Doolittle Raid (1942): The First American Air Attack on Tokyo

The Doolittle Raid was the first American air attack on the Japanese home islands, carried out on 18 April 1942. Sixteen US Army Air Forces B-25B Mitchell bombers, led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, took off from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet and struck Tokyo and five other cities. Although the damage was small, the raid lifted American morale after Pearl Harbor and pushed Japan into decisions that shaped the Pacific War.

Background

In the months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the United States suffered a series of defeats in the Pacific. Guam, Wake Island and Hong Kong fell, Allied forces collapsed in Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and American and Filipino troops were trapped on Bataan. President Franklin D. Roosevelt pressed his commanders for a way to strike back at Japan itself.

The problem was range. No Allied airfield was close enough to Japan for existing bombers, and navy carrier aircraft would require the carriers to come dangerously near the Japanese coast. In January 1942 Captain Francis Low, a submarine officer on the staff of Admiral Ernest King, suggested that army twin-engine bombers might be launched from a carrier. Captain Donald Duncan worked out the naval details, and General Henry “Hap” Arnold, chief of the Army Air Forces, gave the task to Doolittle, a famous racing and test pilot with a doctorate in aeronautics.

Preparing the mission

The B-25B Mitchell was chosen because it could carry a useful bomb load over long distances and, with care, take off in the short space of a carrier deck. The aircraft were stripped of weight, fitted with extra fuel tanks and given a simple aiming device in place of the secret Norden bombsight, which was not to be risked over enemy territory. Some had broom handles painted black in the tail to look like guns.

Volunteer crews, mainly from the 17th Bombardment Group, trained at Eglin Field in Florida in short-field take-offs under the guidance of navy instructor Lieutenant Henry Miller. None of them had ever flown from a carrier. Because the bombers were too large to fit below decks or land back on a carrier, it was a one-way mission. The plan was to bomb Japan at night and fly on to airfields in unoccupied China.

On 2 April 1942 the new carrier USS Hornet, under Captain Marc Mitscher, sailed from Alameda, California, with 16 bombers lashed to its flight deck. Its own fighters were stowed below, so a second carrier group under Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, built around USS Enterprise, joined it at sea to provide air cover. The combined force was known as Task Force 16.

The raid

Early on 18 April, while still well short of the planned launch point, the task force was spotted by the Japanese picket boat No. 23 Nittō Maru, which was sunk after sending a radio warning. Halsey and Doolittle decided to launch immediately, about 650 nautical miles (some 1,200 km) from Japan instead of the 400 to 450 nautical miles planned. The extra distance meant the bombers would arrive in daylight and would almost certainly run out of fuel before reaching their Chinese airfields.

Doolittle took off first, at about 08:20 local ship time, with the shortest run of all. All 16 aircraft got airborne in heavy seas over the next hour. Flying low to avoid detection, they reached Japan around midday. Ten bombers attacked targets in Tokyo, including oil stores, factories and military installations, two struck Yokohama, and one each hit Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka. One bomb damaged the light carrier Ryūhō, then being converted in dock at Yokosuka.

Japanese air defences were caught largely by surprise, partly because an air-raid drill had been held that morning. No bomber was shot down over Japan. However, some bombs fell on residential areas, a school and a hospital. Most estimates put Japanese deaths at around 50, with several hundred injured.

The fate of the crews

After the attack the bombers headed west across the East China Sea. As expected, fuel ran low, and none reached the intended airfields. Fifteen aircraft came down over eastern China as night fell: crews bailed out in darkness and rain or crash-landed along the coast. One crew, under Captain Edward York, flew instead to the Soviet Union because of high fuel consumption and landed near Vladivostok. The Soviets, neutral towards Japan, interned the five men, who escaped through Iran in 1943.

Of the 80 airmen, three were killed during bailouts or crash landings. Eight from two crews were captured by Japanese forces. After a military trial, Lieutenants Dean Hallmark and William Farrow and Sergeant Harold Spatz were executed near Shanghai on 15 October 1942. Lieutenant Robert Meder died in captivity in 1943, and the other four prisoners survived until liberation in 1945. The remaining 69 men, including Doolittle, reached safety with the help of Chinese soldiers, guerrillas and villagers, and of the American missionary John Birch.

Japan’s response

The Japanese government was humiliated that the emperor’s capital had been bombed. The army launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign in eastern China from May to September 1942, aimed at destroying the airfields the raiders had tried to reach and punishing the areas that had sheltered them. Villages were burned, and there is evidence of the use of biological weapons by Japanese units. Chinese civilian deaths are difficult to establish; estimates range from tens of thousands to around 250,000.

The raid also strengthened the case of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of the Combined Fleet, for an operation against Midway Atoll to push Japan’s defensive perimeter outwards and draw the American carriers into a decisive battle. Opposition within the naval staff faded after 18 April. The resulting Battle of Midway in June 1942 cost Japan four fleet carriers. Japan also kept fighter units at home for air defence, aircraft that might otherwise have served at the front.

Key people

• James H. Doolittle (1896–1993): led the raid and flew the first aircraft. He received the Medal of Honor and was promoted directly from lieutenant colonel to brigadier general. He later commanded the Eighth Air Force in Europe.
• William F. Halsey (1882–1959): commanded Task Force 16 and made the decision, with Doolittle, to launch early.
• Marc Mitscher (1887–1947): captain of USS Hornet, later a leading carrier task force commander.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945): encouraged the idea of striking Japan. Asked where the bombers had come from, he joked that they had flown from “Shangri-La”, the mythical land in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon.

Legacy

The raid became one of the best-known episodes of the Second World War in the United States. Lieutenant Ted Lawson’s account, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1943), was made into a film in 1944. The surviving raiders held annual reunions and toasted fallen comrades with a set of silver goblets, one for each man; the last surviving raider, Richard E. Cole, Doolittle’s co-pilot, died in 2019.

The aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La, commissioned in 1944, took its name from Roosevelt’s joke. In 2014 Congress voted to award the raiders collectively the Congressional Gold Medal. The raid was followed nearly three years later by the far more destructive firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945.

Timeline

• 1941, 7 December: Japan attacks Pearl Harbor.
• 1942, January: Captain Francis Low proposes launching army bombers from a carrier.
• 1942, 2 April: USS Hornet sails from Alameda with 16 B-25B bombers on deck.
• 1942, 18 April, morning: The task force is sighted by a Japanese picket boat; the bombers launch early.
• 1942, 18 April, midday: The bombers strike Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka.
• 1942, 18–19 April: Fifteen aircraft come down in China; one lands near Vladivostok.
• 1942, May–September: Japan’s Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign devastates parts of eastern China.
• 1942, 4–7 June: Japan is defeated at the Battle of Midway.
• 1942, 15 October: Three captured raiders are executed near Shanghai.

Why it matters

The Doolittle Raid did little physical harm, but its effects were large. It showed Americans that Japan could be hit, embarrassed Japan’s leaders and helped lead them into the Midway operation that turned the tide of the Pacific War. Its heavy cost in eastern China is a reminder of how civilians paid for military decisions on both sides.