Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (38 page)

“Boy,” Bain called out. “You ought to see that place burn.”

FIRST LIEUTENANT DONALD SMITH
piloted the fifteenth bomber off the
Hornet
, staying off Hilger’s wing as he listened to radio station JOAK. An alarm interrupted the regular broadcast at about 1:25 p.m., consisting of a forty-five second bell followed by what sounded like someone shouting three words. “This took place about 10 times,” Smith logged in his report. “That was the last we heard of the station.”

There was little doubt the raid had begun.

“Oh-oh!” copilot Griffith Williams called out. “There’s the land.”

“We ought to be seeing some action pretty soon,” added Doc White.

Smith banked south for the hour-and-fifteen-minute run down the coast, flying barely a hundred feet over the heads of the fishermen.

“Here’s a good chance to sink some of these ships, Smitty,” Howard Sessler called out from the bomber’s nose. “Fly over them and I’ll give a few bursts.”

“Better not,” Smith replied. “They may think we’re friendly aircraft if we don’t fire. This is supposed to be a surprise.”

“Guess I’ll unbutton my collar,” engineer Edward Saylor announced, the tension rising. “Getting a little tight.”

Smith turned into Nagoya Bay, zooming past lighthouses and coastal defense batteries without drawing any fire. “The only person we bothered,” White wrote in his diary, “was one fisherman who jumped into the water!”

Hilger waggled his wings at about 2:30 p.m. and headed for Nagoya. Smith pressed on toward Kobe, piloting the
TNT
just a few feet over the waters crowded with small and colorful boats. “We had our first opposition as we zoomed over the beach heading inland,” White later wrote. “Four small boys who were playing along the shore
threw rocks at us as we skimmed by a few feet over their heads.”

Smith pulled back on the yoke and started to climb up to several thousand feet to cross the mountains. “Say, Saylor, start pushing,” copilot Griffith Williams joked. “Seems like we’re stopped up here.”

The airmen scanned the skies and the ground below. “Very pretty and interesting countryside, rice paddies terraced clear to the tops of the hills,” White wrote in his diary. “Only airplane seen was a commercial airliner which flew by overhead. No pursuit seen though we flew by several airfields.”

The bomber passed just north of Osaka, Japan’s second-largest city, with almost two million residents. The airmen saw no evidence that the nation’s largest commercial center had been bombed, but instead marveled at the congestion. No line appeared to mark where Osaka ended and Kobe began, while the city’s factories belched a heavy smoke that left a thick haze in the air, slashing visibility and prompting White in his diary to label the city the “Pittsburgh of Japan.”

Smith followed the Shinyodo River as White snapped photos of the industry that crowded the banks. “Trains, streetcars and buses were still running on the streets, people were out walking about,” he later wrote. “We even passed a commercial airliner heading in the other direction,” the Greater Japan Airlines daily round-trip flight from Fukuoka to Tokyo, carrying twenty-one passengers that afternoon and bound to arrive in the capital at 4:40 p.m. The sea breeze blew back some of the haze as the bomber neared Kobe, the nation’s sixth-largest city, with a population of about a million. The airmen spotted Koshien stadium, the largest ballpark in Asia, able to seat some fifty thousand fans and even boasting flush toilets. On the same field where Nankai battled Taiyo this afternoon, Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig played during a 1934 visit, later commemorated on a plaque at the stadium’s entrance. “Everything looked very much as the objective folder had shown, and we had no trouble in finding our targets,” Smith wrote in his report. “No anti-aircraft fire was encountered, and nothing hindered us from completing the mission.”

Japan’s confidence that America would never raid its cities was on display in Kobe, where the airmen observed no effort to camouflage important factories and plants. The skies likewise proved empty of any fighter opposition, barrage balloons, or even
antiaircraft fire as the
TNT
droned toward its targets, carrying four incendiary bombs to use against the city’s warehouses, shipping docks, and aircraft factories.

“There’s the steel foundries straight ahead, Smitty,” Sessler said. “That’s where we’ll start our bombing run from.”

“I see it,” Smith replied. “Give ’em hell!”

Smith lined up for his run at two thousand feet and 240 miles per hour.

“Bomb bay doors open,” Sessler announced.

“Okay.”

Sessler stared down the Mark Twain sight, dropping the first bomb immediately west of the Uyenoshita Steelworks and aiming the second at the Kawasaki Dockyard Company. The third fell west of the Electric Machinery Works, an area populated by small factories, machine shops, and residences. Sessler aimed the fourth at the Kawasaki aircraft factory and the Kawasaki Dockyard Company aircraft works. Only then did antiaircraft batteries open fire, from positions near the mouth of Shinminato River.

“Hey, when you going to start dropping those things,” Smith blurted out, unaware that the red light on his cockpit instrument panel had burned out. “It’s getting kind of hot up here and I’m starting to sweat.”

“I’ve already dropped them,” Sessler called back.

“Bet they got a bang out of that!” Saylor quipped.

“Hope they don’t lose their heads over it,” added Smith.

A postwar analysis showed that the
TNT
largely missed its intended targets. One of the bombs destroyed eighteen homes in the Nishide neighborhood and damaged eleven others, killing one person, who was hit by an incendiary bomblet. Another bomb burned up three homes and damaged two others in the neighborhood of Minami Sakasegawa, while most of the final incendiary bomblets came down harmlessly in a canal alongside the Kawasaki aircraft factory. All told, Smith’s attack killed one person and injured five others, while destroying twenty-one homes and damaging fourteen others.

White took photographs throughout the attack, spotting the aircraft carrier
Hiyo
under construction at the Kawasaki dockyard. When he shot all thirty-two frames, the doctor removed the film, slipped it in a canister, and taped the edges.

Smith swooped down over the bay and headed
back out to sea as the airmen marveled at how easy the mission was. “Nobody realized we were enemies until the bombs dropped,” Saylor later said. “The Japs simply didn’t think it could be done.” Smith agreed. “It was like the old sleeper play in football,” the pilot recalled. “We caught them napping and got away with it.”

SECOND LIEUTENANT BILLY FARROW
roared in last, in the
Bat out of Hell
, the encore of America’s first attack against Japan. Farrow’s orders allowed him to target either Osaka or Nagoya; he chose the latter. “We came in over the Japanese mainland at hedgehopping height,” recalled navigator George Barr. “The sun was shining and the people in the streets below were all waving. They’d been so indoctrinated that Japan would never be bombed that they couldn’t imagine it could really happen.”

When enemy fighters appeared in the skies, Farrow increased speed and pulled back on the controls, climbing up to seven thousand feet and vanishing in the clouds. The airmen flew dead reckoning toward Nagoya, diving through a hole in the clouds over the city.

“Get set to drop bombs at five hundred feet,” Farrow ordered bombardier Jacob DeShazer. “There is the first target.”

The
Bat out of Hell
carried four incendiary bombs to target an oil refinery and an aircraft factory. Farrow lined up his run as DeShazer looked down the sight.

“See that gasoline tank?”

DeShazer did.

The red light flashed on the cockpit instrument panel as the first three bombs dropped. Farrow banked the plane. DeShazer smelled smoke and wanted to see the refinery burn. “To the left of us I saw where the first bombs had dropped. There was fire all over the tank, but it had not blown up yet,” he recalled. “What I was smelling, however, was powder of the shells that were being shot at us instead of the bombs I had dropped. I had noticed a little black smoke cloud right in front of us, and evidently the hole in the nose of our airplane allowed the smoke to come inside.”

Farrow pressed on toward the next target, a long flat building that the pilot suspected was an aircraft factory.

“Let your bombs go,” he ordered DeShazer
.

The red light flashed a final time.

The
Bat out of Hell
hit the Toho Gas Company’s no. 3 tank, sparking a massive fire. Japanese workers rushed to prevent an explosion by releasing gas throughout the city. Farrow’s final attack hit Mitsubishi Heavy Industries’ Nagoya Aeronautical Manufacturing, a plant that produced the famed Zero fighter. Damage was light, but the attack killed five people and injured eleven others, two seriously.

“We didn’t miss,” Deshazer and copilot Bobby Hite wrote. “We bombed from 500 feet with ack-ack bursting all around us, but we never got hit. We circled fast, took a look at the fires and then headed west and a little south for the China coast.”

CHAPTER 13

Saturday’s experience has shown that despite the series of crushing defeats which he has suffered so far, the enemy still has the spirit left to make air raids on this country.

—
NICHI NICHI
NEWSPAPER, APRIL 19, 1942

HALSEY DID NOT WAIT
to see the bombers vanish over the horizon. Three minutes after Farrow’s B-25 roared off the
Hornet
’s deck, the admiral ordered his task force to turn back to Pearl Harbor. The
Enterprise
took over as guide, the force charging through the swells due east at twenty-five knots. Sailors hustled to ready the
Hornet
’s idle planes for action, bolting wings onto torpedo, bomber, and scout planes before sending them up the carrier’s three elevators to the flight deck. The
Nitto Maru
’s contact report would no doubt trigger a Japanese response, but the force remained far outside the range of enemy fighters and would soon slip beyond the reach of multiengine bombers. The only real threat came from enemy surface ships or submarines.

Sailors hurried to help Seaman First Class Robert Wall, chewed up by Farrow’s propeller, down to the carrier’s sprawling sick bay. Doctors and corpsmen stopped the bleeding, then x-rayed his mangled left arm. The prognosis was bad.

Real bad.

Lieutenant Commander Edwin
Osterloh, an assistant medical officer, summoned Chaplain Harp. “It will have to come off,” he said. “See if you can console him.”

Harp approached the bunk, noting that Wall appeared pale and in shock. He wondered what to say, when the ship’s loudspeaker interrupted his thoughts: “The U.S.S.
Hornet
has reversed its course and is heading for Honolulu.”

Harp seized on the announcement as his segue. “That’s good news, isn’t it?”

Wall was silent for a moment before he answered, skipping the banter. “Please don’t let them cut it off,” he pleaded.

Harp pulled a chair alongside the bed. “There is only one thing I can tell you,” he said, noting that the injured seaman studied his face as he spoke. “Please listen.”

Wall turned away. Harp knew his tone had only confirmed the sailor’s fears. The chaplain pressed on with his impromptu speech, telling him that there wasn’t a man on board from the skipper on down who would not sacrifice an arm to help make the mission a success. “You gave yours in freeing one of his planes, possibly saving the life of its crew,” Harp said. “If that plane had crashed, it could never have flown over Tokyo, and the mission would have been weakened by just that much.”

Wall listened.

“The crew of that plane has a mighty slim chance of getting through alive. Compare yourself to them. There is a serious danger that they will be shot down or crash. They knew that; nevertheless, they went ahead. You have already made your sacrifice toward the success of that mission. May theirs be no more serious than yours.”

Harp watched as the sailor regained his composure then nodded. The doctor appeared moments later alongside the bed.

“All right, Sir,” Wall said. “Let’s get on with it.”

Officers would later take up a collection on behalf of the injured sailor, raising $2,700. Wall broke down in tears when presented the money.

The task force continued to battle rough seas, winds of up to thirty miles an hour, and low broken clouds. Halsey took no chances with the force’s security. The
Enterprise
turned into the wind and launched four scout bombers at 11:15 a.m. to search south, where radar had earlier indicated the presence of enemy vessels. Twelve
minutes later a dozen more lifted off, tasked to search up to two hundred miles astern. Eight fighters roared into the skies for an inner air patrol joined by eight
Hornet
fighters.

The bombers soon went to work. At 11:50 a.m. Ensign Robert Campbell spotted a dark gray patrol boat that he estimated to be about 125 feet long. He charged in and dropped a 500-pound bomb at 1,200 feet, but missed by about 100 feet. Campbell circled back and dropped two 100-pound bombs, this time at an altitude of just 800 feet. Again he missed. The dogged naval aviator then circled back and strafed the picket boat with his .30- and .50-caliber machine guns, firing more than three hundred armor-piercing, tracer, and incendiary rounds. “The enemy maneuvered radically but did not return the fire,” he noted in his report. “Minor damage topside due to strafing was observed.”