THE DOOLITTLE RAID- APRIL 18, 1942
http://www.cv6.org/1942/doolittle/doolittle.htm
“THIS FORCE IS BOUND FOR TOKYO-TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND HIS GALLANT COMMAND GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU
Vice Admiral William F. Halsey, 13 April 1942
In the wake of shock and anger following Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt pressed his military planners for a strike against Tokyo. Intended as revenge for Pearl Harbor, and an act of defiance in the face of a triumphant Japanese military, such a raid presented acute problems in execution. No working Allied air base was close enough to Japan. A carrier would have to approach within three hundred miles of the home islands for its planes to reach. Sending surface ships so close to Japan at that time would practically assure their destruction, if not from Japan’s own surface forces, then from her ground-based planes or submarine forces.
Still Roosevelt insisted – demanded – that a way be found.
The first piece of the puzzle fell into place in the second week of January 1942. Captain Francis Lowe, attached to the Admiral Ernest King’s staff in Washington, paid a visit to Norfolk, Virginia, to inspect the new carrier USS Hornet CV-8. There, on a nearby airfield, was painted the outline of a carrier, inspiring Lowe to pursue the possibility of launching ground-based bombers – large planes, with far greater range than carrier-based bombers – from the deck of an aircraft carrier.
Enterprise (foreground) and Hornet race towards Japan prior to launching the Doolittle Raid.
By January 16, Lowe’s air operations officer, Captain Donald Duncan, had developed a proposal. North American B-25 medium bombers, with capacity for a ton of bombs and capable of flying 2000 miles with additional fuel tanks, could take off in the short distance of a carrier deck, attack Japanese cities, and continue on to land on friendly airfields in mainland China.
Under a heavy veil of secrecy, Duncan and Captain Marc Mitscher, Hornet’s commanding officer, tested the concept off the Virginia coast in early February, discovering the B-25s could be airborne in as little as 500 feet of deck space. The plan now began to develop into action.
On April 8, 1942, the same day that the Americans and Filipinos defending Bataan Peninsula surrendered, Enterprise steamed slowly out of Pearl Harbor. With her escorts – the cruisers Salt Lake City and Northampton, four destroyers and a tanker – she turned northwest and set course for a point in the north Pacific, well north of Midway, and squarely on the International Date Line.
Six days earlier, Enterprise’s sister ship Hornet had sailed from San Francisco, also accompanied by a cruiser and destroyer screen. Ploughing westwards, Hornet carried a somewhat unusual cargo. Arrayed across her aft flight deck, in two parallel rows, sat 16 Mitchell B-25 bombers: Army Air Force medium bombers. By all appearances, the bombers were too large to possibly take off from a carrier deck.
Certainly, this is what the men in Enterprise’s task force thought when Hornet and her escorts hove into view early April 13. Rumors spread about the force’s mission: some thought the bombers were being delivered to a base in the Aleutians, while others speculated they were destined for a Russian airfield on the Kamchatka peninsula. The mystery was solved later in the day, when Vice Admiral William F. Halsey signaled that Task Force 16 – two carriers, four cruisers and eight destroyers, supported by two tankers and two submarines – was “bound for Tokyo.”
The plan was more daring than most of TF 16’s 10,000 men could imagine. After refueling on April 17, Hornet, Enterprise – the force’s Flagship – and four cruisers would leave the destroyers and tankers behind, to make a high speed dash west, towards the Japanese home islands. The next afternoon, Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle and his crew would take off alone, arrive over Tokyo at dusk, and drop incendiary bombs, setting fires to guide the remaining bombers to their targets. Three hours behind Doolittle, the remaining fifteen B-25s would be launched, just 500 miles from Tokyo. Navigating in darkness over open ocean, they’d be guided in by Doolittle’s blazing incendiaries, and bomb selected military and industrial targets in Tokyo, as well as Osaka, Nagoya and Kobe.
Though the bombers could take off from a carrier deck, they couldn’t land on a carrier. Instead of returning to Hornet, they’d escape to the southwest, flying over the Yellow Sea, then some 600 miles into China, to land at the friendly airfield at Chuchow (Zhuzhou). If all went well, the bombers would have a reserve of perhaps 20 minutes of fuel. Success depended on the carriers being able to approach within 500 miles of Japan undetected, and survival on the airmens’ ability to evade the formidable air defenses expected near the target areas.
Hornet, the morning the raid was launched: “Some of the waves were actually breaking over the deck.”
Things went according to plan until early April 18. Shortly after 0300, Enterprise’s radar made two surface contacts, just ten miles from the task force. As the force went to general quarters, Halsey turned his ships north to evade the contacts, resuming the course west an hour later. Then, a little past 0600, LT Osborne B. Wiseman of Bombing Six flew low over Enterprise’s deck, his radioman dropping a weighted message: a Japanese picket ship had been spotted 42 miles ahead, and Wiseman suspected his own plane had been sighted.
Halsey, however, forged ahead, the carriers and cruisers slamming through heavy seas at 23 knots. Still nearly two hundred miles short of the planned launching point, Halsey strove to give the Army pilots every possible advantage by carrying them as close to Tokyo as he dared.
Ninety minutes later, however, the gig was up. At 0738, Hornet lookouts spotted the masts of another Japanese picket. At the same time, radio operators intercepted broadcasts from the picket reporting the task force’s presence. Halsey ordered the cruiser Nashville to dispose of the picket, and launched Doolittle’s bombers into the air:
Jimmy Doolittle’s own bomber was the first to rumble down Hornet’s pitching flight deck. Between the forward velocity of the carrier, and the winds churned up by the stormy weather, he and the other pilots had the benefit of a 50 mph headwind. Still, with less than 500 feet of open flight deck to take off from, many of the planes nearly stalled on take-off, and hung precariously over the high seas for hundreds of yards before finally gaining altitude.
April 18, 1942: An Army Air Force B-25 lumbers off the deck of Hornet CV-8, bound for an audacious raid on the Japanese home islands.
As Doolittle’s B-25s strained to become airborne, Nashville opened fire on the Japanese picket at a range of 9000 yards, drawing the attention of the Enterprise planes in the area. ENS J. Q. Roberts of Scouting Six made a glide-bombing attack on the little vessel, but missed with his 500-pounder. VF-6 fighters also dove on the picket, then veered off to strafe a second picket even nearer the task force, which had been hidden from view in the wild seas. Over the course of that morning and afternoon, Nashville, Enterprise Air Group, and later planes from Hornet, spotted and attacked sixteen Japanese picket ships. Several were sunk, and more damaged, but the pickets were aided by the high seas, which made them difficult targets.
The last of the sixteen bombers struggled into the air an hour after Doolittle’s B-25 cleared Hornet’s flight deck. Launched 170 miles further from their targets than planned, the bombers didn’t waste fuel forming up, and instead headed directly westward, in a long ragged line behind Doolittle’s plane. His mission accomplished, Halsey didn’t dally even a minute before ordering Task Force 16 east.
In the afternoon, as the carriers and cruisers raced for safety at 25 knots, radiomen tuned into Radio Tokyo, which was broadcasting a program of English language propaganda. They didn’t know it, but also in the listening audience was Ambassador Joseph Grew, interned in the U.S. Embassy in Japan.
A little after 1400 – noon in Tokyo – the announcer’s studied English diction suddenly gave way to frantic Japanese, and then dead air. As air raid sirens in Tokyo screamed, Ambassador Grew placed a losing bet with his lunch guest, the Swiss ambassador, wagering the sirens and gunfire were all just a false alarm.
Racing in at just 2000 feet, the first B-25s over Tokyo emptied their bomb bays, and Ambassador Grew’s wallet. Doolittle’s and twelve other bombers sought out and bombed military and industrial targets throughout Tokyo: an oil tank farm, a steel mill, and several power plants. To the south, other bombers struck targets in Yokohama and Yokosuka, including the new light carrier Ryuho, the damage delaying its launching until November. Perhaps inevitably, some civilian buildings were hit as well: six schools and an army hospital.
Aided by low altitude, camouflage, and extra speed gained from leaving their loads of bombs behind, the bombers were able to evade the enemy fighters patrolling overhead, and anti-aircraft fire from the cities below. But they were far short of the fuel needed to reach the airfield at Chuchow. One plane turned north, and surprised Russian soldiers by landing near Vladivostok. The remaining fifteen planes crashed or were ditched over China. Remarkably, most of the 80 pilots and crewmen survived the mission. Of eight airmen who were captured, three were executed by the Japanese, and another died in captivity. Four others were killed during the mission.
The Consequences
The damage inflicted by Doolittle and his raiders was slight, but it had lasting effects on both sides of the Pacific. As Roosevelt had calculated, the daring raid was a tremendous boost to American morale, which had been severely tested by four long months of defeat and loss.
China bore the heaviest cost of the raid. In May 1942, the Japanese army launched operation Sei-Go, with the dual aims of securing Chinese airfields from which raids could be launched against the Home Islands, and punishing villages which might have sheltered Doolittle’s airmen after the Raid. Exact figures are impossible to come by, but tens of thousands – perhaps as many as 250,000 – Chinese civilians were murdered in the Chekiang and Kiangsu provinces.
The raid, however, made a profound impression on the Japanese leadership. For several months, the Japanese high command had been debating its next major move against the Allies. The Navy General Staff, headed by Admiral Osami Nagano, called for a strategy of cutting off America from Australia, by occupying the Fiji Islands, New Caledonia and Samoa. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Commander in Chief of the Combined Fleet, disagreed, arguing that the U.S. Navy – in particular, its carriers – had to be neutralized. This necessitated seizing bases in the Aleutian Islands to the north, and the western tip of the Hawaiian Island chain. From those bases, as well as the bases already held in the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, Japanese long-range bombers could keep the American carriers penned up in Pearl Harbor, perhaps even forcing them to retire clear back to the American west coast.
The Doolittle raid ended the debate. With Japan’s military deeply embarrassed by having exposed the Emperor to danger, and fed up with the harassing American carriers, Yamamoto prevailed. His staff was given the go-ahead to prepare and execute a major operation in the central Pacific. Yamamoto hoped the operation – a complex plan involving a thrust to the north, followed by the occupation of several American-held islands near Hawaii – would result in “decisive battle” with the American fleet near a tiny atoll known as Midway.
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