Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (37 page)

FIRST LIEUTENANT BILL BOWER IN
the twelfth bomber came ashore north of Choshi, a city due east of Tokyo.
Bower and his crew struggled to orient themselves, so he flew an irregular course south, paralleling the coast of Japan anywhere from five to twenty miles inland toward a point east of Yokosuka.

Bower then hedgehopped, keeping the
Fickle Finger of Fate
just a few feet off the ground. “I became a busy boy trying to harvest the rice crop for the natives,” he wrote in his diary. “Pretty rough job flying at zero altitude.”

Despite the tough flying, Bower couldn’t help admiring the lush countryside. “Why on earth,” he wondered, “do they want war with us?”

Bower buzzed an airfield, interrupting a traffic pattern of as many as ten medium bombers preparing to land. East of the capital and near Sakura, the aircrew spotted a huge fire, Greening’s handiwork. Several fighters tailed the bomber, but never closed to within a thousand yards. When Bower neared Yokosuka, he banked west, flying south of the Kisarazu naval air station. “Ahead was the bay,” he wrote in his diary. “Down to the surface we went, mouths like glue, eyes wide open, and the target in sight.”

Bower’s orders were to blast the Yokohama dockyards. Barrage balloons encircled the target, making an attack impossible. He ordered Waldo Bither to pick another target. The bombardier settled on what he thought was an Ogura oil refinery—it was actually Japan Oil—as Bower leveled off at roughly eleven hundred feet. “About that time,” the pilot later wrote in his diary, “all hell broke lose.”

Antiaircraft shells exploded in the skies. Bower ignored the black clouds of smoke and pressed on toward his target. The red flight flashed.

“Bombs away,” Bither called out.

Bower banked the plane, and the red light flashed several more times. The total time to unload the bombs was just four seconds, which, with a speed of two hundred miles per hour, spread the destruction over a quarter-mile area. Bither watched the first tear through the roof of a warehouse near the docks, while another hit a railroad track that ran down between the two piers. He had aimed another at three oil storage tanks and thought he either hit them or came close as a massive black cloud suddenly enveloped the area. “I was watching through the driftmeter and saw them hit,” navigator Bill Pound later wrote. “There was no doubt but that a lot of work
was stopped on the docks that day.” Copilot Thad Blanton echoed Pound: “Our bombs were right on the nose.”

A postwar analysis would reveal that one of the bombs missed a massive Japan Oil tank by just thirty feet and an army oil tank by ninety, instead destroying six underground gas pipes and a steel-reinforced concrete wall. Workers dove inside a recently built, though not yet activated, furnace to escape. Two other bombs hit a Showa Electric factory, blasting roads inside the compound and leaving a crater eight feet deep and almost forty feet wide. The explosion hurled a sixteen-foot piece of rail line nearly two hundred feet, where it crashed into a roof of a nearby factory, while shrapnel tore into a hydrogen tank, triggering a fire. Several dozen incendiary bomblets fell across the Showa Electric factory and the neighboring Japan Steel Piping, destroying a two-story building. Some seventy other bomblets fell harmlessly in the canal that ran between the two factories; investigators would later collect thirteen unexploded ones. All told, Bower’s attack destroyed two buildings and damaged a third. No one was hurt or killed.

Bower dove back down, hedgehopping over rooftops toward the sea, dodging the dark bursts of antiaircraft fire. Only when the bomber buzzed the breakers did the fliers finally relax. “Because we were not allowed to smoke, I was chewing gum,” Pound wrote. “My mouth had become so dry that the gum got stuck all over the inside of my mouth and I felt I really had a mouth full of cotton.”

FIRST LIEUTENANT EDGAR M
c
ELROY,
the last one tasked to bomb the Tokyo suburbs, spotted the coastline in the distance at 1:30 p.m., and there he ordered bombardier Robert Bourgeois to ready the nose gun.

“Mac, I think we’re going to be about sixty miles too far north,” navigator First Lieutenant Clayton Campbell announced. “I’m not positive, but pretty sure.”

Campbell was close. The
Avenger
charged ashore about fifty miles north, prompting McElroy to turn back to sea and parallel the coastline south. The bomber buzzed many small fishing boats and at least four freighters before McElroy turned inland again at 2:20 p.m. The
Avenger
passed an airfield on the southeastern shore of Tokyo Bay. Antiaircraft guns thundered as Campbell pinpointed the bomber’s precise location. McElroy banked northwest and bore down on
the target: the Yokosuka naval station. “It was a thrilling sensation to see the sprawling metropolis below,” Bourgeois later wrote. “This was it, our answer for Pearl Harbor.”

Copilot Richard Knobloch spotted several cruisers anchored in the harbor, but the real prize, the airmen soon realized, was in the dry docks, where Japanese workers were converting the former submarine tender
Taigei
into a new 16,700-ton carrier,
Ryuho
. Bourgeois couldn’t believe how accurate his preparation was. “I had looked at the pictures on board the carrier so much that I knew where every shop was located at this naval base,” he later wrote. “It was as if it were my own backyard.”

McElroy pulled back on the controls and climbed to thirteen hundred feet, his speed two hundred miles per hour. “There were furious black bursts of antiaircraft fire all around us,” the pilot later wrote, “but I flew straight on through them, spotting our target, the torpedo works and the dry docks.”

“Get ready!” McElroy shouted.

Bourgeois opened the bomb bay doors as McElroy lined up for his east-to-west run over the base’s shops and building slips. Bourgeois stared down the rudimentary sight, knowing that the low altitude combined with the large target guaranteed success. “A blind man,” he later joked, “could have hit my target.”

The red light flashed again and again as Bourgeois dropped his three demolition bombs, followed by his single incendiary.

“Bombs away!” he shouted.

Knobloch had picked up a candid camera at the Sacramento Air Depot’s base exchange. He and Campbell now snapped pictures out of the cockpit and navigator’s side window, the only ones that would survive the raid.

“We got an aircraft carrier!” shouted engineer and gunner Adam Williams, who manned the turret. “The whole dock is burning!”

The bomb had ripped a massive hole twenty-six feet tall and fifty feet wide, through the port side of the
Taigei
, damage that would set back its conversion to an aircraft carrier by four months. Another thirty incendiary bomblets came down inside dock no. 4, igniting a fire that burned five crew members, carnage McElroy would capture in his report of the attack. “The large crane was seen to be blown up and a ship in the building slips was seen to burst into flames,” he wrote. “When some 30 miles to sea, we could see huge
billows of black smoke rising from target.”

The view looked much worse to Kazuei Koiwa, a nineteen-year-old civilian who worked out of the Yokosuka naval arsenal. He was on the phone with the staff of the Sasebo naval arsenal when the air raid alert sounded and explosions shook the building. “I looked out the window and saw a ferocious cloud of black smoke rising rapidly,” he recalled, charging out onto the roof for a better view. “Large numbers of wounded were being carried on stretchers to the infirmary next to the docks.”

Vice Admiral Ishichi Tsuzuki, chief of the arsenal, appeared behind him, a mournful smile on his face. “The enemy,” the admiral said, “is quite something.”

MAJOR JACK HILGER MADE LANDFALL
on the cliffs just north of the Katsura lighthouse, a point almost due east of Yokosuka. Doolittle’s second-in-command led the fifth and final wave of attacks, aimed at the industrial cities of Nagoya, Kobe, and Osaka. For Hilger the mission was personal: the Navy had just announced that his younger brother was lost when the Japanese sank the destroyer
Pillsbury
off Java.

Hilger banked southwest and paralleled the coast toward Nagoya Bay, buzzing over dozens of fishermen, many of whom waved. Donald Smith, in the fifteenth bomber, flew on Hilger’s wing, finally separating to make his run on Kobe. Hilger never saw Billy Farrow, in the sixteenth bomber, who should have been on his other wing.

South of Nagoya, Hilger turned inland and at a hundred feet zoomed north up Chita Wan, a narrow inlet crowded with industrial installations that paralleled the much larger Nagoya Bay.

Hilger planned to skirt the east side of Nagoya, a move that would allow him to circle back and make a north-to-south run over the city. Herb Macia scanned the empty skies for any sign of enemy opposition. “Where are those fighters?” the navigator wondered with relief. “Thank God, we’re not going to be shot down.”

The aircrew marveled at the landscape. “It was a beautiful spring day with not a cloud in the sky,” Hilger wrote in his diary. “The Japanese country is beautiful and their towns look like children’s play gardens. It is a shame to bomb them but they asked for it.” Macia agreed. “We climbed over some low-lying,
beautifully cultivated country; very green, spotless,” he recalled. “Every inch of land seemed to be fully utilized.”

“Look, they’ve got a ball game on over there,” Hilger announced to his crew. “I wonder what the score is.”

No one suspected an air raid.

Macia noted that some people even stood up and waved.

The city of Nagoya defied the aircrew’s expectations. Most thought the industrial powerhouse—Japan’s third-largest city, with about 1.3 million residents—would be much larger than it actually was. Viewed from an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, the city’s canals proved tough to spot and the waterfront area poorly defined. “While over Japan our entire crew was impressed with the drabness of the cities and the difficulty of picking out targets,” Hilger later noted in his report. “All buildings were grey and very much the same in appearance. The cities did not look at all the way we expected them to look from the information in our objective folders and on our maps.”

Hilger thundered in over the city. His orders were to target the barracks of the Third Division Military Headquarters adjacent to the Nagoya castle, Matsuhigecho oil storage northwest of the business district, the Atsuta factory of the Nagoya arsenal in the city’s center, and the Mitsubishi aircraft works along the waterfront. Two minutes before Hilger lined up for his run, the antiaircraft batteries opened fire, filling the empty skies above and behind the bomber with puffs of black smoke.

“Major Hilger, sir,” Bain called over the interphone, his voice filled with indignation. “Those guys are shooting at us!”

Engineer Jacob Eierman spotted one antiaircraft battery of four guns on a parade ground of the army barracks, which was the target. He saw a second battery on the side of the Mitsubishi aircraft factory. “Some of the stuff was so far off it didn’t seem that they were really trying,” Eierman later wrote. “I saw only one mark on the plane—a little hole near the running light on the left wing tip.”

Hilger leveled off for his run at a speed of 220 miles per hour. Copilot Jack Sims asked him whether he was hot.

“No,” Hilger replied.

“Then what the hell are you sweating so for?”

Hilger carried four incendiary bombs, hoping to do as much damage as possible. Macia sited the army barracks on the ground below. The red light flashed as the first incendiary
dropped, the individual bomblets spreading out over several rows. Bain watched the destruction from the rear gun turret: “I saw some ten to fifteen fires in this area and another twenty or more columns of greenish smoke.”

Macia prepared next to bomb the oil and gasoline storage warehouses. He selected the largest building in the cluster, which resembled a massive college gymnasium, complete with a curved roof.

Hilger bore down on his third target, the arsenal. “A tremendous building,” he noted in his diary. “Macia could have hit it with his eyes shut.” The bombardier agreed. “All I had to do was just drop the bomb,” he recalled. “I couldn’t have missed.”

Antiaircraft batteries continued to roar, throwing up flak and filling the skies with dark puffs of smoke. “Our fourth and last target was one that I had been waiting to take a crack at ever since this war started,” Hilger later wrote. “It was the Mitsubishi Aircraft Works. It turns out a bimotored medium bomber very similar to a B-25. The main building was about 250 yd. square and Macia hit it dead center.”

Others agreed. “That was a beautiful hit,” Eierman wrote. “I could see the bombs strike and flames burst up all over it.” He spied something else. “As we passed over, a cleaning woman rushed out of one door and shook a mop at us!”

Hilger dove the bomber, buzzing past two oil storage tanks. “I fired a burst of some thirty to fifty rounds but did not set fire to the tanks,” Bain noted in his report. “From the tracers I am certain the tanks were hit.”

Hilger’s attack destroyed twenty-three buildings and damaged six others. He had missed the army barracks and instead hit the Nagoya army hospital, destroying eighteen buildings; among the burned structures were six wards, but orderlies were able to evacuate the patients. Unable to put out the blaze, Army firefighters called in civilian assistance. Even then the inferno burned until the next day. The raid likewise burned up a food storage warehouse and Army arsenal, and destroyed five buildings at the Nagoya engine depot and damaged five others. No one was killed or injured.

Eierman looked at Bain and couldn’t contain his laughter. “His left fist was clenched tight and his fingers were oozing peanut butter and jelly from that sandwich he had started to eat as we swept in over Japan,” the engineer later wrote. “The whole raid had taken us about
eight minutes, and he had never let go.”

The bomber buzzed just a few feet above the bay and headed back out to sea. A mushroom-shaped column of heavy black smoke rose as much as six thousand feet above the city, visible to the airmen at a distance of thirty miles. Sources picked up in China would later confirm that fires raged for the next forty-eight hours.