Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (39 page)

Lieutenant Ralph Arndt led three planes in an attack on a seventy-five-foot motor patrol boat equipped with a radio mast at 12:26 p.m. In repeated bombing and strafing attacks, the aviators unleashed three 500-pound bombs and five 100-pounders, scoring only one near miss, which managed to knock out the patrol’s lone gun. Ensign John Butler picked up a third patrol at 12:45 p.m., this one towing a small white boat. He dropped two 100-pound bombs, both duds. He then released his 500-pound bomb, which appeared to strike the target’s port side. The patrol cut the smaller boat adrift and charged in circles, firing on Butler as he strafed the vessel. His plane took three minor hits, including a .25-caliber machine-gun bullet later recovered from the aircraft.

Radar at one point picked up an enemy patrol plane, passing north of the task force at a range of more than thirty-five miles, oblivious to the escaping armada. More patrol boats crowded the seas, giving the naval aviators a workout. Lookouts on the
Enterprise
sighted two such vessels at 2:01 p.m. Two minutes later carrier planes pounced, firing some 6,000 incendiary, tracer, and armor-piercing rounds. One of the patrols sank, and aviators damaged the other. The
Nashville
charged in for the kill, opening fire on the wooden patrol boat at a range of six thousand yards. The guns roared again and again, firing 102 six-inch rounds and another 63 five-inch rounds, reducing the patrol to little more than timbers. “Her whole starboard side,” the cruiser’s gunnery officer wrote in his report, “was riddled before she finally sank.”

Sailors threw lines in the water and lowered
a makeshift sea ladder, fashioned from a cargo net. Five enemy prisoners, suffering from shock and immersion, climbed aboard, one with a bullet wound in the cheek. Through sign language
Nashville
sailors learned that six other Japanese crewmen had died. “One was wounded and another virtually exhausted,” the cruiser’s action report noted, “yet all were recovered without great difficulty although the ship was rolling heavily.”

Despite his wounded cheek the injured prisoner later recounted the attack. He had tried unsuccessfully to rouse his sleeping skipper when he first spied American planes at dawn. The sailor returned a few hours later when he spotted the task force.

“Two of our beautiful carriers ahead, sir!”

News of the carriers finally rallied the Japanese skipper, who climbed out of bed and marched up to the deck. He studied the American task force through binoculars. “They’re beautiful,” he admitted, “but they’re not ours.”

The Japanese skipper retreated below deck; this time he put a pistol to his head and squeezed the trigger.

The
Nashville
’s work was not over. One of the
Enterprise
’s bombers, hit in the engine by machine-gun fire while strafing the patrols, ditched at 3:03 p.m., some nine thousand yards astern of the carrier. The cruiser plucked the two airmen from the water, but the plane vanished beneath the swells.

The task force resumed its twenty-five-knot run east. Halsey’s forces in a matter of hours had ripped a gaping hole in Japan’s defensive net, destroying the
Nitto Maru
and
Nagato Maru
and so heavily damaging the
No. 1 Iwate Maru
and
No. 26 Nanshin Maru
that Japanese forces would later sink them. The Navy likewise damaged the merchant cruiser
Awata Maru
, along with the guardboats
Chokyu Maru
,
No. 2 Asami Maru
,
Kaijin Maru
,
No. 3 Chinyo Maru
,
Eikichi Maru
, and
Kowa Maru
. Enemy casualties totaled no fewer than thirty-three dead and another twenty-three wounded.

The
Nashville
’s guns drew much of the praise.

“She had a grand day,” recalled Robin Lindsey of the
Enterprise
. “She loved it, nothing to do but not get fired at but to sink sampans. She chased all over the ocean after them as fast as our pilots would report them.”

Throughout the task force officers and crewmen alike crowded around radio receivers, anxiously awaiting
news of the raid. The entire mission—the work of sixteen ships and ten thousand men—came down to this moment. Had Doolittle succeeded?

At Mitscher’s request Jurika settled in the
Hornet
’s flag plot, where he monitored Tokyo’s AM broadcast stations via headphones. Others scanned the airways with personal radios or crowded inside the carrier’s air plot, which was so jammed men could barely move. “All the ship’s radios that morning were tuned in on Japan, picking up the programs from Tokyo, Kobe and Yokohama,” recalled Chaplain Harp. “Our public-address system in turn relayed the programs along to the ship’s personnel, so that from one end of the
Hornet
to the other there was the weird sound of Japanese broadcasters intoning their various versions of the day’s news in the Axis world.”

One broadcaster cited the Reuters report of an alleged American raid, assuring listeners such an attack was impossible. Jurika translated this morsel for the crew.

“Boy, oh boy, are they going to be surprised!” exclaimed one of the pharmacist’s mates in the sick bay. “Whoopee!”

Jurika calculated the expected time the bombers should appear in the skies over Tokyo. That time came and went. Fifteen more minutes passed. Then twenty. The Tokyo announcers rattled on unfazed. “There was nothing to indicate from the broadcasts that there was any unusual event taking place,” he recalled. “Nothing.”

Jurika wasn’t alone in his fears.

“We began to worry,” Harp wrote, “suspecting that the fliers had either become lost in the dreadful weather or that they had been intercepted somewhere along the way.”

Many of the sailors had taken to calling a female English announcer with JOAK “Lady Haw Haw,” the same name the British used to describe a female Atlanta native who made similar propaganda broadcasts from Germany. The announcer suddenly interrupted her afternoon broadcast with a shrill scream just as the radio went dead.

Sailors waited in anticipation.

“A moment before, the continued broadcasting had worried us,” Harp later wrote, “but now the silence was almost unbearable.”

The
Hornet
’s quartermaster recorded the first official news of the attack in the ship’s log at 2:45 p.m., when the broadcast resumed. “Enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo today
shortly after noon for the first time in the current East Asia War,” the announcer stated in English. “Heavy and telling damage was inflicted on schools and hospitals, and the populace shows much indignation.”

The announcement was followed by another in Japanese, designed for domestic audiences. “A large fleet of enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo this noon and caused much damage to non military objectives and some damage to factories. The known death toll is between three and four thousand so far. No planes were reported shot down over Tokyo. Osaka was also bombed. Tokyo reports several large fires burning.”

Cheers erupted throughout the
Hornet
.

On board the
Enterprise
Halsey listened as the airwaves filled with sudden excitement, then fell silent.

“They made it,” the admiral said.

Others agreed.

“It doesn’t take much imagination to follow through as to what had happened,” observed Lieutenant Elias Mott, an assistant gunnery officer on the
Enterprise
.

Chicago Daily News
reporter Robert Casey listened on board the
Salt Lake City
as afternoon turned into evening. One bulletin claimed Chinese, American, and Russian planes executed the attack, an identification the Japanese later abandoned, as military leaders struggled to determine who was actually responsible. The official Nazi news agency later reported that Yokohama had been bombed, while the British United Press announced carriers in Japanese waters had launched the raid.

The sailors bounced back and forth between the announcements intended for an international audience and the local broadcast bands designed for Japanese ears. Over one of the nation’s domestic frequencies the sailors listened as a female announcer shrieked hour after hour about the need for blood donors.

“Even if she had been talking of nothing more unusual than new ways to cook rice, you would know that terror had arrived in Tokio,” Casey noted in his diary. “It is her voice, rather than the subject, that gives you the notion.”

The
Salt Lake City
skipper, Captain Ellis Zacharias, who was in Japan when the 1923 earthquake struck, joined his men to listen.

“The woman’s had a shock,” he said, “
a bad shock
. Japanese women don’t get that way over nothing. Maybe
this bombing amounts to something after all.”

The announcer continued.

“Give your blood as the men at the front are giving theirs,” she cried. “Give your blood. Your lives are in danger. Tomorrow—tonight—your children may be blown to bits. Give your blood. Save them—save Japan.”

“An interesting moment, gentleman,” Zacharias added.

Sailors listened as Japanese broadcasters depicted the American raiders as barbarians who targeted civilians.

“There has been no damage at all to military objectives, but several schools, hospitals and shrines have been destroyed,” a male broadcaster announced in English. “Thirty primary school children on their way home from morning classes were machine-gunned in the street.”

“You notice that nobody on the Jap radio yet knows whose planes they were. They give themselves away guessing,” one of the cruiser’s senior aviators noted. “On the face of the evidence it looks as if this bombing has been a great success.”

The broadcaster announced that nine unidentified planes had been shot down, drawing a laugh from the same flier. “More evidence the bombing was a success,” he added. “We shot down nine planes but we don’t know whose.”

On board the
Hornet
Chaplain Harp worked most nights from 7:30 until 11 p.m., typing up the news reports that came over the radio and mimeographing them into a makeshift daily paper for the officers and crew, the
News Digest
. Stenciled across the top of the edition that he prepared for April 19 was the same slogan that Mitscher had ordered painted on the carrier’s stack: “REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR!!” Just beneath that Harp ran a cartoon of Uncle Sam spitting a stream of bombs on an island emblazoned with the caption “Japan or where it used to be.”

A seaman contributed another cartoon, which Harp, though he felt it was “rowdy,” still chose to publish. The sketch showed several bombers targeting an outhouse, revealing a Japanese man squatting with his trousers around his knees. The caption read, “How does it feel to be caught with your pants down?”

Commander Stanhope Ring, the carrier’s air group commander, penned a four-stanza poem, the first of which read,

Twas the eighteenth of April
in forty-two

When we waited to hear what Jimmy would do,

Little did Hiro think that that night

The skies above Tokio would be alight

With the fires Jimmy started in Tokio’s dives

To guide to their targets the B-25s.

Such humor wasn’t restricted to just the
Hornet
. An anonymous sailor on board the
Enterprise
wrote a mock business letter to Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo. “It gives me great pleasure to inform you, in case it has not been brought to your attention, that, in accordance with the terms of your contract, accepted by us on 7 December 1941, the first consignment of scrap metal has been delivered to your city. You understand, of course, that shipping conditions being what they are it is necessary for us to effect delivery via air,” the creative sailor wrote. “I wish to remind you that we are in a position to continue deliveries for years to come.”

That night the tired officers crowded into the
Hornet
’s wardroom, peppering Jurika with questions as the carrier steamed farther away from the enemy’s homeland, the mission now a clear success. America had struck its first blow in the war against Japan. “No one could get enough of talking and asking that night. We tried to eat, but couldn’t taste our food,” Harp later wrote. “We talked for hours. When I finally went to my quarters and got to bed, I was too tense to sleep. I took sleeping powders, but they were useless. I lay awake until morning, thinking about the Doolittle fliers. I could almost hear ‘Deep in the Heart of Texas’ booming along my passageway.”

CHAPTER 14

There have been thousands and thousands of sorties in all these wars and what’s different about ours is only that we knew when we took off that we weren’t going to make it.

—DAVY JONES, PILOT OF PLANE NO. 5

DOOLITTLE
SETTLED
IN
FOR
the long flight to China, trailed by fourteen other bombers—all but that of York, who had diverted to Russia. The pilots had executed the attacks and returned to sea, vanishing over the same horizon where the B-25s had first appeared, a move designed to confuse the Japanese as to the mission’s true terminus. Once at sea the pilots turned south and paralleled the Japanese coast, buzzing the corner of Kyushu before banking west along the twenty-ninth parallel to cross the East China Sea.