Today marks the 83rd Anniversary of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, April 18, 1943.
As planned, the sixteen Army Air Corps B-25 medium range bombers, led by then-Major James Doolittle, were to take off from the deck of the U.S.S. Hornet at around 5 p.m. while the naval task force that brought them across the ocean from San Francisco was some 500 miles distant from Tokyo and other areas on Honshu, putting the planes over their targets for a night raid before they would continue west to China, where they were to be guided to an airfield in Chuchow by a radio signal, where they would land just as the sun was rising on the morning of April 19.
It turned out, however, that storms over the Himalayas prevented the radio signal equipment the pilots were to rely on for direction finding from being delivered to Chuchow. Worse, at 7:38 a.m. on April 18, the task force encountered a Japanese picket boat some 730 miles from Japan. The picket boat was sunk, but not before it radioed an attack warning to Japan.
At that point, a decision was made to launch the five-man crew planes at once, between nine and ten hours earlier and more than 200 miles further from their target than was originally planned. As the planes reached a point roughly 300 miles from Japan, they flew in a single file at wave-top level to avoid detection. Upon reaching Honshu, the planes peeled off to their several various targets, including ten military and industrial targets in Tokyo, two in Yokohama and one each in Yokosuka, Nagoya, Kobe and Osaka.
After climbing to 1,500 feet, fifteen of the planes, which encountered for the most part light anti-aircraft fire and only sporadic interference by enemy fighter or pursuit aircraft, were able to open their bomb bays and drop their payloads over or close to their planned targets. One B-25 did come under heavy attack by fighters and, with its gun turret malfunctioning because of mechanical or electrical failure, dropped its bombs before reaching its target.
Fifteen of the planes gamely headed toward China after completing the raid. The pilot of one, which was severely low on fuel, elected to head toward Russia, which at that point was not involved in hostilities with Japan. That plane alone was able to land intact, at Vozdvizhenka. That crew was interned by the Soviets, who transported them across the country before releasing them in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkmen, some 20 miles from the Iranian border, where they were able to walk to Iran, then allied with the United States and Britain.
The remaining fifteen planes continued westward across Japan, turning southwest upon passing over the Japan’s southeastern coast, making a determined effort to cross the East China Sea to eastern China. As the planes neared 13 hours in the air, they were extremely low on fuel. Twelve of the fifteen were aided by a tailwind, which put them over China. Three were forced to ditch at sea, two off the coast near Changshu, China and one near Wenzhou, China. The twelve that made it over Chinese air space all crashed in the dark of night, six at various points north, northeast, southeast and southwest of Quzhou, China; two in or near Ningbo, China; two near Nanchang, China; and two southeast of Shangrao, China.
Two of the raiders were drowned when their plane ditched in the sea. Another was killed during his bailout attempt over China. Eight of the raiders, including the entirety of one of the crews that crashed south of Ningbo and the three survivors of one of the crew that ditched in the ocean near Wenzhou, were captured by the Japanese. Those eight were sentenced to death by a Japanese war crimes tribunal. Five of those sentences were commuted, but the pilots in those crews, 1st Lt. Dean E. Hallmark and 1st Lt. William G. Farrow, along with Cpl. Harold A. Spatz, who was an engineer and gunner on the B-25 piloted by Farrow which ditched near Wenzhou, were executed. Another captured flyer, Lt. Robert Meder, the navigator on the plane flown by Hallmark which crashed near Ningbo, died of starvation in captivity.
Doolittle and the remainder of his men were able, with the assistance of Chinese soldiers and civilian, to avoid capture by the Japanese and return to the United States by June 1942.
While the raid was not a spectacular success in tactical or operational terms and Doolittle was concerned after the landing in China that he was going to be court martialed for having inflicted so little damage on the enemy while losing all 16 aircraft, as the first attack on the Japanese home islands it registered as a huge strategic gain for the United States, as the Japanese abandoned some of its more aggressive elements of its strategy and instead devoted resources to protecting the country itself. President promoted Doolittle two ranks to brigadier general, skipping over those of lieutenant colonel and colonel, while he was yet in China. Roosevelt thereafter awarded him the Medal of Honor.
-Mark Gutglueck