Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (24 page)

But Tokyo proved an urban planner’s nightmare. Factories, homes, and stores were all crowded together. Areas classified industrial turned out to be densely populated, while homes often doubled as workshops. Visitors complained that the layout of city blocks failed to conform to any decipherable plan, complicated by the fact that streets often went unnamed, forcing residents to direct one another via nearby major intersections. A further challenge emerged from the city’s practice of numbering properties not on the basis of a geographical sequence along a street but by the order constructed. A residence built on the site of a demolished property would retain the original address, a procedure that only exacerbated the confusion as Tokyo’s density soared. One street had no fewer than a dozen homes—all with the exact same street number.

These quirks complicated navigation in a city that on the war’s eve counted a staggering 1,057,921 homes, shops, schools, and government buildings. A network of buses, electric trains, and even a subway—albeit with only nine miles of lines—shuttled an army of commuters throughout the teeming capital. Workers at more than 45,000 factories and small workshops churned out products ranging from textiles and ceramics to machines and tools. There were two dozen banks in Tokyo, and the port welcomed an average of fifty ships each
day. Wealthy patrons strolled along the Ginza—Japan’s tony shopping avenue, dubbed the Broadway of Tokyo—where stores whisked customers between floors on escalators and in high-speed elevators. Others flocked to motion picture palaces that competed against traditional Kabuki and Noh theaters.

The Imperial Palace occupied the heart of this congested city. Protected by wide moats, ancient walls, and towering pines, the 531-acre compound and home of the forty-year-old emperor Hirohito was the largest open space in all of Tokyo, eloquently described by one American newspaper reporter as “a piece of heaven in which dwells a god in human form.” A few blocks south sat the Imperial Diet, a Western-style political palace that housed Japan’s bicameral legislature. Workers toiled for nineteen years to complete the $8.5 million parliament building—hailed as Japan’s largest public structure—with 390 rooms spread across 597,000 square feet. The marble walls, carpeted corridors, and numbered elevators—as well as a central tower capped with a pyramid—prompted reporters to compare the Diet to Madison Avenue’s Metropolitan Life Insurance Building and the Bankers Trust Company skyscraper on Wall Street.

But Japan’s transformation from isolated island nation to modern power proved far from complete. New arrivals accustomed to the magnificent ports of San Francisco and New York found themselves underwhelmed—if not outright appalled—by the capital’s rough and unpolished appearance. Tokyo represented a dichotomy, a city that straddled centuries with a wealthy Western veneer of shiny offices and wide boulevards loosely covering a primitive and agrarian past. How could a nation strong enough to seize control of one-tenth of the globe still have open sewers in some districts of its crowded capital? “It is a city old and new, backward and ultra-modern, Oriental and Occidental,” observed one American newspaper reporter. “Stately Buddhist temples rise serenely against a background of smoke stacks. Shiba Park boasts the temples and tombs of the Shoguns as well as a modern swimming pool.”

New York Times
correspondent Otto Tolischus, who arrived aboard the SS
Coolidge
at daybreak on February 7, 1941, captured in his diary his impressions of the roughly twenty-mile drive from Yokohama to downtown Tokyo, a city permeated by the nauseating odor of rotting fish. “Both sides of the road were lined with dirty, dilapidated, ramshackle wooden shops and shacks
, which had nothing in common with the pretty doll houses pictured in Japanese scenes at home. The people looked equally poverty-stricken. Most of them shuffled about in dirty kimonos or a bizarre array of Western dress, and most of them, though it was winter, walked about in bare feet shod in wooden clogs. Farmers, driving lumbering oxcarts, were completely in rags, sometimes covered with a raincoat made of straw. Ragged were also the innumerable children—tiny but chunky half-naked urchins,” Tolischus observed. “Shantytown! That was the only word I could find for the scene. I looked at my companions, who smiled; they had seen that astonished look on the faces of other new arrivals.”

More than four years of war with China had reduced the stream of imported luxuries to a trickle, replaced by a flood of tin boxes carrying the ashes of Japan’s war dead. Scrap drives, food rationing, and fuel shortages abounded as the nation diverted all resources to the war. Tokyo was not spared. Guests hiked up the stairs at the landmark Imperial Hotel—designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright—after the elevators stopped running in an effort to conserve electricity. The government discouraged travel and forbade dancing—an activity deemed out of touch with the nation’s wartime mood—shuttering the city’s eight large dance halls and more than one hundred nightclubs. Residents nursed rationed beers and guarded pet dogs and cats, often netted and killed for the promise of warm fur to insulate gloves. “I’ve seen housewives,” wrote
Wall Street Journal
reporter Ray Cromley, “wait in line all morning to get two carrots, in another line all afternoon to get one sardine, and go away bragging at their luck.”

American war planners knew that Tokyo made an especially inviting target for a surprise air attack for reasons far greater than the city’s role as Japan’s capital and hub of industry. Tokyo was cursed with an Achilles’ heel, a fatal design flaw laid bare before the world at two minutes before noon on September 1, 1923. That warm Saturday morning, as residents headed to beach and mountain getaways, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck. The ground swayed and groaned before a sudden roar raced across the city, the chorus of collapsing offices, hotels, and restaurants. Police in neighboring Yokohama estimated that the quake toppled no fewer than ten thousand structures—one out of every ten in the city. But the earthquake and the forty-foot tsunami that slammed ashore proved to be only the start of
Tokyo’s nightmare. Ruptured gas lines and toppled stoves triggered an inferno—fueled by the strong winds of an approaching typhoon—that feasted on the region’s dense mix of homes and shops built of little more than brittle wood and paper.

Terrified residents fled to the few parks as collapsing bridges and marching fires cut off exits. Some slathered their faces in mud to prevent their skin from burning, while sparks ignited the hair of other, less fortunate souls. Many dove into canals and ponds, only to drown among the tangled masses or boil as fires superheated the water. Of the 44,000 who had crowded onto the twenty-acre field of the Army Clothing Depot near Tokyo’s sumo stadium, only 300 survived, many consumed by the unique phenomenon of a fire tornado. Henry Kinney, editor of the monthly magazine
Trans-Pacific
, later described the horror he witnessed from a hilltop above. “Yokohama, the city of almost half a million souls, had become a vast plain of fire, of red, devouring sheets of flame which played and flickered. Here and there a remnant of a building, a few shattered walls, stood up like rocks above the expanse of flame, unrecognizable,” he wrote in the
Atlantic Monthly
. “It was as if the very earth were now burning.”

The conflagration that burned for forty-six hours destroyed Yokohama and most of Tokyo, claiming an estimated 140,000 lives—more than Japan lost in the Russo-Japanese War. Though an earthquake had triggered the 1923 fire, incendiary bombs could just as easily spark the next blaze. To limit the spread of fire, engineers added six major avenues—each 120 feet wide—and cut more than one hundred other streets through the dense city. Workers constructed several large parks and fifty smaller ones to serve as firebreaks and refuges for victims, while Tokyo’s newly rebuilt business district sported Western earthquake and fire-resistant technologies. But the lessons proved short-lived. The economic depression that dragged from 1927 to 1931 prompted officials to relax building regulations, a situation made even worse in 1938 when steel was banned for private construction. The Tokyo that Doolittle now set his sights on—much like the city destroyed nineteen years earlier—consisted of 98 percent wood and paper. “If you can start seven good fires,” Jurika promised the men, “they’ll never put them out.”

DOOLITTLE DEBATED THE BEST
plan of attack. One idea called for liftoff three hours before sunrise, which
would put the raiders over Tokyo at dawn. That would assure an element of surprise and guarantee the planes maximum security. Bomb conditions would be ideal and crews would have plenty of time to reach China before nightfall. The Navy’s refusal to light up the carrier at night—easy prey for any Japanese submarine—coupled with the uncertainty of taking off in the dark prompted Doolittle to abandon the plan. Another possible scenario called for a dawn liftoff, with the attack to take place early in the morning yet still allow enough time for crews to reach China before nightfall. Doolittle nixed this plan as well because it would force pilots to bomb during the day, exposing them to antiaircraft fire and fighters.

The plan Doolittle settled on called for a takeoff just before dark. He would lift off first and arrive over Tokyo at dusk, pummeling the most flammable sector of the city with incendiary bombs. The others would take off three hours later and use his fires to guide them into the city. This would allow the bombers to attack under the cover of darkness and arrive over China at dawn. Doolittle organized the fifteen planes into five waves of three bombers. Travis Hoover would lead the first flight and cover northern Tokyo. The second wave, under Davy Jones, would target the city’s center. Ski York would lead the third flight over southern Tokyo and the north-central part of the bay area. The fourth wave, led by Ross Greening, would hit the southern suburbs of Kanagawa, Yokohama, and the Yokosuka navy yard. Jack Hilger would lead the final wave, tasked to bomb the industrial cities of Nagoya, Osaka, and Kobe.

Doolittle spread the flights over a fifty-mile front, a move that would give the attack maximum coverage and create the appearance of a greater aerial armada than just sixteen bombers. Such a wide front would furthermore help ensure surprise, preventing two bombers from passing over the exact same points. The approach likewise would help dilute any subsequent countermeasures. Doolittle allowed the pilots to pick the target city. Folders were then handed out with selected objectives, from oil refineries and tank farms to steel plants, ammunition dumps, and dockyards. Each crew was assigned a primary target as well as alternatives in case flak or fighters barred them from reaching the principal target. “I spent more time than most of the other crews evaluating the total target selection,” Hilger recalled, “in order to assure a balance of targets that would do what we considered the
greatest damage to the Japanese.”

The fliers pored over the two-and-half-foot target maps, which showed highways, railroads, and even individual houses, while Jurika instructed them on major landmarks like the Tama River and the Diet. “Every outline of the coast which we were to approach was carefully studied and memorized,” navigator Charles McClure later wrote. “So were the silhouettes of the particular plants, rail yards, and other military objectives we were to strike.” Doolittle drilled his men hard. “We went over and over and over again the exact route that a ship should take,” he recalled, “what they should see; the points that would identify the approach to the target; what the pilot, the navigator and bombardier would see as they approached the target; the point at which they were to pull up to the proper altitude; the appearance of the targets.”

Much to Jurika’s frustration not all the raiders paid close attention. “A briefing would be set up for 8:30 in the morning, after breakfast, they would saunter in and the briefing scheduled for 8:30 wouldn’t start before 9:00 or 9:15, sometimes as late as 9:30,” he recalled. “And their attention span was very short, half an hour at the most. They would be interested up to a point, and yet, from my point of view, their lives were at stake. The success of a raid was at stake.” More than anyone else, Jurika understood the danger these men faced. “If they were captured dropping bombs on Japan, the chances of their survival would be awfully slim,” he warned. “I figured they would be, first of all, paraded through the streets as Exhibit A, and then tried by some sort of a kangaroo court and probably publicly beheaded. This seemed to settle them down quite a bit.”

Some of the raiders went so far as to cut a deck of cards to see who would bomb the Imperial Palace.

“We all wanted it,” Chase Nielsen recalled. “There wasn’t any of us had any love for the Japs. Besides that, we figured the Emperor was at the bottom of the whole thing and we wanted to get at the bottom of it all.”

Doolittle heard the scuttlebutt and immediately put a stop to it. “You are to bomb military targets only,” he ordered. “There is nothing that would unite the Japanese nation more than to bomb the emperor’s home. It is not a military target! And you are to avoid hospitals, schools, and other nonmilitary targets.”