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- [00:00]
Don Wildman
Thanks for listening to American History Hit. To get all the History Hit podcasts ad free early access and bonus episodes, head over to historyhit.com subscribe or you can sign up on Apple podcasts with just one click. Aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, a B25 bomber, fueled and loaded with ordnance and crew is positioned for takeoff. It is a hive of activity out here as 15 more planes just like this one are lined up behind, waiting on their signals. Inside each plane, crew members ready for flight, nervously checking and rechecking equipment, reviewing procedures and studying the charts they'll follow to their targets. Here inside the lead plane, Army Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle watches as the Hornet's bow pitches and yaws in the churning seas. He is timing his takeoff, calculating the acceleration acceleration he'll need to lift this burdened craft into a 40 knot gale, sea spray obscuring his view. He advances the throttle to maximum horsepower and releases his brakes. Doolittle's plane lumbers along the 467foot flight deck, gradually gaining speed. Normal B25 takeoff procedures call for a 1,200foot Runway. When the bomber finally covers the full distance of the deck, the ship's bow pitches skyward and Doolittle launches into the gloom, at first barely achieving lift and dipping towards the sea, then climbing skyward. The other planes of the squadron can now follow. It is April 18, 1942 and the Doolittle Raid is on. Destination Japan. This is American History hit and thanks for clicking through. I'm your host, Don Wildman. Today's tale involves a military endeavor of supreme courage and daring. It happened in the early months of the Pacific War with Japan, a dangerous top secret mission conducted at sea as an incursion against the Japanese home islands to destroy naval and industrial assets. Yes, but perhaps more importantly, to deliver a psychological blow to the spiritual backbone of the Japanese people and at the same time a morale booster for Americans still reeling from Pearl Harbor. It all happened on April 18, 1942 when 16 B25 bombers took off from a single aircraft carrier some 600 miles off the coast of Japan and flew a one way journey that would take them over targets in Tokyo Bay and elsewhere and onward to land in China. It's the Doolittle Raid and author Michel Paradis just a few years ago published a celebrated book about it entitled Last Mission to Tokyo. Hello Michelle. Glad you're back. We had you last month for Dwight Eisenhower and the birth of the American superpower. Episode 203 Look It Up Today we reach further back. Thank you for joining us.
- [03:09]
Michel Paradis
Oh, my pleasure. It's great to be back.
- [03:11]
Don Wildman
Part of the pain of Pearl harbor was its remoteness out there in Hawaii in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and the frustrating reality to Americans that we couldn't immediately strike back in those days. So for months, as we mobilized and equipped our massive fighting force, Americans had to sit with the fact that we'd been ambushed. Was this the primary project of the Doolittle raid?
- [03:31]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, because it's easy to forget, certainly with hindsight, how desperate the first year of the Second World War was for the United States. Hitler, you know, occupies nearly all of Europe in Fortress Europe, which obviously the breach of which is the subject of the last book we talked about. But North Africa is also under Nazi and fascist occupation, the Pacific. Japan is waging one of the most aggressive, surprising and rapid advances over the largest area of the globe, arguably in human history. You know, Pearl harbor we think of as this attack against, you know, the Hawaiian Islands, which at that point were just an American colony. But they were conducted with a simultaneous invasion of the Philippines, where the Japanese had routed the United States within a matter of months, sending Douglas MacArthur famously, into exile, from which he declared, he will return. They had pressed deep into China, took over British possessions in Shanghai, Hong Kong, in Malaysia and Singapore. All the dominoes were falling to the point that Japan was beginning to menace the northern coast of Australia. And the United States and the Allies were on inexorable retreat basically everywhere in the globe. And so the reality was that it wasn't even obvious that the United States and the Allies could win the Second World War, certainly a two front war against Nazi Germany in Europe, in Japan, in the East. And there was a desperate sense amongst the public that this might be the end. This is some dark man in the high castle times. And the impetus for the Dolittle raid was Roosevelt's political instincts as much as they were his military strategic instincts. And it was this idea that we have to do something. We have to strike back. We have to get into this fight early to show the American people that this war not only must be won, but can be won. And that was ultimately the initial thought for the Doodle Raid. A naval commander came in with an idea of what if we took medium bombers, essentially army heavy bombers, off of an aircraft carrier and launched them against Japan? And as you described in your really excellent summary and introduction, it was one of the most improbable, indeed impossible things that could be done, because an army bomber, just to give you some of the basic physics, even A medium army bomber requires, you know, close to, you know, half a mile or so of Runway at a minimum, to get up into the air, especially once it's fully loaded with bombs and a crew and fuel. The range of airplanes just did not cross the Pacific in 1942. There had been one Trans Pacific flight that was done as a bit of a stunt the year before, and it required the pilot to drop the landing gear off the plane and to crash land on the other side. And even if you used an aircraft carrier the way we did with the naval fighters to take these army bombers off, there was nowhere to land them. Because just the basic physics, again, of an army bomber, which is a very heavy plane and the size of an aircraft Runway, is that if they put the hooks up to try and tail hooks up to try and catch an army bomber coming across to landing on a aircraft carrier, it would very much more likely rip the plane in half due to the momentum, than it would stop the plane and crew safely on ground. And even if you did that successfully, there was nowhere to put the plane, because they're so big, you can't put them in the bottom of the aircraft carrier. And so it fell to this figure who is a, you know, certainly to World War II buffs. He's well known, but is not a household name anymore.
- [07:14]
Don Wildman
An unlikely project, to say the least. The raid or something like it entered the planning phase, as you said, in January 1942, right after Pearl Harbor. Pretty much almost immediately, a figure named Jimmy Doolittle is engaged. James Harold Doolittle, who had been out of the military, working in the aviation industry, doing remarkable things, a famous flyer. Why this guy? Who is he? And how's he going to figure into the planning of this?
- [07:38]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, Jimmy Doolittle is, you know, certainly known to World War II buffs, but he's not as much of a household name today as he was in the first half of the 20th century. And that's a shame, because he's almost a quintessentially American figure. He grows up in Alaska, ultimately moves to Southern California as a child and goes to an air show. And I think it was 1908 where he sees some of the first airplanes taking off and is just as most Americans, as most people around the world were at the time, just utterly stunned. Right. It's so difficult for us today to imagine what it was like to live in a world where flight was something that birds and bats did, and to see a human being literally flying through the air and not like a bird in this Loud, angry machine. It just presaged a whole new world of possibility. And Jimmy Doolittle was, you know, very early to that. Joins the Army Air Corps, doesn't end up flying combat during the First World War, which is very much to the world in his benefit, given that, you know, aviators in the First World War had a casualty rate of about 50%. He goes off after the war to get a PhD at MIT in what we now call aeronautical engineering. And he's famous, indeed most famous for being the kind of guy who makes all the numbers add up. You know, if aviation in that first generation of flying was much like the way, you know, stunt motorcycle riders ride around on by the seat of, literally the seat of their pants. Jimmy Doolittle was mathematical in his orientation, which in turn allowed him to do even crazier stunts than anyone else, because he understood that once you're up in an airplane, you don't know where anything is, right. You up, even up and down, all of a sudden becomes ambiguous. Human beings were not built to fly through the air. And so he developed aeronautical instruments and really principles of instrument based flying that we rely on today to make airplanes rise and land safely hundreds, if not thousands of times a day, such that he was the first American to actually cross the United States in a single day, which, again, from the standpoint of just human history, is an amazing moment. Lewis and Clark took months to get across the United States. Trains took days, if not weeks to get across the United States. And here someone treated the distance between Florida and San Francisco as the same between Philadelphia and New York. And that's a total paradigm shift in how people thought about the world. And Jimmy Doolittle was the man to do it. But he'd do other crazy stuff too, almost to prove the value of math over gut. And his most famous example of this was blind flying. He took off from an airport in Long island with an airplane that was completely blacked out. The windows were completely blacked out, couldn't see a thing, took off, flew a perfect circle for several miles overhead and then landed without ever being able to see a foot outside of the airplane and did it entirely with the plane's instruments and got this reputation as the man who could even fly blind. And so when the United States is beginning to remobilize with war on the horizon in the summer of 1941, Doolittle leaves the aeronautics industry, where he had been essentially a celebrity stunt pilot for Shell, and rejoins the Army Air Forces, as it was called at the time, as an aide to Hap Arnold, who is the commander of the Army Air Forces. And so when Hap Arnold is given this kind of cockamamie plan, this idea of taking army bombers off an aircraft carrier, there's only one person he's going to give that plan to, and it's Jimmy Doolittle. And Jimmy Doolittle looks at the plan is like, this is impossible, you can't do this. But ha. Arnold says, well, make it add up, make the numbers add up. And thankfully it was Jimmy Doolittle who got that because that was, you know, ultimately the calculated risk, as it was said, was his specialty.
- [11:23]
Don Wildman
Yeah, he had, I mean he was in the conversation with Charles Lindbergh in those days, I mean, and by the time World War II comes along, he's a middle aged man. I mean this guy's really deep into his life. He enters as he's got the rank of major, he's promoted to lieutenant Colonel and assigned this project. As you mentioned, preparations for the attack begin at Columbia Army Air Base in South Carolina. Let's go through this. This is fascinating to me, how logistical they have to be in a very, very short amount of time. I mean, they've got to train crews, they've got to gather these planes, they got to train the crews. It's this massive affair. And Doolittle is overseeing the whole thing.
- [11:58]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, he is. It's all about, in a way, the spreadsheets, as we would say today. You know, the first thing he does is reengineer the B25 bomber to both be able to take off more quickly but also fly an extraordinary like essentially two to three times its standard distance. And the main way he does that is by stripping everything out of the plane, right? All the safety mechanisms, all the guns, anything that adds additional weight and replacing it with giant fuel tanks that turn these, you know, air, you know, B25s into flying gas cans. And then once he does that, he has to train up the crews. And I love the call that he gives to the bomb group because he asked for volunteers and he just says volunteers for a dangerous mission. And if you're an aviator in 1942, like that's just catnip, right? No details at all. Just a dangerous mission. And so he gets more than enough volunteers, 120 in all, who he then takes down to Elgin Air Force Base in Florida. He doesn't tell them what they're doing or where they're going, but he paints lines on a Runway that happened to just be exactly the distance of an aircraft carrier's Runway and says, you guys have to get these planes up in 500ft. And they just train one day after day, they're just, these crews are in these planes going as fast as they can. Trying to just get the finesse to get these planes up in 500ft in the early runs are not encouraging. Right? These are again, these are planes that are designed to take off at, you know, really three to four times that distance. And they're taken off in nowhere near 500ft. But he keeps drilling them, keeps drilling them and ultimately just the time comes to launch. And so they fly these modified gas cans all the way across the United States to the Alameda Air Base or naval base right outside of San Francisco. They load them up onto an aircraft carrier. At this point, again, no one really technically knows the details of the mission. At least very, very few people do other than Doolittle. And then there are a few days out at sea when they declare this convoy is going for Tokyo. And that's when the men first learned that this is a one way mission.
- [14:07]
Don Wildman
Yeah, I just want to recap. This is a four month training process that basically invented the idea because no one had ever taken a bomber and taken off of an aircraft carrier anywhere in the world. Is that fair to say?
- [14:17]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, that's right.
- [14:18]
Don Wildman
Never mind under the conditions at sea, you know, the open sea with a lot of stuff going on, as we'll find out, this is a remarkably fast learning curve that everybody goes up. So on April Fool's Day, April 1, 1942, these modified planes and crews, along with a crew of 71 officers, 130 enlisted men. I mention this just to say this is a very large thing to organize. They have to have a fleet. This isn't just the single aircraft carriers is going to go off secretly. This entire fleet of destroyers, cruisers, two aircraft carriers, the USS Hornet and the Enterprise depart from San Francisco Bay, surprisingly to me, in broad daylight, which I thought they would not do. How much were they worried about people finding this out?
- [15:03]
Michel Paradis
Oh, it was a huge concern. Security was the biggest concern, which is why no one actually even in the naval convoy knows where they're going, except for Admiral Halsey, who is the commander. It's only once they're out at sea that they make this announcement and roars of cheers going up that they're going to Tokyo. But then the real learning has to happen because now that they're at sea, now that they're essentially sequestered, all the pilots and crews are given their orders where they're given their targets, they're given maps, they're given these fairly extensive briefings on where they're trying to go in China, which is a city called Guzhou or Chongqing, as they would say at the time. They are given sort of rudimentary Chinese and Japanese expressions such as, I'm an American, I am here to help, all these sorts of things which they, you know, whether or not they master, I, I would question. And they're told that they have to fly at 500ft above Japan. This is some low level bombing, which is done for two primary reasons. One is accuracy. There's a real premium put on actually hitting Japanese military targets inside of Japan. A big part of American bombing strategy and theory at the time was to hit the industrial nerves and intersections of an enemy's economy, as opposed to, for example, British doctrine, which at that point had basically moved to carpet bombing. And so there was a very high premium put on accuracy when it came to bombing. But the other was Japanese air defenses. Japan had built, as you might imagine, incredibly sophisticated air defenses, but with the anticipation of high level bombing. And so if they flew down at 500ft, it would give them a little more cover at least from like the flak guns and all the Japanese air defenses, which would be expecting the enemy to come, you know, maybe at about 10,000ft at that time.
- [16:49]
Don Wildman
I learned a lot about this that I didn't know. I remember first seeing this in newsreel footage when I was in fifth grade. It just is an extraordinary thing to find out about. I can only imagine what that looked like to Americans back home when this was finally publicized. I neglected to mention that there were how many planes on this thing? Sixteen planes. The 16th, interestingly, was added. Right. This was a fine point in this process. They had to figure out if this was even going to work because they, I just want to emphasize they hadn't even taken off of an aircraft carrier yet in the training. So when they're at sea, they're going to have to find out if that first plane can even get off the thing.
- [17:27]
Michel Paradis
Yeah.
- [17:27]
Don Wildman
And how they has to do that. So they may lose that first plane, and they almost do, as a matter of fact. But what's the armament that they're carrying and how impossible is this task to take off?
- [17:38]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, it's totally extraordinary. So they're given each two 500 pound bombs as well as two incendiary clusters to drop over their targets. Right. This is very light armament from the state, certainly from the perspective of what happens later. And as you said, they have to like get. Getting the planes onto the deck of the USS Hornet is no small feat. They actually end up having to use a crane. And when you see these photographs of these planes that have been essentially tied to the deck of the Hornet going out to sea, right. The tail of the final plane, the 16th plane, is literally hanging off the edge of the Hornet. That's how tightly packed in they are. And in fact, the first plane off the deck doesn't even have a full 500ft. It has only about 460ft, if I recall. Exactly. And somewhat controversially, but you know, he's the guy to do it. Jimmy Doolittle is the one who says, I'm going to fly that first plane. That ends up bumping another pilot, bumping his pilot to the co pilot seat. And then a couple people have to rearrange. But he says, look, I'm going to be the one to lead this mission. And it's very early in the morning. Their initial plan had been to take off in the afternoon so that they could fly over Japan at night. And that would give them at least the COVID of darkness as they are approaching Japan. Hit their targets early in the morning before the Japanese can mobilize and then hopefully get the rest of the way, the few hundred, like five, almost 1,000 miles actually onto Chungking, which is the rallying point inside of China. But what happens is in the morning they're spotted by a Japanese picket boat. And the task force commander, Admiral Halsey, is absolutely not going to keep the two American aircraft carriers that are still operational after Pearl harbor and in the fleet in the Pacific in Japanese controlled waters any longer than he absolutely has to. And so he gives the order to launch essentially 12 hours early. And that does a lot of things that make the Doolittle raid even higher risk than it already is. For one thing, now they're going over Japan in broad daylight in the middle of the morning. And the other thing is they now have to go essentially an extra 5 to 600 miles with the fuel they have. And so this is, to put it lightly, you know, pushing the outer bounds of the math and physics on which Jimmy Doolittle had so carefully planned this operation.
- [19:53]
Don Wildman
This took about two weeks to get across the ocean. They actually left April 2nd, I misspoke and then begin to arrive at where they want to be. April 18, they are spotted by a Japanese picket boat. How much do the Japanese expect this kind of attack? And what was their early warning system? Because this is pre radar days for them.
- [20:12]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, for sure. So they were on alert. They understood their vulnerability, particularly from the air. And in the Imperial Conference, when they ultimately do launch the, you know, the attacks on Pearl harbor and the rest of the Pacific and declare war on Britain and the United States, they are quite concerned. And people raise very clear concerns that Japan is going to be quite vulnerable to air attack. Right? Not. Not the least because it's made out of wood, right? This is a wooden city. And they decided to go forward anyway, in part because at that time they understood precisely what Doodle confronted when he first got the mission. Right. The Japan, at least the main islands of Japan, were outside the radius of most airfields that could pose a direct threat to Japan. The only exception to that, really, was the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union was neutral towards Japan, at least at this point. But there was this lingering threat, this concern that air forces could take off from Russia and attack into Japan if Russia ultimately entered the war on the Allied side against Japan. But the idea that people would be taking off large bombers from an aircraft carrier just wasn't in the cards, so to speak. And so they were concerned about, you know, naval aircraft, which could bomb, but those were light bombers. So they did have a fairly wide perimeter of picket boats. And when I say picket boats, oftentimes these are like fishing boats that also have a radio into the War Department, like the Nittumaru, which was the picket boat that picked up the Doolittle Raiders convoy. And they did actually send a message back. This is sort of one of the interesting discoveries I found in going through the Japanese archives. The alert was sent by this picket boat that there was an American task force seemingly headed towards Japan. It's just that the Japanese army and sort of military establishment of the time just kind of bungled the alert. So they had the warning. They just didn't pass it down to all the places that need to go or take it as seriously as they should.
- [22:02]
Don Wildman
So then one of those cruisers goes out and sinks that boat real fast.
- [22:07]
Michel Paradis
They do.
- [22:08]
Don Wildman
And that's what alarms Halsey and says, this has to go now, immediately. It really speaks to the strategy that the Japanese were pursuing here. The hitting of Pearl harbor was meant to knock the ability of the Americans to answer in the Pacific, during which time in the following few months, they were going to wreak havoc out there. So much so that we could never answer that realistically. Doolittle Raid figures prominently in the transition, how we're going to deal with this renegade state. We mentioned that first plane. I want to explain what that was like for James Doolittle, when he takes off that aircraft carrier, right, to add.
- [22:46]
Michel Paradis
Sort of danger and anxiety to this entire exercise. The they take off, as I said, early in the morning and the weather is just terrible. The other ships in the convoy actually ended up taking some amazing newsreels that you can watch online of the airplanes taking off. And the seas are just pitching up and down. The front of this aircraft carrier is just bouncing and bobbing in the ocean. And as Doolittle is sitting on that Runway with 500ft, less than 500ft in front of him, you know, he varies essentially every 10 seconds between a shot of the sky and a shot of the ocean. And so he has to time his takeoff perfectly so that when he lifts off the edge of that aircraft carrier of the USS Hornet, that he's pointing up and not down right into the sea. And so it's just this incredibly tense moment and he does it right. Everyone is just watching with bated breath as this plane just rolls down and it. And the funny thing too is like they don't go that fast, right? They're going like their top speed of these planes is only about 150, 200 some miles an hour. And so when they're taking off, like, it doesn't look like they're going all that fast to begin with. And you're just watching what looks like this plane roll off the deck of the aircraft carry. And then just, just in the nick of time, the pitch of the deck goes up and the airplane goes up and then begins to sag. It looks like it might not quite. And then he. And then he pulls off and gets up into the air and one man after another, one plane after another, all 16 planes, despite some very close calls and including one man on the deck of a plane who accidentally walks into one of the propellers. And I'm not laughing, but he ends up getting his arm cut off. With the exception of that one casualty, all 16 planes get off and up into the air and make their way to Japan.
- [24:38]
Don Wildman
So 600 miles takes them how long to get to the Japanese islands?
- [24:42]
Michel Paradis
All told, it's about a five to seven hour flight, depending on the winds they hit. And because different crews have different targets in Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka. And so they fly most of the way just over open ocean towards their targets, navigating their way. And then as they come upon the Japanese mainland, they then go low. So low in fact, that the crews on the Doolittle Raiders, the crews on the planes talk about little kids just on baseball fields, you know, waving up at them as they fly by, like, that's how close they are. They can be seen as people from the ground. And they fly low over Japan. And that's again, no small feat of navigation. Right. You're going 150 miles an hour over a place you don't know. Right. That's like speeding through a city, you know, at 150 miles an hour that you visited for the first time.
- [25:30]
Don Wildman
This formation of planes, I mean, it's not that. It's not a singular formation. They go to different targets, right?
- [25:35]
Michel Paradis
That's right, yeah. They break off, they go into clusters, typically about two to three planes per sort of target area. And then with each, each one has an individual target within a sort of broader area that's about 10 miles wide.
- [25:46]
Don Wildman
What was the purpose of the Enterprise? I mean, were they accompanied by by fighters at sea?
- [25:51]
Michel Paradis
They were, but once they got into open ocean, once they had taken off, they were all alone. They were flying, you know, in formation for much of the way, but then ultimately off into their own particular target areas, and they're entirely alone in those planes. It's an incredible thing to imagine being a young American who had come, who signed up for this dangerous mission. You'd probably never left the United States before, and there you are in an airplane over the vastness of the Pacific and then over Japan to do a quick bombing run with a fairly small payload and then to just make your way off into some unknown place in China.
- [26:26]
Don Wildman
I'm surprised that the Japanese were caught so off guard. I would have thought they were more prepared for this with anti aircraft and so forth. I mean, if they're only 500ft in the air, you would have thought they'd be shot down with a gun.
- [26:36]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, you would think, wouldn't you? But I think a couple of things were going on there. One is Japan had moved most of its experienced sort of airmen, combat air defenders and just soldiers, just army groups out into the Pacific. Japan was at this point in a very offensive strategy. And so it was pursuing, at this point in the war, Japan was pursuing a very offensive strategy. And so those who were stationed in the defense of the homeland were just not the A team that Japan had been fielding at that time. This was where the young, inexperienced recruits certainly had been put. Japan also had this history of invincibility that it very much took for granted. Almost superstitious, you know, you have to also remember that Japan had never actually suffered a military invasion from abroad, never been really attacked from abroad. This history goes back thousands of years in Japanese lore, the only serious attempt at breaching Japanese sovereignty was by Genghis Khan. He brought a fleet into the Sea of Japan that a typhoon just happened to come through and devastate in a moment that had gone down in Japanese legend as the Kamikaze or the divine wind. So Japan had both a literal and sort of mystical belief in its own invincibility and so just wasn't really as prepared for an enemy strike on the homeland as it certainly should have been. I think the low level bombing though also was incredibly effective at frustrating what little air defences the Japanese had. One Japanese report into the response to the Doolittle raid and to the defense against the Doolittle raid commented that the anti aircraft gunners did more damage to Tokyo than the Doolittle raiders did. Because you have these planes flying so low, really just right over the rooftops, the anti aircraft gunners are just inaccurately blasting away into Japan's own buildings. And so there was just this utter confusion, frankly, a lot of incompetence. And another thing that ends up becoming a bigger theme in the longer story of the book, a lot of the costs of having a massive bureaucracy. Japan is and was one of the great bureaucracies of the world and individual actors within that bureaucracy had very little space to exercise initiative. And so there was a lot of command and control that ended up preventing even those Japanese who saw it coming and who were alert and ready to go from actually acting because they had to get higher level permission in order to do basic things like sound local alarms and warning systems to potentially engage any enemy aircraft that came over.
- [29:15]
Don Wildman
I'll be back with more American history after this short break. Spark something uncommon this holiday with just the right gift from Uncommon Goods. The busy holiday season is here and Uncommon Goods makes it less stressful with incredible hand picked gifts for everyone on your list. All in one spot. Gifts that spark joy, wonder, delight. And that. It's exactly what I wanted feeling. They scour the globe for original, handmade, absolutely remarkable things. Somehow they know exactly the perfect gift for every single person you know. Here's one of my favorite gifts I found on their site. I bought a pair of Buffalo Bills pint glasses for my football loving, beer loving friend. The perfect thank you. When you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent businesses. Many of their handcrafted products are made in small batches, so shop now before they sell out this holiday season. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com americanhistoryhit that's uncommongoods.com AmericanHistoryHit for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary.
- [30:34]
C
I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. And in God Medieval we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History. Hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast.
- [31:10]
Don Wildman
The targets are Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Kobe, Nagoya and Osaka. Six cities you've already mentioned, not much damage. But that really wasn't the point of this mission, was it?
- [31:22]
Michel Paradis
No, not at all. It was. You know, in some ways it's the most strategically effective light bombing, maybe in the context of the second World War, because it's primary goal really was two things. One was breaching Japan's self confidence. And it does that. It does that in spades. It really causes Japan to make a number of then profoundly strategic errors to include essentially the beginning of a retreat from the wider Pacific. That in turn makes Japan much more vulnerable in the long term to the kind of air attacks that we end up seeing in 1945. But it also had the important effect of, as I mentioned at the beginning, giving the United States public right. The United States is a democracy. Franklin Roosevelt has to lead a democracy into war and he has to get public support not just for things like the draft, but for reorienting America's entire economy almost into a war footing. And that comes at a lot of human personal cost. And he has to convince the public not only is this war the right noble thing to do, but that it can be won, that we're not wasting our time, that we shouldn't be immediately running to the negotiating table to trade away the parts of Europe and Asia that Americans frankly just didn't have an interest in to begin with. The United States has always been very ambiguous just about its own colonies, including the Philippines. And so the idea that the United States would go to war and mobilize for a long term war in the Pacific for interests that were very ill defined to most Americans. You know, even Hawaii was barely America at the time. And Franklin Roosevelt was very cognizant of that in focusing his address to Congress, in mobilizing the country after Pearl Harbor. And so long and short, the Doolittle raid. The Doolittle raid just proved to America that this was a war that America could win, that America could go on the initiative and succeed.
- [33:10]
Don Wildman
Yeah. How much was it a feint like if we attacked the home islands? I mean, Japan at this point was just marching across the Pacific and down into Southeast Asia. This kind of is a chess move in a way that forces them to think on the defensive, doesn't it?
- [33:25]
Michel Paradis
Absolutely. It goes off way better than anyone could have predicted because Japan had to rationally calculate, can the United States keep doing this? And if they can keep doing this, we do have to reconsider our overarching strategy. And one of the main things Japan does after they learn how the Doolittle Raiders escape essentially by crash landing into China, is they go on just a ruthless campaign throughout China to devastate Chinese airfields to prevent the United States from launching similar kinds of attacks in the future.
- [33:58]
Don Wildman
Let's talk about that in a moment because it's an extraordinary factor in this. 15 of the 16 planes make it to the Chinese coast. All this happens in one day. Just remember, this is an extraordinary April 18th in our history. They make it to the Chinese coast. It takes 13 hours for them to get there. A1 steers off to Soviet Russia because it's low on fuel. Hearkening back to, you know, the early decision to go costing them more fuel. Crash landings happen. One crewman is killed bailing out. Two other crews go missing. Doolittle parachutes with his men and is assisted by Chinese soldiers. Interestingly, very sidebar. But John Birch, the missionary, John Birch is part of this. I grew up in the 60s with the John Birch Society, which was named after this man. Little weird, you know, historical footnote here. Doodle lands in dung, a pile of dung which saves his injured ankle, and they get transported. Resounding success all in all, but followed by a lot of chaos. Let's. Let's go through the resulting consequences of this, of this mission.
- [34:59]
Michel Paradis
Yeah. So, you know, I mean, Doolittle certainly, as the one middle aged man of the group, I think probably had the clearest sense of their odds of catastrophic failure, not just in attacking Japan, but even if they succeeded in attacking Japan, in getting away to safety over China, you know, they had fairly ambiguous targets with a very ambiguous ally, Chiang Kai Shek, who was supposedly supposed to set up a beacon for them all to land. That was never set up. And so the Doolittle Raiders end up scattered all over the western coast of China. Some even crash land into the ocean for lack of fuel. The raiders themselves actually quickly rally over the course of About a week where they're supposed to go into Chongqing, into this cave. And I got to visit it when I was in China researching this story. And the cave is still there. There are still carvings into the wall by some of the Doolittle Raiders, sort of in the Kilroy was here sense. Today, the cave is mostly used by teenagers who are trying to hide from their parents in some fashion. But they get away. But the Chinese don't get away. Japan's reaction to the Doodle Du raid is one of immediate crisis and extreme violence, particularly toward the Chinese, who were seen as both instrumental and treacherous for helping the Doolittle Raiders. Chongqing, the city in which the Doolittle Raiders rally is brutally suppressed. The bombing goes on, according to some reports, days and nights. Men are conscripted to literally, physically, manually dig up these compressed clay and concrete airfields. Tens of thousands potentially die. War statistics in this period are extremely difficult to confirm, but the casualties are astronomical, the civilian casualties are astronomical. As a result of Japanese retaliation, I.
- [36:49]
Don Wildman
Read 250,000 people die.
- [36:51]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, I try to be very cautious about that just because numbers can be very easy to manipulate and get out of control. But it's tens of thousands, at a minimum. It's tens of thousands. I should say that. And it's a punitive campaign that's done as much against the civilian population who is seen as collaborating with the Americans, as much as it is against those factions within the Chinese army that are still allied with the United States as opposed to with Japan's forces.
- [37:18]
Don Wildman
As we mentioned, the bombing really wasn't the point. A very little damage done, nothing that can be repaired. The real aspect of this is strategic, and it changes the whole way the war begins to be fought from that point on. Of the 80 crewmen, three died, eight captured, three were killed in captivity by the Japanese. There's a giant story at the other side of this, which you skillfully take us through in the book about the legal aspect of this, which we'll talk about in a moment. The Japanese looked for the fleet, couldn't find them. This was really done on the total down low. It was really a remarkable and effective mission. As I say, the big result of this was a new determination on the part of the Japanese to destroy the carrier force that they had missed at Pearl harbor, thus prompting the strategy to attack finally in Midway in June, a decision which, you know, was fateful, and lost them their carriers and perhaps the war, arguably in the aftermath of this, and this is what's really fascinating about your book. The Doolittle mission told in many accounts. But you are a lawyer, a legal mind, and you take us through how this plays out in the show trials that follow. The Japanese, Remember, have these POWs which they are going to put on trial and show off. But there's another aspect of this in the aftermath of the war. Right, sure.
- [38:34]
Michel Paradis
You know, so this was the thing that really drew me to the story. As you said, there are so many great tellings of the Doolittle Raid, and I can recommend any to your, to many of your listeners. But the one part of the story that had been in, to my mind, quite surprisingly neglected was the legal drama. And most we know we only don't think of a World War II as filled with legal dramas, but this is really one. And it ends up being one of the most consequential legacies of the Doolittle Raid, ends up being a legal legacy even more than the sort of great story and sort of strategic legacy that it has in the conduct of the Pacific War. And that's because when the Japanese capture the eight Doolittle raiders in eastern China, you know, they're in this phase of real crisis. And they want to figure out exactly how the United States pulled this off. And as many of your listeners might be not surprised to hear, they used torture, they waterboarded these men, they used sleep deprivation, isolation, temperature extremes, mock executions, stress positions, you name it. This was all part of a twofold effort, actually. One was the genuine intelligence gathering. How did the Americans do this? But just as important was satisfying a certain kind of political bloodlust in Tokyo, because not only was this operation proof that the United States could attack Japan, it was a real challenge to the credibility of the military clique that had dominated Japanese politics really for the previous decade almost. These men were basically fascist in their orientation. They had assured the emperor and the public that Japan would be invulnerable for all the mystical and practical reasons we've discussed. And so the idea that the Americans could in some way puncture that invincibility, that puncture that self conception of Japan and its military leaders required scapegoats. And so in the course of, you know, torturing these men, the Japanese were also very much committed to proving that the United States had to essentially have cheated in order to pulled off this attack. And they really just wanted to execute these men. Basically, to put not too fine a point on it, the Army Chief of Staff, Hajime Sugiyama, who's this very bellicose figure in the Japanese war cabinet, was basically demanding immediate execution. And Japan, though, is, as I mentioned before, a bureaucratic society, but it's also a very legalistic one. And you had in the Japanese Cabinet a real debate about what to do, because on the one hand, you needed to have some display for the public of punishment for the men who had done this. But by the same token, Japan had agreed, at least in principle, to comply with the Geneva Conventions. And the Foreign Ministry, including Foreign Minister Togo, did not want to put Japan in an even darker place as a pariah state. And so there's a debate. What do you do with the Doolittle Raiders? And they asked, as you always do in these kinds of situations, they asked the lawyers, they went to the War Ministry lawyers, and they said, okay, we have these men. Can we legally execute them? And the lawyers in the War Ministry came back and gave the obvious answer, which is, no, you absolutely may not. That is clearly illegal. And that message went back up through the War Department. And then another message was sent back down to the lawyers, and they were told, look, I don't think you understand. If we don't find a legal way to execute these men, the Kempeitai, which is the feared sort of secret police that are part of the Japanese army, they'll just kill them anyway. And it will be a crisis, it'll be a diplomatic crisis, it'll be a political crisis. And so the lawyers brewed another pot of tea and thought about it and said, well, if the Doolittle raiders committed war crimes, if they attacked civilians in the course of the doodle raid, well, then they could be executed for committing war crimes. And so this goes up, and the Kempeitai, who at this point are interrogating and torturing the deliterators and asking, are asked, is there any evidence of war crimes? And what do the Kempei Tai do? They do what everyone does when they need to make evidence. They torture the deliterators more. And the deliterators, in turn, confess to the Kempei Tay to attacking civilians, to killing a little boy at a school in northern Tokyo, as well as to bombing and strafing civilians throughout Japan. And armed with these confessions, the Japanese put the Doolittle raiders in front of a show trial that lasts anywhere from a half an hour to an hour and a half, depending on the account you believe they're all sentenced to death. And they, on the basis of their evidence, these confessions, and then the question goes to the Cabinet, again, should we execute them? And again, there's a lot of concern, because by the time this all happens, it's the fall of 1942, the Battle of Midway has already gone very much in the Americans direction. The tide of the war is changing. The Japanese are aware of this, and they understand that these are very valuable prisoners. And so a compromise is cut under which the emperor commutes the sentence of all but three of them. And so the pilots and one of the gunners on one of the planes is shot to death at a golf course in Shanghai, China, where they're being held. And this news goes back to the United States as sort of one of the great atrocities, one of the great crimes of the war. And it mobilizes the United States and reinvigorates the desire to seek justice against the Japanese. Indeed, revenge that animates a lot of the United States response to the atrocities committed by the Axis powers overall in the Second World War.
- [44:14]
Don Wildman
I'll be back with more American history after this short break.
- [44:21]
C
I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonega. And in God Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing, subscribing to gone Medieval from history, hit on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [45:00]
Don Wildman
It will go hand in hand with Nuremberg eventually, the war trials in Japan, won't they? Is this part of that process?
- [45:06]
Michel Paradis
It is. So it's, you know, from the very beginning of the war, you know, opportunistic or idealistic, depending on how you're going to view them. Lawyers within the British and American governments argued for a rethinking of how to deal with the Germans and the Japanese once they have been defeated. There was an early effort to use the concepts of law, and particularly the idea of war criminality as a way of dealing with captured sort of Axis leadership. This is something the Russians actually had pioneered as well, although the Russians had their own sort of theory of how you conduct a trial, as you might expect so soon after the purge trials. But there was this idea, this germ of an idea that we could use law as a way of getting justice as opposed to the historical methods of just executing people right or exiling them. Right. There was no trial for Napoleon before he was exiled to Elba. But one of the things the dualerators did was actually galvanize the United States, and particularly in the War Department, to think about this as something serious and there were reasons for this. One of the reasons was when the public was told that the Doors were tortured and murdered. As it was told to the public on the first anniversary of the Doolittle raid in 1943, the public desire for revenge against the Japanese and indiscriminate violence against Japanese prisoners was about as high as you can imagine, including at high levels of political leadership. You have members of Congress saying that Japanese, we should. We're no, we're not going to take any more prisoners after this. And there was a real concern inside the Roosevelt administration that this sort of, this bloodlust not be fed anymore. And so Roosevelt made a very canny decision to say, we are not going to take revenge against the Japanese indiscriminately. That's not who we are as a people. Instead, we're going to find justice for these criminals and we will hold them to account. We will show them justice. And in the popular mind at least, the idea that there would be some mechanism of justice for the Axis war criminals as opposed to, again, the traditional summary execution began to really feed on itself. So that by the end of the war, a real infrastructure had developed in the United States as well as the United nations more generally. United nations being the name for the Allies to conduct prosecutions. And as you mentioned, Nuremberg is probably the marquee example of that. There was a similar trial in Tokyo called the Tokyo Trial. But what is less remembered are the dozens, even hundreds of war crimes trials that were conducted primarily by the army in Europe and in the Pacific against what were called the class B and C war criminals, lower level war criminals in the Nazi and Japanese Imperial army apparatus. And ultimately the Doolittle Raiders trial ends up primarily being one of these class B and C war crimes trials.
- [48:01]
Don Wildman
So much of this, Michel, is the predecessor of what we now know as the International Court and the Hague and all that sort of thing. It really does come out of all this World War II legal struggle, isn't it?
- [48:11]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, it does. And the Doolittle raid ends up providing one of the most important precedents in all of this. Because after the war, the dollarators are discovered in just a stunning operation that was conducted by the Office of Strategic Services in the immediate aftermath. Like literally in the second week of August of 1945, where they're discovered in a prisoner of war camp and four of them are still alive. And this is just a thunderbolt to the American public because all the Doolittle Raiders had been presumed dead at this point. And the idea that they're still alive revives that sort of 1942 spirit and the heroism of the Doolittle Raids. And also a reminder of Roosevelt's promise to get justice for those who were tortured and murdered by the Japanese. And this poses a massive problem for the army lawyers who get assigned the Doolittle Raid case, because in a way, everybody is responsible for the Doolittle Raiders torture and prosecution. You have the low level Kempeitai officers who are actually doing the waterboarding, but it goes all the way up to Hirohito. And there's a political dimension to this. There's the question about whether or not we're going to conduct prosecutions of the Emperor at all. And then obviously, the Tokyo tribunal that follows later in 1946. And so these army lawyers who are stationed at the time in Shanghai have this conundrum, who is responsible for the torture and murder of the Doolittle Raiders? And the thing, and this is ultimately what much of my book is about, the thing they settle on is it wasn't necessarily the torturers. It wasn't necessarily the Emperor, it was the lawyers. The Japanese lawyers were the ones who were the most responsible for what happened to the Doolittle Raiders. And the army rounds up the Japanese judges and prosecutors who conducted the show trial of the Doolittle Raiders in 1942 and puts them on trial as murderers for essentially conducting a show trial for perverting law in the service of violence. And it's a remarkable story. It has incredible twists and turns. I know we're running long, so I'll leave the. I'll avoid any spoilers I can because it's a great sort of legal drama in the tradition of, really, John Grisham, more than Stephen Ambrose. But the one legacy that I'll point to, which I think is most significant is out of the Doolittle Raid trial comes a part of the Geneva Convention that continues to resonate to this day. And that's specifically a part of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which, without getting too technical, is the. Is the summary of the things that absolutely cannot be done in war against anybody, no matter who they are, no matter what kind of war it is. There are certain fundamental minimum standards of humanity that we insist upon in war, and those include, you know, everything from don't torture people to don't summarily execute them. But one of them, one of the more peculiar ones, is do not carry out sentences except upon a regularly constituted court that affords all the judicial guarantees recognized as indispensable by civilized people. And what does that mean? You have to. If you're going to have a trial, it has to be a fair trial. And that's such a radical thing to say in 1949, because every country has its own legal system, every country has its own theory of justice and standards of due process and fairness. And the greatest, I think, single legacy of the Doolittle Raiders trial is this notion that, no, there are basic standards of fairness, that if we're going to call something a trial, if we're going to claim to be acting in pursuit of justice, that that means something the world around. And the standards that get set are probably one of the most sort of lasting and, I would say, admirable legacies of America's victory in the Second World War. Because, you know, I'm a law professor, so I could go on about this kind of stuff all day. But if there's one thing Americans love and look to, it's a trial, right? Whether or not it's OJ or currently former President Trump, right? Americans, everything goes to court. Even Alexis de Tocqueville, when he came to the United states in the 1820s, commented, Americans take everything to court. They're the most litigious people you've ever met. And it's true. And we take trials seriously. We look to them as a way of determining the truth. And we look to them as a fundamentally important test of, you know, a test of any society's commitment to human rights and human dignity. And the greatest legacy, in some ways, of the Doolittle raid is less the defeat of Japan and more of the victory of this very peculiarly American ideal of the rule of law into international law. You know, to this day, it continues to resonate.
- [52:58]
Don Wildman
To this day, it should come as no surprise that Michel Paradis is a law professor at Columbia Law School. He writes widely on various subjects. And the book we've been discussing is called Last Mission to the Extraordinary Story of the Dolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice. Another book we've covered in a previous episode, as I mentioned, is the Light of Battle, Eisenhower, D. Day, and the Birth of the American Superpower. Thank you so much, Michel. I promise we will talk again, and I really appreciate this one.
- [53:25]
Michel Paradis
Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a lot of fun.
- [53:29]
Don Wildman
Hey, thanks for listening to American History hit. You know, every week we release new episodes, two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode by hitting like and follow. You help us out, which is great, but you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, share it with a friend. American History Hit with me. Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.
- [54:04]
Michel Paradis
Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from? Like, what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi, I'm Maite Gomez. Our podcast Hungry for History is back, and this season we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history, seeing that the.
- [54:20]
Don Wildman
Most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed.
- [54:23]
Michel Paradis
By the mojito from Cuba and the from Puerto Rico. Listen to Hungry for history on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.