Four months after Pearl Harbor, 80 airmen launched a one-way bombing run over Tokyo — with no way home and almost no chance of survival — just to prove it could be done.
On April 18, 1942 — just four months after Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor — 16 B-25 Mitchell bombers lifted off the deck of USS Hornet and flew over 600 miles to bomb Tokyo and four other Japanese cities. It was the first time enemy aircraft had ever struck the Japanese home islands, and it sent shockwaves through a nation that had been told it was invulnerable.
The mission was audacious to the point of seeming impossible. B-25 medium bombers were never designed to take off from aircraft carriers — their wingspan barely cleared the ship's superstructure. The crews had only weeks of training on short-field takeoffs, and once airborne there was no going back: the planes didn't have enough fuel to return to the carrier, so every man aboard was committed to a one-way flight into enemy territory.
The plan called for launching 200 miles from Japan under cover of darkness, but the task force was spotted by a Japanese patrol boat 650 miles out, forcing an early daylight launch. The extra distance meant the crews would almost certainly run out of fuel before reaching their landing sites in China. Colonel James Doolittle, leading from the front, took off first — into a 35-knot headwind with only 467 feet of deck.
The physical damage from the raid was minimal — 50 people killed, 400 injured, and limited industrial destruction. But the psychological impact was enormous. In America, the raid electrified public morale at a desperate moment. In Japan, it shattered the myth of an impenetrable homeland and humiliated the military leadership. Emperor Hirohito had been told a raid on Japan was impossible; now his generals had to explain how it had happened.
Of the 16 crews, all but one crash-landed or bailed out over China or the ocean after running out of fuel. One plane diverted to the Soviet Union, where the crew was interned for over a year before secretly being allowed to escape. Eight airmen were captured by Japanese forces in China; three were executed and one died in captivity. The remaining raiders were sheltered and guided to safety by Chinese civilians at enormous personal risk.
Japan's fury at those Chinese civilians who helped the raiders was catastrophic. In retaliation, the Imperial Army launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign — a brutal sweep through eastern China that killed an estimated 250,000 civilians. The raid that cost Japan almost nothing in military terms had provoked a reprisal of staggering proportions.
Doolittle himself expected to be court-martialed for losing all his aircraft and missing primary targets. Instead, he was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Roosevelt and promoted two ranks to Brigadier General — skipping an entire grade. The raid's strategic legacy was even larger than the honor: it panicked Admiral Yamamoto into accelerating his attack on Midway Island, which resulted in Japan's catastrophic defeat there two months later.