before instructing Hoover to ease back on the gas. China was still a long way to go.
“I want to get out of here fast.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT GRAY TORE ACROSS the Japanese coastline fifteen miles south of the Inubo Saki lighthouse and due east of Yokohama at 1:35 p.m.—some twenty minutes after Doolittle and Hoover had attacked.
The bombers had lifted off from the Hornet at average intervals of only 3.9 minutes, but mechanical troubles and navigational errors had slowed the aerial armada’s advance across the Pacific. This respite of as much as half an hour had given the Japanese vital time to recover from the shock. Air-raid sirens sounded throughout Tokyo at approximately 12:35 p.m. local time, while pilots scrambled into fighters and troops manned antiaircraft batteries. The element of surprise had vanished.
Gray roared across the Boso Peninsula, the arm of land that curled south and protected Tokyo Bay from the Pacific. The aircrew spied men in blue uniforms in the hills before the bomber reached the bay, approaching the capital from the southeast. Gray’s route into the city would lead him across the flank of the antiaircraft batteries that covered the Tokyo’s waterfront, a dangerous course he would then have to retrace on his escape. Gray’s journey was made all the more perilous in that Doolittle had flown over his targets, no doubt alerting ground forces.
The flak thundered as Gray charged across the bay, the puffs of smoke creating a trail through the skies toward his targets: a steel mill, chemical factory, and gas company in the densely populated industrial district northwest of the palace.
“They’re shooting at us,” exclaimed copilot Shorty Manch, making what his fellow fliers would later joke was a brilliant observation.
Gray pressed on through the flak and climbed to 1,450 feet; ten miles east an oil tank appeared to burn.
“Dropped our bombs in four individual runs,” wrote Sergeant Aden Jones, the bombardier. “Then hit the deck and got the hell out of there.”
Gray didn’t see the first bomb hit, but he felt the concussion. He believed he scored direct hits with his second and third attacks against the gas company and chemical works, the latter appearing to set the entire factory ablaze. He scattered his lone incendiary bomb over a densely populated small-factories district. Second Lieutenant Charles Ozuk Jr., Whiskey Pete’s navigator, peered out the window, later describing the scene in his report. “Observed heavy smoke from the target area.”
Gray had scored a direct hit on the Japan Diesel Manufacturing Corporation, the bomb tearing through the timber roof of warehouse no. 3 and punching an eighteen-centimeter dent in the concrete floor before detonating. Employees had scattered for lunch, and no one had sounded the air-raid alarm. The massive explosion killed twelve workers and injured another eighty-eight, including forty-seven seriously. The attack leveled the warehouse and damaged eight other buildings, sparking a fire in warehouse no. 2 that crews eventually extinguished. Another one of his bombs partly destroyed two additional buildings and injured nine people. Gray’s incendiary bomblets spread out over a largely civilian area, destroying four buildings containing twenty-seven homes. One of those was the Sanrakuso apartment building and another a clothing factory dormitory.
Gray immediately began evasive maneuvers to throw off the heavy antiaircraft fire as he banked sharply right and began his retreat.
Jones manned the .30-caliber nose gun, opening fire on the buildings and streets a thousand feet below; the distinct rattle of the machine gun filled the cockpit. Ozuk saw some of the tracers tear into wooden buildings below, appearing to set some on fire. Jones then set his sights on what appeared to be a factory complete with an air defense surveillance tower perched atop the roof. “I saw fifteen to twenty bodies which had fallen as if they were hit by our bombardier’s fire,” Ozuk wrote in his report. “The rest of the men just scattered and ran in all directions.”
Sadly, those weren’t men.
Teachers at Mizumoto Primary School had earlier dismissed the students for the day, though many of the children remained behind to help clean classrooms. About 150 of the students had started to walk home moments before Gray’s plane thundered in the skies overhead and Jones squeezed the trigger of his machine gun, blasting the first and second floors of the school.
Terrified students ran back toward the school, where teacher Yukiteru Furusawa directed them into the classrooms for shelter. High school freshman Minosuke Ishide suddenly collapsed. Furusawa thought the boy had stumbled and helped others into a classroom, returning minutes later to find Ishide still on the floor. He examined the boy and realized he had been shot, a hole visible through one of the glass window planes. “This student was immediately taken to another room and it was found that his pulse was very weak,” Furusawa recalled. “The student died on the way to the hospital which was about one hour and fifteen minutes after being hit by the bullet.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT EVERETT HOLSTROM, at the controls of the fourth bomber to take off from the Hornet, felt apprehensive as he approached Japan. One of his wing tanks leaked, the .50-caliber machine guns didn’t work, and he was the last bomber in the first wave of attacks aimed at northern Tokyo, meaning that local air defenses would no doubt be on high alert. He decided his only hope was to outsmart the Japanese.
He instructed his navigator to make landfall just south of the capital, a move he believed would allow him to slip past any fighters that might anticipate more attacks from the east. Holstrom had flown due west all morning without realizing the bomber’s compass was off as much as fifteen degrees. He made landfall at just seventy-five feet on a small group of islands south of Tokyo.
Far south.
A check of the map revealed the bomber’s position 75 miles south of the capital, a finding that would add 150 miles to his trip. Holstrom soldiered on, however, banking north toward Tokyo. If the Japanese jumped the bomber, he told his men, he planned to dump the bombs and run. Holstrom’s orders called for him to bomb a powder magazine and clothing depot in northern Tokyo. He would never reach those targets coming up from the south, so he decided to drop his three demolition bombs and one incendiary on alternate targets—an oil storage tank farm and troop barracks.
Holstrom’s hope to outsmart the Japanese backfired. The outbound bombers raced out to sea, followed by Japanese fighters. Holstrom flew straight toward them—in a plane low on gas and without workable .50-caliber machine guns.
Copilot Lucian Youngblood was climbing back to transfer the last of the fuel from the bomb bay to the wing tank, when Holstrom spotted the first two fighters over Sagami Bay, t
he scenic body of water southwest of Tokyo. He shouted for Youngblood to return to his seat as he immediately banked under them. “The red dots on their wings looked as big as barns,” Youngblood wrote in his diary. “We were really in a spot.”
One of the fighters opened fire.
Holstrom watched as tracer bullets zinged over the cockpit.
“When I saw 7.7-millimeter bullets bouncing off our wing,” he recalled, “I figured the hell with this!”
Youngblood spotted two more fighters zoom past the bow at fifteen hundred feet.
“I made up my mind that we should try to escape,” Holstrom wrote. “I thought that if we continued, it was a certainty that we would be shot down.”
Holstrom ordered the bombardier to dump the ordnance. Sergeant Robert Stephans opened the bomb bay doors, placed the arming hammer in the safe position, and salvoed the weapons at an altitude of just seventy-five feet. Holstrom’s four eggs vanished into the water below. He turned south to outrun the fighters.
The crew felt depressed.
“It’s kind of a sickening feeling,” navigator Harry McCool recalled. “There’s all this effort for nothing.”
CAPTAIN DAVY JONES CHARGED ashore north of the Inubo Saki lighthouse at just fifty feet above the waves, with Dean Hallmark and Ted Lawson close behind. These three pilots made up the second wave of bombers tasked to pummel central Tokyo. Jones throttled up to 200 miles per hour as he punched inland, but when the expected enemy fighters failed to materialize, he slowed to 180 miles per hour.
His relief over his lack of opposition soon gave way to a more pressing concern. Fields, streets, and villages raced beneath the bomber’s belly as Jones and his crew searched for landmarks that might help orient them. Five minutes turned into ten before Jones had to make a painful confession: “We didn’t know where in the hell we were.”
“Well,” he finally decided. “We’ll turn south.”
Ten minutes more passed.
Then fifteen.
Every gallon of fuel burned hunting for Tokyo, Jones knew, was one gallon less he could count on to reach China.
The flustered flier decided to bomb the first target he found just as his B-25 crested a ridge and passed over the mouth of Tokyo Bay. He instantly recognized his location. Rather than approach Tokyo from the north, Jones had turned south too soon, flying down the Boso Peninsula and bypassing the Japanese capital. He entered the bay due east of Yokosuka, banked north, and pressed on toward Tokyo.
His orders were to bomb several targets east of the Imperial Palace, including an armory. With his gas running low, however, Jones opted for an alternative. The cockpit windshield revealed myriad possible targets packed along the bay shores. He informed bombardier Denver Truelove of his new plan.
Jones pulled up to twelve hundred feet as Truelove coached him in over the targets by voice, sighting an oil tank two blocks from the waterfront. Truelove next targeted what appeared to be a brick power plant several stories tall. Jones banked left in search of more targets, a move that allowed him to witness the second explosion. “The building assumed the shape of a barrel,” he recalled. “The sides rounded out and the top became circular. Then the ‘barrel’ burst. Smoke and dust and bricks were everywhere.”
The raiders scored another hit with an incendiary bomb on a two-story building with a saw-toothed roof. The massive structure, which stretched more than two city blocks, reminded Jones of North American Aviation’s California factory. “It was easy to hit,” he wrote in his report. “Every one of the bombs in the cluster hit on the roof of this plant.”
The antiaircraft fire had prompted Jones to increase his speed to as much as 270 miles per hour, causing Truelove to overshoot his final target. The demolition bomb appeared to blow off only the corner of a two-story building with windows and ventilators on the roof and a canal running along the west side.
A postwar analysis would reveal that one of the bombs ripped through the top of a roofing factory and exploded on a support beam ten feet above the ground, killing twelve workers and injuring eleven others on lunch break. Only the structure’s steel frame prevented the total loss of the building. Another bomb tore through the roof of a Yokoyama Industries warehouse, which doubled as an office. The bomb hit a pile of firewood and exploded, killing fifteen workers and injuring another eleven within a sixty-five-foot radius of the blast, including some in a factory next door. All told, the attack killed twenty-seven people—the most by any single bomber.
Jones now dove down to rooftop level to make his escape, as the Japanese antiaircraft fire and even machine-gun bullets buzzed the bomber, terrifying Joseph Manske in the turret. “When I saw the tracer bullets,” the gunner recalled, “I got out of that turret in a hurry and never fired a round.”
SECOND LIEUTENANT HALLMARK AND THE crew of the Green Hornet marveled at the ease of entry into the enemy’s homeland. No antiaircraft fire. No fighters. Just a warm Saturday afternoon. “It was so pleasant and serene then you’d think we were a commercial airliner coming in for a visit,” navigator Chase Nielsen recalled. “The fine weather made us feel good. We figured it was a sign that our mission would be successful.”
That serenity ended when the bomber closed in on Tokyo.
Zooming in at more than 220 miles per hour, Hallmark pulled up to fifteen hundred feet. The bomb bay doors swung open as the antiaircraft fire thundered, some of it from warships moored in the bay. One round struck Plexiglas near copilot Second Lieutenant Robert Meder. Dark smoke curled above the horizon from the previous attacks, as six Japanese planes roared overhead at ten thousand feet.
Hallmark’s orders were to target the steel mills and foundries in the northeastern corner of the capital that crowded the banks of the bay, a massive target Nielsen estimated to be no less than six hundred feet by two thousand feet. The Texas pilot now poised to fulfill a prophecy he had made just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The Japs sure did make a big mistake,” he wrote then in a letter to his parents. “I imagine they will be awfully sorry they ever heard of the U.S. in a few months.”
Sergeant William Dieter, the bombardier, stared down his Mark Twain sight at the congested Japanese capital below. Nielsen pressed him on where he planned to drop the bomber’s lone incendiary.
“I’ll figure that out,” Dieter answered.
Hallmark interrupted the debate.
“I’ve already figured out what he’s going to do with the incendiary,” the pilot instructed. “I’m going to circle and come back and we’re gonna go over the target area and spread it all over.”
“Are you sure you’re not going to circle and go over the Imperial Palace?” Nielsen joked.
Hallmark leveled off and made his run. He then circled back; his total time over the target was just three minutes.
“We couldn’t miss from 1,500 feet,” Nielsen later wrote. “We saw the bombs explode, watched the smoke and fire and then circled.”
Hallmark’s first bomb detonated on the concrete road in front of Japan Steel Fuji Steelworks, blasting a crater some thirty feet wide. The explosion destroyed seven nearby homes and damaged eleven others, seriously injuring one person. The Green Hornet’s second bomb hit steelmaker Nippon Yakin Kogyo, tearing through the roof and denting the concrete floor. The massive explosion blew apart the wooden building and took the roof and windows off the neighboring factory building. Alerted workers had begun to evacuate, though flying shrapnel cut some of them. Hallmark’s incendiary bomblets spread across a residential area 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. Sixty-nine of the explosives landed on homes, injuring three people. The others burned up on roads and in nearby fields, and Japanese investigators would count eleven duds.
Nielsen would later dispute Japanese charges that the Green Hornet strafed civilians on the ground, arguing that no one on board the bomber had ever even fired the machine guns. Nevertheless, postwar Japanese records would show that preschooler Yoshiro Nakamura was hit in the back and killed in the area where the bomber’s i
ncendiary bomblets fell, possibly from bomb shrapnel or even antiaircraft fire.
Hallmark and his crew strained for a final glimpse of the damage as dark puffs of antiaircraft fire flooded the sky, turning white as the shells exploded.
“I didn’t feel any sort of emotion until we began to circle after we dropped our bombs,” Nielsen recalled. “But when we saw that we’d scored with our bombs we let go.”
“That’s a bulls-eye!” Hallmark yelled.
The others joined him to congratulate Dieter.
Hallmark dove down to just fifty feet and tore across the bay, joining his navigator in a duet of “We Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”
The crew relaxed, the mission accomplished. “We felt good,” Nielsen wrote. “We figured the worst was over now.”
He was wrong.
FIRST LIEUTENANT TED LAWSON ROARED ashore in the seventh bomber, the last one charged with bombing central Tokyo. He was surprised at how basic it looked. “I had an ingrained, picture-postcard concept of Japan. I expected to spot some snow-topped mountain or volcano first,” he wrote. “But here was land that barely rose above the surface of the water and, at our twenty feet of height, was hardly distinguishable.”
The beaches gave way to green fields and farms, carved into the landscape with an almost mathematical precision. Lawson realized that after nearly three weeks at sea—surrounded by grays and blues—the vibrant colors were a welcome change. “The fresh spring grass was brilliantly green. There were fruit trees in bloom, and farmers working in their fields waved to us as we pounded just over their heads,” he wrote. “A red lacquered temple loomed before us, its coloring exceedingly sharp.”
Even Corporal David Thatcher, who manned the .50-caliber machine guns to ward off enemy fighters, couldn’t help stealing glances at the exotic landscape that raced beneath the bomber. “I saw quite a few good highways in Japan but no cars, only bicycles,” he wrote in his report. “As we passed over the rooftops the people in the fields and on the roads would stop whatever they were doing and look up at us. From the way they acted it seemed as though no Japanese planes ever flew that low.”