On the morning of April 18, 1942, sixteen B-25 bombers took off from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Hornet on a flight into history.

For this was the Doolittle Raid: America’s first counterstrike on Tokyo, a gesture of revenge for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor four months earlier. Yet if not strategic, the raid was far more than symbolic.

It was, of course, a huge boost to the morale of the American people. But it was also a terrible blow to that of the Japanese, who discovered that not only could we bomb their greatest city, but that its air defenses were pitifully inadequate: not a single raider plane was shot down by Tokyo’s anti-aircraft and fighter defenses.

This, in turn, prompted Admiral Yamamoto to radically extend the Japanese defensive perimeter at sea. And the key to that strategic goal became the capture of Midway – which turned into the greatest disaster in Japan’s naval history, and destroyed its ability to wage offensive warfare barely six months after Pearl Harbor.

The Doolittle Raid is a quintessential American story: a legendary aviation pioneer leading his group of eighty volunteers on a one-way mission – the best they could hope for was to get to Japanese-occupied China after they dropped their bombs – by first performing a feat never even attempted before: launching bombers off a carrier.

The definitive account of the Doolittle Raid, using original and often untapped sources, is James M. Scott’s magisterial Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor. As well-written as it is superbly researched, it demands to be read by anyone who cares to understand the astonishing generation that fought humanity’s most terrible war.

No one need be surprised that the first B-25 which took off that morning – the one at the head of the line, and that therefore had the shortest runway – was Doolittle’s. Seated alongside him was his co-pilot, Lieutenant Richard E. Cole – today, at age 101, the last surviving Doolittle Raider.
 

© 2017 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in his monthly newsletter (nickmurraynewsletters.com). His new book is Around the Year with Nick Murray.