Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (33 page)

First Lieutenant Carl Wildner, the navigator, had set a course upon takeoff of 272 degrees, virtually due west. Following that heading meant Hoover should have come ashore over a rocky promontory topped by the Inubo Saki lighthouse, but instead he looked down on white sandy beaches that stretched for miles. Wildner knew this was bad.

Real Bad.

So did Hoover.

“What’ll I do?” the pilot asked.

All Wildner could suggest was to follow Doolittle.

Wildner scanned his maps and peered out the window, desperate for any clue of his location. He had ended up as a navigator only after he had washed out of pilot training. The experience had left him with a major inferiority complex. With each passing minute—and as the plane plunged blindly deeper into Japan—his fears mounted. “In all my life I have never felt so helpless,” he wrote. “We passed over rice paddies, streams and a few temples but I couldn’t identify a single landmark on my maps. I knew the maps had been made up from very poor information but it seemed to me that the maps I was holding were of another part of the world. Nothing matched.”

Unsure of his position, Hoover opted to trail his commander, zigzagging west across the rural landscape at an altitude of barely a hundred feet. The airmen remained surprised at the lack of concern. Despite the battle with the
Nitto Maru
, coupled with sightings of various other ships and planes, Japan seemed oblivious to the inbound aerial armada. Even the military bases the bomber buzzed appeared not to be on alert.

“There were no pursuit planes or anti-aircraft,” Wildner wrote in his report. “The populace had shown no alarm at our coming.”

“The people that I observed on the ground,” added Richard Miller, the bombardier, “casually looked up and watched us go by.”

His plane armed with three
500-pound demolition bombs and one incendiary, Hoover had orders to target a powder factory and magazines near a bend in the Sumida River. “Nothing of military importance was observed until we reached the outskirts of northern Tokyo,” he noted in his report. “I recognized the Sumida River and immediately turned west along it toward our target. We started the climb.”

Hoover scanned the congested riverbanks below but failed to spot the powder factory where the map indicated it. He hustled to pick an alternative target, spotting two factory buildings and storehouses near the river. The entire area was congested with small buildings, which would no doubt burn.

Perfect.

“There’s our target,” Hoover shouted.

Hoover didn’t have time to pull up to fifteen hundred feet, so he leveled off at nine hundred. Second Lieutenant Richard Miller raced to set up the shot, unaware Hoover had swapped out the targets. “I spotted a large factory with several small warehouses around it which fit the description of our target,” he wrote in his report. “I immediately opened the bomb-bay doors and took a very quick aim at the center of the large factory and released all four of my bombs at half-second intervals by means of the manual release switch.”

“Bombs away,” Miller yelled as he closed the doors. “Let’s get out of here.”

Hoover banked the plane just as the bombs detonated. At less than nine hundred feet, the explosions jolted the crew, hurling debris as much as one hundred feet above the low-flying plane. “The concussion of the three demolition bombs,” Wildner later noted in his report, “lifted us before I realized that they had been dropped.”

Even Richard Cole, Doolittle’s copilot in the skies several miles away, saw debris cloud the air, while gunner Paul Leonard in the turret thought the blast would bring down Hoover’s plane.

But Hoover survived, roaring through the smoke and debris. The massive explosions near an Asahi Electrical Manufacturing Corporation factory would level or set ablaze thirty-eight buildings, all but eight completely destroyed. Fifty-two homes were lost and fourteen others damaged. The blast blew one woman out of her second-floor; miraculously she landed unhurt in the street atop a tatami mat.

Ten others would not be so lucky
, including several who burned to death in collapsing houses. The attack injured another forty-eight people, thirty-four seriously. Ruptured water lines hindered efforts to fight the fires, as did the low tide of the Sumida River, which made it difficult for firefighters to pump water. Investigators would later measure two bomb craters thirty feet wide and fifteen feet deep.

“I looked back and saw about half of our target covered with black smoke,” Staff Sergeant Douglas Radney, who manned the .50-caliber machine-gun turret, wrote in his report. “Near the base of the target there were flames and smoke.”

The anxious airmen in the front of the bomber asked Radney whether he had seen the explosions.

“Yes, sir,” the gunner informed Hoover. “All four hit close together and there’s smoke all over the area. We got it all right!”

“OK, gang, hold your hats,” Hoover announced over the interphone. “We’re going down.”

The pilot pushed the bomber into such a steep dive that loose items floated upward, along with Wildner’s stomach. “I glanced at the airspeed indicator and saw that it was close to the redline,” the navigator later wrote. “Outside all I could see were rooftops—millions of them.”

The bomber skimmed barely thirty feet above the city’s rooftops until Hoover spied a power line dead ahead.

“Over or under it?” he asked

“You better not go under,” Wildner shot back, before instructing Hoover to ease back on the gas. China was still a long way to go.

“I want to get out of here fast.”

FIRST LIEUTENANT GRAY TORE ACROSS
the Japanese coastline fifteen miles south of the Inubo Saki lighthouse and due east of Yokohama at 1:35 p.m.—some twenty minutes after Doolittle and Hoover had attacked.

The bombers had lifted off from the
Hornet
at average intervals of only 3.9 minutes, but mechanical troubles and navigational errors had slowed the aerial armada’s advance across the Pacific. This respite of as much as half an hour had given the Japanese vital time to recover from the shock. Air-raid sirens sounded throughout Tokyo at approximately 12:35 p.m. local time, while pilots scrambled
into fighters and troops manned antiaircraft batteries. The element of surprise had vanished.

Gray roared across the Boso Peninsula, the arm of land that curled south and protected Tokyo Bay from the Pacific. The aircrew spied men in blue uniforms in the hills before the bomber reached the bay, approaching the capital from the southeast. Gray’s route into the city would lead him across the flank of the antiaircraft batteries that covered the Tokyo’s waterfront, a dangerous course he would then have to retrace on his escape. Gray’s journey was made all the more perilous in that Doolittle had flown over his targets, no doubt alerting ground forces.

The flak thundered as Gray charged across the bay, the puffs of smoke creating a trail through the skies toward his targets: a steel mill, chemical factory, and gas company in the densely populated industrial district northwest of the palace.

“They’re shooting at us,” exclaimed copilot Shorty Manch, making what his fellow fliers would later joke was a brilliant observation.

Gray pressed on through the flak and climbed to 1,450 feet; ten miles east an oil tank appeared to burn.

“Dropped our bombs in four individual runs,” wrote Sergeant Aden Jones, the bombardier. “Then hit the deck and got the hell out of there.”

Gray didn’t see the first bomb hit, but he felt the concussion. He believed he scored direct hits with his second and third attacks against the gas company and chemical works, the latter appearing to set the entire factory ablaze. He scattered his lone incendiary bomb over a densely populated small-factories district. Second Lieutenant Charles Ozuk Jr.,
Whiskey Pete
’s navigator, peered out the window, later describing the scene in his report. “Observed heavy smoke from the target area.”

Gray had scored a direct hit on the Japan Diesel Manufacturing Corporation, the bomb tearing through the timber roof of warehouse no. 3 and punching an eighteen-centimeter dent in the concrete floor before detonating. Employees had scattered for lunch, and no one had sounded the air-raid alarm. The massive explosion killed twelve workers and injured another eighty-eight, including forty-seven seriously. The attack leveled the warehouse and damaged eight other buildings, sparking a fire in warehouse no. 2 that crews eventually extinguished. Another one of his bombs partly destroyed two additional buildings and injured nine people. Gray’s incendiary bomblets spread out over a largely civilian area, destroying four buildings containing
twenty-seven homes. One of those was the Sanrakuso apartment building and another a clothing factory dormitory.

Gray immediately began evasive maneuvers to throw off the heavy antiaircraft fire as he banked sharply right and began his retreat.

Jones manned the .30-caliber nose gun, opening fire on the buildings and streets a thousand feet below; the distinct rattle of the machine gun filled the cockpit. Ozuk saw some of the tracers tear into wooden buildings below, appearing to set some on fire. Jones then set his sights on what appeared to be a factory complete with an air defense surveillance tower perched atop the roof. “I saw fifteen to twenty bodies which had fallen as if they were hit by our bombardier’s fire,” Ozuk wrote in his report. “The rest of the men just scattered and ran in all directions.”

Sadly, those weren’t men.

Teachers at Mizumoto Primary School had earlier dismissed the students for the day, though many of the children remained behind to help clean classrooms. About 150 of the students had started to walk home moments before Gray’s plane thundered in the skies overhead and Jones squeezed the trigger of his machine gun, blasting the first and second floors of the school.

Terrified students ran back toward the school, where teacher Yukiteru Furusawa directed them into the classrooms for shelter. High school freshman Minosuke Ishide suddenly collapsed. Furusawa thought the boy had stumbled and helped others into a classroom, returning minutes later to find Ishide still on the floor. He examined the boy and realized he had been shot, a hole visible through one of the glass window planes. “This student was immediately taken to another room and it was found that his pulse was very weak,” Furusawa recalled. “The student died on the way to the hospital which was about one hour and fifteen minutes after being hit by the bullet.”

FIRST LIEUTENANT EVERETT HOLSTROM
, at the controls of the fourth bomber to take off from the
Hornet
, felt apprehensive as he approached Japan. One of his wing tanks leaked, the .50-caliber machine guns didn’t work, and he was the last bomber in the first wave of attacks aimed at northern Tokyo, meaning that local air defenses
would no doubt be on high alert. He decided his only hope was to outsmart the Japanese.

He instructed his navigator to make landfall just south of the capital, a move he believed would allow him to slip past any fighters that might anticipate more attacks from the east. Holstrom had flown due west all morning without realizing the bomber’s compass was off as much as fifteen degrees. He made landfall at just seventy-five feet on a small group of islands south of Tokyo.

Far south.

A check of the map revealed the bomber’s position 75 miles south of the capital, a finding that would add 150 miles to his trip. Holstrom soldiered on, however, banking north toward Tokyo. If the Japanese jumped the bomber, he told his men, he planned to dump the bombs and run. Holstrom’s orders called for him to bomb a powder magazine and clothing depot in northern Tokyo. He would never reach those targets coming up from the south, so he decided to drop his three demolition bombs and one incendiary on alternate targets—an oil storage tank farm and troop barracks.

Holstrom’s hope to outsmart the Japanese backfired. The outbound bombers raced out to sea, followed by Japanese fighters. Holstrom flew straight toward them—in a plane low on gas and without workable .50-caliber machine guns.

Copilot Lucian Youngblood was climbing back to transfer the last of the fuel from the bomb bay to the wing tank, when Holstrom spotted the first two fighters over Sagami Bay, the scenic body of water southwest of Tokyo. He shouted for Youngblood to return to his seat as he immediately banked under them. “The red dots on their wings looked as big as barns,” Youngblood wrote in his diary. “We were really in a spot.”

One of the fighters opened fire.

Holstrom watched as tracer bullets zinged over the cockpit.

“When I saw 7.7-millimeter bullets bouncing off our wing,” he recalled, “I figured the hell with this!”

Youngblood spotted two more fighters zoom past the bow at fifteen hundred feet.

“I made up my mind that we should try to escape,” Holstrom wrote. “I thought that if we continued, it was a certainty that we would be shot down.”

Holstrom ordered the bombardier
to dump the ordnance. Sergeant Robert Stephans opened the bomb bay doors, placed the arming hammer in the safe position, and salvoed the weapons at an altitude of just seventy-five feet. Holstrom’s four eggs vanished into the water below. He turned south to outrun the fighters.

The crew felt depressed.

“It’s kind of a sickening feeling,” navigator Harry McCool recalled. “There’s all this effort for nothing.”

CAPTAIN DAVY JONES CHARGED
ashore north of the Inubo Saki lighthouse at just fifty feet above the waves, with Dean Hallmark and Ted Lawson close behind. These three pilots made up the second wave of bombers tasked to pummel central Tokyo. Jones throttled up to 200 miles per hour as he punched inland, but when the expected enemy fighters failed to materialize, he slowed to 180 miles per hour.

His relief over his lack of opposition soon gave way to a more pressing concern. Fields, streets, and villages raced beneath the bomber’s belly as Jones and his crew searched for landmarks that might help orient them. Five minutes turned into ten before Jones had to make a painful confession: “We didn’t know where in the hell we were.”