70 Years Since Doolittle Raid on Tokyo Posted By Daniel Mandel
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/04/18/70-years-since-doolittle-raid-on-tokyo/print/
On this day seventy years ago (April 18, 1942), America’s already famous pioneer aviator and air force Lieutenant-Colonel James H. Doolittle (1896-1993) led the intrepid and celebrated first U.S. air raid on Tokyo. The raid, carried out by 80 airman and 16 specially modified B-25 Mitchell bombers launched from the windswept deck of the carrier Hornet, did much to dissipate the darkness and foreboding overhanging the Pacific war.
In the four and half months since the surprise attack upon U.S. naval and air installations at Pearl Harbor by the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Vice-Admiral Chuichi Nagumo’s aircraft carriers, Japan had enjoyed one success after another: the seizure of Guam; the surrender of Hong Kong and later Singapore; the destruction from the air of the British battleship Prince of Wales and the battle-cruiser Repulse; the further destruction of the British aircraft carrier Hermes and the cruisers Dorsetshire and Cornwall off Ceylon; the invasion of a brace of Pacific islands, including the Philippines and New Guinea, the bombing of Darwin in Australia’s Northern Territory and so on. Imperial Japan had appeared unstoppable. The Doolittle Raid permitted a different inference.
In a day, the notion that Japan was invulnerable to attack because of its sudden, far-flung conquests and the long arm of its navy was dissolved. The U.S. Navy had demonstrated that it could penetrate to within range of metropolitan Japan and launch a squadron of medium bombers upon the imperial capital itself.