Once off the carrier, everything was peaceful until we hit the coast.
—CHARLES MCCLURE, NAVIGATOR ON PLANE NO. 7
DOOLITTLE CLOSED IN ON Japan, the bomber skimming just two hundred feet above the blue Pacific swells. The weather had cleared seventy miles out, and numerous civilian and naval vessels crowded the seas. Second Lieutenant Hank Potter, the twenty-three-year-old navigator from South Dakota, had struggled to obtain an accurate fix ever since takeoff. The airmen sighted the shore ahead.
“We’re either fifty miles north of Tokyo or fifty miles south of it, that’s the way I figure it,” Doolittle told Potter.
“I think we’re about thirty miles north,” Potter replied.
Doolittle’s bomber charged ashore about fifty miles north of Inubo Saki. “Was somewhat north of desired course but decided to take advantage of error and approach from a northerly direction,” he wrote in his report, “thus avoiding anticipated strong opposition to the west.” The sighting by the patrol boats coupled with other reports made Doolittle suspect that fighters and antiaircraft batteries would anticipate the bomber’s arrival from the west. Approaching from the north would throw them off.
“We’ve got company, Colonel,” copilot Richard Cole interjected, motioning out the cockpit at a B-25 that dipped its wings.
First Lieutenant Travis Hoover, lead pilot of the first flight of three bombers, cruised off of Doolittle’s port side.
The two bombers roared in over airfields north of Tokyo. The fields and the skies above were full of planes, mostly small biplanes that appeared to be primary or basic trainers. Gunner Staff Sergeant Paul Leonard in the turret counted as many as forty. “Japan looked green, peaceful and picturesque,” Cole later wrote. “The people on the ground waved to us and it seemed everyone was playing baseball.” Braemer echoed him. “We looked down and saw the street cars running and people walking in the streets,” he recalled, “so we knew our little party was going to be a complete surprise.”
Doolittle flew as low as the terrain would allow, heading due south over the capital’s outskirts. The bomber roared over Tega Numa, a large lake northeast of Tokyo, with the plane almost “on the water.” The awful weather that had plagued the mission for days had cleared, and the ceiling over Japan this Saturday was unlimited, though a haze reduced visibility to about twenty-five miles. The pilots and gunners scanned the skies for fighters, while Potter sought to orient the plane, a much greater challenge than he expected. The maps showed that mountains as high as five thousand feet ringed northwest Tokyo, but Potter looked down and saw only miles of flat lands. Furthermore, although highways did not stand out, he found that rivers, canals, and railroads did, including the gigantic Tobata railway yard. He picked up the Ara River, which sliced through the landscape north of Tokyo—and was crossed by large bridges—as well as the easily identifiable Tachikawa railroad, which started by the palace and ran due west out of Tokyo.
About ten miles out, Doolittle spotted nine fighters in three flights of three. The planes charged through the skies as much as eight thousand feet above. Doolittle kept the bomber low, hoping to avoid being detected. As the fighters roared past, the airmen spotted five barrage balloons over east central Tokyo and more in the distance.
Twenty minutes after crossing the coastline, the bombers reached the Sumida River, which wound through northern Tokyo. Hoover banked west in search of his target, while Doolittle pressed on into Tokyo. His primary target was the armory just a few miles north of the Imperial Palace. In the bomb bay sat four incendiary bombs, which he hoped would serve as the match for a much larger explosion. The airmen could now clearly see the high-rises that crowded Tokyo’s business district as well as the palace and even the muddy moat that encircled Emperor Hirohito’s home.
Doolittle was now poised like a dagger to stab at the heart of the empire of Japan. He pulled up to twelve hundred feet and banked southwest to prepare to bomb.
“Approaching target,” he told Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer, the twenty-four-year-old bombardier from Washington.
Braemer mashed the button, and the bomb bay doors yawned open, the roar of the engines now loud inside the plane.
“All ready, Colonel,” Braemer announced over the interphone.
Antiaircraft fire thundered into the sky as Doolittle leveled off for the run, buzzing his target by less than a quarter mile. Braemer sighted the arsenal. A red light on the cockpit instrument panel blinked as the first bomb plummeted to the ground below. Braemer noted the time was 1:15 p.m., though the time on the ground was one hour behind. The red light on Doolittle’s instrument panel flashed again.
Then again.
And again.
Four incendiary bombs—each packed with 128 four-pound bomblets—tumbled down to Tokyo.
On the ground below, several teachers at the Tsurumaki national school looked up as Doolittle’s bomber roared overhead, low enough that the American insignia was clearly visible. “Bomb-like objects fell from the plane,” one recalled. “On their way down they opened up like umbrellas and came down like leaflets.”
About thirty of the bomblets landed on the school, including fifteen in the yard near where some 150 students gathered on the playground after lunch before kendo class. Others came down on the street, killing a pedestrian and setting fire to several stores and homes. Startled resident Seikichi Honjo charged outside in such a rush that he didn’t put on his pants. Still other bomblets set fire to the nearby Okazaki Hospital, where orderlies rushed to carry out the sick.
About two hundred yards beyond the hospital sat Waseda Middle School, where faculty discussed attending the funeral of a colleague as students played outside in the yard. One of the bomblets hit fourth-grader Shigeru Kojima in the shoulder; he collapsed and started convulsing. Seconds later he fell still and died.
All told, Doolittle’s attack killed two people and injured nineteen others, four seriously. Japanese investigators would later recover 425 incendiary bomblets, including 31 unexploded ones. As many as 250 others set fire to homes; fire brigades extinguished another 150, which caused minor damage. Another 100 came down on area roads and fields. Firefighters hurried to extinguish the blazes, but not before thirty-six buildings containing forty-four homes burned to the ground. The attack partially destroyed six other buildings, which included a total of twenty homes.
Antiaircraft fire thundered. With the bombing complete, Braemer slipped the .30-caliber nose gun in place and loaded it, only to suffer a jam at this most inopportune time. He discovered a round jammed in the T slot. He pulled back on the bolt handle and fished the round out with his finger and then reloaded the gun.
Antiaircraft shells exploded in the skies around the bomber. The elevation of the fire was good, but most shells burst a hundred yards to the right or left of the bomber.
“Everything okay back there, Paul?” Doolittle asked his gunner.
“Everything’s fine,” he answered.
“They’re missing us a mile,” Doolittle added.
A shell burst shook the bomber.
“Colonel,” Leonard replied, “that was no mile.”
Doolittle dove the bomber down to the rooftop level and flew over the western outskirts into a low haze and smoke. Smoke from the fires tickled the sky. He then turned south and headed back out to sea, passing over a small aircraft factory with a dozen newly completed planes on the line.
“Colonel, can’t we burn up some of those Jap planes?” Braemer asked.
“It would only alert them down there,” Doolittle replied. “This would give them a chance to raise hell with any of the boys coming after us.”
The anxious Braemer spotted what appeared to be either a tank or an armored car on a highway below, once again asking permission to fire.
“Relax, Fred,” Doolittle said. “They probably think we are a friendly aircraft. Let them keep on thinking that. And knocking off one tank isn’t going to win this war.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT TRAVIS HOOVER reached his target at almost the exact same time as Doolittle. The lead pilot in the first wave of three bombers, Hoover had scanned the skies all morning for First Lieutenants Robert Gray and Everett Holstrom, but had never spotted them. The only other bomber he had seen was Doolittle’s.
First Lieutenant Carl Wildner, the navigator, had set a course upon takeoff of 272 degrees, virtually due west. Following that heading meant Hoover should have come ashore over a rocky promontory topped by the Inubo Saki lighthouse, but instead he looked down on white sandy beaches that stretched for miles. Wildner knew this was bad.
Real Bad.
So did Hoover.
“What’ll I do?” the pilot asked.
All Wildner could suggest was to follow Doolittle.
Wildner scanned his maps and peered out the window, desperate for any clue of his location. He had ended up as a navigator only after he had washed out of pilot training. The experience had left him with a major inferiority complex. With each passing minute—and as the plane plunged blindly deeper into Japan—his fears mounted. “In all my life I have never felt so helpless,” he wrote. “We passed over rice paddies, streams and a few temples but I couldn’t identify a single landmark on my maps. I knew the maps had been made up from very poor information but it seemed to me that the maps I was holding were of another part of the world. Nothing matched.”
Unsure of his position, Hoover opted to trail his commander, zigzagging west across the rural landscape at an altitude of barely a hundred feet. The airmen remained surprised at the lack of concern. Despite the battle with the Nitto Maru, coupled with sightings of various other ships and planes, Japan seemed oblivious to the inbound aerial armada. Even the military bases the bomber buzzed appeared not to be on alert.
“There were no pursuit planes or anti-aircraft,” Wildner wrote in his report. “The populace had shown no alarm at our coming.”
“The people that I observed on the ground,” added Richard Miller, the bombardier, “casually looked up and watched us go by.”
His plane armed with three 500-pound demolition bombs and one incendiary, Hoover had orders to target a powder factory and magazines near a bend in the Sumida River. “Nothing of military importance was observed until we reached the outskirts of northern Tokyo,” he noted in his report. “I recognized the Sumida River and immediately turned west along it toward our target. We started the climb.”
Hoover scanned the congested riverbanks below but failed to spot the powder factory where the map indicated it. He hustled to pick an alternative target, spotting two factory buildings and storehouses near the river. The entire area was congested with small buildings, which would no doubt burn.
Perfect.
“There’s our target,” Hoover shouted.
Hoover didn’t have time to pull up to fifteen hundred feet, so he leveled off at nine hundred. Second Lieutenant Richard Miller raced to set up the shot, unaware Hoover had swapped out the targets. “I spotted a large factory with several small warehouses around it which fit the description of our target,” he wrote in his report. “I immediately opened the bomb-bay doors and took a very quick aim at the center of the large factory and released all four of my bombs at half-second intervals by means of the manual release switch.”
“Bombs away,” Miller yelled as he closed the doors. “Let’s get out of here.”
Hoover banked the plane just as the bombs detonated. At less than nine hundred feet, the explosions jolted the crew, hurling debris as much as one hundred feet above the low-flying plane. “The concussion of the three demolition bombs,” Wildner later noted in his report, “lifted us before I realized that they had been dropped.”
Even Richard Cole, Doolittle’s copilot in the skies several miles away, saw debris cloud the air, while gunner Paul Leonard in the turret thought the blast would bring down Hoover’s plane.
But Hoover survived, roaring through the smoke and debris. The massive explosions near an Asahi Electrical Manufacturing Corporation factory would level or set ablaze thirty-eight buildings, all but eight completely destroyed. Fifty-two homes were lost and fourteen others damaged. The blast blew one woman out of her second-floor; miraculously she landed unhurt in the street atop a tatami mat.
Ten others would not be so lucky, including several who burned to death in collapsing houses. The attack injured another forty-eight people, thirty-four seriously. Ruptured water lines hindered efforts to fight the fires, as did the low tide of the Sumida River, which made it difficult for firefighters to pump water. Investigators would later measure two bomb craters thirty feet wide and fifteen feet deep.
“I looked back and saw about half of our target covered with black smoke,” Staff Sergeant Douglas Radney, who manned the .50-caliber machine-gun turret, wrote in his report. “Near the base of the target there were flames and smoke.”
The anxious airmen in the front of the bomber asked Radney whether he had seen the explosions.
“Yes, sir,” the gunner informed Hoover. “All four hit close together and there’s smoke all over the area. We got it all right!”
“OK, gang, hold your hats,” Hoover announced over the interphone. “We’re going down.”
The pilot pushed the bomber into such a steep dive that loose items floated upward, along with Wildner’s stomach. “I glanced at the airspeed indicator and saw that it was close to the redline,” the navigator later wrote. “Outside all I could see were rooftops—millions of them.”
The bomber skimmed barely thirty feet above the city’s rooftops until Hoover spied a power line dead ahead.
“Over or under it?” he asked
“You better not go under,” Wildner shot back, before instructing Hoover to ease back on the gas. China was still a long way to go.
“I want to get out of here fast.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT GRAY TORE ACROSS the Japanese coastline fifteen miles south of the Inubo Saki lighthouse and due east of Yokohama at 1:35 p.m.—some twenty minutes after Doolittle and Hoover had attacked.
The bombers had lifted off from the Hornet at average intervals of only 3.9 minutes, but mechanical troubles and navigational errors had slowed the aerial armada’s advance across the Pacific. This respite of as much as half an hour had given the Japanese vital time to recover from the shock. Air-raid sirens sounded throughout Tokyo at approximately 12:35 p.m. local time, while pilots scrambled into fighters and troops manned antiaircraft batteries. The element of surprise had vanished.
Gray roared across the Boso Peninsula, the arm of land that curled south and protected Tokyo Bay from the Pacific. The aircrew spied men in blue uniforms in the hills before the bomber reached the bay, approaching the capital from the southeast. Gray’s route into the city would lead him across the flank of the antiaircraft batteries that covered the Tokyo’s waterfront, a dangerous course he would then have to retrace on his escape. Gray’s journey was made all the more perilous in that Doolittle had flown over his targets, no doubt alerting ground forces.
The flak thundered as Gray charged across the bay, the puffs of smoke creating a trail through the skies toward his targets: a steel mill, chemical factory, and gas company in the densely populated industrial district northwest of the palace.
“They’re shooting at us,” exclaimed copilot Shorty Manch, making what his fellow fliers would later joke was a brilliant observation.
Gray pressed on through the flak and climbed to 1,450 feet; ten miles east an oil tank appeared to burn.
“Dropped our bombs in four individual runs,” wrote Sergeant Aden Jones, the bombardier. “Then hit the deck and got the hell out of there.”
Gray didn’t see the first bomb hit, but he felt the concussion. He believed he scored direct hits with his second and third attacks against the gas company and chemical works, the latter appearing to set the entire factory ablaze. He scattered his lone incendiary bomb over a densely populated small-factories district. Second Lieutenant Charles Ozuk Jr., Whiskey Pete’s navigator, peered out the window, later describing the scene in his report. “Observed heavy smoke from the target area.”
Gray had scored a direct hit on the Japan Diesel Manufacturing Corporation, the bomb tearing through the timber roof of warehouse no. 3 and punching an eighteen-centimeter dent in the concrete floor before detonating. Employees had scattered for lunch, and no one had sounded the air-raid alarm. The massive explosion killed twelve workers and injured another eighty-eight, including forty-seven seriously. The attack leveled the warehouse and damaged eight other buildings, sparking a fire in warehouse no. 2 that crews eventually extinguished. Another one of his bombs partly destroyed two additional buildings and injured nine people. Gray’s incendiary bomblets spread out over a largely civilian area, destroying four buildings containing twenty-seven homes. One of those was the Sanrakuso apartment building and another a clothing factory dormitory.
Gray immediately began evasive maneuvers to throw off the heavy antiaircraft fire as he banked sharply right and began his retreat.
Jones manned the .30-caliber nose gun, opening fire on the buildings and streets a thousand feet below; the distinct rattle of the machine gun filled the cockpit. Ozuk saw some of the tracers tear into wooden buildings below, appearing to set some on fire. Jones then set his sights on what appeared to be a factory complete with an air defense surveillance tower perched atop the roof. “I saw fifteen to twenty bodies which had fallen as if they were hit by our bombardier’s fire,” Ozuk wrote in his report. “The rest of the men just scattered and ran in all directions.”
Sadly, those weren’t men.
Teachers at Mizumoto Primary School had earlier dismissed the students for the day, though many of the children remained behind to help clean classrooms. About 150 of the students had started to walk home moments before Gray’s plane thundered in the skies overhead and Jones squeezed the trigger of his machine gun, blasting the first and second floors of the school.
Terrified students ran back toward the school, where teacher Yukiteru Furusawa directed them into the classrooms for shelter. High school freshman Minosuke Ishide suddenly collapsed. Furusawa thought the boy had stumbled and helped others into a classroom, returning minutes later to find Ishide still on the floor. He examined the boy and realized he had been shot, a hole visible through one of the glass window planes. “This student was immediately taken to another room and it was found that his pulse was very weak,” Furusawa recalled. “The student died on the way to the hospital which was about one hour and fifteen minutes after being hit by the bullet.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT EVERETT HOLSTROM, at the controls of the fourth bomber to take off from the Hornet, felt apprehensive as he approached Japan. One of his wing tanks leaked, the .50-caliber machine guns didn’t work, and he was the last bomber in the first wave of attacks aimed at northern Tokyo, meaning that local air defenses would no doubt be on high alert. He decided his only hope was to outsmart the Japanese.
He instructed his navigator to make landfall just south of the capital, a move he believed would allow him to slip past any fighters that might anticipate more attacks from the east. Holstrom had flown due west all morning without realizing the bomber’s compass was off as much as fifteen degrees. He made landfall at just seventy-five feet on a small group of islands south of Tokyo.
Far south.
A check of the map revealed the bomber’s position 75 miles south of the capital, a finding that would add 150 miles to his trip. Holstrom soldiered on, however, banking north toward Tokyo. If the Japanese jumped the bomber, he told his men, he planned to dump the bombs and run. Holstrom’s orders called for him to bomb a powder magazine and clothing depot in northern Tokyo. He would never reach those targets coming up from the south, so he decided to drop his three demolition bombs and one incendiary on alternate targets—an oil storage tank farm and troop barracks.
Holstrom’s hope to outsmart the Japanese backfired. The outbound bombers raced out to sea, followed by Japanese fighters. Holstrom flew straight toward them—in a plane low on gas and without workable .50-caliber machine guns.
Copilot Lucian Youngblood was climbing back to transfer the last of the fuel from the bomb bay to the wing tank, when Holstrom spotted the first two fighters over Sagami Bay, the scenic body of water southwest of Tokyo. He shouted for Youngblood to return to his seat as he immediately banked under them. “The red dots on their wings looked as big as barns,” Youngblood wrote in his diary. “We were really in a spot.”
One of the fighters opened fire.
Holstrom watched as tracer bullets zinged over the cockpit.
“When I saw 7.7-millimeter bullets bouncing off our wing,” he recalled, “I figured the hell with this!”
Youngblood spotted two more fighters zoom past the bow at fifteen hundred feet.
“I made up my mind that we should try to escape,” Holstrom wrote. “I thought that if we continued, it was a certainty that we would be shot down.”
Holstrom ordered the bombardier to dump the ordnance. Sergeant Robert Stephans opened the bomb bay doors, placed the arming hammer in the safe position, and salvoed the weapons at an altitude of just seventy-five feet. Holstrom’s four eggs vanished into the water below. He turned south to outrun the fighters.
The crew felt depressed.
“It’s kind of a sickening feeling,” navigator Harry McCool recalled. “There’s all this effort for nothing.”
CAPTAIN DAVY JONES CHARGED ashore north of the Inubo Saki lighthouse at just fifty feet above the waves, with Dean Hallmark and Ted Lawson close behind. These three pilots made up the second wave of bombers tasked to pummel central Tokyo. Jones throttled up to 200 miles per hour as he punched inland, but when the expected enemy fighters failed to materialize, he slowed to 180 miles per hour.
His relief over his lack of opposition soon gave way to a more pressing concern. Fields, streets, and villages raced beneath the bomber’s belly as Jones and his crew searched for landmarks that might help orient them. Five minutes turned into ten before Jones had to make a painful confession: “We didn’t know where in the hell we were.”
“Well,” he finally decided. “We’ll turn south.”
Ten minutes more passed.
Then fifteen.
Every gallon of fuel burned hunting for Tokyo, Jones knew, was one gallon less he could count on to reach China.
The flustered flier decided to bomb the first target he found just as his B-25 crested a ridge and passed over the mouth of Tokyo Bay. He instantly recognized his location. Rather than approach Tokyo from the north, Jones had turned south too soon, flying down the Boso Peninsula and bypassing the Japanese capital. He entered the bay due east of Yokosuka, banked north, and pressed on toward Tokyo.
His orders were to bomb several targets east of the Imperial Palace, including an armory. With his gas running low, however, Jones opted for an alternative. The cockpit windshield revealed myriad possible targets packed along the bay shores. He informed bombardier Denver Truelove of his new plan.
Jones pulled up to twelve hundred feet as Truelove coached him in over the targets by voice, sighting an oil tank two blocks from the waterfront. Truelove next targeted what appeared to be a brick power plant several stories tall. Jones banked left in search of more targets, a move that allowed him to witness the second explosion. “The building assumed the shape of a barrel,” he recalled. “The sides rounded out and the top became circular. Then the ‘barrel’ burst. Smoke and dust and bricks were everywhere.”
The raiders scored another hit with an incendiary bomb on a two-story building with a saw-toothed roof. The massive structure, which stretched more than two city blocks, reminded Jones of North American Aviation’s California factory. “It was easy to hit,” he wrote in his report. “Every one of the bombs in the cluster hit on the roof of this plant.”
The antiaircraft fire had prompted Jones to increase his speed to as much as 270 miles per hour, causing Truelove to overshoot his final target. The demolition bomb appeared to blow off only the corner of a two-story building with windows and ventilators on the roof and a canal running along the west side.
A postwar analysis would reveal that one of the bombs ripped through the top of a roofing factory and exploded on a support beam ten feet above the ground, killing twelve workers and injuring eleven others on lunch break. Only the structure’s steel frame prevented the total loss of the building. Another bomb tore through the roof of a Yokoyama Industries warehouse, which doubled as an office. The bomb hit a pile of firewood and exploded, killing fifteen workers and injuring another eleven within a sixty-five-foot radius of the blast, including some in a factory next door. All told, the attack killed twenty-seven people—the most by any single bomber.
Jones now dove down to rooftop level to make his escape, as the Japanese antiaircraft fire and even machine-gun bullets buzzed the bomber, terrifying Joseph Manske in the turret. “When I saw the tracer bullets,” the gunner recalled, “I got out of that turret in a hurry and never fired a round.”
SECOND LIEUTENANT HALLMARK AND THE crew of the Green Hornet marveled at the ease of entry into the enemy’s homeland. No antiaircraft fire. No fighters. Just a warm Saturday afternoon. “It was so pleasant and serene then you’d think we were a commercial airliner coming in for a visit,” navigator Chase Nielsen recalled. “The fine weather made us feel good. We figured it was a sign that our mission would be successful.”
That serenity ended when the bomber closed in on Tokyo.
Zooming in at more than 220 miles per hour, Hallmark pulled up to fifteen hundred feet. The bomb bay doors swung open as the antiaircraft fire thundered, some of it from warships moored in the bay. One round struck Plexiglas near copilot Second Lieutenant Robert Meder. Dark smoke curled above the horizon from the previous attacks, as six Japanese planes roared overhead at ten thousand feet.
Hallmark’s orders were to target the steel mills and foundries in the northeastern corner of the capital that crowded the banks of the bay, a massive target Nielsen estimated to be no less than six hundred feet by two thousand feet. The Texas pilot now poised to fulfill a prophecy he had made just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The Japs sure did make a big mistake,” he wrote then in a letter to his parents. “I imagine they will be awfully sorry they ever heard of the U.S. in a few months.”
Sergeant William Dieter, the bombardier, stared down his Mark Twain sight at the congested Japanese capital below. Nielsen pressed him on where he planned to drop the bomber’s lone incendiary.
“I’ll figure that out,” Dieter answered.
Hallmark interrupted the debate.
“I’ve already figured out what he’s going to do with the incendiary,” the pilot instructed. “I’m going to circle and come back and we’re gonna go over the target area and spread it all over.”
“Are you sure you’re not going to circle and go over the Imperial Palace?” Nielsen joked.
Hallmark leveled off and made his run. He then circled back; his total time over the target was just three minutes.
“We couldn’t miss from 1,500 feet,” Nielsen later wrote. “We saw the bombs explode, watched the smoke and fire and then circled.”
Hallmark’s first bomb detonated on the concrete road in front of Japan Steel Fuji Steelworks, blasting a crater some thirty feet wide. The explosion destroyed seven nearby homes and damaged eleven others, seriously injuring one person. The Green Hornet’s second bomb hit steelmaker Nippon Yakin Kogyo, tearing through the roof and denting the concrete floor. The massive explosion blew apart the wooden building and took the roof and windows off the neighboring factory building. Alerted workers had begun to evacuate, though flying shrapnel cut some of them. Hallmark’s incendiary bomblets spread across a residential area 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. Sixty-nine of the explosives landed on homes, injuring three people. The others burned up on roads and in nearby fields, and Japanese investigators would count eleven duds.
Nielsen would later dispute Japanese charges that the Green Hornet strafed civilians on the ground, arguing that no one on board the bomber had ever even fired the machine guns. Nevertheless, postwar Japanese records would show that preschooler Yoshiro Nakamura was hit in the back and killed in the area where the bomber’s incendiary bomblets fell, possibly from bomb shrapnel or even antiaircraft fire.
Hallmark and his crew strained for a final glimpse of the damage as dark puffs of antiaircraft fire flooded the sky, turning white as the shells exploded.
“I didn’t feel any sort of emotion until we began to circle after we dropped our bombs,” Nielsen recalled. “But when we saw that we’d scored with our bombs we let go.”
“That’s a bulls-eye!” Hallmark yelled.
The others joined him to congratulate Dieter.
Hallmark dove down to just fifty feet and tore across the bay, joining his navigator in a duet of “We Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”
The crew relaxed, the mission accomplished. “We felt good,” Nielsen wrote. “We figured the worst was over now.”
He was wrong.
FIRST LIEUTENANT TED LAWSON ROARED ashore in the seventh bomber, the last one charged with bombing central Tokyo. He was surprised at how basic it looked. “I had an ingrained, picture-postcard concept of Japan. I expected to spot some snow-topped mountain or volcano first,” he wrote. “But here was land that barely rose above the surface of the water and, at our twenty feet of height, was hardly distinguishable.”
The beaches gave way to green fields and farms, carved into the landscape with an almost mathematical precision. Lawson realized that after nearly three weeks at sea—surrounded by grays and blues—the vibrant colors were a welcome change. “The fresh spring grass was brilliantly green. There were fruit trees in bloom, and farmers working in their fields waved to us as we pounded just over their heads,” he wrote. “A red lacquered temple loomed before us, its coloring exceedingly sharp.”
Even Corporal David Thatcher, who manned the .50-caliber machine guns to ward off enemy fighters, couldn’t help stealing glances at the exotic landscape that raced beneath the bomber. “I saw quite a few good highways in Japan but no cars, only bicycles,” he wrote in his report. “As we passed over the rooftops the people in the fields and on the roads would stop whatever they were doing and look up at us. From the way they acted it seemed as though no Japanese planes ever flew that low.”
The Ruptured Duck buzzed a school. Children flooded out into the yard, many waving to the airmen. The calm scene was strangely disarming, until Lawson caught sight of the school’s flagpole. Fluttering in the warm April wind was the Japanese flag, the bright red sun plastered against the white background. “It was like getting hit in the chest very hard,” the pilot recalled. “This was for keeps.”
“Keep your eyes open, Thatcher,” he ordered.
“I’m looking.”
Lawson followed several valleys toward Tokyo, the surrounding hills hiding the twin-engine bomber. The minutes ticked past. Lawson, copilot Second Lieutenant Dean Davenport, and bombardier Robert Clever spotted six enemy fighters at the same time, racing toward them in two formations at fifteen hundred feet. The first buzzed overhead, followed by a second, though one fighter peeled off and started to dive.
“I saw him,” Thatcher assured his pilot.
Lawson asked whether he wanted to power up the turret.
“No,” he replied, “wait awhile.”
With each second, Lawson grew more fearful.
“I don’t know what the dickens happened to him,” Thatcher finally announced. “I think he must have gone back in the formation.”
The Ruptured Duck crested a hill, then swooped down on Tokyo Bay, skimming the surface at just fifteen feet.
“Nowhere was there any evidence of a warning,” recalled McClure, the navigator. “Shipping lay in the harbor. We passed close to an aircraft carrier which looked almost deserted—not a plane on deck. We could have bombed it with ease. But we didn’t. Our orders were to hit specific targets and we passed up everything else.”
Lawson closed in on the Japanese capital, charging over wharves and docks that crowded the shore. Through the cockpit he saw the city stretched out before him. “In days and nights of dreaming about Tokyo and thinking of the eight millions who live there, I got the impression that it would be crammed together, concentrated, like San Francisco. Instead it spreads all over creation, like Los Angeles,” Lawson wrote. “There is an aggressively modern sameness to much of it.”
The aircrew spied several large fires from previous attacks and a smoky haze settled over northeastern Tokyo. The antiaircraft fire thundered as Lawson pulled up to fourteen hundred feet, executing a run west from the waterfront toward the Imperial Palace. Though tasked to bomb Nippon Machine Works, Clever instead sighted a factory almost half the size of a city block with several 100-foot chimneys.
The red light on Lawson’s instrument panel flashed as the first demolition bomb plummeted toward Tokyo, landing in a canal next to a Japan Steel Piping factory and causing only minor damage. Clever sighted two more factories. The red light flashed again and again. The second bomb exploded atop a pile of coke, an important fuel used in steel mills, while the third landed nearby with little damage.
Clever took a final look down the Mark Twain sight, releasing his incendiary bomb over Japan Steel Piping’s shipbuilding factory. The explosives scattered across an area that measured some nine hundred feet by two hundred. Others came down on roofs and sparked fires, which sand bucket brigades raced to extinguish. All told, the attack injured four people, two seriously, with most suffering burns to the arms and legs.
The Ruptured Duck blew past the emperor’s home, the towering walls and greensward visible to the airmen in the cockpit. McClure flipped on his movie camera to capture the damage done by Doolittle and his men. “I became disgusted when I noticed little specks of dirt on the camera lens. What a time, I thought, for a lens to show up dirty,” he wrote. “I took the camera from my eye and saw what the trouble was. Those weren’t dust specks but the bursts of antiaircraft shells.”
The batteries on the ground below zeroed in on the Ruptured Duck. Thatcher saw one burst just off the right wing about the same time Lawson dove to escape.
“That’s flak—flak,” the airmen shouted in unison. “Let’s get out of here.”
A BRITISH PROFESSOR AT the University of Tokyo—and one of the few English subjects the Japanese had not interned—John Morris was wandering that Saturday afternoon down the Ginza, Tokyo’s main shopping boulevard, when an air-raid alarm suddenly screamed. Morris assumed it was a routine noontime drill, until he looked up and saw an American bomber tear through the skies overhead, the plane’s insignia clearly visible. He saw no Japanese fighters, though minutes later he heard the distant roar of antiaircraft fire over the city’s suburbs. The puzzled Englishman looked around at other shoppers. “There was not the slightest sign of panic,” Morris later wrote. “The police halted the traffic, but nobody made any attempt to take shelter; the general sentiment was one of bewildered interest, everybody wondering what was going to happen next.”
Morris’s experience proved far from unique. The raid had managed to catch most Tokyo residents completely unaware. The attack by sixteen bombers on a city spread across more than two hundred square miles meant few of the capital’s nearly seven million residents would witness firsthand the raid’s destruction, though many would see the enemy marauders either en route to targets or afterwards. The low-flying bombers that hedgehopped over homes, restaurants, and businesses prompted people to press against windows, while others ran out into the streets for a better look. “Most of the people did not believe it, thinking it was just another drill,” remembered Bruno Bitter, a Catholic priest at Tokyo Sophia University. “But when they learned it was a real raid, nobody could hold them back to go outside, to climb the roofs or the chimneys to get a better view. In other words, it was a thrill rather than a frightening event.”
That was the case for French journalist Robert Guillain, who was at home near the city’s center when the attack started. He heard a series of powerful explosions. “Bombs?” he wondered before he heard what sounded like antiaircraft fire. “Still,” he thought, “if it were a raid, we’d have heard the sirens.” Less than four minutes later, an alarm pierced the Saturday air. “A raid at high noon!” Guillain exclaimed. “Our first raid! So they’ve come!” The reporter charged down the street toward Toranomon, a major intersection near the city’s principal ministries. He followed the skyward point of many fingers just in time to spot a bomber zoom past. “Everyone was out of doors; they had watched the raid from the middle of the street to get a better view,” he later wrote. “The people were not visibly worried, but at least they showed a lively excitement.”
The raid likely made the Stanford University–educated Kazuo Kawai, chief editorial writer for the Japan Times & Advertiser, question the wisdom of his morning pronouncement that the Pacific was now an exclusive lake for the Japanese. “The sirens did not even go off until the planes were over the city and the sky was full of antiaircraft fire,” he recalled. “I was out and saw the firing, but thought it was just practice, although it seemed strange to be practicing with what appeared to be live shells. Then I saw the planes and realized it was a raid. Then finally the sirens were sounded.” The attack made others question the nation’s preparedness, including a primary school principal in a village just outside Tokyo who watched the planes buzz over his school. How had the enemy penetrated Japan’s defensive net? “As for military weapons, we had bamboo spears. We were instructed to use bamboo spears in case parachute troops landed,” he would later tell American investigators after the war. “It was truly comical.”
Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka was enjoying lunch at the Army and Navy Club with Colonel Takushiro Hattori. The two officers discussed the proposed seizure of Midway, which both opposed, when the distant rumble of bombs interrupted them. Tomioka surmised the planes came from carriers, calculating that Yamamoto could abandon the Midway plan and destroy the American fleet right off the shores of Japan.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed.
American ambassador Joseph Grew had just finished a morning meeting with the Swiss minister before departing his embassy office to wander up the hill toward the residence for his Saturday lunch. The mustached statesman spotted several fires in the distance, which he dismissed as the ordinary blazes that periodically erupted throughout the wooden capital. Grew reached the residence and wandered out into the garden with several other interned Americans. Additional fires soon broke out in the distance, forming a 180-degree arc that stretched from northern Tokyo south to Yokohama, the dark columns of smoke curling skyward. Antiaircraft fire suddenly thundered. Just then the ambassador spotted a twin-engine bomber charge through the skies less than a mile from the embassy. The plane suddenly dove, buzzing the rooftops to the west.
“My goodness—I hope that is not an American bomber,” Grew blurted out. “I think it is crashing.”
Grew realized that the low-flying bomber was actually executing evasive maneuvers about the time he spotted a second plane to the east, this one trailed by a line of black puffs of smoke that he recognized as the bursts of antiaircraft shells. “All this was very exciting,” he wrote in his diary, “but at the time it was hard to believe that it was more than a realistic practice by Japanese planes.”
Naval attaché Lieutenant Commander Henri Smith-Hutton was relaxing in his office with his wife when he heard the first explosions. The couple hurried outside. The Army’s language officer, who had climbed up to the roof, called down, telling him this was the most realistic drill he had ever seen. The officer reported smoke from several fires, while another blaze appeared to have just started. Smith-Hutton ran into the departing Swiss minister, asking whether it could be a real raid. The European diplomat doubted it. Smith-Hutton headed on to lunch in the compound, where the dining room doors opened to the garden. The attaché spotted a policeman on a nearby rooftop about the time an explosion rattled the embassy. His wife ran out into the garden just as a bomber roared overhead, vanishing before anyone identified the insignia. “Half of our group thought it was a genuine air raid, but no one could be sure of the nationality of the planes,” Smith-Hutton recalled. “The other half of our group still thought it was a drill.”
The diplomats decided to settle the dispute with a $100 wager that the bombers were part of the earlier planned drill. “We saw three bombers altogether and six big fires,” Grew recalled. “Even then, however, we didn’t know whether it was a real raid or whether it was a well-managed show put on by the Japanese in accordance with their air-raid precautions. There was a great difference of opinion among my own staff—quite a lot of money changed hands on that issue, I may say.”
“Well,” someone finally said to the policeman at the gate, “that was a very successful show you put on today.”
“That was no show,” the guard responded. “That was the real thing.”
A similar response played out at the British embassy, where the drone of American bombers coupled with dark smoke on the horizon finally convinced the eighty-seven interned diplomats that the attack was real, including Frank Moysey, a cipher officer. “Our fondest wish,” he later said, “had come true.” Embassy staffers manned air-raid posts. He guarded the entrance to the compound’s cellar, where he was supposed to aid stretcher bearers, watching the smoke rise from behind a hill until he could no longer stand idle. “I ran into a building and climbed to the roof; it was a beautiful sight,” recalled Moysey, whose colleagues would spend the rest of the afternoon toasting the American fliers. “There, surging up from Tokyo’s heavy industrial district, were six enormous columns of smoke, dense and black. No smoke bombs could have caused them. While we watched the smoke increase and spread with the wind, a big twin-engined bomber suddenly roared across the sky a half-mile away.”
“It is so unfair that you should bomb us,” complained one of the embassy’s local staffers. “Our houses are only made of wood, while yours are of stone.”
The Danish minister to Japan, Lars Tillitse, watched the attack from his home window. Only the night before, he had attended a dinner the Japanese foreign minister hosted for diplomats of neutral countries. Tillitse had overheard the foreign minister’s wife insist to another woman that there was no need to build an air-raid shelter or even to ship her furs, jewels, and wines out of Tokyo. America could never bomb Tokyo. He thought of the conversation again as he saw one of the bombers streak overhead.
Argentinian commercial attaché Ramón Muñiz Lavalle likewise watched the attack unfold, albeit from the roof of the embassy. He saw four bombers zoom barely a hundred feet over the city’s rooftops, sparking one of the few noted scenes of chaos. “I looked down the streets. All Tokyo seemed to be in panic. Japs were running everywhere, pushing, shouting, screaming,” Lavalle recalled. “I could see fires starting near the port. Our two Japanese interpreters in the embassy were frightened out of their skins.”
“If these raids go on,” one maid complained, “we’ll all go mad.”
American reporters who worked in Japan at the war’s outbreak had endured far worse treatment than the diplomats. “It is true,” one Office of Strategic Services report later noted, “that there seemed to be a special animus against newspaper correspondents.” No one knew that better than New York Times reporter Otto Tolischus, who had spent months locked up, praying for “an American air armada come to smash the whole town into smithereens, and the whole blasted prison with it.” The shriek of a siren followed by the rush of guards down the passageway alerted Tolischus that his prayer had finally been answered. “My friendly floor guard opened my door long enough to indicate to me that this was no drill, but the real thing. He made a long face and shook his head,” Tolischus wrote in his diary. “An air raid—a real honest-to-goodness air raid—was apparently something the Japanese had not counted upon. I felt like cheering.”
Associated Press correspondent Joseph Dynan sat out the war in an internment camp halfway between Tokyo and Yokohama, along with a dozen other Americans. The police had grabbed the reporter as soon as he came home from church the day the war started. Dynan’s long wait for the Japanese to ship him home was interrupted by what he later described as “the thrill of a lifetime.” “We were having coffee and toast when the police rushed into our camp excitedly and told us to extinguish the fires in the stoves and close the windows because there was an air raid. We thought it was only a drill—even when we heard two tremendous explosions in the direction of the Kawasaki industrial area,” Dynan wrote in an article after his release in July. “One of the United States planes flew directly over our camp and the music of its motors was sweeter than Beethoven’s Fifth symphony, which our phonograph was playing at the time.”