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By Jack Sweetman
The Halsey-Doolittle raid lifted U.S. spirits and confounded Japanese strategy.
In April 1942 the war in the Pacific was entering its fifth month. For Americans, most of the news since December had been filled with accounts of disaster. True, there had been reports of triumphs, as well. In December Major James P. Devereux’s Marines had repulsed the first Japanese assault on Wake Island; in January 1942 four elderly destroyers savaged an enemy amphibious force off Balikpapan, Borneo, in the first surface engagement the U.S. Navy had fought since the Spanish-American War; in February and March carrier task forces struck outlying Japanese positions in the Central and Southwest Pacific; and in the Philippines a gaunt FilAmerican army was still maintaining its grim hold on the Bataan peninsula.
In the final analysis, though, all of these actions were in vain. The defenders of Wake Island had been overwhelmed by a second Japanese assault; Balikpapan did not slow the Japanese conquest of the East Indies; carrier strikes had not done the enemy great harm; and it was apparent that the fall of the Philippines was inevitable. So far, the United States had spent four months on the receiving end of a one-sided war in which Japan had yet to suffer a serious setback.
The startling announcement that bombers of the U.S. Army Air Forces had raided Tokyo and other Japanese cities on 18 April therefore aroused outbursts of fierce jubilation. At last, Americans felt, they had struck back—where it would hurt worst, in Emperor Hirohito’s home town. Samuel Elliott Morison, the great historian of the Navy ’ s part in the war, recalled that no action before the B attle of the Coral Sea gave the country deeper satisfaction.
Naturally, the question occurred: how could U.S. bombers have reached Japan? The enemy homeland was far out of range of the nearest known U.S. base.
A jovial President Franklin D. Roosevelt answered newsmen’s inquiries with the quip that the bombers had come from Shangri-La, the imaginary Himalayan city in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. The truth would have seemed almost as fanciful: the bombers had come from an aircraft carrier.
Foreseeing the huge boost it would give U.S. and allied morale, the President had been urging his service chiefs since the closing weeks of 1941 to find a way to bomb the Japanese Home Islands. Early in January 1942 Navy Captain Francis S. Low, a submariner on the staff of Admiral Ernest J. King, Commander-inChief U.S. Fleet and soon-to-be Chief of Naval Operations, proposed a means of doing so. The sight of twin- engine Army bombers making simulated attacks on the outline of an aircraft carrier painted on a runaway at Norfolk caused Low to wonder if planes that size could operate from an actual carrier. King authorized him to pursue the idea, and on 17 January Low and Captain Donald B. Duncan, the admiral’s air operations officer, explained it to Major General H. H. (“Hap”) Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces. To ascertain whether a bomber carrying the requisite fuel and bombs could indeed fly off a carrier, Arnold turned to Lieutenant Colonel James H. (“Jimmy”) Doolittle, a reserve officer whose interwar exploits as a test pilot and air racer had made him one of the best-known U.S. aviators. Doolittle quickly determined that North American Aviation’s twin-engine B-25 Mitchell medium bomber filled the bill. While no bomber could land on a carrier deck, a B-25 could take off from one. The only major modification required would be the installation of the extra fuel tanks needed for a 2,000-mile flight. Informed of these findings, King and Arnold agreed that the mission should be launched without delay.
Doolittle commanded the Army’s part of the operation and Duncan coordinated the Navy’s share. On 1 February two B-25s successfully flew off Captain Marc Mitscher’s Hornet (CV-8) in an acid test off Norfolk, and by the end of the month Doolittle had assembled an all-volunteer force to practice short take-offs at Eglin Air Field, near Pensacola. Late in March the raiders flew to San Francisco, where the crew of the Hornet hoisted them aboard on 1 April. The carrier and her escorts sailed the next day. Because their 67-foot, 6-inch wingspan was too wide for the Hornet's elevators, the B- 25s were stored on the flight deck. This limited the number that could embark to 16. Each would carry a crew of
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five: pilot, copilot, navigator, gunner, and bombardier.
In concept—if not execution—the plan was simple.
0n 13 April the Hornet group would join Task Force 16, under the command of Vice Admiral William F. Halsey in the carrier Enterprise (CV-6), at a rendezvous some 600 nautical miles northwest of Midway Island. The task force, 16 ships altogether, would then advance to a point 500 nautical miles from the Home Islands and there launch the B-25s. After striking their targets, the planes Would head west to land behind Nationalist lines in China. Halsey’s force would retire at flank speed.
As is so often the case, things did not go according to Plan. The Hornet group and Task Force 16 accomplished *he rendezvous without incident, but early on 18 April, still more than 600 nautical miles from Japan, the task force began to encounter Japanese picket boats, one of which managed to send a radio message before being sunk. Security had been compromised. In a discussion of what to do in such a situation, Halsey and Doolittle had decided that if their mission remained feasible, they would launch at once. At 0820, Doolittle started the lead H-25 down the 467 available feet of the Hornet's deck °n a 625-mile flight to Japan. The last Mitchell clawed its way into the air exactly an hour later.
Thirteen of the raiders were assigned to bomb Tokyo, °ne each to hit Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe. The Osaka Plane probably devoted its attention to Nagoya instead, hut this was the only glitch in an otherwise expert attack. On Doolittle’s insistence, only military and industrial sites had been targeted. Despite the picket boat’s signal, the bombers achieved surprise; the Japanese had assumed that the carriers would need to close to within 300 nautical miles of the coast before launching, which meant that no intruders could appear until the next day. To add to the enemy’s confusion, the B-25s arrived over Tokyo at the end of an air-raid drill, at first leading the Japanese to think they were a postscript to the exercise. Although the volume of antiaircraft fire increased throughout the raid, opposition remained ineffectual. All 16 planes safely cleared Japanese air space.
Then came the long flight to China. One Mitchell, low on fuel, landed and was interned at Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. Another splashed into the water off the China coast, drowning two of its crewmen. The others arrived over the mainland after nightfall, only to find that the arrangements supposedly made with the Nationalists to transmit homing beacons to their airfields had somehow miscarried. Eleven crews, including Doolittle’s, bailed out; four crash-landed. Remarkably, only one man was killed in the process. Eight others, taken prisoner by the Japanese, were convicted of “war crimes,” and three were shot. Another died in captivity. Of the remaining 59 raiders, most returned to combat;
13 gave their lives in later missions. Jimmy Doolittle received the Medal of Honor, an award he protested that he did not deserve. He finished his war service as a lieutenant general, commanding the 8th Air Force.
Materially, the effects of the raid were not great. The B-25s had been able to carry only four 500-pound bombs, too little ordnance to inflict extensive damage. But in Japan—no less than the United States—its psychological consequences proved immense. The Japanese people, whose government astutely downplayed the raid, do not seem to have been impressed; but the leaders of the Imperial Navy were decidedly shaken. They had entered the war under the assumption that they could shield the homeland from its ravages, as had been done during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. The raid called their whole strategy into question. Only two weeks earlier, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander-in-Chief of the Combined Fleet, had compelled a reluctant Naval General Staff to accept his plan for a grandiose Central Pacific offensive designed both to extend the Japanese defensive perimeter and to destroy the enemy carriers he had missed at Pearl Harbor. Until the Halsey-Doolittle Raid, opposition to Yamamoto’s project persisted. The appearance of U.S. bombers over Tokyo silenced that opposition and thereby confirmed the Imperial Japanese Navy on course to the disaster that enveloped it at Midway.
For further reading: General James H. Doolittle with Carroll V. Clines, / Could Never Be So Lucky Again: An Autobiography (New York: Bantam Books, 1991); E. B. Potter, Bull Halsey (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1985); H. P. Will- mott. The Barrier and the Javelin: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies, February to June 1942 (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1981).
Dr. Sweetman is a member of the History Department at the U.S. Naval Academy.
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