Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (52 page)

As the days marched past—and the silence continued—Japan’s curiosity gave way to desperation, prompting Tokyo radio to fish for news. “The American papers are talking big, but not a whisper from the Army or Navy,” announced one broadcast picked up by United Press in San Francisco. “We will be very interested in knowing their claims of damages, which, according to them, no doubt will be great.”

Members of Congress proved happy to sound off, many boasting that the raid was a prelude to continued assaults, which America was in no position to execute. “This will prove TNT in boosting morale,” declared Representative John Snyder of Pennsylvania, while
Senator Joseph Hill of Alabama described it as “hardly a token compared with what we’re going to give them.” “This is the only way we are going to win the war,” said Senator D. Worth Clark of Idaho. “Start right in bombing them at home.”

No one was more pleased than President Roosevelt, who had left two days before the raid for an unannounced visit to his home at Hyde Park. Only when the task force bore down on the Japanese homeland did Admiral King finally share the full details of the impending assault with the president, who, of course, had known the principal concept of the mission, just not the final logistics. “Until twenty-four hours before the raid only seven people—King, Low, Duncan, Arnold, Doolittle, Nimitz, and Halsey—knew of the
complete
plan,” King later wrote. “President Roosevelt and even Secretary Knox were not told until the planes had taken off from the
Hornet
.”

Armed with that news, the president had stewed. He phoned his distant cousin and confidante Daisy Suckley around 10:15 a.m. on April 17.

“Hell’s a-poppin,” he told her.

The president drove over to pick up Daisy, accompanied by speechwriter Sam Rosenman, aide Marvin McIntyre, and secretary Grace Tully. Daisy climbed into the front seat, and the car set off through the New York countryside. The president confided in Daisy that he was in a “bad humor—needed fresh air & a change.” The hourlong ride along narrow wooded roads and past fresh-cut lumber appeared the perfect tonic for the commander in chief. “So many things were coming to life,” Eleanor Roosevelt noted in her “My Day” column, “lilies of the valley, bulbs of various kinds and lilac bushes.”

That evening the president and Eleanor dined with Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau and his wife, who celebrated their twenty-sixth wedding anniversary. Roosevelt had settled into work Saturday with Rosenman and Tully on his seven-point anti-inflation message for Congress and the fireside chat that would follow, when word of the raid arrived from Washington. “The President was, of course, overjoyed by the news,” Rosenman later wrote. “He knew the heartening effect it would have on American morale and the morale of our Allies, and the blow to the prestige of the Japanese, to have American bombers over Tokyo even for a short, fleeting time.”

Roosevelt spent much of Saturday on the phone
. While Arnold fretted over the logistical outcome of the mission, Roosevelt had only to worry about the morale of the American people. Any effort to strike back against the Japanese, he knew, would be seen as a victory. The president realized he would soon need to answer the question of where the bombers had originated, a sensitive issue he brainstormed with Rosenman.

“Mr. President, do you remember the novel of James Hilton,
Lost Horizon
, telling of that wonderful, timeless place known as Shangri-La,” Rosenman asked. “It was located in the trackless wastes of Tibet. Why not tell them that that’s where the planes came from? If you use a fictional place like that, it’s a polite way of saying that you do not intend to tell the enemy or anybody else where the planes really came from.”

Roosevelt immediately liked the idea. He phoned Steve Early and briefed him on the plan. The president then tried out the line the next morning on Assistant Secretary Bill Hassett when he entered Roosevelt’s bedroom.

“What’s the news?” the president asked.

Hassett relayed to him the latest headlines and recounted how all the papers were filled with speculation over the mysterious raid on Japan.

“You know,” Roosevelt said, “we have an airplane base in the Himalayas.”

A former journalist with the Associated Press and the
Washington Post
, Hassett thought about the president’s answer for a moment. “That seemed to me, geographically, a prodigious distance from Tokyo,” he wrote in his diary.

The president then brought the joke to its climax. “The base,” he continued, “is at Shangri-La.”

The befuddled Hassett stared at the commander in chief. “I was unfamiliar with James Hilton’s book
Lost Horizon
,” he later admitted, “and so was dumb enough until I sensed that he was kidding.”

Roosevelt ordered the train readied that night to leave at eleven and return to Washington. The reference from Hilton’s book stayed in his mind. He liked it so much that he confided in his cousin Daisy over breakfast the next morning, on the train as it approached the nation’s capital, that he planned to use that phrase with reporters.

When a journalist brought up the raid during the 4:10 p.m. press conference in the Executive Office on April 21, Roosevelt immediately segued to the question over where the
bombers originated. “I think the time has now come to tell you,” the president announced. “They came from our new secret base at Shangri-La!”

The press erupted in laughter, though as Daisy recorded in her diary, only about half of them understood the joke. Reporters pressed Roosevelt for details of the raid, which only served to highlight how little the White House still knew.

“Would you care to go so far as to confirm the truth of the Japanese reports that Tokyo was bombed?” one reporter asked.

“No. I couldn’t even do that,” Roosevelt said with a laugh. “I am depending on Japanese reports very largely.”

Like Roosevelt, the press soon took to the joke about America’s mythical base in the Himalayas, using it days later in an April 24 press conference.

“Is there any news today from Shangri-La?” one reporter asked.

Roosevelt would have particular fun with the theme during a May 26 press conference. “A southern newspaper editor,” he told reporters, “was asked in a letter to the editor where Shangri-La was, and he said that he had examined carefully the maps of every parish in the State of Louisiana and been unable to find Shangri, L-A.”

The press howled with laughter.

“When is the ambassador of Shangri-La going to present his credentials?” one reporter asked to even more chuckles.

“I understood that was an American possession,” another countered.

“Have you any Shangri-La stamps for cancellation?”

“Yes,” Roosevelt answered. “I have a special album sent me by the ‘Lama.’”

Roosevelt would later go so far as to dub the new presidential retreat in Maryland’s Catoctin Mountain Shangri-La, a name future president Dwight Eisenhower changed in 1953 in honor of his grandson to Camp David. The Navy followed Roosevelt’s lead in 1944, inviting Joe Doolittle to christen the 27,100-ton aircraft carrier
Shangri-La
. Even her husband would embrace the president’s humor, recording the famous mission in his flight log simply as “Shangri-La to Shangri-La.”

The president’s jocular humor in the days after the raid helped mask the administration’s lack of information. At other times Roosevelt simply deflected questions, arguing that he knew
only what had been reported in the press.

“Mr. President, there are complaints in Tokyo that our Army and Navy are keeping too quiet,” one reporter asked on April 24, addressing the official silence that had surrounded the mission. “Could you do anything about that?”

“I read that too,” Roosevelt cryptically answered, ending the discussion.

Privately the president couldn’t help gloating, firing off a message to Winston Churchill. “As you will have seen in the press we have had a good crack at Japan by air and I am hoping that we can make it very difficult for them to keep too many of their big ships in the Indian Ocean,” Roosevelt wrote. “I am frank to say that I feel better about the war than at any time in the past two years.”

The military hustled to keep the president informed of any news. The same day Roosevelt first joked about Shangri-La, Arnold sent him a one-page memo, noting that sixteen bombers had left the carrier and successfully attacked targets in the Tokyo-Osaka area, but had encountered bad weather over China. “The number of airplanes forced down or shot down over Japan are not definitely known,” the general wrote. “We have received reports of nineteen crew members landing safe and uninjured in the area south of Hangchow.” Arnold’s opinion of the mission’s success was mixed. “From the viewpoint of damage to enemy installations and property, and the tremendous effect it had upon our Allies, as well as the demoralizing effect upon our enemies, the raid was undoubtedly highly successful,” he wrote. “However, from the viewpoint of an Air Force operation the raid was not a success, for no raid is a success in which losses exceed ten per cent, and it now appears that probably all of the airplanes were lost.”

Arnold’s view improved drastically the next day. The general had finally received Doolittle’s cable, which had been sent to the Chinese embassy, translated, and forwarded to Arnold. The general quoted it in full to the president. He likewise cited reports from Chungking, noting that he could now account for eleven bombers, meaning the Japanese could have shot down at most only five. He further noted that despite early discovery, the dogged Doolittle had charged ahead with the mission, a fact that clearly impressed Arnold
. “Everything points to Doolittle having accomplished a most remarkable flight. He knowingly and willingly took off twelve hours ahead of time, which put him over Japan at the worst possible time of day. He also knew that this would put him over China at night where, if the weather broke against him the chances of getting in safely were very very poor,” he wrote. “Thus, he had the breaks against him on the take off, at the time he did his bombing, and also at the time of landing in China.”

William Standley, the American ambassador, messaged Washington on April 22 that York’s crew had landed in Vladivostok, news Russia didn’t want public: “The Soviet military authorities would like to have this information kept secret and especially do not wish that the press should know that a United States Army plane had landed in the Soviet Union,” Marshall informed the president the next day. “The crew,” he wrote, “was apparently uninjured and is being well cared for.” Major General Dwight Eisenhower drafted a message to the embassy on Marshall’s behalf with a plan to get the crew out. “It would appear desirable, if consistent with the views of the Soviet Government, to remove the crew and plane from eastern Siberia as quickly as possible,” he wrote. “This would minimize the danger of the enemy discovering their presence and demanding explanation. If this can be accomplished, it is further suggested that these individuals might be attached for the time being to the United States Embassy. If Mr. Stalin desires to take possession of the plane you are authorized to offer it to him for use in Russia.”

The raid did create real fears of possible Japanese retaliation in some observers, including Admiral William Leahy, who that summer would become Roosevelt’s chief of staff. “This might have been of some assistance to our war effort by requiring defensive Japanese air forces to remain in Japan,” the admiral later wrote, “but I feared it would bring reprisal bombing attacks on American Pacific Coast cities.” So, too, did Henry Stimson, though the public’s enthusiasm over the raid coupled with the Japanese government’s hysteria initially tamped down the war secretary’s concerns. “I have always been a little bit doubtful about this project, which has been a pet project of the President’s,” Stimson confided in his diary the day of the attack. “But I will say that it has had a very good psychological effect on the country both here and abroad and it has had also a very wholesome effect on Japan’s public sentiment.”

After news of the attack settled
, Stimson’s earlier concerns returned. He summoned Generals Marshall and Arnold on April 21 for a “few earnest words,” expressing his fear that Japan would have no choice but to counter with a carrier raid against the West Coast. The war secretary made similar predictions during a press conference in an effort to prepare the public for just such a possibility. “The United States government,” Stimson told reporters, “administered a stinging, humiliating, surprise blow when it bombed Tokyo. This was shown by the fact that at the time of the raid the Japanese were boasting about their invulnerability. To any one who knows Oriental psychology, as I do, this meant to the Japanese a serious loss of face, which can only be wiped out by a return blow, possibly a little bigger than the one suffered. We have a paramount necessity to set our house in order for what seems inevitable.”

Such concerns prompted major cities across the nation to review air-raid precautions. “Don’t forget the payoff,” warned New York City’s police commissioner, Lewis Valentine. “If we can do it, they can do it, too.” Brooklyn held a massive blackout just a few days after the raid that affected 968,000 residents spread across seventeen square miles. Tensions remained so high that two men got into a fistfight at the intersection of Russell Street and Norman Avenue after one refused to snuff out his cigarette. Similar fears triggered a three-hour shutdown of San Francisco—the longest so far of the war, leaving motorists stranded on the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges—after authorities reported the discovery offshore of an “unidentified target.”

Despite those anxieties—coupled with the lack of concrete details—Americans applauded the raid, both those at home in the United States and those serving overseas. “We drank a bottle of champagne to celebrate the event,” Major General Lewis Brereton wrote in his diary when news reached him in New Delhi. “Good for Jimmy!”

Editorials across the nation lit up with the news. “Tokyo bombed! Yokohama bombed! Kobe bombed!” trumpeted the
Washington Post
. “After four months of defeats in the Pacific War these words have abruptly electrified the pulse of America.”