Far from winning the war, we have just begun to fight. But we have begun.
—PITTSBURGH PRESS, APRIL 20, 1942
JAPAN’S LEADERS FUMED OVER the attack on Tokyo. Almost more humiliating than the assault was the fact that it literally followed an air-raid drill. Shouldn’t Japanese forces have been on alert? The raid not only made a mockery of the earlier exercise but also exposed the flawed assumptions of Japan’s senior leaders, a sentiment captured best in the diary of Captain Yoshitake Miwa. “As the enemy position was 700 miles east of Tokyo, it was thought that an enemy air raid would be made early tomorrow morning. Therefore, when a telephone call came in from Tokyo saying that Tokyo and Yokohama area was bombed, it seemed entirely unbelievable,” Miwa wrote. “We cursed ourselves for this, but there is no other way to do. We only thanked God for our not being inflicted much damage, especially no damage sustained to the Imperial Palace.”
The lack of widespread damage did little to comfort Yamamoto, who was physically sickened by the news of the attack. The veteran admiral who once had two fingers blown off in the Russo-Japanese War retreated to his stateroom aboard the battleship Yamato, refusing to come out. His chief steward, Heijiro Omi, had never seen the admiral so depressed. Yamamoto battled the shame of having failed not only the emperor and the people of Tokyo but even his own mistress, Chiyoko Kawai, who was in bed with pleurisy at the time of the raid, a scene she captured in her diary. “Helped in my hard-labored breathing and got up in spite of myself. Abandoned by doctors, there is no other way but to leave myself in the hand of destiny,” she wrote. “Sad indeed.”
Yamamoto’s incapacitation left Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki to handle the attack’s fallout. Early reports showed that the raiders had used twin-engine bombers—Ugaki incorrectly speculated about possible B-26s—and had targeted at least nine spots in Tokyo, plus others in Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Wakayama, and Kobe. Ugaki learned that one of the bombers had hit the bow of the submarine tender Taigei—undergoing conversion to an aircraft carrier—while reports claimed another targeted Niitsu’s oil wells in Niigata Prefecture. Early casualty figures revealed that the attacks had killed twelve and wounded more than a hundred. The raiders had burned fifty houses and left another fifty partly or completely destroyed. Ugaki could not figure out how the bombers had escaped. Did the planes return to carriers or fly on to Russia or China?
The Japanese bombers and fighters that had sortied shortly before 1 p.m. had flown as far out as seven hundred miles without locating the enemy task force. By 5 p.m.—and with no sign of the attackers—Ugaki could do little more than vent. “We have missed him again and again. This is more than regrettable, because this shattered my firm determination never to let the enemy attack Tokyo or the mainland,” he wrote in his diary. “If the enemy carried out attacks from such a long distance, which is about the same as an expected one-way attack, we shall have to revise our countermeasures fundamentally, studying their type planes. In any case, this is one up to the enemy today. As we have no information whether he’ll attack again tomorrow, going north toward Hokkaido or south heading for Marcus and Wake, we shall have to let it up to him.”
Erroneous reports of new attacks kept Japanese leaders on edge. At 2:02 a.m. on April 19 observation posts at Sawara, Kagoshima, and Togane all reported hearing large explosions and issued an aircraft alert. Two flying boats took off at 2:45 a.m. to search the waters east of Tokyo, but found nothing. The Japanese lifted the alarm half an hour later, but as a precaution kept fighters in the air and dozens more on a fifteen-minute standby alert. A 12:15 p.m. telephone call from the central military district claimed enemy planes had been sighted over Osaka and the suburb of Sakae. More than two dozen fighter and scout planes again roared into the skies, only to learn that several Japanese bombers had triggered the false alarm. These measures coincided with a search of the waters out to seven hundred miles by eighteen land-based bombers.
Reports indicated the enemy task force might head north, creating fear of a raid on Hokkaido. No one had heard from the doomed Nitto Maru or the Nagato Maru, though Ugaki learned that the Americans had damaged at least three other picket boats. Twenty-four hours after the raid the casualty count climbed to as many as 363 killed and injured. “The reason,” Ugaki wrote in his diary, “for the comparatively large number of casualties versus the number of bombs might be splinters from our own antiaircraft fire.” News that at least one American bomber had crashed in China initially added to the confusion. “What relation there was between the powerful enemy task force sighted in the east sea of Japan yesterday and the movement of this Army air force is still beyond our judgment,” Miwa wrote in his diary. “Did they take off from carriers? Did they operate separately, or, did they intend a simultaneous attack?”
Ugaki did soon catch a break. The Japanese captured five raiders, though the initial interrogation reports out of China proved a muddled mess, thanks to the wild and conflicting stories made by members of the Bat out of Hell’s crew. Harold Spatz had told interrogators that the aviators took off from a fictitious island west of Midway, while Bobby Hite claimed the men flew from the Aleutians. One check of the charts revealed to veteran sailor Ugaki that it was all bogus. “They never told the truth,” he griped in his diary. “It couldn’t be helped, as the interrogators must have been some army officers of lower rank with little knowledge of foreign languages and the sea. We must investigate further promptly so that we can take proper measures for the future.”
Even through the blatant falsehoods the Japanese gleaned some valuable details, deducing that at least thirteen North American B-25s—each with a five-man crew—all headed for China. Based on that, Ugaki pieced together the plan. “What the enemy intended in this attack, I suppose, was to launch long-distance planes from converted carriers after closing in our homeland supported by carriers, heavy cruisers, and destroyers. After flying over our homeland, the bombers were to go to the mainland of China, where they would use bases for carrying out raids on our country. In view of this recent success, undoubtedly the enemy will repeat this kind of operation while attempting raids from China. Therefore, we must take steps to watch far to the east and, at the same time, always keep a sharp lookout on the threat from the west.”
By the following evening—and after the Americans failed to attack Hokkaido—Japan suspended Tactical Method No. 3 against the U.S. Fleet, the nation’s plan for the defense of the homeland. Even forty-eight hours after the raid, Ugaki clearly was still irritated. “The enemy, already withdrawn far to the east, through radio must have observed our confusion with contempt,” he wrote. “Thus, our homeland has been air raided and we missed the enemy without firing a shot at him. This is exceedingly regrettable.” Yamamoto had since recovered and shared the outrage. “One has the embarrassing feeling of having been caught napping just when one was feeling confident and in charge of things. Even though there wasn’t much damage, it’s a disgrace that the skies over the imperial capital should have been defiled without a single enemy plane being shot down. It provides a regrettably graphic illustration of the saying that a bungling attack is better than the most skillful defense.”
The Japanese had transferred the crew of the Bat out of Hell to Nanking, where after waterboarding and other tortures the airmen had talked. Ugaki knew by April 21 that the Hornet, loaded with sixteen bombers, had left San Francisco around the first of the month accompanied by two cruisers, four destroyers, and a tanker, joining up at sea with another carrier plus more cruisers and destroyers. He knew that detection by the Japanese had prompted the early takeoff and that the bombers had flown due west across the Boso Peninsula to targets. Ugaki not only knew that all the fliers were volunteers, but he knew the approximate wind speed across the carrier’s deck at takeoff. Ugaki’s frustration over the raid appeared tempered only by his professional curiosity and even admiration for the plan’s ingenuity. “How the sixteen planes were accommodated remained unsolved,” he wrote. “Work harder to solve the riddle!”
A final tally revealed that the attack obliterated no fewer than 112 buildings—containing 180 units—and damaged another 53 buildings, with 106 units. In Tokyo, raiders had torched more than 50 buildings around the Asahi Electrical Manufacturing Corporation’s Oku factory, another 13 around the National Hemp Dressing Corporation along with the Communication Ministry’s transformer station. In nearby Kanagawa Prefecture, they targeted the foundries, factories, and warehouses of the Japanese Steel Corporation and Showa Electric. They had blasted the Yokosuka naval station and experimental laboratory and wrecked the Japan Diesel Corporation manufacturing in Saitama Prefecture. The attacks on Nagoya had completely burned one of Toho Gas Company’s massive storage tanks as well as damaged the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries aircraft factory. Six wards of the army hospital had gone up in flames, along with a food storage warehouse and army arsenal.
Civilians were not immune. The attack burned homes in places ranging from Tokyo to Kobe. A postwar analysis would count 87 men, women, and children killed in the raid and another 151 seriously injured, including a woman shellfishing near Nagoya who was shot through the left cheek and thigh. More than 311 others suffered minor injuries. Most of the deaths had occurred in just a few of the attacks— namely, those led by the pilots Hoover, Gray, Jones, and Joyce, which accounted for 75 of the mission’s total fatalities. The deaths of children in the attacks by Doolittle, Hallmark, Joyce, and Gray would become a flashpoint as newspapers in the weeks ahead begged parents of those killed to share their views on how Japan should treat the captured raiders. “One father wrote to a leading daily telling of the killing of his child in the bombing of the primary school,” stated the interrogation report of one Japanese prisoner of war. “He deplored the dastardly act and avowed his intention of avenging the child’s death by joining the army and dying a glorious death.”
While Ugaki and others in the Navy struggled to decipher the details of the raid, the Army and government likewise wrestled with the question of how to handle publicly the news of the attack, given the longstanding claim that such a raid was an impossibility. Japanese leaders juggled several goals, including informing the public and minimizing blame as well as covering up the abysmal fact that the defense forces failed to intercept or shoot down any of the bombers. On a larger level Japanese leaders wanted to paint themselves as victims in the inevitable propaganda war with the Americans. The official communiqués issued throughout the afternoon reflected those goals and differed greatly from the frantic broadcasts intercepted by radiomen on the Hornet. That was evident by the first bulletin issued by Eastern District Army headquarters at 2 p.m.:
“Today, April 18, at about 12:30 p.m., enemy planes from several directions raided the Tokyo-Yokohama district. Countered by the air and land defense corps of the Imperial forces, the enemy raiders are being repulsed.
“Thus far nine enemy planes are known to have been shot down, while damage inflicted by the enemy appears to be slight.
“The Imperial Household is in no way affected, it has been learned.”
That was followed by a similar bulletin at 3 p.m. from the Central District Army headquarters, stating that two bombers had raided Nagoya, but caused only slight damage, while another had targeted Kobe with incendiary bombs, again without causing any real destruction. “The time has come,” the bulletin declared, “for the people to rise to the occasion by defending the sky courageously and with absolute confidence in victory.” Authorities with the Central Nippon Army headquarters put out more details an hour later, again deemphasizing the raid’s damage. “Incendiary bombs were dropped by the enemy at six different places in the vicinity of Nagoya, but they are practically extinguished by now,” the bulletin stated. “In Kobe one incendiary bomb each was dropped at three different places. They were, however, extinguished.”
Bulletins proved quick to congratulate the air defense forces, which not only were slow to sound the alarm but failed to shoot down any of the invaders. “The corps guarding the air was very prompt to locate the enemy planes, with the result that the air raid alarm could be sounded in time,” stated a 4:30 p.m. bulletin from the Eastern District Army headquarters. “Thanks to the efforts of the air and land defense units and the presence of mind and quick action of the people, the damage inflicted by the invading planes could be limited to the minimum.” The deceptive alerts stunned senior naval officers. “The Army announced that nine enemy planes were shot down, which was entirely untrue. In fact, even one enemy plane was not shot down,” Miwa wrote in his diary. “What for, I wonder, did the army make such a false announcement?”
At the same time the government sought to reassure the public, leaders looked to spin the raid for the rest of the world, as evidenced by a message from Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo to Berlin that America intercepted: “In connection with the recent air attack by enemy planes, in order to circumvent enemy propaganda we had Domei and the radio broadcast the facts immediately to the outside world.” Japan’s version of the attack, playing up the civilian loss of life, went out over the airwaves in eight different languages. “This afternoon a few spots in Tokyo had some bombs dropped by enemy planes,” Japanese broadcasts declared. “The cowardly raiders purposely avoided the industrial centers and important military establishments, and blindly dumped their incendiaries in a few suburban districts, especially on schools and hospitals. The shameless raiders, however, were almost all downed by our surface guns and bombing planes, to the open view of the Tokyo residents who shouted Banzai at the sight.”
Newspaper headlines in the days after the attack parroted those themes, championing Japan’s alleged success in destroying nine American bombers, while others sought to assure the public that the nation’s air defense network was impenetrable. One of the more comical write-ups appeared in an April 22 editorial in the Japan Times & Advertiser, which boasted that of the hundreds of planes American flattops carry, only ten could penetrate Japan’s protected airspace. “The few enemy planes that did manage to slip through the defense cordon failed to get near any of the establishments of military importance which were too well guarded,” the paper boasted. “Hence the planes were forced to fly around aimlessly over the suburbs of Tokyo, dropping incendiary bombs on schools and hospitals, machine-gunning innocent civilians and hitting at least one elementary school pupil, before being brought down or driven away.”
The schizophrenic press, when not decrying the slaughter of civilians, portrayed the raid as so inconsequential that it had no effect on daily life. Even Emperor Hirohito could not be bothered to seek shelter, opting instead to listen to a 2 p.m. report on other matters from Home Minister Michio Yuzawa. Others noted that motion picture and stage theaters refused to cancel shows; the only exceptions were the Kabukiza and the Imperial Theater, which chose simply to postpone afternoon performances. Financial markets likewise took no hit; the press even bragged that the stock market opened stronger on Monday on news of the nation’s great defense. Public officials spoke out often in the media, describing the raid if anything as a “valuable experience.” “Air raids are nothing to be feared,” stated Mamoru Shigemitsu, the ambassador to China, who was in England during the German blitz. “Compared with German raids on London, today’s air attacks cannot be called an air raid in any sense of the word.”
“The truth is that the American raiders were easily repulsed by the iron-wall air defense of our country,” asserted Tomokazu Hori, a spokesman for the board of information.
“Air raids alone, no matter how intensive, have not ruined any nation,” declared Lieutenant General Asasaburo Kobayashi, chief of staff of the Defense General Headquarters.
To bolster the reports of so many planes shot down—and no doubt to help obscure the fact that Japan in the short term could produce no wreckage—the press published colorful accounts of two pilots who claimed to have blasted enemy bombers, though neither could confirm seeing the enemy planes actually crash.
“I pursued this plane, showering machinegun shots. The enemy plane strove to flee south,” reported Lieutenant Ryosaburi Umekawa, who in fact had pursued Ross Greening’s bomber. “I caused her to burst into flames.”
“We saw her right engine in flames,” added the other pilot. “There can be no doubt that the enemy plane crashed into the sea.”
Editorial pages meanwhile helped peddle the government’s spin, applauding the valiant Japanese forces and ridiculing America.
“The enemy’s daring enterprise failed to achieve any results worth mentioning,” argued the Nichi Nichi newspaper.
“The manner in which the invading planes were driven back conclusively showed that air defenses in Japan Proper are perfect,” added the Miyako.
“Their weak attacking strength was a sort of comic play,” declared the Mochi newspaper.
Others sought to remind the public how the government expected them to behave in the event of a future attack. “The most important thing is that the people at large should remain calm and collected under all circumstances,” advised the Chugai Shogyo. “The sense of alarm and consternation which the public may betray would be most deplorable, as it will then be only playing into the hands of the enemy.”
Not all editorials were so laughable. Some precisely outlined America’s true motivation behind the surprise attack. “It was a mere gesture made for its psychological effect on the American public,” argued the Japan Times & Advertiser. “The harassed and embarrassed leaders at Washington had to do something to quiet the mounting tide of criticism from their own people. Something dramatic, even if desperate, had to be done. The air attack on Japan was the answer.”
Despite the bravado and efforts to belittle the raid, Japan could not suppress all the news. Some practical information had to be released. Reports revealed that the Industrial Bank of Japan and the Hypothec Bank of Japan would take over claims of financial institutions that were creditors to air-raid victims and that life insurance companies would pay unconditionally the entire insured amount to anyone killed in the attack. Other reports noted that prefectural governors would dole out aid to victims under the Wartime Sufferers Protection Law. “The law provides that family members of those killed and injured as a result of wartime disaster such as air-raids will be given temporary or continuous protection for a fixed period of time from the viewpoint of stabilizing the people’s living,” the news stated. “Besides being housed, the afflicted will be supplied with food, clothes, bedding, and other daily necessities.”
Americans and other captive Allies pored over the papers, looking for clues that might provide a sense of the attack’s success. Under house arrest inside the American embassy, Ambassador Joseph Grew had long since grown accustomed to the government’s propaganda. “It is sometimes so poor that it is surprising that they can even fool themselves,” he later quipped. “After the fall of Bataan they published in all the vernacular newspapers a photograph of an arch with a lot of Japanese soldiers around it waving helmets and shouting. On the arch was painted, ‘United States Naval Vase’ with a base spelled with a v. Our Navy is able to spell at least. The next day the same picture was published in the Japan Advertiser, an English language paper owned by the Japanese government. The v was scratched out and a b was substituted.”
The veteran diplomat scanned the papers for telltale signs of bomber wreckage. If Japan had indeed shot down nine bombers, he knew the government would display the burned wreckage as a trophy of its airmen’s great success. Not until April 26—eight days after the attack—did the Japan Times & Advertiser finally run such a photo, accompanied by the colorful headline “Miserable Remains of Wrecked Enemy Raider.” To maintain the charade Japanese authorities had gone so far as to hunt down bomber wreckage—the Chinese army would later report that it was Farrow’s plane—and import it to Tokyo, putting it on display for the crowds to see at the Yasukuni Shrine. To verify the wreckage’s authenticity, the press highlighted a stamp on a gasoline tank that read, “North American Aviation Company.” Authorities included a parachute, again noting the tag “Made by Switlik Company, Inglewood, California.”
Grew wasn’t the only diplomat on the lookout for wreckage. “We expected photographs of the planes to appear in the papers. We waited and waited and waited,” recalled Frank Moysey, the cipher officer at the British embassy. “Finally, a week later, the papers published an explanation for the lack of photographs—all the planes had been shot into the sea. We finally concluded that all the planes shot down were Japanese fighters.” Moysey added that the raid led servants who had long been friendly with the diplomats to suddenly cool toward them. “For two weeks after the raid the Japs were jumpy as cats,” he recalled. “Trips to do necessary shopping and to hospitals for treatment were immediately abolished. We were not permitted out of the compound, so it was impossible to determine the amount of damage.”
Other Westerners likewise noted a psychological change, including Ramón Muñiz Lavalle, the commercial attaché at the Argentine embassy. “The raid by Doolittle was one of the greatest psychological tricks ever used. It caught the Japs by surprise. Their unbounded confidence began to crack,” the diplomat would tell reporters after his arrival in the United States in April 1943. “The results of Doolittle’s raid are still evident in Japan. They are stamped into the daily living habits of the Japanese people. Where before they imagined themselves safe from aerial aggression, they now search the skies each morning and each night. Japanese newspapers carry pictures of American planes and say these planes are practicing in Texas on how to bomb Tokyo. Fire brigades have been organized. Fire drills are practiced. Fearlessness has turned to fear.”
French journalist Robert Guillain concluded that the flat-footed response of both the military and the civilian population served as an important lesson for the Japanese, who redoubled efforts to prepare for the possibility of future attacks. “The raid did the Japanese more good than harm,” Guillain later wrote. “Air defenses were reinforced; in Tokyo, rooftops in the business and ministerial districts sprouted spotters and heavy machine guns. Parks were dug up for antiaircraft batteries. Barrage balloons soon encircled the capital and new bases were built for fighter squadrons. Air-raid drills were frequent and for a full day, sometimes two, every month, normal activity was suspended in an entire quarter, occasionally in the whole city, by firefighting drills in which hundreds of thousands of men and women took part.”
Interviews with repatriated Americans aboard the Swedish vessel Gripsholm in the summer of 1942 echoed those themes. “The Doolittle raid produced noticeable results in the attitude of the Japanese,” stated a report by the Office of Strategic Services. “One man from Kobe saw a plane above his house, heard the explosion of bombs, and observed four fires, one of which was in a lumber yard and burned for more than a day. The air raid is reported to have shaken the Japanese because many of the common people were firmly convinced that, after all, Japan could not be successfully attacked. The raid is, therefore, to be regarded from the point of view of its psychological effect as well as from the point of view of its material consequences. We found no one who could make any estimate of the extent of the damage. At the same time we found no one who thought it unimportant in its effect upon the attitude of the people.”
Senior Japanese leaders privately agreed. “It could hardly be called a real raid,” Yamamoto complained in an April 29 letter, “but I feel it was just enough of a taste of the real thing to warn the people of Tokyo against their present outlook.” Shigenori Togo, Japan’s foreign minister, was more blunt. “The bombing of Tokyo,” the diplomat later wrote, “produced a serious shock in Japan, as it proved the falsity of the military assurances of the inviolability of the Imperial capital.” Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who led the attack on Pearl Harbor, agreed. “In point of physical damage inflicted, it was true enough that the raid did not accomplish a great deal,” he later wrote. “But the same could not be said of its impact on the minds of Japan’s naval leaders and its consequent influence on the course of the war at sea. From this standpoint, neither ‘do-nothing’ nor ‘do-little’ were accurate descriptions. On the contrary, it must be regarded as a ‘do-much’ raid.”
The effects of the raid rippled through the military’s and public’s mindset, both in Japan and beyond, as was noted by Saburo Sakai, one of Japan’s top fighter pilots down in New Guinea. “The attack unnerved almost every pilot at Lae,” he wrote. “The knowledge that the enemy was strong enough to smash at our homeland, even in what might be a punitive raid, was cause for serious apprehension of future and heavier attacks.” His cousin Hatsuyo had witnessed the attack. “The bombing of Tokyo and several other cities has brought about a tremendous change in the attitude of our people toward the war,” she wrote. “Now things are different; the bombs have dropped here on our homes. It does not seem any more that there is such a great difference between the battlefront and the home front. I know that I, as well as the other girls, will work all the harder to do our share at home to support you and the other pilots who are so far away from Japan.”
The biggest effect of the raid was on the proposed plan to capture Midway. Even though Yamamoto had strong-armed approval of the operation within his service, the Navy had since encountered complications with the Army. Just six days before Doolittle’s bombers appeared in the skies over Tokyo, Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka had presented the plan to Lieutenant General Shinichi Tanaka, chief of the operations section of the Army general staff. The general saw the Midway operation as a stepping-stone for the Navy’s desired capture of Hawaii, a move Tanaka warned risked a dangerous overextension of Japan’s defensive perimeter and could ultimately undermine the nation’s entire war effort. The Army refused to cooperate. Tomioka soldiered on, preparing a report on the proposed operation that Navy chief of staff Admiral Osami Nagano presented to Emperor Hirohito on April 16.
No final decision had been made when American bombers thundered over the capital, ending all debate. “It was just as if a shiver had passed over Japan,” recalled Kameto Kuroshima, one of Yamamoto’s senior staff officers. “The Doolittle raid had a pronounced effect on the Midway operation,” added Yasuji Watanabe, another senior aide. “With the Doolittle raid the Japanese Army changed its strategy and not only agreed to the Midway plan of the Navy but agreed to furnish the troops to occupy the islands.” Mitsuo Fuchida concurred. “Even the most vociferous opponents of the Midway plan were now hard put to deny that the threat from the east, if not greater than the potential threat from Australia, was at least more pressing and immediate,” Fuchida wrote. “The Midway operation was now definitely decided. Combined Fleet had gained its way, thanks to the unwitting assistance of Colonel Doolittle and his fliers.”
BACK IN WASHINGTON, General Hap Arnold anxiously awaited word from Doolittle regarding the outcome of the raid. There was little doubt that at least some of the bombers had hit Tokyo. American newspapers had all but screamed the news in bold headlines that ran across the top of papers nationwide—all of it picked up from Japanese radio broadcasts. But Arnold was unable to balance out the Japanese propaganda with the actual results. Did the raiders really blast schools and hospitals? Had the Japanese in fact shot down nine of Doolittle’s bombers? Arnold had no way of knowing.
Absent any real information, American leaders remained quiet, much to the frustration of the press. “Why, everybody wants to know, does Washington keep silent as to the bombing attacks on Japan?” asked the Boston Globe. “For the best news of the war—the sensational American air attack on Japan—the United States yesterday had to depend entirely on enemy radio broadcasts,” noted the Washington Post. “Our own Army and Navy were silent. No communiqués on the raid were issued, and none were promised: indeed, there was no confirmation of any kind here in Washington.”
Washington’s silence baffled even the Japanese, who had expected the U.S. government to celebrate the attack. “I wonder why the publicity-minded Americans did not make a fuss out of this air raid,” Captain Yoshitake Miwa wrote in his diary on April 22. “Is it that all of the attacking bombers made a forced landing, thus making it difficult for them to assess the result of the air raid? Is it because most of them failed to return to the designated base with too much damage sustained to announce it? Or, is it that they are thinking of more contemplated plans?”
As the days marched past—and the silence continued—Japan’s curiosity gave way to desperation, prompting Tokyo radio to fish for news. “The American papers are talking big, but not a whisper from the Army or Navy,” announced one broadcast picked up by United Press in San Francisco. “We will be very interested in knowing their claims of damages, which, according to them, no doubt will be great.”
Members of Congress proved happy to sound off, many boasting that the raid was a prelude to continued assaults, which America was in no position to execute. “This will prove TNT in boosting morale,” declared Representative John Snyder of Pennsylvania, while Senator Joseph Hill of Alabama described it as “hardly a token compared with what we’re going to give them.” “This is the only way we are going to win the war,” said Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho. “Start right in bombing them at home.”
No one was more pleased than President Roosevelt, who had left two days before the raid for an unannounced visit to his home at Hyde Park. Only when the task force bore down on the Japanese homeland did Admiral King finally share the full details of the impending assault with the president, who, of course, had known the principal concept of the mission, just not the final logistics. “Until twenty-four hours before the raid only seven people—King, Low, Duncan, Arnold, Doolittle, Nimitz, and Halsey—knew of the complete plan,” King later wrote. “President Roosevelt and even Secretary Knox were not told until the planes had taken off from the Hornet.”
Armed with that news, the president had stewed. He phoned his distant cousin and confidante Daisy Suckley around 10:15 a.m. on April 17.
“Hell’s a-poppin,” he told her.
The president drove over to pick up Daisy, accompanied by speechwriter Sam Rosenman, aide Marvin McIntyre, and secretary Grace Tully. Daisy climbed into the front seat, and the car set off through the New York countryside. The president confided in Daisy that he was in a “bad humor—needed fresh air & a change.” The hourlong ride along narrow wooded roads and past fresh-cut lumber appeared the perfect tonic for the commander in chief. “So many things were coming to life,” Eleanor Roosevelt noted in her “My Day” column, “lilies of the valley, bulbs of various kinds and lilac bushes.”
That evening the president and Eleanor dined with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his wife, who celebrated their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. Roosevelt had settled into work Saturday with Rosenman and Tully on his seven-point anti-inflation message for Congress and the fireside chat that would follow, when word of the raid arrived from Washington. “The President was, of course, overjoyed by the news,” Rosenman later wrote. “He knew the heartening effect it would have on American morale and the morale of our Allies, and the blow to the prestige of the Japanese, to have American bombers over Tokyo even for a short, fleeting time.”
Roosevelt spent much of Saturday on the phone. While Arnold fretted over the logistical outcome of the mission, Roosevelt had only to worry about the morale of the American people. Any effort to strike back against the Japanese, he knew, would be seen as a victory. The president realized he would soon need to answer the question of where the bombers had originated, a sensitive issue he brainstormed with Rosenman.
“Mr. President, do you remember the novel of James Hilton, Lost Horizon, telling of that wonderful, timeless place known as Shangri-La,” Rosenman asked. “It was located in the trackless wastes of Tibet. Why not tell them that that’s where the planes came from? If you use a fictional place like that, it’s a polite way of saying that you do not intend to tell the enemy or anybody else where the planes really came from.”
Roosevelt immediately liked the idea. He phoned Steve Early and briefed him on the plan. The president then tried out the line the next morning on Assistant Secretary Bill Hassett when he entered Roosevelt’s bedroom.
“What’s the news?” the president asked.
Hassett relayed to him the latest headlines and recounted how all the papers were filled with speculation over the mysterious raid on Japan.
“You know,” Roosevelt said, “we have an airplane base in the Himalayas.”
A former journalist with the Associated Press and the Washington Post, Hassett thought about the president’s answer for a moment. “That seemed to me, geographically, a prodigious distance from Tokyo,” he wrote in his diary.
The president then brought the joke to its climax. “The base,” he continued, “is at Shangri-La.”
The befuddled Hassett stared at the commander in chief. “I was unfamiliar with James Hilton’s book Lost Horizon,” he later admitted, “and so was dumb enough until I sensed that he was kidding.”
Roosevelt ordered the train readied that night to leave at eleven and return to Washington. The reference from Hilton’s book stayed in his mind. He liked it so much that he confided in his cousin Daisy over breakfast the next morning, on the train as it approached the nation’s capital, that he planned to use that phrase with reporters.
When a journalist brought up the raid during the 4:10 p.m. press conference in the Executive Office on April 21, Roosevelt immediately segued to the question over where the bombers originated. “I think the time has now come to tell you,” the president announced. “They came from our new secret base at Shangri-La!”
The press erupted in laughter, though as Daisy recorded in her diary, only about half of them understood the joke. Reporters pressed Roosevelt for details of the raid, which only served to highlight how little the White House still knew.
“Would you care to go so far as to confirm the truth of the Japanese reports that Tokyo was bombed?” one reporter asked.
“No. I couldn’t even do that,” Roosevelt said with a laugh. “I am depending on Japanese reports very largely.”
Like Roosevelt, the press soon took to the joke about America’s mythical base in the Himalayas, using it days later in an April 24 press conference.
“Is there any news today from Shangri-La?” one reporter asked.
Roosevelt would have particular fun with the theme during a May 26 press conference. “A southern newspaper editor,” he told reporters, “was asked in a letter to the editor where Shangri-La was, and he said that he had examined carefully the maps of every parish in the State of Louisiana and been unable to find Shangri, L-A.”
The press howled with laughter.
“When is the ambassador of Shangri-La going to present his credentials?” one reporter asked to even more chuckles.
“I understood that was an American possession,” another countered.
“Have you any Shangri-La stamps for cancellation?”
“Yes,” Roosevelt answered. “I have a special album sent me by the ‘Lama.’”
Roosevelt would later go so far as to dub the new presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Shangri-La, a name future president Dwight Eisenhower changed in 1953 in honor of his grandson to Camp David. The Navy followed Roosevelt’s lead in 1944, inviting Joe Doolittle to christen the 27,100-ton aircraft carrier Shangri-La. Even her husband would embrace the president’s humor, recording the famous mission in his flight log simply as “Shangri-La to Shangri-La.”
The president’s jocular humor in the days after the raid helped mask the administration’s lack of information. At other times Roosevelt simply deflected questions, arguing that he knew only what had been reported in the press.
“Mr. President, there are complaints in Tokyo that our Army and Navy are keeping too quiet,” one reporter asked on April 24, addressing the official silence that had surrounded the mission. “Could you do anything about that?”
“I read that too,” Roosevelt cryptically answered, ending the discussion.
Privately the president couldn’t help gloating, firing off a message to Winston Churchill. “As you will have seen in the press we have had a good crack at Japan by air and I am hoping that we can make it very difficult for them to keep too many of their big ships in the Indian Ocean,” Roosevelt wrote. “I am frank to say that I feel better about the war than at any time in the past two years.”
The military hustled to keep the president informed of any news. The same day Roosevelt first joked about Shangri-La, Arnold sent him a one-page memo, noting that sixteen bombers had left the carrier and successfully attacked targets in the Tokyo-Osaka area, but had encountered bad weather over China. “The number of airplanes forced down or shot down over Japan are not definitely known,” the general wrote. “We have received reports of nineteen crew members landing safe and uninjured in the area south of Hangchow.” Arnold’s opinion of the mission’s success was mixed. “From the viewpoint of damage to enemy installations and property, and the tremendous effect it had upon our Allies, as well as the demoralizing effect upon our enemies, the raid was undoubtedly highly successful,” he wrote. “However, from the viewpoint of an Air Force operation the raid was not a success, for no raid is a success in which losses exceed ten per cent, and it now appears that probably all of the airplanes were lost.”
Arnold’s view improved drastically the next day. The general had finally received Doolittle’s cable, which had been sent to the Chinese embassy, translated, and forwarded to Arnold. The general quoted it in full to the president. He likewise cited reports from Chungking, noting that he could now account for eleven bombers, meaning the Japanese could have shot down at most only five. He further noted that despite early discovery, the dogged Doolittle had charged ahead with the mission, a fact that clearly impressed Arnold. “Everything points to Doolittle having accomplished a most remarkable flight. He knowingly and willingly took off twelve hours ahead of time, which put him over Japan at the worst possible time of day. He also knew that this would put him over China at night where, if the weather broke against him the chances of getting in safely were very very poor,” he wrote. “Thus, he had the breaks against him on the take off, at the time he did his bombing, and also at the time of landing in China.”
William Standley, the American ambassador, messaged Washington on April 22 that York’s crew had landed in Vladivostok, news Russia didn’t want public: “The Soviet military authorities would like to have this information kept secret and especially do not wish that the press should know that a United States Army plane had landed in the Soviet Union,” Marshall informed the president the next day. “The crew,” he wrote, “was apparently uninjured and is being well cared for.” Major General Dwight Eisenhower drafted a message to the embassy on Marshall’s behalf with a plan to get the crew out. “It would appear desirable, if consistent with the views of the Soviet Government, to remove the crew and plane from eastern Siberia as quickly as possible,” he wrote. “This would minimize the danger of the enemy discovering their presence and demanding explanation. If this can be accomplished, it is further suggested that these individuals might be attached for the time being to the United States Embassy. If Mr. Stalin desires to take possession of the plane you are authorized to offer it to him for use in Russia.”
The raid did create real fears of possible Japanese retaliation in some observers, including Admiral William Leahy, who that summer would become Roosevelt’s chief of staff. “This might have been of some assistance to our war effort by requiring defensive Japanese air forces to remain in Japan,” the admiral later wrote, “but I feared it would bring reprisal bombing attacks on American Pacific Coast cities.” So, too, did Henry Stimson, though the public’s enthusiasm over the raid coupled with the Japanese government’s hysteria initially tamped down the war secretary’s concerns. “I have always been a little bit doubtful about this project, which has been a pet project of the President’s,” Stimson confided in his diary the day of the attack. “But I will say that it has had a very good psychological effect on the country both here and abroad and it has had also a very wholesome effect on Japan’s public sentiment.”
After news of the attack settled, Stimson’s earlier concerns returned. He summoned Generals Marshall and Arnold on April 21 for a “few earnest words,” expressing his fear that Japan would have no choice but to counter with a carrier raid against the West Coast. The war secretary made similar predictions during a press conference in an effort to prepare the public for just such a possibility. “The United States government,” Stimson told reporters, “administered a stinging, humiliating, surprise blow when it bombed Tokyo. This was shown by the fact that at the time of the raid the Japanese were boasting about their invulnerability. To any one who knows Oriental psychology, as I do, this meant to the Japanese a serious loss of face, which can only be wiped out by a return blow, possibly a little bigger than the one suffered. We have a paramount necessity to set our house in order for what seems inevitable.”
Such concerns prompted major cities across the nation to review air-raid precautions. “Don’t forget the payoff,” warned New York City’s police commissioner, Lewis Valentine. “If we can do it, they can do it, too.” Brooklyn held a massive blackout just a few days after the raid that affected 968,000 residents spread across seventeen square miles. Tensions remained so high that two men got into a fistfight at the intersection of Russell Street and Norman Avenue after one refused to snuff out his cigarette. Similar fears triggered a three-hour shutdown of San Francisco—the longest so far of the war, leaving motorists stranded on the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges—after authorities reported the discovery offshore of an “unidentified target.”
Despite those anxieties—coupled with the lack of concrete details—Americans applauded the raid, both those at home in the United States and those serving overseas. “We drank a bottle of champagne to celebrate the event,” Major General Lewis Brereton wrote in his diary when news reached him in New Delhi. “Good for Jimmy!”
Editorials across the nation lit up with the news. “Tokyo bombed! Yokohama bombed! Kobe bombed!” trumpeted the Washington Post. “After four months of defeats in the Pacific War these words have abruptly electrified the pulse of America.”
“If we can do it once, we can do it again—and again,” added the Pittsburgh Press. “We have sweat and bled. Now it is her turn.”
The New York Times called it a “blow at the heart of the Japanese Empire.” “For 2,600 years Japan’s warriors have suffered no invaders on the sacred soil of the homeland. Now they have suddenly swarmed out of the sky,” the paper wrote. “A reverse so striking and portentous is bound to reverberate throughout the Orient.”
Many news outlets characterized the raid as a reprisal for Japan’s horrific attack in December. The Associated Press went so far as to describe it as a “balm for the wounds of Pearl Harbor and Bataan,” while the Los Angeles Times suggested that Japan “consider this another installment on our debt to her.”
Amid the celebration and demands for more attacks, other editorial voices cautioned Americans to temper expectations, pointing to the long fight still ahead. “Encouraging as the news is, it will be a mistake for our people to give it too much weight,” wrote the Chicago Daily Tribune. “Japan is a powerful nation.” The Boston Globe agreed. “Satisfaction felt in this country because of this daring exploit should not lead us to forget that air attacks of greater power and persistence will be needed before there is any real diminution of Japan’s strength,” argued the paper. “The trail blazers have marked out the way, but the task ahead remains formidable.”