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

by Scott, James M.

  The Ruptured Duck buzzed a school. Children flooded out into the yard, many waving to the airmen. The calm scene was strangely disarming, until Lawson caught sight of the school’s flagpole. Fluttering in the warm April wind was the Japanese flag, the bright red sun plastered against the white background. “It was like getting hit in the chest very hard,” the pilot recalled. “This was for keeps.”

  “Keep your eyes open, Thatcher,” he ordered.

  “I’m looking.”

  Lawson followed several valleys toward Tokyo, the surrounding hills hiding the twin-engine bomber. The minutes ticked past. Lawson, copilot Second Lieutenant Dean Davenport, and bombardier Robert Clever spotted six enemy fighters at the same time, racing toward them in two formations at fifteen hundred feet. The first buzzed overhead, followed by a second, though one fighter peeled off and started to dive.

  “I saw him,” Thatcher assured his pilot.

  Lawson asked whether he wanted to power up the turret.

  “No,” he replied, “wait awhile.”

  With each second, Lawson grew more fearful.

  “I don’t know what the dickens happened to him,” Thatcher finally announced. “I think he must have gone back in the formation.”

  The Ruptured Duck crested a hill, then swooped down on Tokyo Bay, skimming the surface at just fifteen feet.

  “Nowhere was there any evidence of a warning,” recalled McClure, the navigator. “Shipping lay in the harbor. We passed close to an aircraft carrier which looked almost deserted—not a plane on deck. We could have bombed it with ease. But we didn’t. Our orders were to hit specific targets and we passed up everything else.”

  Lawson closed in on the Japanese capital, charging over wharves and docks that crowded the shore. Through the cockpit he saw the city stretched out before him. “In days and nights of dreaming about Tokyo and thinking of the eight millions who live there, I got the impression that it would be crammed together, concentrated, like San Francisco. Instead it spreads all over creation, like Los Angeles,” Lawson wrote. “There is an aggressively modern sameness to much of it.”

  The aircrew spied several large fires from previous attacks and a smoky haze settled over northeastern Tokyo. The antiaircraft fire thundered as Lawson pulled up to fourteen hundred feet, executing a run west from the waterfront toward the Imperial Palace. Though tasked to bomb Nippon Machine Works, Clever instead sighted a factory almost half the size of a city block with several 100-foot chimneys.

  The red light on Lawson’s instrument panel flashed as the first demolition bomb plummeted toward Tokyo, landing in a canal next to a Japan Steel Piping factory and causing only minor damage. Clever sighted two more factories. The red light flashed again and again. The second bomb exploded atop a pile of coke, an important fuel used in steel mills, while the third landed nearby with little damage.

  Clever took a final look down the Mark Twain sight, releasing his incendiary bomb over Japan Steel Piping’s shipbuilding factory. The explosives scattered across an area that measured some nine hundred feet by two hundred. Others came down on roofs and sparked fires, which sand bucket brigades raced to extinguish. All told, the attack injured four people, two seriously, with most suffering burns to the arms and legs.

  The Ruptured Duck blew past the emperor’s home, the towering walls and greensward visible to the airmen in the cockpit. McClure flipped on his movie camera to capture the damage done by Doolittle and his men. “I became disgusted when I noticed little specks of dirt on the camera lens. What a time, I thought, for a lens to show up dirty,” he wrote. “I took the camera from my eye and saw what the trouble was. Those weren’t dust specks but the bursts of antiaircraft shells.”

  The batteries on the ground below zeroed in on the Ruptured Duck. Thatcher saw one burst just off the right wing about the same time Lawson dove to escape.

  “That’s flak—flak,” the airmen shouted in unison. “Let’s get out of here.”

  A BRITISH PROFESSOR AT the University of Tokyo—and one of the few English subjects the Japanese had not interned—John Morris was wandering that Saturday afternoon down the Ginza, Tokyo’s main shopping boulevard, when an air-raid alarm suddenly screamed. Morris assumed it was a routine noontime drill, until he looked up and saw an American bomber tear through the skies overhead, the plane’s insignia clearly visible. He saw no Japanese fighters, though minutes later he heard the distant roar of antiaircraft fire over the city’s suburbs. The puzzled Englishman looked around at other shoppers. “There was not the slightest sign of panic,” Morris later wrote. “The police halted the traffic, but nobody made any attempt to take shelter; the general sentiment was one of bewildered interest, everybody wondering what was going to happen next.”

  Morris’s experience proved far from unique. The raid had managed to catch most Tokyo residents completely unaware. The attack by sixteen bombers on a city spread across more than two hundred square miles meant few of the capital’s nearly seven million residents would witness firsthand the raid’s destruction, though many would see the enemy marauders either en route to targets or afterwards. The low-flying bombers that hedgehopped over homes, restaurants, and businesses prompted people to press against windows, while others ran out into the streets for a better look. “Most of the people did not believe it, thinking it was just another drill,” remembered Bruno Bitter, a Catholic priest at Tokyo Sophia University. “But when they learned it was a real raid, nobody could hold them back to go outside, to climb the roofs or the chimneys to get a better view. In other words, it was a thrill rather than a frightening event.”

  That was the case for French journalist Robert Guillain, who was at home near the city’s center when the attack started. He heard a series of powerful explosions. “Bombs?” he wondered before he heard what sounded like antiaircraft fire. “Still,” he thought, “if it were a raid, we’d have heard the sirens.” Less than four minutes later, an alarm pierced the Saturday air. “A raid at high noon!” Guillain exclaimed. “Our first raid! So they’ve come!” The reporter charged down the street toward Toranomon, a major intersection near the city’s principal ministries. He followed the skyward point of many fingers just in time to spot a bomber zoom past. “Everyone was out of doors; they had watched the raid from the middle of the street to get a better view,” he later wrote. “The people were not visibly worried, but at least they showed a lively excitement.”

  The raid likely made the Stanford University–educated Kazuo Kawai, chief editorial writer for the Japan Times & Advertiser, question the wisdom of his morning pronouncement that the Pacific was now an exclusive lake for the Japanese. “The sirens did not even go off until the planes were over the city and the sky was full of antiaircraft fire,” he recalled. “I was out and saw the firing, but thought it was just practice, although it seemed strange to be practicing with what appeared to be live shells. Then I saw the planes and realized it was a raid. Then finally the sirens were sounded.” The attack made others question the nation’s preparedness, including a primary school principal in a village just outside Tokyo who watched the planes buzz over his school. How had the enemy penetrated Japan’s defensive net? “As for military weapons, we had bamboo spears. We were instructed to use bamboo spears in case parachute troops landed,” he would later tell American investigators after the war. “It was truly comical.”

  Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka was enjoying lunch at the Army and Navy Club with Colonel Takushiro Hattori. The two officers discussed the proposed seizure of Midway, which both opposed, when the distant rumble of bombs interrupted them. Tomioka surmised the planes came from carriers, calculating that Yamamoto could abandon the Midway plan and destroy the American fleet right off the shores of Japan.

  “Wonderful!” he exclaimed.

  American ambassador Joseph Grew had just finished a morning meeting with the Swiss minister before departing his embassy office to wander up the hill toward the residence for his Saturday lunch. The mustached statesman spotted several fires in the
distance, which he dismissed as the ordinary blazes that periodically erupted throughout the wooden capital. Grew reached the residence and wandered out into the garden with several other interned Americans. Additional fires soon broke out in the distance, forming a 180-degree arc that stretched from northern Tokyo south to Yokohama, the dark columns of smoke curling skyward. Antiaircraft fire suddenly thundered. Just then the ambassador spotted a twin-engine bomber charge through the skies less than a mile from the embassy. The plane suddenly dove, buzzing the rooftops to the west.

  “My goodness—I hope that is not an American bomber,” Grew blurted out. “I think it is crashing.”

  Grew realized that the low-flying bomber was actually executing evasive maneuvers about the time he spotted a second plane to the east, this one trailed by a line of black puffs of smoke that he recognized as the bursts of antiaircraft shells. “All this was very exciting,” he wrote in his diary, “but at the time it was hard to believe that it was more than a realistic practice by Japanese planes.”

  Naval attaché Lieutenant Commander Henri Smith-Hutton was relaxing in his office with his wife when he heard the first explosions. The couple hurried outside. The Army’s language officer, who had climbed up to the roof, called down, telling him this was the most realistic drill he had ever seen. The officer reported smoke from several fires, while another blaze appeared to have just started. Smith-Hutton ran into the departing Swiss minister, asking whether it could be a real raid. The European diplomat doubted it. Smith-Hutton headed on to lunch in the compound, where the dining room doors opened to the garden. The attaché spotted a policeman on a nearby rooftop about the time an explosion rattled the embassy. His wife ran out into the garden just as a bomber roared overhead, vanishing before anyone identified the insignia. “Half of our group thought it was a genuine air raid, but no one could be sure of the nationality of the planes,” Smith-Hutton recalled. “The other half of our group still thought it was a drill.”

  The diplomats decided to settle the dispute with a $100 wager that the bombers were part of the earlier planned drill. “We saw three bombers altogether and six big fires,” Grew recalled. “Even then, however, we didn’t know whether it was a real raid or whether it was a well-managed show put on by the Japanese in accordance with their air-raid precautions. There was a great difference of opinion among my own staff—quite a lot of money changed hands on that issue, I may say.”

  “Well,” someone finally said to the policeman at the gate, “that was a very successful show you put on today.”

  “That was no show,” the guard responded. “That was the real thing.”

  A similar response played out at the British embassy, where the drone of American bombers coupled with dark smoke on the horizon finally convinced the eighty-seven interned diplomats that the attack was real, including Frank Moysey, a cipher officer. “Our fondest wish,” he later said, “had come true.” Embassy staffers manned air-raid posts. He guarded the entrance to the compound’s cellar, where he was supposed to aid stretcher bearers, watching the smoke rise from behind a hill until he could no longer stand idle. “I ran into a building and climbed to the roof; it was a beautiful sight,” recalled Moysey, whose colleagues would spend the rest of the afternoon toasting the American fliers. “There, surging up from Tokyo’s heavy industrial district, were six enormous columns of smoke, dense and black. No smoke bombs could have caused them. 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.”

  “It is so unfair that you should bomb us,” complained one of the embassy’s local staffers. “Our houses are only made of wood, while yours are of stone.”

  The Danish minister to Japan, Lars Tillitse, watched the attack from his home window. Only the night before, he had attended a dinner the Japanese foreign minister hosted for diplomats of neutral countries. Tillitse had overheard the foreign minister’s wife insist to another woman that there was no need to build an air-raid shelter or even to ship her furs, jewels, and wines out of Tokyo. America could never bomb Tokyo. He thought of the conversation again as he saw one of the bombers streak overhead.

  Argentinian commercial attaché Ramón Muñiz Lavalle likewise watched the attack unfold, albeit from the roof of the embassy. He saw four bombers zoom barely a hundred feet over the city’s rooftops, sparking one of the few noted scenes of chaos. “I looked down the streets. All Tokyo seemed to be in panic. Japs were running everywhere, pushing, shouting, screaming,” Lavalle recalled. “I could see fires starting near the port. Our two Japanese interpreters in the embassy were frightened out of their skins.”

  “If these raids go on,” one maid complained, “we’ll all go mad.”

  American reporters who worked in Japan at the war’s outbreak had endured far worse treatment than the diplomats. “It is true,” one Office of Strategic Services report later noted, “that there seemed to be a special animus against newspaper correspondents.” No one knew that better than New York Times reporter Otto Tolischus, who had spent months locked up, praying for “an American air armada come to smash the whole town into smithereens, and the whole blasted prison with it.” The shriek of a siren followed by the rush of guards down the passageway alerted Tolischus that his prayer had finally been answered. “My friendly floor guard opened my door long enough to indicate to me that this was no drill, but the real thing. He made a long face and shook his head,” Tolischus wrote in his diary. “An air raid—a real honest-to-goodness air raid—was apparently something the Japanese had not counted upon. I felt like cheering.”

  Associated Press correspondent Joseph Dynan sat out the war in an internment camp halfway between Tokyo and Yokohama, along with a dozen other Americans. The police had grabbed the reporter as soon as he came home from church the day the war started. Dynan’s long wait for the Japanese to ship him home was interrupted by what he later described as “the thrill of a lifetime.” “We were having coffee and toast when the police rushed into our camp excitedly and told us to extinguish the fires in the stoves and close the windows because there was an air raid. We thought it was only a drill—even when we heard two tremendous explosions in the direction of the Kawasaki industrial area,” Dynan wrote in an article after his release in July. “One of the United States planes flew directly over our camp and the music of its motors was sweeter than Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, which our phonograph was playing at the time.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Tokyo is our capital and center of our divine country, so in this sense any enemy air raid on there cannot be allowed to take place under any circumstances.

  —CAPTAIN YOSHITAKE MIWA, FEBRUARY 8, 1942, DIARY ENTRY

  WITH THE GAS DWINDLING, Ski York roared into Tokyo, piloting the eighth bomber off the Hornet and the first flight of three planes aimed at the capital’s south side. His objective: an aircraft engine manufacturing plant known simply as target no. 331.

  Calculations showed that the bomber burned through an average of ninety-eight gallons an hour, far more than the seventy-two to seventy-five gallons it should have. York had used up his auxiliary tanks, which were supposed to last through the raid, forty-five minutes before even reaching the coast. Ted Laban’s latest check of the tanks revealed the bomber would not come within three hundred miles of China.

  “Kee-rist,” York exclaimed, “that sure looks like a carrier up ahead there!”

  York banked left to avoid the flattop, which with guns and a deck full of fighters could prove problematic for the unescorted bomber.

  “Where in the hell is Mount Fujiyama?” Emmens asked, scanning the approaching coastline. “I’d seen lots of Jap laundry calendars and I thought old Fujiyama, snow-covered and pink, would be looming up to meet us long before now,” he wrote. “But only a rugged mountainous sky line began appearing inland.”

  The cockpit windshield framed a view of the breakers leading into the beaches.

  “Course from Tokyo to Vladivostok, three hun
dred degrees,” Herndon called out.

  “Damn it, Bob,” York griped again, “I can’t get over that gas consumption. Can you figure it out?”

  “Not unless we’ve got a gas leak—and hell, there’s no evidence of that.”

  The men agreed Russia offered the only hope.

  “I sure wish we could let them know we’re coming,” Emmens added, “so they’ll know who we are when and if we get there.”

  The bomber roared ashore. The crew looked down on a fenced-off encampment filled with a couple hundred people. A guard tower with a white roof stood in one corner. Many of the people below waved frantically. Others jumped up and down. The crew noted that most had Western features, leading the crew to surmise that the compound was likely an internment camp. “Maybe a ray of hope pierced their black existences for that brief moment,” Emmens wrote. “I hope so.”

  The bomber zoomed over villages and rice paddies and buzzed the heads of schoolchildren. David Pohl in the gun turret spotted nine fighters some ten thousand feet overhead, but the enemy fliers never saw the ground-hugging B-25. “After flying for about 30 minutes after our landfall was made, we still hadn’t spotted Tokyo itself, so I started looking for any suitable target; something that was worthwhile bombing,” York said. “We came across a factory, with the main building about four stories high. There was a power plant, and about three or four tall stacks, and railroad yards.”

  York pulled back on the yoke, climbing to fifteen hundred feet.

  “Open your bomb bay doors, Herndon,” York said, then turned to Emmens. “That would be a fine thing at a time like this—to forget to open your bomb bay doors!”