A Fresh Look At The Doolittle Raid

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News reporting is often described as the first draft of history, but for events as momentous as World War II, there may never be a final draft. Decades after the fact, what my parents and my generation knew as simply “the war” continues to generate ever more detailed histories and analysis, as new records come to light and historians employ new methods to find and cross-reference this material for a fresh look.

One such work is a new book on the 1942 carrier-borne attack on Tokyo led by Jimmy Doolittle, a raid that forever after bore his name. The topic has never lacked for attention; I count at least nine books on the subject, plus mention in countless others. James M. Scott’s Target Tokyo builds on the research that went before it and, in exhaustive detail, paints a vivid portrait of the Doolittle raid, its origins, the tactical planning and execution and the overarching effect the raid had, told from both the U.S. and Japanese perspective.

At 648 pages, Target Tokyo will probably stand as the landmark work on the Doolittle raid. Most of us know the story well enough to recite at least the outlines of the raid, but Scott has drilled deeply into the record to reveal details I’ve never read elsewhere. I can’t list them all here, but I found several surprises in the book. One was that post-attack Japanese news reports had claimed the raiders bombed schools and hospitals, something I always took to be Japanese propaganda. But Scott’s review of contemporaneous Japanese records revealed that the raid did cause casualties in schools and hospitals, including Doolittle’s own bombs. That was, of course, unintentional and what we describe today by the discordantly sterile term “collateral damage.”

I also never realized that the Japanese were fully aware that the bombers were on their way to Japan. Some previous histories were vague about whether the patrol trawler the U.S. task force encountered, the hapless Nitto Maru, got off radio warnings before it was sunk by the Navy. Post-action review, classified at the time, left no doubt. The Navy monitored continuous radio transmissions from the trawler for 27 minutes until the ship was sunk. And the Navy had such a time of it, that skipper of the U.S.S. Nashville, a light cruiser, was mortified that 915 rounds were fired at the Nitto, without a hit. Aircraft from the U.S.S. Enterprise sunk the trawler with gunfire.

The 16 carrier-launched B-25s each carried only a ton of bombs, a mix of incendiaries and general purpose ordnance. The raid has often been described as a militarily insignificant pinprick, and while that’s true, the raiders did more damage than I had understood. No fewer than 112 buildings were destroyed and 53 damaged. One of the incendiary-set fires burned for 48 hours, a fact that would portend of worse to come—much worse—when B-29 fire raids commenced in earnest in early 1945. Curiously, in this long form podcast, author Scott told me that those devastating B-29 raids could have destroyed the very records he relied on to examine the Doolittle mission from the Japanese perspective. Luckily, many appear to have survived and Scott relied on a translator to review them.

Even some U.S. records of the raid have been obscure or classified until recently. One of these was a detailed accounting of the raid assembled by Merian Cooper in Chunking, immediately after the raid. “Cooper is one of the fascinating characters in this time period. He was the director of King Kong, the original movie from the 1930s … he ends up being brought in as the briefing officer for the raiders in China. His job was to sit down with each of these raiders and to take their statements,” Scott says. The result was 300 pages of fresh eyewitness accounts never used in previous books on the raid. These records may represent the best accounts of the raid itself.

Scott writes that Japanese records reveal that the raid had consequences far beyond bombed buildings and fires. The Japanese military had assured the population that the country could never be attacked because in two millennia, it had not been. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, knew different and was so shocked and depressed by the Doolittle raid he retired to his flagship cabin for several days.

Yamamoto later used reverberations from the raid to argue for the Japanese assault on Midway, which the Japanese army had been cool to. Obsessed with the destruction of the U.S. Pacific fleet, Yamamoto prevailed and the tipping point of the Pacific war followed in June of 1942 when the Japanese suffered a crushing defeat. History is replete with what-ifs, but had Japan not attacked Midway, the war certainly would have spiraled in a different direction.

These discussions and more are covered in fascinating detail by Scott, in a book that almost reads like a historical novel. History isn’t often chronicled in page-turners, but Scott has definitely written one. Anyone interested in World War II history will want it for the bookshelf. Hear my conversation with James Scott about the research and writing of Target Tokyo here.

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