Doolittle raid

Doolittle raid. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Roosevelt pressed the US Joint Chiefs of Staff to retaliate. But the only way bombers could reach Japan was from a carrier which, if it was to escape detection, had to operate beyond the range of Japanese air and sea patrols. It was thought that these patrols did not operate more than 800 km. (500 mi.) from Japan, beyond the range of normal carrier aircraft. Instead, 16 USAAF B25 bombers were loaded aboard the carrier Hornet, the maximum number that could be carried as they were too big to stow below. They were manned by volunteers who, under their commander, Colonel James Doolittle (1896–1993), trained by taking off from an air strip marked to the exact dimensions of the flight deck. But they never practised taking off from a real carrier.

Hornet sailed from San Francisco Bay on 1 April 1942, and was joined by Vice-Admiral Halsey's Task Force 16 on 13 April. The plan was for the bombers, each of which was armed with four 500 lb. (225 kg.) bombs, to fly to Chuchow airfield in China after the raid, some 1,600 km. (1,000 mi.) from the target.

Before dawn on 18 April, while still 1,100 km. (700 mi.) from Tokyo, Halsey's force detected Japanese patrol boats by radar. Halsey altered course to avoid them but another alerted Tokyo before it was sunk, forcing the decision to launch the bombers immediately instead of at night as planned. One attacked Kobe, another Nagoya, while a third, scheduled to bomb Osaka, dropped its bombs instead on Yokosuka naval yard and Yokohama. A fourth was forced to land at Vladivostok, but the other twelve arrived over Tokyo at noon, just as a mock air raid was being completed by Japanese planes. This lessened the psychological impact of the raid on the local population but helped the bombers escape, and not one was lost over Japan. About 50 people were killed and 100 houses damaged. The bombed areas were cordoned off from civilians who, by and large, remained unimpressed. However, the uncomfortable thought that Japan was more open to air attack than had been supposed did not escape Japanese officialdom, which lost considerable face by the raid, and earlier objections to Admiral Yamamoto's plans to bring the US Pacific fleet to battle at Midway promptly ceased.

After the raid, the bombers either crash-landed in China or their crews bailed out, and all but 9 of the 80 crew members involved survived. However, some were captured by the Japanese occupation forces in China (see China incident) and because civilian buildings had been accidentally hit—and a school machine-gunned—three were subsequently executed after a show trial; another died in prison. The greatest number of casualties caused by the raid were Chinese, as the following month the Japanese launched their Chekiang-Kiangsi offensive in China, both as a revenge for the raid and to capture the local airfields to prevent another.

The raid, of little consequence militarily, gave a much needed fillip to American morale. US Army Air Forces historians subsequently credited Roosevelt with the idea, but there is no documentation to prove this. The navy's C-in-C, Admiral King, said it came from his operations officer. See also strategic air offensives, 3.