USA TODAY International Edition
In the wake of Pearl Harbor, Doolittle’s raid rattles Tokyo
Barely five months after Pearl Harbor, Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s daring air raid on Tokyo provided the morale boost the United States needed so early after entering World War II. The 16 B- 25 bombers that took off on April 18, 1942, from the aircraft carrier Hornet bound for Japan did little real damage to the Japanese war effort, but they showed that American forces could reach the home islands and rattle the sense of security there. Their mission was to fly over Tokyo, bomb strategic targets, then fly to China, where they would be greeted by friendly troops allied against their Japanese invaders.
All but three of 80 crewmembers survived the mission, but none of the aircraft did. The pilots either ditched them off the coast of China or crashed as the crews bailed out. Eight crewmembers were captured by the Japanese, and three were executed. The rest eventually returned to the United States.
“The Doolittle mission promised a potent tonic to the frustration brought on by Pearl Harbor, Wake, Guam, and now Bataan,” author James Scott writes in Target Tokyo. “But the recent disaster in the Philippines only magnified the enormous political risk of a mission grounded in the promise not of tactical gains but of positive headlines.”
Generate headlines it did. Doolittle and his raiders were feted across the country. Even before the end of the war, the raid was part of the American legend. Doolittle was awarded the Medal of Honor, and Spencer Tracy played him in the 1944 movie Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. The morale- building value for a nation uncertain of how to take on a war on two fronts was immeasurable.
Scott doesn’t try to rebuild or tear down the legend, but to reshape it and provide the kind of clarity that emerges 73 years after the fact. He researched Target Tokyo in more than three dozen archives around the country and in Japan. He adds depth to a story that many Americans think they already know, and he takes you into the airplanes, prison camps and Chinese villages where the crews sought refuge.
The raid pushed the Japanese to react rashly by moving toward Midway Island in the Pacific for
the naval and aerial battle that would become the war’s turning point. That alone made it worthwhile.
But, as Scott shows, the collateral damage was immense. More than 250,000 Chinese civilians were killed by the Japanese who searched for crewmembers who bailed out in China after their planes ran out of gas. Thousands of Chinese had helped protect the downed Americans, and the Japanese, whose brutal occupation had seared the Chinese countryside, made them pay for it.
Given the multiplier effect from the Doolittle raid in improved morale and rattling the Japanese into a major strategic blunder at Midway, President Franklin Roosevelt and his military leaders would have continued with the raid anyway. In this case, and in too many others, the human toll gets lost. Scott fixes that problem here.
As the world celebrates the 70th anniversary of the war’s end — most of its veterans have died — it’s easy to forget the sacrifices involved in defeating fascism. The Doolittle raid and its effects need to be remembered; Target Tokyo makes them hard to forget.