Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (34 page)

“Well,” he finally decided. “We’ll turn south.”

Ten minutes more passed.

Then fifteen.

Every gallon of fuel burned hunting for Tokyo, Jones knew, was one gallon less he could count on to reach China.

The flustered flier decided to bomb the first target he found just as his B-25 crested a ridge and passed over the mouth of Tokyo Bay. He instantly recognized his location. Rather than approach Tokyo from the north, Jones had turned south too soon, flying down the Boso Peninsula and bypassing the Japanese capital. He entered the bay due east of Yokosuka, banked north, and pressed on toward Tokyo.

His orders were to bomb several targets east of the Imperial Palace, including an armory. With his gas running low, however, Jones opted for an alternative. The cockpit windshield revealed myriad possible targets packed along the bay shores. He informed bombardier Denver Truelove of his new plan.

Jones pulled up to twelve hundred feet
as Truelove coached him in over the targets by voice, sighting an oil tank two blocks from the waterfront. Truelove next targeted what appeared to be a brick power plant several stories tall. Jones banked left in search of more targets, a move that allowed him to witness the second explosion. “The building assumed the shape of a barrel,” he recalled. “The sides rounded out and the top became circular. Then the ‘barrel’ burst. Smoke and dust and bricks were everywhere.”

The raiders scored another hit with an incendiary bomb on a two-story building with a saw-toothed roof. The massive structure, which stretched more than two city blocks, reminded Jones of North American Aviation’s California factory. “It was easy to hit,” he wrote in his report. “Every one of the bombs in the cluster hit on the roof of this plant.”

The antiaircraft fire had prompted Jones to increase his speed to as much as 270 miles per hour, causing Truelove to overshoot his final target. The demolition bomb appeared to blow off only the corner of a two-story building with windows and ventilators on the roof and a canal running along the west side.

A postwar analysis would reveal that one of the bombs ripped through the top of a roofing factory and exploded on a support beam ten feet above the ground, killing twelve workers and injuring eleven others on lunch break. Only the structure’s steel frame prevented the total loss of the building. Another bomb tore through the roof of a Yokoyama Industries warehouse, which doubled as an office. The bomb hit a pile of firewood and exploded, killing fifteen workers and injuring another eleven within a sixty-five-foot radius of the blast, including some in a factory next door. All told, the attack killed twenty-seven people—the most by any single bomber.

Jones now dove down to rooftop level to make his escape, as the Japanese antiaircraft fire and even machine-gun bullets buzzed the bomber, terrifying Joseph Manske in the turret. “When I saw the tracer bullets,” the gunner recalled, “I got out of that turret in a hurry and never fired a round.”

SECOND LIEUTENANT HALLMARK AND THE
crew of the
Green Hornet
marveled at the ease of entry into the enemy’s homeland. No antiaircraft fire. No fighters. Just a warm Saturday afternoon. “It was so pleasant and serene then you’d think we were a commercial airliner coming in for a visit,” navigator Chase Nielsen recalled
. “The fine weather made us feel good. We figured it was a sign that our mission would be successful.”

That serenity ended when the bomber closed in on Tokyo.

Zooming in at more than 220 miles per hour, Hallmark pulled up to fifteen hundred feet. The bomb bay doors swung open as the antiaircraft fire thundered, some of it from warships moored in the bay. One round struck Plexiglas near copilot Second Lieutenant Robert Meder. Dark smoke curled above the horizon from the previous attacks, as six Japanese planes roared overhead at ten thousand feet.

Hallmark’s orders were to target the steel mills and foundries in the northeastern corner of the capital that crowded the banks of the bay, a massive target Nielsen estimated to be no less than six hundred feet by two thousand feet. The Texas pilot now poised to fulfill a prophecy he had made just days after the attack on Pearl Harbor. “The Japs sure did make a big mistake,” he wrote then in a letter to his parents. “I imagine they will be awfully sorry they ever heard of the U.S. in a few months.”

Sergeant William Dieter, the bombardier, stared down his Mark Twain sight at the congested Japanese capital below. Nielsen pressed him on where he planned to drop the bomber’s lone incendiary.

“I’ll figure that out,” Dieter answered.

Hallmark interrupted the debate.

“I’ve already figured out what he’s going to do with the incendiary,” the pilot instructed. “I’m going to circle and come back and we’re gonna go over the target area and spread it all over.”

“Are you sure you’re not going to circle and go over the Imperial Palace?” Nielsen joked.

Hallmark leveled off and made his run. He then circled back; his total time over the target was just three minutes.

“We couldn’t miss from 1,500 feet,” Nielsen later wrote. “We saw the bombs explode, watched the smoke and fire and then circled.”

Hallmark’s first bomb detonated on the concrete road in front of Japan Steel Fuji Steelworks, blasting a crater some thirty feet wide. The explosion destroyed seven nearby homes and damaged eleven others, seriously injuring one person. The
Green Hornet
’s second bomb hit steelmaker Nippon Yakin Kogyo, tearing through the roof and denting the concrete floor. The massive explosion
blew apart the wooden building and took the roof and windows off the neighboring factory building. Alerted workers had begun to evacuate, though flying shrapnel cut some of them. Hallmark’s incendiary bomblets spread across a residential area 1,000 feet long and 150 feet wide. Sixty-nine of the explosives landed on homes, injuring three people. The others burned up on roads and in nearby fields, and Japanese investigators would count eleven duds.

Nielsen would later dispute Japanese charges that the
Green Hornet
strafed civilians on the ground, arguing that no one on board the bomber had ever even fired the machine guns. Nevertheless, postwar Japanese records would show that preschooler Yoshiro Nakamura was hit in the back and killed in the area where the bomber’s incendiary bomblets fell, possibly from bomb shrapnel or even antiaircraft fire.

Hallmark and his crew strained for a final glimpse of the damage as dark puffs of antiaircraft fire flooded the sky, turning white as the shells exploded.

“I didn’t feel any sort of emotion until we began to circle after we dropped our bombs,” Nielsen recalled. “But when we saw that we’d scored with our bombs we let go.”

“That’s a bulls-eye!” Hallmark yelled.

The others joined him to congratulate Dieter.

Hallmark dove down to just fifty feet and tore across the bay, joining his navigator in a duet of “We Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

The crew relaxed, the mission accomplished. “We felt good,” Nielsen wrote. “We figured the worst was over now.”

He was wrong.

FIRST LIEUTENANT TED LAWSON ROARED
ashore in the seventh bomber, the last one charged with bombing central Tokyo. He was surprised at how basic it looked. “I had an ingrained, picture-postcard concept of Japan. I expected to spot some snow-topped mountain or volcano first,” he wrote. “But here was land that barely rose above the surface of the water and, at our twenty feet of height, was hardly distinguishable.”

The beaches gave way to green fields and farms, carved into the landscape with an almost mathematical precision. Lawson realized that after nearly three weeks at sea—surrounded by grays and blues—the vibrant colors were a welcome change
. “The fresh spring grass was brilliantly green. There were fruit trees in bloom, and farmers working in their fields waved to us as we pounded just over their heads,” he wrote. “A red lacquered temple loomed before us, its coloring exceedingly sharp.”

Even Corporal David Thatcher, who manned the .50-caliber machine guns to ward off enemy fighters, couldn’t help stealing glances at the exotic landscape that raced beneath the bomber. “I saw quite a few good highways in Japan but no cars, only bicycles,” he wrote in his report. “As we passed over the rooftops the people in the fields and on the roads would stop whatever they were doing and look up at us. From the way they acted it seemed as though no Japanese planes ever flew that low.”

The
Ruptured Duck
buzzed a school. Children flooded out into the yard, many waving to the airmen. The calm scene was strangely disarming, until Lawson caught sight of the school’s flagpole. Fluttering in the warm April wind was the Japanese flag, the bright red sun plastered against the white background. “It was like getting hit in the chest very hard,” the pilot recalled. “This was for keeps.”

“Keep your eyes open, Thatcher,” he ordered.

“I’m looking.”

Lawson followed several valleys toward Tokyo, the surrounding hills hiding the twin-engine bomber. The minutes ticked past. Lawson, copilot Second Lieutenant Dean Davenport, and bombardier Robert Clever spotted six enemy fighters at the same time, racing toward them in two formations at fifteen hundred feet. The first buzzed overhead, followed by a second, though one fighter peeled off and started to dive.

“I saw him,” Thatcher assured his pilot.

Lawson asked whether he wanted to power up the turret.

“No,” he replied, “wait awhile.”

With each second, Lawson grew more fearful.

“I don’t know what the dickens happened to him,” Thatcher finally announced. “I think he must have gone back in the formation.”

The
Ruptured Duck
crested a hill, then swooped down on Tokyo Bay, skimming the surface at just fifteen feet.

“Nowhere was there any evidence of a warning,” recalled McClure, the navigator. “Shipping lay in the harbor. We passed close to an aircraft
carrier which looked almost deserted—not a plane on deck. We could have bombed it with ease. But we didn’t. Our orders were to hit specific targets and we passed up everything else.”

Lawson closed in on the Japanese capital, charging over wharves and docks that crowded the shore. Through the cockpit he saw the city stretched out before him. “In days and nights of dreaming about Tokyo and thinking of the eight millions who live there, I got the impression that it would be crammed together, concentrated, like San Francisco. Instead it spreads all over creation, like Los Angeles,” Lawson wrote. “There is an aggressively modern sameness to much of it.”

The aircrew spied several large fires from previous attacks and a smoky haze settled over northeastern Tokyo. The antiaircraft fire thundered as Lawson pulled up to fourteen hundred feet, executing a run west from the waterfront toward the Imperial Palace. Though tasked to bomb Nippon Machine Works, Clever instead sighted a factory almost half the size of a city block with several 100-foot chimneys.

The red light on Lawson’s instrument panel flashed as the first demolition bomb plummeted toward Tokyo, landing in a canal next to a Japan Steel Piping factory and causing only minor damage. Clever sighted two more factories. The red light flashed again and again. The second bomb exploded atop a pile of coke, an important fuel used in steel mills, while the third landed nearby with little damage.

Clever took a final look down the Mark Twain sight, releasing his incendiary bomb over Japan Steel Piping’s shipbuilding factory. The explosives scattered across an area that measured some nine hundred feet by two hundred. Others came down on roofs and sparked fires, which sand bucket brigades raced to extinguish. All told, the attack injured four people, two seriously, with most suffering burns to the arms and legs.

The
Ruptured Duck
blew past the emperor’s home, the towering walls and greensward visible to the airmen in the cockpit. McClure flipped on his movie camera to capture the damage done by Doolittle and his men. “I became disgusted when I noticed little specks of dirt on the camera lens. What a time, I thought, for a lens to show up dirty,” he wrote. “I took the camera from my eye and saw what the trouble was. Those weren’t dust specks but the bursts of antiaircraft shells.”

The batteries on the ground below zeroed in on
the
Ruptured Duck
. Thatcher saw one burst just off the right wing about the same time Lawson dove to escape.

“That’s flak—flak,” the airmen shouted in unison. “Let’s get out of here.”

A BRITISH PROFESSOR AT
the University of Tokyo—and one of the few English subjects the Japanese had not interned—John Morris was wandering that Saturday afternoon down the Ginza, Tokyo’s main shopping boulevard, when an air-raid alarm suddenly screamed. Morris assumed it was a routine noontime drill, until he looked up and saw an American bomber tear through the skies overhead, the plane’s insignia clearly visible. He saw no Japanese fighters, though minutes later he heard the distant roar of antiaircraft fire over the city’s suburbs. The puzzled Englishman looked around at other shoppers. “There was not the slightest sign of panic,” Morris later wrote. “The police halted the traffic, but nobody made any attempt to take shelter; the general sentiment was one of bewildered interest, everybody wondering what was going to happen next.”

Morris’s experience proved far from unique. The raid had managed to catch most Tokyo residents completely unaware. The attack by sixteen bombers on a city spread across more than two hundred square miles meant few of the capital’s nearly seven million residents would witness firsthand the raid’s destruction, though many would see the enemy marauders either en route to targets or afterwards. The low-flying bombers that hedgehopped over homes, restaurants, and businesses prompted people to press against windows, while others ran out into the streets for a better look. “Most of the people did not believe it, thinking it was just another drill,” remembered Bruno Bitter, a Catholic priest at Tokyo Sophia University. “But when they learned it was a real raid, nobody could hold them back to go outside, to climb the roofs or the chimneys to get a better view. In other words, it was a thrill rather than a frightening event.”