Tokyo is our capital and center of our divine country, so in this sense any enemy air raid on there cannot be allowed to take place under any circumstances.
—CAPTAIN YOSHITAKE MIWA, FEBRUARY 8, 1942, DIARY ENTRY
WITH THE GAS DWINDLING, Ski York roared into Tokyo, piloting the eighth bomber off the Hornet and the first flight of three planes aimed at the capital’s south side. His objective: an aircraft engine manufacturing plant known simply as target no. 331.
Calculations showed that the bomber burned through an average of ninety-eight gallons an hour, far more than the seventy-two to seventy-five gallons it should have. York had used up his auxiliary tanks, which were supposed to last through the raid, forty-five minutes before even reaching the coast. Ted Laban’s latest check of the tanks revealed the bomber would not come within three hundred miles of China.
“Kee-rist,” York exclaimed, “that sure looks like a carrier up ahead there!”
York banked left to avoid the flattop, which with guns and a deck full of fighters could prove problematic for the unescorted bomber.
“Where in the hell is Mount Fujiyama?” Emmens asked, scanning the approaching coastline. “I’d seen lots of Jap laundry calendars and I thought old Fujiyama, snow-covered and pink, would be looming up to meet us long before now,” he wrote. “But only a rugged mountainous sky line began appearing inland.”
The cockpit windshield framed a view of the breakers leading into the beaches.
“Course from Tokyo to Vladivostok, three hundred degrees,” Herndon called out.
“Damn it, Bob,” York griped again, “I can’t get over that gas consumption. Can you figure it out?”
“Not unless we’ve got a gas leak—and hell, there’s no evidence of that.”
The men agreed Russia offered the only hope.
“I sure wish we could let them know we’re coming,” Emmens added, “so they’ll know who we are when and if we get there.”
The bomber roared ashore. The crew looked down on a fenced-off encampment filled with a couple hundred people. A guard tower with a white roof stood in one corner. Many of the people below waved frantically. Others jumped up and down. The crew noted that most had Western features, leading the crew to surmise that the compound was likely an internment camp. “Maybe a ray of hope pierced their black existences for that brief moment,” Emmens wrote. “I hope so.”
The bomber zoomed over villages and rice paddies and buzzed the heads of schoolchildren. David Pohl in the gun turret spotted nine fighters some ten thousand feet overhead, but the enemy fliers never saw the ground-hugging B-25. “After flying for about 30 minutes after our landfall was made, we still hadn’t spotted Tokyo itself, so I started looking for any suitable target; something that was worthwhile bombing,” York said. “We came across a factory, with the main building about four stories high. There was a power plant, and about three or four tall stacks, and railroad yards.”
York pulled back on the yoke, climbing to fifteen hundred feet.
“Open your bomb bay doors, Herndon,” York said, then turned to Emmens. “That would be a fine thing at a time like this—to forget to open your bomb bay doors!”
Herndon did as ordered, repeating the Twenty-Third Psalm: “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil.”
Four eggs plummeted down.
“Bombs away!” Herndon called out.
The explosions jolted the bomber, hurling debris above the plane. Smoke and steam climbed into the sky. The first bomb narrowly missed the Nishi Nasuno train station and railway buildings, blasting a crater more than six feet deep and thirty feet wide. The explosion blew out the windows and doors of a nearby home, whose family was away at the time. The second bomb hit a largely unpopulated area, while the third exploded in a rice field and shattered the glass windows of nearby buildings. The incendiary likewise caused little destruction. All told, York’s attack managed to damage only a single building and neither killed nor injured anyone. Japanese investigators would later recover a casing labeled “Chicago ACME Steel Company.”
York dove back down to rooftop level. Rather than turn back to sea, like the other crews, the bomber continued northwest.
“Keep your eyes peeled back there, Pohl.”
“Yes, sir,” the gunner answered. “All clear.”
The foothills west of Tokyo soon grew into 8,000-foot peaks, the wide mountain range that served as the spine of Honshu. York eased back on the yoke, and the bomber climbed, soaring over the snow-covered peaks below. In the distance the aircrew spied the Sea of Japan, a streak of silver on the distant horizon.
“Okay,” Pohl announced as the plane began its descent on the western slope of mountains. “All clear.”
“I’ll bet we’re the first B-25 crew of five to bomb Tokyo and cross Japan at noon on a Saturday,” Emmens joked.
“And took off from an aircraft carrier called the Hornet,” York replied with a smile.
FIRST LIEUTENANT HAROLD WATSON piloted the Whirling Dervish—the ninth bomber off the Hornet—ashore thirty-five miles north of Tokyo. He had come straight across the ocean, catching up with planes that had taken off ahead of his.
Watson buzzed the beach and over a coastal airport with eighteen twin-engine bombers dispersed on the ground and fighters warming up on the ramp. The pilot banked southwest and climbed above the haze to 4,500 feet, passing over four more airfields en route to his target, the Kawasaki Truck and Tank plant. The aircrew saw fires near the Electric Light plant, the radio station JOAK, and the Japanese Special Steel Company. Others burned north of the palace near where Doolittle had attacked.
Watson flew across the northwest corner of Tokyo Bay, diving as he approached his target, which sat along the waterfront. Barrage balloons floated over the water at altitudes of as much as three thousand feet—some anchored on barges in the bay. Antiaircraft fire thundered from the time Watson reached the capital’s outskirts all the way to the target, prompting the Whirling Dervish’s gunner, Technical Sergeant Eldred Scott, to describe the afternoon as “a nice, sunshiny day with overcast anti-aircraft fire.”
“I expected to see holes opening up any minute,” Scott would later tell reporters, “but never saw one.”
Watson pressed on through the flak toward his target, holding the bomber steady in what one witness on the ground would later describe as “majestic deliberation.” The bomber zoomed between the Imperial Palace and the bay waterfront, buzzing over the Japanese Diet and the Nichi Nichi newspaper plant. A photo of the Whirling Dervish would even appear in the paper the following morning.
Watson leveled off at 2,500 feet and a speed of 230 miles per hour, lining up for a ten-second run. Wayne Bissell sized up the target, which sat on a sand spit along the edge of the bay and consisted of eight or nine buildings about 50 feet by 200 set in rows with about 100 feet between them. “I dropped two demolition on our target area,” the bombardier wrote. “There was a 4½ second delay for our incendiary bundle and I released the remaining demolition and the incendiary bundle at the end of that time.”
The first bomb tore through the roof of a hazardous-materials warehouse filled with gasoline, heavy oil, and methyl chloride. The 500-pound weapon bounced off gas cylinders and landed in the wooden building next door before it exploded. The second bomb detonated sixty feet away, leaving a crater six feet deep and thirty feet wide. Alerted to the raid by antiaircraft fire, workers had begun to evacuate, but shrapnel from the second bomb killed one and injured forty-one others, three seriously; one victim with a shrapnel wound to the head later died. The attack damaged five of the factory’s buildings. The incendiary came down in a residential area, partially burning one home. The final demolition bomb proved a dud, but it still ripped a nearly two-foot hole through the tiled roof of a home, passed through the wooden floor and buried in the wet red clay, forcing the military to form a 650-foot perimeter to later dig it out.
When gunner Eldred Scott looked back to see the damage, he found the crew in trouble. The Japanese jumped the bomber. “Tracers were looping up at us from behind and below from a single fighter that was only a hundred yards away from us and pointing straight at me!” he wrote. “I opened fire only to find that my sight fogged up. All I could do was keep my finger on the trigger and aim with my tracers. As my bullets came closer and closer, the enemy fighter fell off on the left wing and I never saw it again. I think I got him but I’ll never be able to swear to it.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT RICHARD JOYCE PILOTED the final plane tasked to bomb the capital’s southern end, specifically the Japan Special Steel Company’s plants and warehouses in the Shiba Ward about a mile and a half north of the Tana River.
As the pilot of the tenth bomber, Joyce expected opposition, prompting him to pull up to three thousand feet and hide in the clouds as he charged across the Pacific. He hit the coast at Inubo Saki and banked south, flying another ten miles before he turned west and headed across the Boso Peninsula and into Tokyo Bay.
Navigator and bombardier Horace Crouch mentally prepared himself as Joyce closed in for the attack. “When we were a short way out from the target I read briefly from the Testament that I carried,” he recalled. “I also said a short prayer, then I figured it was time to get back to the job at hand.”
Joyce dropped down to 2,400 feet and slowed to 210 miles per hour as he lined up on his target, the bomb bay doors now open. An aircraft carrier steaming out of the bay toward the Yokosuka naval base opened fire, but the flak proved woefully inaccurate.
Crouch lined up his shot and released the bombs. “The targets were so thick and we were so low,” he recalled, “we couldn’t miss.”
Joyce’s first bomb blasted a wharf; the second hit a building that served as a study room and dormitory for workers, many of whom had evacuated to volunteer standby spots once the air-raid alarms sounded. Not everyone, however, had left. New workers who were still waiting for volunteer assignments loitered in the dormitory. The bomb exploded and killed five instantly, plus two female office employees, who had remained behind to collect important records. Seven other workers died hours later from injuries. Joyce’s third bomb exploded in a home just north of the Ministry of Railways Supply Bureau clothing factory in Shinagawa, leveling several wooden houses in a forty-foot radius and killing six residents, two of them children. Shrapnel riddled the clothing factory a hundred feet away, where five workers died, including several female office employees. Seven others were seriously injured, as were many others at the railway ministry. Joyce’s attack killed a total of twenty-five men, women, and children—second only to Jones’s in the number of fatalities—and seriously wounded twenty-three. Another hundred and fifty people suffered minor injuries. All told, he leveled nine buildings with sixteen units and damaged eight others, which contained another twenty units.
The antiaircraft fire thundered around the bomber. Joyce’s long and straight target run had allowed the enemy gunners to zero in on him. Americans imprisoned in a school in the Denenchofu district watched Joyce’s frantic escape, afraid the Japanese would shoot down the bomber. One shell exploded so close that shrapnel tore a hole eight inches in diameter in the fuselage forward of the horizontal stabilizer.
Joyce’s luck went from bad to worse. Nine enemy fighters appeared overhead at about five thousand feet. Two immediately peeled off to attack, closing to within six hundred yards. Joyce pushed the controls forward. The bomber’s speed jumped to 330 miles per hour as Joyce dove under the fighters. The steep dive caused the ammunition to fly out of the can and tangle up, putting the bomber’s turret out of commission. Larkin frantically worked to remedy it, as enemy machine-gun rounds tore into the left wingtip. One fighter passed so close that Crouch felt as if he could reach out and touch it. The bombardier jumped back against the bulkhead: “I remember looking down to see how many holes he had shot in me because I was sure that he had fired on us from there.”
Joyce charged west along the Tama River toward the mountains, buzzing treetops along the way. Two more fighter formations attacked. Joyce outran three fighters, but another three pursued, held off only by Larkin’s gunfire. One fighter closed the distance, pulling alongside and above the bomber. “I turned south at the mountains to go out to sea and we fired at him with everything we had,” Joyce wrote. “I believe that we hit him but none of us are sure whether or not we knocked him down.”
As Joyce passed over Sagami Bay, antiaircraft fire again erupted. Two more fighters jumped the bomber. Joyce increased power and pulled back on the yoke, climbing at two thousand feet per minute. “It seemed that when the Japs saw the tracers coming after them, they were afraid to come close.” Larkin wrote in his diary. “We were finally able to climb to the clouds and lose them.”
CAPTAIN ROSS GREENING, in the eleventh bomber off the Hornet, led the attack’s fourth wave, designed to target Kanagawa, Yokohama, and Yokosuka. First Lieutenants Edgar McElroy and Bill Bower in the twelfth and thirteenth bombers flew close behind, until the trio reached the coast and split off in separate directions.
“Let’s be nonchalant about this,” suggested Ken Reddy, Greening’s copilot. “What do you say we have a sandwich? We can say when we go home, ‘We were eating a sandwich when we were bombing Tokyo.’”
Greening took a bite of his, but he was so wound up that he could neither chew nor swallow. The Hari Kari-er made landfall northeast of Tokyo, and Greening aimed south at 170 miles per hour toward Yokohama, the industrial suburb south of Tokyo. “I don’t think I’d ever flown so low in my life, dodging down creek beds and ducking between trees rather than going over them,” Greening wrote. “I’m not sure it was necessary, but it gave a sense of security. Those minutes seemed like hours.”
The bomber was roaring across Kasumigaura Lake when four Japanese fighters attacked. Machine-gun rounds pinged off the bomber’s right wing. Gunner Melvin Gardner let loose with the .50-caliber machine guns. “Two of these were shot down, one on fire,” Greening would later report. “Neither were seen to hit the ground.”
The other two fighters appeared to back off until Gardner’s gun jammed and then the turret motor burned out, filling the rear of the bomber with smoke. The fighters dove to attack. Greening had no choice but to dive and outrun them. “We hugged the ground as tightly as we could and even flew under some power lines in the hope that some of the ships might crash into them. They didn’t,” the pilot recalled. “I flew so low over an agricultural plot that I can’t understand how I missed hitting a farmer plowing with his ox. I wonder what he thought when our B-25 suddenly went thrashing past his head, with two Japanese fighters shooting at us in furious pursuit.”
Greening looked out the cockpit window and saw one of the fighters score a line of as many as fifteen hits, from the trailing edge of the Hari Kari-er’s right wingtip to the prop. He had to unload his bombs—fast. He ordered Bill Birch to get ready; the bomb bay doors shuddered open. Greening carried four incendiaries to blast Yokohama’s oil refineries, docks, and warehouses, but with the fighters hugging his tail he needed an alternative. “I could see a concentration of buildings ahead and figured we’d better use it as a target while we still could bomb anything,” he wrote. “We noticed refinery pipelines and tanks camouflaged by thatched roofs, appearing to look like a cluster of houses. We rationalized, if we were going to bomb a refinery this one would do just fine. “
Greening lined up for his run and pulled back on the yoke, climbing to just six hundred feet, far less than the desired fifteen hundred.
“Oh, if my wife could see me now,” he thought to himself.
The red light on the cockpit instrument panel flashed again and again. Four incendiaries tumbled out in train, followed immediately by a large explosion and several successive ones, each rocking the bomber. “There were great sheets of flame and a terrific explosion that threw the co-pilot and me right up out of our seats, even though we were belted, and banged our heads against the top of the cockpit,” Greening would later tell reporters. “Once we had unloaded our bombs our speed increased and we ran right away from the two pursuit ships that were following.”
Greening had hit not an oil refinery but the half-built Katori naval air station, which was covered at the time by scaffolding. The attack destroyed six buildings, including a dormitory for workers, but it neither killed nor injured anyone. Greening looked over to see blood running down Reddy’s face from where he had hit his head, a small price to pay for the mission’s success. As the bomber roared out to sea, Greening finally swallowed his bite of the sandwich. “When we turned and looked back,” Reddy wrote in his diary, “we could see huge billows of smoke towering at least ½ a mile high.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT BILL BOWER IN the twelfth bomber came ashore north of Choshi, a city due east of Tokyo. Bower and his crew struggled to orient themselves, so he flew an irregular course south, paralleling the coast of Japan anywhere from five to twenty miles inland toward a point east of Yokosuka.
Bower then hedgehopped, keeping the Fickle Finger of Fate just a few feet off the ground. “I became a busy boy trying to harvest the rice crop for the natives,” he wrote in his diary. “Pretty rough job flying at zero altitude.”
Despite the tough flying, Bower couldn’t help admiring the lush countryside. “Why on earth,” he wondered, “do they want war with us?”
Bower buzzed an airfield, interrupting a traffic pattern of as many as ten medium bombers preparing to land. East of the capital and near Sakura, the aircrew spotted a huge fire, Greening’s handiwork. Several fighters tailed the bomber, but never closed to within a thousand yards. When Bower neared Yokosuka, he banked west, flying south of the Kisarazu naval air station. “Ahead was the bay,” he wrote in his diary. “Down to the surface we went, mouths like glue, eyes wide open, and the target in sight.”
Bower’s orders were to blast the Yokohama dockyards. Barrage balloons encircled the target, making an attack impossible. He ordered Waldo Bither to pick another target. The bombardier settled on what he thought was an Ogura oil refinery—it was actually Japan Oil—as Bower leveled off at roughly eleven hundred feet. “About that time,” the pilot later wrote in his diary, “all hell broke lose.”
Antiaircraft shells exploded in the skies. Bower ignored the black clouds of smoke and pressed on toward his target. The red flight flashed.
“Bombs away,” Bither called out.
Bower banked the plane, and the red light flashed several more times. The total time to unload the bombs was just four seconds, which, with a speed of two hundred miles per hour, spread the destruction over a quarter-mile area. Bither watched the first tear through the roof of a warehouse near the docks, while another hit a railroad track that ran down between the two piers. He had aimed another at three oil storage tanks and thought he either hit them or came close as a massive black cloud suddenly enveloped the area. “I was watching through the driftmeter and saw them hit,” navigator Bill Pound later wrote. “There was no doubt but that a lot of work was stopped on the docks that day.” Copilot Thad Blanton echoed Pound: “Our bombs were right on the nose.”
A postwar analysis would reveal that one of the bombs missed a massive Japan Oil tank by just thirty feet and an army oil tank by ninety, instead destroying six underground gas pipes and a steel-reinforced concrete wall. Workers dove inside a recently built, though not yet activated, furnace to escape. Two other bombs hit a Showa Electric factory, blasting roads inside the compound and leaving a crater eight feet deep and almost forty feet wide. The explosion hurled a sixteen-foot piece of rail line nearly two hundred feet, where it crashed into a roof of a nearby factory, while shrapnel tore into a hydrogen tank, triggering a fire. Several dozen incendiary bomblets fell across the Showa Electric factory and the neighboring Japan Steel Piping, destroying a two-story building. Some seventy other bomblets fell harmlessly in the canal that ran between the two factories; investigators would later collect thirteen unexploded ones. All told, Bower’s attack destroyed two buildings and damaged a third. No one was hurt or killed.
Bower dove back down, hedgehopping over rooftops toward the sea, dodging the dark bursts of antiaircraft fire. Only when the bomber buzzed the breakers did the fliers finally relax. “Because we were not allowed to smoke, I was chewing gum,” Pound wrote. “My mouth had become so dry that the gum got stuck all over the inside of my mouth and I felt I really had a mouth full of cotton.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT EDGAR McELROY, the last one tasked to bomb the Tokyo suburbs, spotted the coastline in the distance at 1:30 p.m., and there he ordered bombardier Robert Bourgeois to ready the nose gun.
“Mac, I think we’re going to be about sixty miles too far north,” navigator First Lieutenant Clayton Campbell announced. “I’m not positive, but pretty sure.”
Campbell was close. The Avenger charged ashore about fifty miles north, prompting McElroy to turn back to sea and parallel the coastline south. The bomber buzzed many small fishing boats and at least four freighters before McElroy turned inland again at 2:20 p.m. The Avenger passed an airfield on the southeastern shore of Tokyo Bay. Antiaircraft guns thundered as Campbell pinpointed the bomber’s precise location. McElroy banked northwest and bore down on the target: the Yokosuka naval station. “It was a thrilling sensation to see the sprawling metropolis below,” Bourgeois later wrote. “This was it, our answer for Pearl Harbor.”
Copilot Richard Knobloch spotted several cruisers anchored in the harbor, but the real prize, the airmen soon realized, was in the dry docks, where Japanese workers were converting the former submarine tender Taigei into a new 16,700-ton carrier, Ryuho. Bourgeois couldn’t believe how accurate his preparation was. “I had looked at the pictures on board the carrier so much that I knew where every shop was located at this naval base,” he later wrote. “It was as if it were my own backyard.”
McElroy pulled back on the controls and climbed to thirteen hundred feet, his speed two hundred miles per hour. “There were furious black bursts of antiaircraft fire all around us,” the pilot later wrote, “but I flew straight on through them, spotting our target, the torpedo works and the dry docks.”
“Get ready!” McElroy shouted.
Bourgeois opened the bomb bay doors as McElroy lined up for his east-to-west run over the base’s shops and building slips. Bourgeois stared down the rudimentary sight, knowing that the low altitude combined with the large target guaranteed success. “A blind man,” he later joked, “could have hit my target.”
The red light flashed again and again as Bourgeois dropped his three demolition bombs, followed by his single incendiary.
“Bombs away!” he shouted.
Knobloch had picked up a candid camera at the Sacramento Air Depot’s base exchange. He and Campbell now snapped pictures out of the cockpit and navigator’s side window, the only ones that would survive the raid.
“We got an aircraft carrier!” shouted engineer and gunner Adam Williams, who manned the turret. “The whole dock is burning!”
The bomb had ripped a massive hole twenty-six feet tall and fifty feet wide, through the port side of the Taigei, damage that would set back its conversion to an aircraft carrier by four months. Another thirty incendiary bomblets came down inside dock no. 4, igniting a fire that burned five crew members, carnage McElroy would capture in his report of the attack. “The large crane was seen to be blown up and a ship in the building slips was seen to burst into flames,” he wrote. “When some 30 miles to sea, we could see huge billows of black smoke rising from target.”
The view looked much worse to Kazuei Koiwa, a nineteen-year-old civilian who worked out of the Yokosuka naval arsenal. He was on the phone with the staff of the Sasebo naval arsenal when the air raid alert sounded and explosions shook the building. “I looked out the window and saw a ferocious cloud of black smoke rising rapidly,” he recalled, charging out onto the roof for a better view. “Large numbers of wounded were being carried on stretchers to the infirmary next to the docks.”
Vice Admiral Ishichi Tsuzuki, chief of the arsenal, appeared behind him, a mournful smile on his face. “The enemy,” the admiral said, “is quite something.”
MAJOR JACK HILGER MADE LANDFALL on the cliffs just north of the Katsura lighthouse, a point almost due east of Yokosuka. Doolittle’s second-in-command led the fifth and final wave of attacks, aimed at the industrial cities of Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka. For Hilger the mission was personal: the Navy had just announced that his younger brother was lost when the Japanese sank the destroyer Pillsbury off Java.
Hilger banked southwest and paralleled the coast toward Nagoya Bay, buzzing over dozens of fishermen, many of whom waved. Donald Smith, in the fifteenth bomber, flew on Hilger’s wing, finally separating to make his run on Kobe. Hilger never saw Billy Farrow, in the sixteenth bomber, who should have been on his other wing.
South of Nagoya, Hilger turned inland and at a hundred feet zoomed north up Chita Wan, a narrow inlet crowded with industrial installations that paralleled the much larger Nagoya Bay.
Hilger planned to skirt the east side of Nagoya, a move that would allow him to circle back and make a north-to-south run over the city. Herb Macia scanned the empty skies for any sign of enemy opposition. “Where are those fighters?” the navigator wondered with relief. “Thank God, we’re not going to be shot down.”
The aircrew marveled at the landscape. “It was a beautiful spring day with not a cloud in the sky,” Hilger wrote in his diary. “The Japanese country is beautiful and their towns look like children’s play gardens. It is a shame to bomb them but they asked for it.” Macia agreed. “We climbed over some low-lying, beautifully cultivated country; very green, spotless,” he recalled. “Every inch of land seemed to be fully utilized.”
“Look, they’ve got a ball game on over there,” Hilger announced to his crew. “I wonder what the score is.”
No one suspected an air raid.
Macia noted that some people even stood up and waved.
The city of Nagoya defied the aircrew’s expectations. Most thought the industrial powerhouse—Japan’s third-largest city, with about 1.3 million residents—would be much larger than it actually was. Viewed from an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the city’s canals proved tough to spot and the waterfront area poorly defined. “While over Japan our entire crew was impressed with the drabness of the cities and the difficulty of picking out targets,” Hilger later noted in his report. “All buildings were grey and very much the same in appearance. The cities did not look at all the way we expected them to look from the information in our objective folders and on our maps.”
Hilger thundered in over the city. His orders were to target the barracks of the Third Division Military Headquarters adjacent to the Nagoya castle, Matsuhigecho oil storage northwest of the business district, the Atsuta factory of the Nagoya arsenal in the city’s center, and the Mitsubishi aircraft works along the waterfront. Two minutes before Hilger lined up for his run, the antiaircraft batteries opened fire, filling the empty skies above and behind the bomber with puffs of black smoke.
“Major Hilger, sir,” Bain called over the interphone, his voice filled with indignation. “Those guys are shooting at us!”
Engineer Jacob Eierman spotted one antiaircraft battery of four guns on a parade ground of the army barracks, which was the target. He saw a second battery on the side of the Mitsubishi aircraft factory. “Some of the stuff was so far off it didn’t seem that they were really trying,” Eierman later wrote. “I saw only one mark on the plane—a little hole near the running light on the left wing tip.”
Hilger leveled off for his run at a speed of 220 miles per hour. Copilot Jack Sims asked him whether he was hot.
“No,” Hilger replied.
“Then what the hell are you sweating so for?”
Hilger carried four incendiary bombs, hoping to do as much damage as possible. Macia sited the army barracks on the ground below. The red light flashed as the first incendiary dropped, the individual bomblets spreading out over several rows. Bain watched the destruction from the rear gun turret: “I saw some ten to fifteen fires in this area and another twenty or more columns of greenish smoke.”
Macia prepared next to bomb the oil and gasoline storage warehouses. He selected the largest building in the cluster, which resembled a massive college gymnasium, complete with a curved roof.
Hilger bore down on his third target, the arsenal. “A tremendous building,” he noted in his diary. “Macia could have hit it with his eyes shut.” The bombardier agreed. “All I had to do was just drop the bomb,” he recalled. “I couldn’t have missed.”
Antiaircraft batteries continued to roar, throwing up flak and filling the skies with dark puffs of smoke. “Our fourth and last target was one that I had been waiting to take a crack at ever since this war started,” Hilger later wrote. “It was the Mitsubishi Aircraft Works. It turns out a bimotored medium bomber very similar to a B-25. The main building was about 250 yd. square and Macia hit it dead center.”
Others agreed. “That was a beautiful hit,” Eierman wrote. “I could see the bombs strike and flames burst up all over it.” He spied something else. “As we passed over, a cleaning woman rushed out of one door and shook a mop at us!”
Hilger dove the bomber, buzzing past two oil storage tanks. “I fired a burst of some thirty to fifty rounds but did not set fire to the tanks,” Bain noted in his report. “From the tracers I am certain the tanks were hit.”
Hilger’s attack destroyed twenty-three buildings and damaged six others. He had missed the army barracks and instead hit the Nagoya army hospital, destroying eighteen buildings; among the burned structures were six wards, but orderlies were able to evacuate the patients. Unable to put out the blaze, Army firefighters called in civilian assistance. Even then the inferno burned until the next day. The raid likewise burned up a food storage warehouse and Army arsenal, and destroyed five buildings at the Nagoya engine depot and damaged five others. No one was killed or injured.
Eierman looked at Bain and couldn’t contain his laughter. “His left fist was clenched tight and his fingers were oozing peanut butter and jelly from that sandwich he had started to eat as we swept in over Japan,” the engineer later wrote. “The whole raid had taken us about eight minutes, and he had never let go.”
The bomber buzzed just a few feet above the bay and headed back out to sea. A mushroom-shaped column of heavy black smoke rose as much as six thousand feet above the city, visible to the airmen at a distance of thirty miles. Sources picked up in China would later confirm that fires raged for the next forty-eight hours.
“Boy,” Bain called out. “You ought to see that place burn.”
FIRST LIEUTENANT DONALD SMITH piloted the fifteenth bomber off the Hornet, staying off Hilger’s wing as he listened to radio station JOAK. An alarm interrupted the regular broadcast at about 1:25 p.m., consisting of a forty-five second bell followed by what sounded like someone shouting three words. “This took place about 10 times,” Smith logged in his report. “That was the last we heard of the station.”
There was little doubt the raid had begun.
“Oh-oh!” copilot Griffith Williams called out. “There’s the land.”
“We ought to be seeing some action pretty soon,” added Doc White.
Smith banked south for the hour-and-fifteen-minute run down the coast, flying barely a hundred feet over the heads of the fishermen.
“Here’s a good chance to sink some of these ships, Smitty,” Howard Sessler called out from the bomber’s nose. “Fly over them and I’ll give a few bursts.”
“Better not,” Smith replied. “They may think we’re friendly aircraft if we don’t fire. This is supposed to be a surprise.”
“Guess I’ll unbutton my collar,” engineer Edward Saylor announced, the tension rising. “Getting a little tight.”
Smith turned into Nagoya Bay, zooming past lighthouses and coastal defense batteries without drawing any fire. “The only person we bothered,” White wrote in his diary, “was one fisherman who jumped into the water!”
Hilger waggled his wings at about 2:30 p.m. and headed for Nagoya. Smith pressed on toward Kobe, piloting the TNT just a few feet over the waters crowded with small and colorful boats. “We had our first opposition as we zoomed over the beach heading inland,” White later wrote. “Four small boys who were playing along the shore threw rocks at us as we skimmed by a few feet over their heads.”
Smith pulled back on the yoke and started to climb up to several thousand feet to cross the mountains. “Say, Saylor, start pushing,” copilot Griffith Williams joked. “Seems like we’re stopped up here.”
The airmen scanned the skies and the ground below. “Very pretty and interesting countryside, rice paddies terraced clear to the tops of the hills,” White wrote in his diary. “Only airplane seen was a commercial airliner which flew by overhead. No pursuit seen though we flew by several airfields.”
The bomber passed just north of Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, with almost two million residents. The airmen saw no evidence that the nation’s largest commercial center had been bombed, but instead marveled at the congestion. No line appeared to mark where Osaka ended and Kobe began, while the city’s factories belched a heavy smoke that left a thick haze in the air, slashing visibility and prompting White in his diary to label the city the “Pittsburgh of Japan.”
Smith followed the Shinyodo River as White snapped photos of the industry that crowded the banks. “Trains, streetcars and buses were still running on the streets, people were out walking about,” he later wrote. “We even passed a commercial airliner heading in the other direction,” the Greater Japan Airlines daily round-trip flight from Fukuoka to Tokyo, carrying twenty-one passengers that afternoon and bound to arrive in the capital at 4:40 p.m. The sea breeze blew back some of the haze as the bomber neared Kobe, the nation’s sixth-largest city, with a population of about a million. The airmen spotted Koshien stadium, the largest ballpark in Asia, able to seat some fifty thousand fans and even boasting flush toilets. On the same field where Nankai battled Taiyo this afternoon, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played during a 1934 visit, later commemorated on a plaque at the stadium’s entrance. “Everything looked very much as the objective folder had shown, and we had no trouble in finding our targets,” Smith wrote in his report. “No anti-aircraft fire was encountered, and nothing hindered us from completing the mission.”
Japan’s confidence that America would never raid its cities was on display in Kobe, where the airmen observed no effort to camouflage important factories and plants. The skies likewise proved empty of any fighter opposition, barrage balloons, or even antiaircraft fire as the TNT droned toward its targets, carrying four incendiary bombs to use against the city’s warehouses, shipping docks, and aircraft factories.
“There’s the steel foundries straight ahead, Smitty,” Sessler said. “That’s where we’ll start our bombing run from.”
“I see it,” Smith replied. “Give ’em hell!”
Smith lined up for his run at two thousand feet and 240 miles per hour.
“Bomb bay doors open,” Sessler announced.
“Okay.”
Sessler stared down the Mark Twain sight, dropping the first bomb immediately west of the Uyenoshita Steelworks and aiming the second at the Kawasaki Dockyard Company. The third fell west of the Electric Machinery Works, an area populated by small factories, machine shops, and residences. Sessler aimed the fourth at the Kawasaki aircraft factory and the Kawasaki Dockyard Company aircraft works. Only then did antiaircraft batteries open fire, from positions near the mouth of Shinminato River.
“Hey, when you going to start dropping those things,” Smith blurted out, unaware that the red light on his cockpit instrument panel had burned out. “It’s getting kind of hot up here and I’m starting to sweat.”
“I’ve already dropped them,” Sessler called back.
“Bet they got a bang out of that!” Saylor quipped.
“Hope they don’t lose their heads over it,” added Smith.
A postwar analysis showed that the TNT largely missed its intended targets. One of the bombs destroyed eighteen homes in the Nishide neighborhood and damaged eleven others, killing one person, who was hit by an incendiary bomblet. Another bomb burned up three homes and damaged two others in the neighborhood of Minami Sakasegawa, while most of the final incendiary bomblets came down harmlessly in a canal alongside the Kawasaki aircraft factory. All told, Smith’s attack killed one person and injured five others, while destroying twenty-one homes and damaging fourteen others.
White took photographs throughout the attack, spotting the aircraft carrier Hiyo under construction at the Kawasaki dockyard. When he shot all thirty-two frames, the doctor removed the film, slipped it in a canister, and taped the edges.
Smith swooped down over the bay and headed back out to sea as the airmen marveled at how easy the mission was. “Nobody realized we were enemies until the bombs dropped,” Saylor later said. “The Japs simply didn’t think it could be done.” Smith agreed. “It was like the old sleeper play in football,” the pilot recalled. “We caught them napping and got away with it.”
SECOND LIEUTENANT BILLY FARROW roared in last, in the Bat out of Hell, the encore of America’s first attack against Japan. Farrow’s orders allowed him to target either Osaka or Nagoya; he chose the latter. “We came in over the Japanese mainland at hedgehopping height,” recalled navigator George Barr. “The sun was shining and the people in the streets below were all waving. They’d been so indoctrinated that Japan would never be bombed that they couldn’t imagine it could really happen.”
When enemy fighters appeared in the skies, Farrow increased speed and pulled back on the controls, climbing up to seven thousand feet and vanishing in the clouds. The airmen flew dead reckoning toward Nagoya, diving through a hole in the clouds over the city.
“Get set to drop bombs at five hundred feet,” Farrow ordered bombardier Jacob DeShazer. “There is the first target.”
The Bat out of Hell carried four incendiary bombs to target an oil refinery and an aircraft factory. Farrow lined up his run as DeShazer looked down the sight.
“See that gasoline tank?”
DeShazer did.
The red light flashed on the cockpit instrument panel as the first three bombs dropped. Farrow banked the plane. DeShazer smelled smoke and wanted to see the refinery burn. “To the left of us I saw where the first bombs had dropped. There was fire all over the tank, but it had not blown up yet,” he recalled. “What I was smelling, however, was powder of the shells that were being shot at us instead of the bombs I had dropped. I had noticed a little black smoke cloud right in front of us, and evidently the hole in the nose of our airplane allowed the smoke to come inside.”
Farrow pressed on toward the next target, a long flat building that the pilot suspected was an aircraft factory.
“Let your bombs go,” he ordered DeShazer.
The red light flashed a final time.
The Bat out of Hell hit the Toho Gas Company’s no. 3 tank, sparking a massive fire. Japanese workers rushed to prevent an explosion by releasing gas throughout the city. Farrow’s final attack hit Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ Nagoya Aeronautical Manufacturing, a plant that produced the famed Zero fighter. Damage was light, but the attack killed five people and injured eleven others, two seriously.
“We didn’t miss,” Deshazer and copilot Bobby Hite wrote. “We bombed from 500 feet with ack-ack bursting all around us, but we never got hit. We circled fast, took a look at the fires and then headed west and a little south for the China coast.”