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

by Scott, James M.

  Herndon did as ordered, repeating the Twenty-Third Psalm: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.”

  Four eggs plummeted down.

  “Bombs away!” Herndon called out.

  The explosions jolted the bomber, hurling debris above the plane. Smoke and steam climbed into the sky. The first bomb narrowly missed the Nishi Nasuno train station and railway buildings, blasting a crater more than six feet deep and thirty feet wide. The explosion blew out the windows and doors of a nearby home, whose family was away at the time. The second bomb hit a largely unpopulated area, while the third exploded in a rice field and shattered the glass windows of nearby buildings. The incendiary likewise caused little destruction. All told, York’s attack managed to damage only a single building and neither killed nor injured anyone. Japanese investigators would later recover a casing labeled “Chicago ACME Steel Company.”

  York dove back down to rooftop level. Rather than turn back to sea, like the other crews, the bomber continued northwest.

  “Keep your eyes peeled back there, Pohl.”

  “Yes, sir,” the gunner answered. “All clear.”

  The foothills west of Tokyo soon grew into 8,000-foot peaks, the wide mountain range that served as the spine of Honshu. York eased back on the yoke, and the bomber climbed, soaring over the snow-covered peaks below. In the distance the aircrew spied the Sea of Japan, a streak of silver on the distant horizon.

  “Okay,” Pohl announced as the plane began its descent on the western slope of mountains. “All clear.”

  “I’ll bet we’re the first B-25 crew of five to bomb Tokyo and cross Japan at noon on a Saturday,” Emmens joked.

  “And took off from an aircraft carrier called the Hornet,” York replied with a smile.

  FIRST LIEUTENANT HAROLD WATSON piloted the Whirling Dervish—the ninth bomber off the Hornet—ashore thirty-five miles north of Tokyo. He had come straight across the ocean, catching up with planes that had taken off ahead of his.

  Watson buzzed the beach and over a coastal airport with eighteen twin-engine bombers dispersed on the ground and fighters warming up on the ramp. The pilot banked southwest and climbed above the haze to 4,500 feet, passing over four more airfields en route to his target, the Kawasaki Truck and Tank plant. The aircrew saw fires near the Electric Light plant, the radio station JOAK, and the Japanese Special Steel Company. Others burned north of the palace near where Doolittle had attacked.

  Watson flew across the northwest corner of Tokyo Bay, diving as he approached his target, which sat along the waterfront. Barrage balloons floated over the water at altitudes of as much as three thousand feet—some anchored on barges in the bay. Antiaircraft fire thundered from the time Watson reached the capital’s outskirts all the way to the target, prompting the Whirling Dervish’s gunner, Technical Sergeant Eldred Scott, to describe the afternoon as “a nice, sunshiny day with overcast anti-aircraft fire.”

  “I expected to see holes opening up any minute,” Scott would later tell reporters, “but never saw one.”

  Watson pressed on through the flak toward his target, holding the bomber steady in what one witness on the ground would later describe as “majestic deliberation.” The bomber zoomed between the Imperial Palace and the bay waterfront, buzzing over the Japanese Diet and the Nichi Nichi newspaper plant. A photo of the Whirling Dervish would even appear in the paper the following morning.

  Watson leveled off at 2,500 feet and a speed of 230 miles per hour, lining up for a ten-second run. Wayne Bissell sized up the target, which sat on a sand spit along the edge of the bay and consisted of eight or nine buildings about 50 feet by 200 set in rows with about 100 feet between them. “I dropped two demolition on our target area,” the bombardier wrote. “There was a 4½ second delay for our incendiary bundle and I released the remaining demolition and the incendiary bundle at the end of that time.”

  The first bomb tore through the roof of a hazardous-materials warehouse filled with gasoline, heavy oil, and methyl chloride. The 500-pound weapon bounced off gas cylinders and landed in the wooden building next door before it exploded. The second bomb detonated sixty feet away, leaving a crater six feet deep and thirty feet wide. Alerted to the raid by antiaircraft fire, workers had begun to evacuate, but shrapnel from the second bomb killed one and injured forty-one others, three seriously; one victim with a shrapnel wound to the head later died. The attack damaged five of the factory’s buildings. The incendiary came down in a residential area, partially burning one home. The final demolition bomb proved a dud, but it still ripped a nearly two-foot hole through the tiled roof of a home, passed through the wooden floor and buried in the wet red clay, forcing the military to form a 650-foot perimeter to later dig it out.

  When gunner Eldred Scott looked back to see the damage, he found the crew in trouble. The Japanese jumped the bomber. “Tracers were looping up at us from behind and below from a single fighter that was only a hundred yards away from us and pointing straight at me!” he wrote. “I opened fire only to find that my sight fogged up. All I could do was keep my finger on the trigger and aim with my tracers. As my bullets came closer and closer, the enemy fighter fell off on the left wing and I never saw it again. I think I got him but I’ll never be able to swear to it.”

  FIRST LIEUTENANT RICHARD JOYCE PILOTED the final plane tasked to bomb the capital’s southern end, specifically the Japan Special Steel Company’s plants and warehouses in the Shiba Ward about a mile and a half north of the Tana River.

  As the pilot of the tenth bomber, Joyce expected opposition, prompting him to pull up to three thousand feet and hide in the clouds as he charged across the Pacific. He hit the coast at Inubo Saki and banked south, flying another ten miles before he turned west and headed across the Boso Peninsula and into Tokyo Bay.

  Navigator and bombardier Horace Crouch mentally prepared himself as Joyce closed in for the attack. “When we were a short way out from the target I read briefly from the Testament that I carried,” he recalled. “I also said a short prayer, then I figured it was time to get back to the job at hand.”

  Joyce dropped down to 2,400 feet and slowed to 210 miles per hour as he lined up on his target, the bomb bay doors now open. An aircraft carrier steaming out of the bay toward the Yokosuka naval base opened fire, but the flak proved woefully inaccurate.

  Crouch lined up his shot and released the bombs. “The targets were so thick and we were so low,” he recalled, “we couldn’t miss.”

  Joyce’s first bomb blasted a wharf; the second hit a building that served as a study room and dormitory for workers, many of whom had evacuated to volunteer standby spots once the air-raid alarms sounded. Not everyone, however, had left. New workers who were still waiting for volunteer assignments loitered in the dormitory. The bomb exploded and killed five instantly, plus two female office employees, who had remained behind to collect important records. Seven other workers died hours later from injuries. Joyce’s third bomb exploded in a home just north of the Ministry of Railways Supply Bureau clothing factory in Shinagawa, leveling several wooden houses in a forty-foot radius and killing six residents, two of them children. Shrapnel riddled the clothing factory a hundred feet away, where five workers died, including several female office employees. Seven others were seriously injured, as were many others at the railway ministry. Joyce’s attack killed a total of twenty-five men, women, and children—second only to Jones’s in the number of fatalities—and seriously wounded twenty-three. Another hundred and fifty people suffered minor injuries. All told, he leveled nine buildings with sixteen units and damaged eight others, which contained another twenty units.

  The antiaircraft fire thundered around the bomber. Joyce’s long and straight target run had allowed the enemy gunners to zero in on him. Americans imprisoned in a school in the Denenchofu district watched Joyce’s frantic escape, afraid the Japanese would shoot down the bomber. One shell exploded so close that shrapnel tore a hole eight inches in diameter in the fu
selage forward of the horizontal stabilizer.

  Joyce’s luck went from bad to worse. Nine enemy fighters appeared overhead at about five thousand feet. Two immediately peeled off to attack, closing to within six hundred yards. Joyce pushed the controls forward. The bomber’s speed jumped to 330 miles per hour as Joyce dove under the fighters. The steep dive caused the ammunition to fly out of the can and tangle up, putting the bomber’s turret out of commission. Larkin frantically worked to remedy it, as enemy machine-gun rounds tore into the left wingtip. One fighter passed so close that Crouch felt as if he could reach out and touch it. The bombardier jumped back against the bulkhead: “I remember looking down to see how many holes he had shot in me because I was sure that he had fired on us from there.”

  Joyce charged west along the Tama River toward the mountains, buzzing treetops along the way. Two more fighter formations attacked. Joyce outran three fighters, but another three pursued, held off only by Larkin’s gunfire. One fighter closed the distance, pulling alongside and above the bomber. “I turned south at the mountains to go out to sea and we fired at him with everything we had,” Joyce wrote. “I believe that we hit him but none of us are sure whether or not we knocked him down.”

  As Joyce passed over Sagami Bay, antiaircraft fire again erupted. Two more fighters jumped the bomber. Joyce increased power and pulled back on the yoke, climbing at two thousand feet per minute. “It seemed that when the Japs saw the tracers coming after them, they were afraid to come close.” Larkin wrote in his diary. “We were finally able to climb to the clouds and lose them.”

  CAPTAIN ROSS GREENING, in the eleventh bomber off the Hornet, led the attack’s fourth wave, designed to target Kanagawa, Yokohama, and Yokosuka. First Lieutenants Edgar McElroy and Bill Bower in the twelfth and thirteenth bombers flew close behind, until the trio reached the coast and split off in separate directions.

  “Let’s be nonchalant about this,” suggested Ken Reddy, Greening’s copilot. “What do you say we have a sandwich? We can say when we go home, ‘We were eating a sandwich when we were bombing Tokyo.’”

  Greening took a bite of his, but he was so wound up that he could neither chew nor swallow. The Hari Kari-er made landfall northeast of Tokyo, and Greening aimed south at 170 miles per hour toward Yokohama, the industrial suburb south of Tokyo. “I don’t think I’d ever flown so low in my life, dodging down creek beds and ducking between trees rather than going over them,” Greening wrote. “I’m not sure it was necessary, but it gave a sense of security. Those minutes seemed like hours.”

  The bomber was roaring across Kasumigaura Lake when four Japanese fighters attacked. Machine-gun rounds pinged off the bomber’s right wing. Gunner Melvin Gardner let loose with the .50-caliber machine guns. “Two of these were shot down, one on fire,” Greening would later report. “Neither were seen to hit the ground.”

  The other two fighters appeared to back off until Gardner’s gun jammed and then the turret motor burned out, filling the rear of the bomber with smoke. The fighters dove to attack. Greening had no choice but to dive and outrun them. “We hugged the ground as tightly as we could and even flew under some power lines in the hope that some of the ships might crash into them. They didn’t,” the pilot recalled. “I flew so low over an agricultural plot that I can’t understand how I missed hitting a farmer plowing with his ox. I wonder what he thought when our B-25 suddenly went thrashing past his head, with two Japanese fighters shooting at us in furious pursuit.”

  Greening looked out the cockpit window and saw one of the fighters score a line of as many as fifteen hits, from the trailing edge of the Hari Kari-er’s right wingtip to the prop. He had to unload his bombs—fast. He ordered Bill Birch to get ready; the bomb bay doors shuddered open. Greening carried four incendiaries to blast Yokohama’s oil refineries, docks, and warehouses, but with the fighters hugging his tail he needed an alternative. “I could see a concentration of buildings ahead and figured we’d better use it as a target while we still could bomb anything,” he wrote. “We noticed refinery pipelines and tanks camouflaged by thatched roofs, appearing to look like a cluster of houses. We rationalized, if we were going to bomb a refinery this one would do just fine. “

  Greening lined up for his run and pulled back on the yoke, climbing to just six hundred feet, far less than the desired fifteen hundred.

  “Oh, if my wife could see me now,” he thought to himself.

  The red light on the cockpit instrument panel flashed again and again. Four incendiaries tumbled out in train, followed immediately by a large explosion and several successive ones, each rocking the bomber. “There were great sheets of flame and a terrific explosion that threw the co-pilot and me right up out of our seats, even though we were belted, and banged our heads against the top of the cockpit,” Greening would later tell reporters. “Once we had unloaded our bombs our speed increased and we ran right away from the two pursuit ships that were following.”

  Greening had hit not an oil refinery but the half-built Katori naval air station, which was covered at the time by scaffolding. The attack destroyed six buildings, including a dormitory for workers, but it neither killed nor injured anyone. Greening looked over to see blood running down Reddy’s face from where he had hit his head, a small price to pay for the mission’s success. As the bomber roared out to sea, Greening finally swallowed his bite of the sandwich. “When we turned and looked back,” Reddy wrote in his diary, “we could see huge billows of smoke towering at least ½ a mile high.”

  FIRST LIEUTENANT BILL BOWER IN the twelfth bomber came ashore north of Choshi, a city due east of Tokyo. Bower and his crew struggled to orient themselves, so he flew an irregular course south, paralleling the coast of Japan anywhere from five to twenty miles inland toward a point east of Yokosuka.

  Bower then hedgehopped, keeping the Fickle Finger of Fate just a few feet off the ground. “I became a busy boy trying to harvest the rice crop for the natives,” he wrote in his diary. “Pretty rough job flying at zero altitude.”

  Despite the tough flying, Bower couldn’t help admiring the lush countryside. “Why on earth,” he wondered, “do they want war with us?”

  Bower buzzed an airfield, interrupting a traffic pattern of as many as ten medium bombers preparing to land. East of the capital and near Sakura, the aircrew spotted a huge fire, Greening’s handiwork. Several fighters tailed the bomber, but never closed to within a thousand yards. When Bower neared Yokosuka, he banked west, flying south of the Kisarazu naval air station. “Ahead was the bay,” he wrote in his diary. “Down to the surface we went, mouths like glue, eyes wide open, and the target in sight.”

  Bower’s orders were to blast the Yokohama dockyards. Barrage balloons encircled the target, making an attack impossible. He ordered Waldo Bither to pick another target. The bombardier settled on what he thought was an Ogura oil refinery—it was actually Japan Oil—as Bower leveled off at roughly eleven hundred feet. “About that time,” the pilot later wrote in his diary, “all hell broke lose.”

  Antiaircraft shells exploded in the skies. Bower ignored the black clouds of smoke and pressed on toward his target. The red flight flashed.

  “Bombs away,” Bither called out.

  Bower banked the plane, and the red light flashed several more times. The total time to unload the bombs was just four seconds, which, with a speed of two hundred miles per hour, spread the destruction over a quarter-mile area. Bither watched the first tear through the roof of a warehouse near the docks, while another hit a railroad track that ran down between the two piers. He had aimed another at three oil storage tanks and thought he either hit them or came close as a massive black cloud suddenly enveloped the area. “I was watching through the driftmeter and saw them hit,” navigator Bill Pound later wrote. “There was no doubt but that a lot of work was stopped on the docks that day.” Copilot Thad Blanton echoed Pound: “Our bombs were right on the nose.”

  A postwar analysis would reveal that one of the bombs missed a massive Japan Oil
tank by just thirty feet and an army oil tank by ninety, instead destroying six underground gas pipes and a steel-reinforced concrete wall. Workers dove inside a recently built, though not yet activated, furnace to escape. Two other bombs hit a Showa Electric factory, blasting roads inside the compound and leaving a crater eight feet deep and almost forty feet wide. The explosion hurled a sixteen-foot piece of rail line nearly two hundred feet, where it crashed into a roof of a nearby factory, while shrapnel tore into a hydrogen tank, triggering a fire. Several dozen incendiary bomblets fell across the Showa Electric factory and the neighboring Japan Steel Piping, destroying a two-story building. Some seventy other bomblets fell harmlessly in the canal that ran between the two factories; investigators would later collect thirteen unexploded ones. All told, Bower’s attack destroyed two buildings and damaged a third. No one was hurt or killed.

  Bower dove back down, hedgehopping over rooftops toward the sea, dodging the dark bursts of antiaircraft fire. Only when the bomber buzzed the breakers did the fliers finally relax. “Because we were not allowed to smoke, I was chewing gum,” Pound wrote. “My mouth had become so dry that the gum got stuck all over the inside of my mouth and I felt I really had a mouth full of cotton.”

  FIRST LIEUTENANT EDGAR McELROY, the last one tasked to bomb the Tokyo suburbs, spotted the coastline in the distance at 1:30 p.m., and there he ordered bombardier Robert Bourgeois to ready the nose gun.

  “Mac, I think we’re going to be about sixty miles too far north,” navigator First Lieutenant Clayton Campbell announced. “I’m not positive, but pretty sure.”

  Campbell was close. The Avenger charged ashore about fifty miles north, prompting McElroy to turn back to sea and parallel the coastline south. The bomber buzzed many small fishing boats and at least four freighters before McElroy turned inland again at 2:20 p.m. The Avenger passed an airfield on the southeastern shore of Tokyo Bay. Antiaircraft guns thundered as Campbell pinpointed the bomber’s precise location. McElroy banked northwest and bore down on the target: the Yokosuka naval station. “It was a thrilling sensation to see the sprawling metropolis below,” Bourgeois later wrote. “This was it, our answer for Pearl Harbor.”