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

by Scott, James M.

  Billy Farrow’s mother wrote that she depended on her faith in God. “If it is His purpose to have my son give his life, I am very proud to say that he was ready and glad to give his life in the noble defense of his own land,” she wrote. “He felt it a very high privilege to serve with you, and to be chosen as one who was capable of doing the job.” She shared her son’s final letter, encouraging her despite her woes in Washington to remain strong, signing the note simply: “Chin up!” “He knew then he was going on a hazardous mission, probably never to return,” she wrote Doolittle. “Such courage as that makes me able to carry on just now. I would be a very unworthy mother who could not manifest some of that same spirit and keep her chin up and hopes high.”

  THE ARMY BRASS, which had promised the raiders the Distinguished Flying Cross in Chungking, prepared to deliver. Doolittle fired off a cryptic letter on June 15, addressed “To All Officers and Men with me at Shangri-La.” He instructed them to come to Washington and report to Major Sherman Altick in room 4414 in the Munitions Building. “You will grant no interviews with the press nor pose for photos and in your communications to your homes will advise them simply that you are back in the United States. Use the utmost caution until such time as you have been given a directive by Major Altick on what you can say and do,” he wrote. “In others words, be most cautious with everyone except authorized Intelligence officers of the United States Army.”

  The returning raiders promised another public relations victory for the military, just as the announcement the month before of Doolittle’s Medal of Honor. Army Air Forces officials initially had hoped for a reception with the president at the White House—followed by a noontime parade in New York City from the Battery to the Waldorf Astoria Hotel—but in the end had to settle for a scaled-back ceremony at Washington’s Bolling Field on June 27. More than two dozen raiders had returned to the United States, but just twenty officers and three enlisted men could be on hand for the ceremony, including Jack Hilger, Ross Greening, David Jones, and Thomas White, the mission doctor. In place of the president stood Hap Arnold, displaying his trademark grin.

  “These officers and enlisted men are cited for extraordinary achievement while participating in a highly destructive raid on the Japanese mainland on April 18, 1942,” announced Colonel Leslie Holcomb, reading the citation. “They volunteered for this mission, knowing full well that the chances of survival were extremely remote, and executed their parts in it with great skill and daring. Their achievement reflects high credit on them and on the military service.”

  Arnold walked down the line and pinned the medals, which had come packed in three green wooden boxes, above the left shirt pocket of each of the raiders, as Doolittle beamed. A half dozen of the airmen’s wives watched the fifteen-minute ceremony, but navigator Bill Pound’s spouse arrived too late, having gotten got lost en route and then stopped in an air-raid traffic test. Tears streamed down her cheeks.

  “Don’t cry, honey,” Pound urged his wife.

  “When I heard they used B-25’s I had an idea my husband was there,” she told reporters once she recovered. “Then when I heard of Doolittle’s promotion I was certain of it.”

  The press, of course, soaked it up, begging the raiders to describe the historic flight. “Something like a picnic,” joked bombardier Denver Truelove. “They waved at us until we dropped the bombs.”

  Though the military designed the ceremony to shine a light on the young heroes—allowing the airmen to tell personal stories of the raid—officials once again adhered to strict limits on what details could be released to the public. The military was keen on preserving the secret of Shangri-La—and the loss of all the planes. “No information should be made public which indicates the starting point of this raid or the ultimate destination after the raid was accomplished, or the ultimate disposition of the aircraft used in the raid,” a briefing memo warned. “Information such as the distances flown or the time in the air or the amount of fuel consumed and all other related matters should not be made public as they furnish a key to the prohibitions mentioned above.” Part of the secrecy stemmed from the reality that America had not ruled out future attacks on Japan; in fact, Arnold had challenged his staff to devise just such a scenario. “You fellows use your imagination and see what ideas on this subject you can present me.”

  Doolittle meanwhile worked behind the scenes to secure additional awards for some of the raiders. He recommended that Hilger, Greening, Jones, and Hoover—the senior officers who had overseen aspects of the mission such as gunnery and intelligence—each receive the Distinguished Service Cross or the Distinguished Service Medal. The Army ultimately denied Doolittle’s requests, but did award Silver Stars to Thomas White and the Ruptured Duck’s Dean Davenport and David Thatcher; the latter’s story particularly wowed debriefing officer Merian Cooper in Chungking, as evidenced by a report he sent to Doolittle. “Beyond the limits of human exertion, beyond the call of friendship, beyond the call of duty, he—a corporal—brought his four wounded officers to safety,” Cooper wrote. “Medal of Honor? Pin it on him. He earned it.”

  Doolittle likewise recommended all officers and enlisted men for promotion with one exception—Ski York’s crew. After his many warnings not to fly to Russia, York had done just that, and a clearly irritated Doolittle wanted answers. He also held back on recommending York for the Distinguished Service Cross or the Distinguished Service Medal. “The crew of the airplane that went to Siberia has not been recommended for promotion,” the general wrote in a memo, “and will not be until such time as it is possible to ascertain why they were in apparent direct violation of orders.”

  The plane carrying Ted Lawson meanwhile touched down in Washington on the afternoon of June 16. Walter Reed Army Hospital sent an ambulance to collect the injured pilot along with Ruptured Duck navigator Charles McClure.

  The men landed in ward five in a room with raider Harold Watson, who had just undergone surgery to repair his broken arm. The fliers traded stories that evening until Doolittle arrived. “I tried to stand up when he came in,” Lawson recalled, “but he put his hands on my shoulders and wouldn’t let me.”

  Doolittle apologized that he was not at Bolling Field to greet them, but no one had told him of the airmen’s arrival. “How about the family situation?” he asked.

  Lawson stalled. He said he wanted a good night’s sleep before he figured out how to proceed.

  “Do you know about your mother?” Doolittle pressed. “She’s had a stroke. She’s pretty bad off. I’m sorry.”

  Lawson fell silent.

  “What do you want to do about your wife?”

  Lawson wasn’t ready for his wife to see him. Not yet. He asked Doolittle to tell her he was still out of the country.

  “I’ve already written your wife and told her you were injured and on the way back, but that I didn’t know the extent of your injuries,” Doolittle advised. “You’d better do something about it.”

  The general decided to intervene, phoning Lawson’s wife in Los Angeles, where she had gone to be closer to her family. Though Doolittle did not go into details about Lawson’s injuries, he told her he was going to send her an airmail letter.

  “Well, what do you think I look like,” Ellen Lawson told Doolittle on the phone. “I’m eight months pregnant!”

  Doolittle wrote that he had spoken at length with Lawson. “He is in good health but quite depressed. The depression results from the fact that a deep cut in his left leg became infected and it was necessary that the leg be amputated. He also lost some teeth and received a cut on his face,” Doolittle wrote. “He is receiving the best medical attention that is possible to obtain, here at Walter Reed Hospital, but I feel that his recovery is being retarded by a fear of how his misfortune is going to affect you and his mother. Ted will probably be hospitalized here for some time and it is my personal belief that his recovery would be expedited through your presence.”

  Ellen Lawson sat down and fired off an airmail letter of her
own, assuring her husband of her love. “I’m glad to know the truth. My imagination has been running away with me,” she wrote. “Darling, it could be so much worse. I’ve had so many nightmarish dreams that you didn’t come back at all, and others in which you completely lost your memory and refused to believe I was your wife. Those were horrible. There is no reason in the world why we can’t lead a perfectly normal life and do the things we’ve planned. When I do see you I’ll do my best to control my tears. But, should there be any, please don’t misinterpret them. Because they’ll be tears of happiness and joy. ”

  Lawson was overjoyed to receive the letter and even more so when she appeared in his hospital doorway days later after Doolittle arranged a flight. “I jumped up to go to the door, forgetting everything. Forgetting the crutches,” Lawson later wrote. “And when I took a step toward her I fell on my face in front of her.”

  Lawson would have to endure a second amputation on his left leg followed by oral surgery to reshape his mouth as well as remove the broken nubs of his teeth, including one that had gone up through his gums into his sinus.

  “He’s still got some of that beach sand in there!” Lawson heard one of the doctors comment during the surgery.

  McClure likewise faced two surgeries to repair his battered shoulders, though his stay in the hospital proved personally beneficial. He fell in love with the occupational therapist Jean Buchanan and would marry her the following January.

  The chief of the Army air staff, Major General Millard Harmon, and Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau visited on July 6 to present the three raiders along with Howard Sessler and James Parker with the Distinguished Flying Cross. Press accounts either made no mention of how the fliers were injured or noted that the airmen “were injured in an airplane crash some time after the raid on Japan.”

  Since the injured raiders had bypassed Chungking, Major General Chu Shih-ming, the military attaché for the Chinese embassy, stopped by on July 25 to present them with the Military Order of China. Doolittle was, as always, on hand for the ceremony. “You have exploded the myth of Japanese invincibility,” the Chinese general told them, “and set up a fine example for other military men of the United Nations to emulate.”

  DOOLITTLE WRAPPED UP THE mission’s postmortem, finalizing his thirty-one-page report and shipping a box of cigars to the Sacramento worker who packed the parachute that had saved his life. He requested that the raiders suggest for possible awards any Chinese individuals who had helped them. Recommendations soon flooded his in-box. Harold Watson suggested Father Wendelin Dunker, who had aided the crew of the Whirling Dervish, while Dave Thatcher recommended guerrilla leader Jai Foo Chang, better known to most of the crew simply as Charlie. Thomas White nominated Chen and his father. The two physicians had graciously opened up their hospital to the crew of the Ruptured Duck, whose badly injured men drained the hospital of much of its precious medicines. “Neither man would take a penny for their services or their supplies saying that they felt it was their part in the fight against Japan,” White wrote. “I feel that Lawson and possibly Davenport owe their lives to Dr. Chen’s prompt and skillful treatment, and we all owe him a lot for his help and our comfort while at Linhai.”

  The military planned to cash in on the success of the raid, asking the stateside airmen to volunteer to travel the country to sell war bonds and deliver morale speeches to factory workers eager for stories from the front. Most of the raiders jumped at the chance—a far safer volunteer assignment than their previous one. Pilot Bill Bower chatted up workers at the B. F. Goodrich Company in Ohio, while navigator Tom Griffin mingled with employees at the Dumore Company in Wisconsin. Pilots Griffith Williams and Ken Reddy spoke at a Birmingham luncheon attended by more than four hundred people, and the Army bragged that engineer Jacob Eierman on his tour of New England factories was seen by as many as twenty-five thousand. “Even though Ross was embarrassed to tears,” a Pierce County War Bond staff official wrote of Greening’s visit to Tacoma, “he helped us sell thousands and thousands of dollars worth of bonds and stamps.”

  Doolittle himself jumped into the action, posing alongside enlistment posters that read, “Fly to Tokyo: All Expenses Paid.” He sent a congratulatory telegram to workers at the Wright Aeronautical Corporation in Paterson, New Jersey, the maker of the B-25’s twin engines. “Jap planes couldn’t do a thing to stop us,” he cabled. “They will never stop us if you keep up your great work.” He fired off another telegram to employees at the Western Electric Company in the nearby town of Kearny, who helped build the radios that aided the raiders. “Through those radios we issued commands between ships that sent our bombers on their marks,” Doolittle wired. “Through those radios we cheered each other on as our bombs crashed into vital Japanese naval and military installations. And, perhaps best of all, through those radios, we heard the hysterical Japanese broadcasters, too excited to lie, screaming about the damage we had done.”

  Doolittle stopped by the California factory of North American Aviation—the manufacturer of all sixteen B-25s used in the raid—congratulating workers in a noontime speech on June 1. “Don’t tell a soul, but Shangri-La is right here in this North American plant. This is where our B-25 bombers came from,” he told the twelve thousand attendees at the Inglewood plant. “Our bombers—your bombers—functioned magnificently.” Company president James Kindelberger was so impressed with the speech that he sent a personal letter to Doolittle’s wife. “He not only made a fine talk, but his going around the plant chatting with people caused more goodwill than anything that has ever happened here,” he wrote. “I have taken many people of fame and prominence through the plant, but this is the first time that anyone has actually stopped the show.”

  Doolittle was no stranger to celebrity, but the raid catapulted his fame to a new level. He was now a hero not just to the aviation community but to a grateful nation, the leader of a mission so dramatic that both Universal Pictures and Warner Brothers begged for the rights to tell it. In the eyes of the public, Doolittle personified bravery—the hero, as the Chicago Daily Tribune noted, with “the plain, honest American face.” Accolades, tributes, and even gifts soon flowed. The Rotary Club of Saint Louis elected Doolittle an honorary life member, as did the San Diego Consistory of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry. The Dayton district commissioner wrote that teens aged fifteen to eighteen wanted to form an air scout squadron named in Doolittle’s honor. Fan mail arrived by the bundle as people asked for autographs, photos, and even old envelopes the general had used, anything he had touched. An Oklahoma woman sent him a flag she crocheted with 3,620 stitches. Total strangers wrote songs—a few went so far as to set such tunes to music and publish them—and poems about Doolittle, including Patsy Browning of New Jersey:

  There is a man in this world

  As proud as he can be,

  For he fights for just one thing,

  And that is “Victory.”

  This man’s power and strength

  Is not just a riddle,

  For this is the great—

  Jimmy Doolittle.

  Tony Mele of Brooklyn sent this poem:

  Doolittle did plenty when he let the Japs know

  That American pilots could bomb Tokyo

  His calling card said, “I’ll be back some day

  And when I do there’ll be hell to pay.”

  Long forgotten friends from Doolittle’s past surfaced, including Everett Hastings, a schoolmate from his youth in Alaska. Hastings confessed in a letter that his mother had referred to Nome’s scrappy young brawler by the diminutive nickname Dooless. Much had changed since those days. “My son gets in a fight every now and then. When he happens to tell some kid that his Dad went to school with you, they give him a laugh and tell him he is a liar,” Hastings wrote. “You and your ‘Gang’ are the idol of all the sprouting fliers to come.”

  Doolittle’s fame grew so much that an autographed war bond poster for the Cleveland Athletic Club would fetch a staggerin
g four million dollars. A newly incorporated Missouri town of 220 residents in the Ozarks even decided to name itself in the general’s honor. “We may not be big,” Mayor Alfred Cook boasted, “but we have a good name and enthusiasm.” Not until after the war did Doolittle’s schedule permit a visit, but when it did city leaders unveiled a bronze plaque of his likeness. As always he attributed his success to others. “I deeply appreciate the honor you have done me,” he said. “However, I should like always to believe that the tribute you have paid me you also intended for the men of vision who made aviation as we know it today possible—and also for the gallant people with whom it was my pleasure and privilege to serve.”

  CHAPTER 22

  One cannot imagine the barbarism of the Japs till one witnesses it with his own eyes.

  —FATHER LOUIS BERESWILL, JANUARY 29, 1943, LETTER

  JAPANESE LEADERS FUMED OVER the Tokyo raid, which had revealed China’s coastal provinces as a dangerous blind spot in the defense of the homeland. American aircraft carriers not only could launch surprise attacks at sea and land in China but could possibly even fly bombers directly from Chinese airfields to attack Japan. Military leaders needed to eliminate that threat by wiping out the airfields in the provinces of Chekiang and Kiangsi. The Imperial General Headquarters ordered an immediate campaign against those bases, issuing an operational plan in late April: “The primary mission will be to defeat the enemy in the Chekiang area and to destroy the air bases from which the enemy might conduct aerial raids on the Japanese Homeland.”

  Japanese forces occupied the area along the lower reaches of the Yangtse River. The Imperial General Headquarters ordered the main force of the Thirteenth Army, along with elements of the Eleventh Army and the North China Area Army, to execute the operation. That force ultimately swelled to fifty-three infantry battalions, along with as many as sixteen artillery battalions. The plan called for the capture of the larger airfields at Chuchow, Lishui, and Yushan—all fields Doolittle had hoped to use—as well as the destruction of many other, smaller bases in the region. Orders left little doubt about the horror to come. “The captured areas will be occupied for a period estimated at approximately one month,” they demanded. “Airfields, military installations and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed.”