The Doolittle Raid was the first American air attack on the Japanese home islands. On 18 April 1942, 16 B-25B bombers with 80 volunteer airmen under Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle took off from the carrier USS Hornet, bombed Tokyo and four other cities, and flew on toward China. Damage was slight; the shock was enormous.
Four months after Pearl Harbor, sixteen Army bombers roared off the pitching deck of a Navy carrier far out in the Pacific. Their crews knew they could not land back on the ship. Their only way home lay across Japan and on to airfields in China that most of them would never reach.
This is the story of that one-way mission: why it was flown, how a picket boat forced it off schedule, what became of its 80 men, and why the people of eastern China paid for it far more heavily than anyone in Japan or America.
Part of The greatest battles of the Pacific War · Before: The Attack on Pearl Harbor · Next: The Battle of the Coral Sea
Why strike Tokyo after Pearl Harbor
The attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 was followed by a run of Japanese victories. By spring 1942 American morale had slumped and the country badly wanted to strike back, but no land-based American bomber could reach Japan.
The idea came from a Navy submariner, Captain Francis Low1: fly Army medium bombers off a Navy carrier. Planners hoped for material damage, but above all for a psychological one, forcing Japan to keep forces at home and planting a fear complex in a nation told it could never be attacked.
The plan: Army bombers from a Navy carrier
The B-25 Mitchell was judged best suited. Tests off Norfolk showed it could take off from a carrier but hardly land back on one. So the bombers would launch east of Tokyo, strike their targets, and fly on about 1,600 miles to friendly airfields in China1. Vladivostok was ruled out because Stalin would not risk his neutrality with Japan.
Twenty-four B-25s and volunteer crews came from the 17th Bombardment Group. At Eglin Field in Florida the crews practised short take-offs under a Navy instructor, Lieutenant Henry L. Miller, along with low-level bombing and night navigation. Sixteen bombers, all that the deck could hold, were loaded aboard USS Hornet at Alameda on 31 March and 1 April 1942. Hornet then joined the carrier Enterprise in Task Force 16 under Vice Admiral William Halsey.
Spotted early: the launch on 18 April
Halsey had agreed to bring the bombers within about 400 miles of Japan. On the morning of 18 April, still about 650 miles out, the task force was found by a converted fishing trawler on picket duty, No. 23 Nitto Maru, which radioed a sighting report2 before the cruiser Nashville sank it. Nobody could be sure how much warning Tokyo now had.
Doolittle and Halsey faced a hard choice: cancel, or launch at once and risk running out of fuel before China. They launched. In heavy seas, with none of the pilots ever having flown a bomber off a carrier, all sixteen B-25s got airborne in a little over an hour, Doolittle's first.
Over Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya and Kobe
The bombers crossed the coast around midday, flying low and mostly singly. They hit oil storage, factory areas and military installations in Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya and Kobe, and some accounts add Osaka. Opposition was light and no bomber was shot down.
At Yokosuka one B-25's bombs damaged the carrier Ryuho, then under conversion2, and delayed her completion. Elsewhere the material damage was small. Japan had expected any carrier raid to come within about 200 miles; Army bombers launched from 650 miles out took the defences by surprise.
What happened to the 80 raiders
Short of fuel after the early launch, none of the fifteen bombers that headed for China reached its airfield. As night fell, crews bailed out in darkness, crash-landed or ditched along the coast. Corporal Leland Faktor was killed bailing out3, and two men of Lieutenant Dean Hallmark's crew drowned when their bomber went into the sea. Most of the rest were sheltered and guided to safety by Chinese villagers, guerrillas and missionaries4.
Captain Edward York's bomber, dangerously short of fuel, turned north and landed near Vladivostok. The Soviet Union, not at war with Japan, interned the five men; in May 1943 they slipped across the border into Iran5 and reached a British consulate.
Eight men of the Hallmark and Farrow crews fell into Japanese hands. They were tortured and tried on charges they were never told. On 15 October 1942 Lieutenants Dean Hallmark and William Farrow and Sergeant Harold Spatz were shot at Public Cemetery No. 1 outside Shanghai6. Lieutenant Robert Meder died in captivity on 1 December 19436. Robert Hite, George Barr, Chase Nielsen and Jacob DeShazer survived until their release in August 1945; after the war four Japanese officers were convicted for their treatment.
China pays the price: the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign
The heaviest cost of the raid fell on people who never saw a B-25 over Japan. Within days the Japanese army ordered a campaign against the airfields of Zhejiang (then Chekiang) and Jiangxi provinces, which had shown how bombers might reach the home islands. Survivors and missionaries described a second aim: to punish the towns and villages that had helped the airmen.
Over roughly three months in the summer of 1942, Japanese troops laid waste to some 20,000 square miles5, looting, burning and killing. People found with gifts from the raiders, a parachute, a glove, a coin, were tortured and killed. Japan's biological warfare Unit 731 spread disease as the army withdrew. Estimates of Chinese deaths run to around 250,000, a figure cited by the National Museum of the US Air Force and the National WWII Museum. It is an estimate, not a count, and no exact total exists.
How Americans and Japanese saw the raid
In the United States the news landed like a thunderclap. After months of defeat, morale soared. Doolittle received the Medal of Honor, and all 80 raiders received the Distinguished Flying Cross7.
In Japan the raid humiliated leaders who had promised the homeland would never be attacked. The press presented it as an indiscriminate bombing of civilians, and civilians did die: figures vary from a preliminary report of 12 dead to a post-war tally3 of 87, with several hundred injured, children among the dead. Each side remembered a different part of the truth.
Why the Doolittle Raid still matters
Militarily, the raid was a pinprick, yet its effects were real. Japan kept four army fighter groups at home through 1942 and 1943 to defend the home islands, when they were badly needed farther south. More important, the raid is commonly cited as hardening Japanese support for Admiral Yamamoto's plan to strike Midway. The Naval History and Heritage Command writes that it dissolved the residual doubts in the Naval General Staff2, and the reluctant army went along. Seven weeks later, at the Battle of Midway, Admiral Chester Nimitz and his carriers sank four Japanese carriers.
Set beside the greatest battles of the Pacific War, the raid shows something they do not: how a small operation can ripple far beyond its targets, and who pays. The last raider, Richard Cole, Doolittle's co-pilot, died on 9 April 2019 at the age of 1038. Each 18 April it deserves a place in any on this day in military history list.