Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (23 page)

Yamamoto saw in this wind-ravaged coral atoll not only the perfect launch pad for the eventual seizure of Hawaii but a priceless piece of Pacific real estate he knew America would never surrender. He green-lighted the plan to grab Midway, setting the stage for what he was sure would be a bitter fight with the Naval General Staff in Tokyo. Yamamoto sent Captain Kameto Kuroshima and Commander Yasuji Watanabe to Tokyo to press his case in a three-day session that began April 2, the same day the
Hornet
left California. Senior officers with the Naval General Staff believed America’s eventual offensive drive would not come across the central Pacific but up from Australia, where the United States and its allies could amass bombers, warships, and troops on Japan’s southern perimeter. Rather than risk resources on a quixotic hunt for a few flattops, officers favored seizing New Caledonia, Samoa, and the Fiji Islands, a move that would sever America’s vital communication lines with its ally down under.

Captain Sadatoshi Tomioka and Commander Tatsukichi Miyo spearheaded the Naval General Staff’s skillful attack on the Midway operation, an attack the men feared risked dangerous overextension in exchange for little strategic reward. Miyo argued tearfully at times that the United States had no doubt learned a valuable lesson on December 7. The Americans had likely reinforced Hawaii and now diligently tracked Japanese fleet movements, refusing to be caught off guard again. The atoll’s proximity to Hawaii furthermore gave the United States the clear tactical advantage. While Japan would have to fight more than two thousand miles east of Tokyo and depend largely on its exhausted carrier forces, the United States could flood the waters with submarines and the skies with Hawaii-based bombers. Furthermore, there was no guarantee that America would even risk its precious carriers to protect Midway. Why not let Japan capture the austere atoll, then strangle it by blockade, making it impossible to reinforce?

Even if Japan managed to capture
Midway, Miyo argued, what strategic value did the tiny atoll really offer? An advancing American armada could easily bypass the limited range of Midway air patrols. Furthermore, the atoll was so far from the West Coast that its capture would have a negligible effect on the morale of the American public. As the debate dragged on over several days, it became clear that Yamamoto’s plan had less grounding in large-scale tactical goals and more in his fixation on destroying America’s carriers. “One wonders whether C. in C. Yamamoto appreciated just how ineffective aerial reconnaissance using Midway as a base would be,” Miyo wrote in an article published after the war. “Had he really taken into thorough account the enormous drain on resources and difficulty in maintaining supplies on such an isolated island, or the reduction in air strength necessary in other areas in order to keep it up, and the influence on the fleet’s operational activities?”

With both sides reluctant to budge, Watanabe phoned Yamamoto for instruction on April 5. The admiral made it clear he planned to dictate, not negotiate. Japan would either seize Midway, or he would resign. “The success or failure of our entire strategy in the Pacific will be determined by whether or not we succeed in destroying the United States Fleet,” he warned in a final statement. “We believe that by launching the proposed operations against Midway, we can succeed in drawing out the enemy’s carrier strength and destroying it in decisive battle.” Yamamoto had made a similar threat when faced with opposition over his plan to attack Pearl Harbor and the Naval General Staff had caved. Now this son of a former samurai warrior was more popular than ever. How could the Naval General Staff explain his sudden resignation? Rear Admiral Shigeru Fukudome, who headed the Naval General Staff’s plans division, knew Yamamoto had again won. “If the C. in C.’s so set on it,” he said, “shall we leave it to him?”

Miyo lowered his head and wept.

CHAPTER 8

We shall not begrudge our enemies the impressive victories which exist in their imaginations and in the ether waves of their radios.

—
JAPAN TIMES & ADVERTISER
, FEBRUARY 8, 1942

LIEUTENANT STEPHEN JURIKA JR.
met Doolittle and his men on board the
Hornet
to brief them about what to expect in the skies over Tokyo and Japan. Few in the Navy could compete with the thirty-one-year-old’s expertise. Jurika had grown up in the Philippines, where his father had settled after the Spanish-American War, operating a plantation on Sibuco Bay, on the southwestern tip of the island of Mindanao. His adolescence was filled with exotic tales most children found only in adventure books. He had learned to swim and sail in azure seas infested with sharks, hunted cobras that nested in abandoned coconut shells, and even shot crocodiles in leech-infested swamps. The ethnic diversity of his childhood friends reflected the Philippines’ historical role as the crossroads of Asia—a mix of Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese, all languages Jurika picked up. As he grew older, his parents sought to further broaden his experience, sending him to boarding school in the Japanese city of Kobe and later in Shanghai, China.

When Jurika finished high school at fourteen, his father encouraged him to attend Stanford University
, hoping he would return to the Philippines to run the family business, but Jurika balked. He had wanted to be a naval officer since he was a child, but even though he was an American citizen, he had no congressman or senator who could appoint him to Annapolis. Jurika had no choice but to enlist, serve two years, and then sit for the academy’s entrance exam. He faked his age and joined the Navy at just fifteen. Jurika went on to graduate from the Naval Academy in 1933 and to serve on the cruisers
Louisville
and
Houston
, playing bridge on the latter against his commander in chief during Roosevelt’s 1934 voyage to Latin America. Jurika later earned his wings, flying torpedo bombers for several years off the carrier
Saratoga
. The head of naval intelligence wrote Jurika in 1939, asking whether he was interested in serving as an assistant naval attaché in Tokyo. Jurika jumped at the opportunity.

The few attachés worked out of the embassy, collecting intelligence on the Japanese Navy. Much of the information came from open sources, ranging from newspaper articles to the Navy’s annual ship construction budget, debated each year in parliament. Other times Jurika traveled south to Kobe to surreptitiously photograph the launches of new ships, reserving a fourth-floor room at the Oriental Hotel with a view of Mitsubishi’s sprawling shipyard, which employed a wartime peak of almost 23,000 workers to hammer out freighters, submarines, and naval auxiliaries. Every three months the attaché hopped an American President Line ship south to the Philippines to log his required hours in a cockpit, persuading the skippers en route to steam near Japanese shipyards, which often used scaffolding and netting to block views from shore. Other days Jurika attended air shows—he once got to sit in the cockpit of a Mitsubishi Zero fighter—or played golf next to air stations so he could clock takeoffs and landings.

As the war in China raged—and tensions between Japan and America increased—authorities ramped up efforts to crack down on American spying. Military police interrogated Japanese guests who had visited the homes of the attachés, a move that discouraged locals from befriending the Americans. Meanwhile, police began to shadow the military diplomats. When Lieutenant Commander Henri Smith-Hutton rode the train past the naval base at Kure, the attendant entered the compartment, lowered the shade, and demanded that the embassy’s senior naval attaché leave it shut. When the train stopped
in Hiroshima—home to a large Japanese Army base—attendants again lowered the shade, this time barring Smith-Hutton from even leaving the compartment. “Tokyo is really a city of the living dead; so different from last year!” Jurika wrote in an October 1940 letter. “Most of the American and British women and some of the men have gone, and now everyone else is packing or about to pack.”

Despite the added challenges, Jurika soldiered on, broadening his sleuthing into an area that would make him a vital asset to Doolittle’s mission. “As an aviator I was interested in more than just ships,” he recalled. “I became interested in targets.” Oil depots, chemical plants, and blast furnaces—the beating heart of any steel mill. The industrial might that powered a nation and its war machine, Jurika knew, would prove the Achilles’ heel in a life-and-death struggle—and in Japan’s capital and sprawling suburbs, the studious attaché found such industry everywhere. “Each time I drove from Tokyo down toward Yokohama, going through the fantastic industrial district of Kawasaki, I would take a different route and go by the petro-chemical factories, the chemical factories, the iron and steel mills, and see for myself where these big things were located, factories that covered hundreds of acres,” Jurika said. “It was really unending, just one succession of one big factory after another, all the way down.”

Jurika and his colleagues realized in the summer of 1940 that they had no target maps of Japan or its principal industries. Some of that information, the officers discovered, was available through books and commercial brochures, published by steel mills, silk factories, and shipyards. The intelligence officers collected detailed land maps—printed by the Japanese government—that pinpointed homes, roads, and principal thoroughfares. Armed with the commercial data, the officers fleshed out the maps, labeling important industries and even specific buildings. “We started to fill in a host of what we considered primary targets, first, in the Tokyo area, and then on down through Kawasaki to Yokohama, where we identified the shipbuilding, the tank farms for fuel oil and gasoline, some major wharves, bridges that were strategic in the sense that the main Tokkaido line would cross, or tunnels where bombs could be dropped and possibly obstruct traffic for a considerable period.”

But the American naval attachés, more accustomed to sizing up new ships and armament, struggled
to complete the target maps, prompting Jurika to turn to an unlikely ally—the Russians. Though the Soviet attachés largely kept to themselves, despite Tokyo’s vibrant diplomatic social scene, Jurika managed to befriend assistant Russian naval attaché Ivan Egoricheff one day on a local tennis court, scoring an invitation to lunch. When Jurika arrived at the Russian embassy, Egoricheff escorted him to his office, seating him next to a potted palm as he handed him a glass of straight vodka. Jurika took a few reluctant sips of his noontime cocktail, watching as his host downed his own drink. “When he went over to fill his,” Jurika remembered, “I dumped mine into the flower pot.” Egoricheff repeatedly refilled both drinks, and Jurika continued to feed his to the palm, never drinking more than a quarter of his vodka. “By the time I’d had one drink,” Jurika recalled, “he’d had four.”

Over lunch the officers complained about how difficult it was to pick up any real intelligence in Japan.

“We know that you get along much better with the Japanese than we do,” Egoricheff observed.

Jurika insisted he must be joking. After all, America was on the verge of war with Japan. “Do you read the newspapers?” Jurika asked.

The Russian officer confessed that he didn’t believe the papers. Despite the tensions between the two governments, Egoricheff repeated his view that American attachés enjoyed friendlier relationships with the Japanese and had better intelligence on the Imperial Navy. But maybe there was something America needed. What did Jurika want in exchange for details on Japanese ships?

Without compromising his hours of spying on launches and timing takeoffs, Jurika knew he could hand over information on the Japanese Navy he had culled from newspapers and magazines, all unclassified open-source intelligence that was available to anyone willing to dedicate the time to hunt for it.

“Well,” Jurika said, “I’ve only recently begun to think in terms of some future day when we might want to know the location of a tank farm or shipbuilding or something like that.”

“Ah,” the Russian attaché replied. “We have all that information down. We’ve been collecting that type of information for years.”

That was the news Jurika wanted to hear.

“I’ll give you what you want to know
,” Egoricheff continued. “Where do you want to start?”

Jurika’s answer was simple: Tokyo.

ANCHORED AT THE HEAD
of Tokyo Bay and in the shadow of majestic Mount Fuji—an active volcano rising to more than twelve thousand feet—spread the sprawling capital of the empire of Japan. Tokyo served not only as the national seat of government and power but also as Japan’s great commercial, industrial, transportation, and communications center, with the nation’s top hospitals, universities, department stores, museums, and theaters. According to the 1940 census, the population had hit 6,778,804, making Tokyo home to one out of every ten Japanese and the third-largest city in the world, behind only London and New York. Divided into thirty-five wards, Tokyo stretched out across more than two hundred square miles; the density in some wards topping more than 100,000 people per square mile—a figure almost ten times that of Washington, D.C.