The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (55 page)

Doolittle reached Tokyo first. The city was immense—eight million people—and spread out more like Los Angeles than compact San Francisco. Once inside the boundaries his ship began to encounter antiaircraft fire. There were reportedly five hundred batteries within Tokyo’s environs. Nevertheless, the Japanese people had been told they were immune from attack—forever shielded by the “divine wind,” the
kamikaze
, which had protected them from invasion for a thousand years. By coming in at rooftop level the B-25s had the jump on the antiaircraft guns, for the most part, but Doolittle admitted the black puffs of flak “shook us up a little and might have put a few holes in the fuselage.”

Doolittle spotted the large munitions factory that was his target and pulled up to 1,200 feet, which was the bombing altitude they all had practiced. His bomb bay doors opened. He was carrying the four five-hundred-pound incendiaries that were supposed to have marked the targets during the planned night attack. The bombardier dropped them and set the munitions factory afire.

Afterward, as he sped to the coast, Doolittle saw five enemy fighters converging on him from above. There were two small hills ahead, however, and he swung around them in an S turn, “pouring on the coal.” The Japanese gave chase but Doolittle lost them. “They didn’t see the second half of my S,” he guessed. “The last time I saw them they were going off in the opposite direction.”

Somewhere behind Doolittle, McElroy had climbed to 2,000 feet, “to see where we were,” when he began to take flak. He put the nose down and headed for Tokyo Bay. Ahead, he could see smoke rising around the city from the bombers that got there before him. McElroy’s destination was the big Yokosuka Naval Base across the bay in Yokohama, and as he approached it he could see the black bursts of flak exploding ahead. He soon was amid the layer of flak and the plane was jerked violently about by the aerial concussions, but McElroy headed straight for the torpedo factory and dry docks, where a big ship lay on the ways.
^a
He called for the bomb bay doors to be opened.

“Those flak bursts were really getting close and bouncing us around,” McElroy said, “when I heard Bourgeois shouting, ‘Bombs Away!’ I couldn’t see it but Williams had a bird’s eye view from the back and he shouted jubilantly, ‘We got an aircraft carrier! The whole dock is burning!’ ” As McElroy turned south he looked back to see a giant crane begin to topple over. From the back of the plane there was “wild yelling and clapping each other on the back. We were all just ecstatic and still alive, but there wasn’t much time to celebrate.”

Ted Lawson dropped his bombs without incident, though he had some scary encounters with antiaircraft flak. He looked behind him to see a steel smelter that had been his target “puff out its walls and then subside and dissolve in a black-and-red cloud” after a direct hit from a five-hundred-pound bomb. Then Lawson took
Ruptured Duck
back down on the deck and gunned her full speed, “expecting a cloud of Zeros from moment to moment.”

In the city itself, the airmen saw bicyclers and children looking up and waving as they roared over the rooftops; citizens assumed that the B-25 was some new type of Japanese aircraft. The military had conducted an air-raid drill that morning and many thought this had something to do with it. Just as had Americans at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were expecting nothing more than a lovely spring day with their cherry trees in blossom. Then the bombs began to fall.

At the U.S. embassy, the ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew and his staff and their families were being interned by the Japanese until they could be exchanged for Japanese diplomats in the United States. They heard the explosions but were uncertain if it was an actual attack. Some of them went out on the roof and discovered it was in fact a U.S. raid, prompting Grew to report that “we were all very happy and proud in the embassy and the British told us that they drank toasts all day to the American fliers.” When the wife of the American military attaché saw one of the planes she said, “Those planes are American bombers and I bet you that Lieutenant Jurika is in one of them.” She was wrong by just a hair. Jurika, who until recently had been assistant naval attaché in the Tokyo embassy, was, of course, now Lieutenant Commander Jurika who had briefed the American fliers aboard the
Hornet
.
⁹

The raid over Tokyo was over in a little more than an hour and achieved nearly complete surprise. In the other Japanese target cities it was the same. It had been four months and eleven days since the attack on Pearl Harbor. At one point during the action, the Japanese prime minister General Hideki Tojo was riding in a small official plane that was trying to land at the Mito aviation school on the far western side of Tokyo, where Tojo intended to conduct an inspection. As his plane descended to the runway, one of Doolittle’s B-25s “roared up on its right side and flashed by without firing a shot.” Tojo’s secretary, an army colonel, reported that the plane was “queer looking.”
¹⁰

A good deal of damage was done but it was minimal with respect to the size of Japan’s immense military power. Nevertheless, the psychological damage would prove to be devastating to the Japanese. By early afternoon the raiders were in open waters headed for China—and, in the case of one plane, Russia. None of the B-25s had been shot down although some had been hit and one in particular sustained considerable antiaircraft damage. The gunners of
Whirling Dervish
shot down an enemy fighter, and
Hari Kari-er
claimed two. Thus far the raid was a success, but there remained a long, nightmarish passage into the setting sun, where the weather ahead was worsening and the gas gauges falling ominously.

Aboard
Hornet
, which was racing back toward Pearl Harbor, all ears were tuned to the Japanese radio stations. Commander Jurika had been stationed by Captain Mitscher at the ship’s radio to translate any news, but nothing abnormal was coming in, even though the bombers should have made their attack by then. Instead, the infamous Tokyo Rose, an American woman of Japanese descent who regularly made propaganda broadcasts for the Japanese, was at that moment reassuring Japanese listeners that they had nothing to fear from enemy bombers. At last at 1:45 a station interrupted its programing with a special bulletin.

“A large fleet of enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo this afternoon and much danger to nonmilitary objectives and some damage to factories,” it said. “The death toll is between three thousand and four thousand so far. No planes were reported shot down over Tokyo.” Another radio station referred to numerous fires set by the bombing and requested the people to pray for rain. The cheering broke out immediately aboard
Hornet
as Jurika translated the broadcast, and on
Enterprise
and the other ships soon thereafter. They had done it! After months of helpless frustration America had hit back.
¹¹

As the hours wore on, and the censors took hold of the information, the reports from the Japanese radio stations became less hysterical. The raid was described as “cowardly,” and was said to have deliberately targeted hospitals and schools. In the days to come the damage was greatly played down and civilian casualties increasingly played up. Words such as “fiendish,” “inhuman,” and “indiscriminate” were applied to the raiders. But many Japanese were shaken after being told for so long that the islands were invulnerable to enemy attack, and they naturally expected and feared a repeat performance at any time. The raid induced an unsettling attitude among the Japanese population, which had been given to believe that the U.S. fleet had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor and there was no danger from the Americans. Now this!

The raid had immediate and serious repercussions for the military as well, particularly the Japanese navy, which was responsible for safeguarding the home islands. The Japanese quickly concluded that the planes must have come from aircraft carriers and after sending out every plane and warship in its fleet the navy returned empty-handed. Halsey was long gone—a highly embarrassing, if not humiliating, development. The reaction of the imperial navy was to recall as many modern warplanes as possible—mostly the famed Zeros—from areas in the South Pacific and Indochina. This of course interfered with other operations, most notably in New Guinea, control of which was the final stepping-stone to the conquest of Australia and New Zealand, which in turn would have been devastating to the American war effort in the Pacific. And there were even greater repercussions from the raid further along.

Meantime, Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders were flying into a very tight fix. With fuel running low and huge storms closing in, each plane carried a small hand-cranked radio to pick up the homing signal—the simple ID number 57—that would guide them in the darkness to the airfields of Chuchow that the Chinese army was supposed to have arranged for them with lighting and refueling trucks. But they listened in vain; no signal was broadcast. In fact, no homing beacons had been installed, nor were the fields prepared with illumination. It was one of the worst failures of communication in the history of the war.

General Chiang Kai-shek, it seemed, had thwarted the landing plans out of fear of reprisal within the Japanese-held parts of China. Since Washington didn’t trust Chiang enough to inform him of the true nature of the mission for which the fields were to be prepared, Chiang did not share the sense of urgency and importance of getting the job done. So the general stalled and said he first wanted to bring the areas where the landing fields lay under his army’s control. The problem might have been solved if Hap Arnold or U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall had thought to send a man of high rank to coordinate plans on the China end, but this was not done.

Doolittle, of course, knew none of this. He had expected to be able to follow a beacon to a secure, illuminated airfield. Instead he found himself flying into the worst sort of situation. The weather was abominable. Pilots could barely see their wingtips for the storm clouds; a layer of fog completely shrouded the ground. The Chuchow airfield was located in a steep valley ringed by the vast mountain chain that lay along the China coast. Worse, the pilots knew that the altitudes given on their maps for the mountains were faulty: on one map the altitude given for a peak would be 5,000 feet and on another the same peak would be measured at 10,000 feet. They all were running low on fuel.

By eight-thirty Doolittle spotted the first islands along the Chinese coast. They had been in the air a full twelve hours. Their choice for survival lay between going down on the deck, ditching in the sea and hoping their life rafts would carry them to shore, or flying high on instruments and chancing to find some landing spot beyond the jagged peaks before their gas ran out.

Some took the first option, including Ted Lawson, but most, including Doolittle, took the second. Bob Emmens had somehow burned so much gas he was forced to land in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, despite what Stalin had said.

Lawson was about to take the high route when a hole in the fog revealed a long sandy beach on an island below. Lawson thought he’d take the chance it was not occupied by the Japanese and spiraled down on the deck to come in just feet above the water. As he skimmed along, however, suddenly both engines quit and the landing gear hit the water. It was like hitting a brick wall. Lawson, his copilot, and the navigator were catapulted through the Plexiglas windshield into the water. The bombardier was likewise thrown through the Plexiglas bubble in the nose. The gunner remained in the plane, which was upside down. Miraculously, because the tide was coming in, all five made it to the beach about a hundred yards away, though all were terribly injured. One man had both shoulders broken; another’s head was deeply gashed. It was pouring rain.

Lawson was mangled the worst. His leg had been nearly cut in two and his biceps was slashed off. He put his hand to his mouth and realized his lip had been cut clear through to his chin. His upper teeth were bent in and, when he put his thumbs into his mouth to push them out, “they broke off in my hands,” as did his bottom teeth. His navigator, Dean Davenport, came staggering down the beach, took a look, and said, “God damn! You’re really bashed open! You’re whole face is pushed in.” And for Lawson that wasn’t the worst of it.
¹²

Doolittle had tried to fly as close to the landing field at Chuchow as possible using instruments and dead reckoning. When the gas gauges showed empty Doolittle put the plane on automatic pilot, gave the order in which the men would jump, and prayed they would land in Chinese territory. Nobody but Doolittle had jumped from an airplane before. When the fourth man had gone out the hatch, Doolittle shut off the gas valves and bailed out himself, earning his third star in the Caterpillar Club. On the way down he suddenly became concerned about breaking his ankles again, as he had done in Chile in 1926, but needn’t have worried. In the pitch dark he plunged waist-deep into a soggy paddy field that had been fertilized in the typical Chinese fashion with “night soil,” or human excrement. Doolittle waded out and presented himself at the door of a farmhouse shouting
Lushu hoo metwa fugi!
as he had been taught aboard the
Hornet
. But it failed to produce the results indicated by Commander Jurika. There was some rustling inside the house, Doolittle said, and then “the sound of a bolt sliding into place. The light went out and there was dead silence.” He was on his own.