18 April in military history: Doolittle Raid, 1942

The first American air raid on the Japanese home islands. On 18 April 1942 sixteen U.S. Army B-25 bombers led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle took off from the carrier USS Hornet and bombed Tokyo, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya and Kobe; Doolittle’s report and the Marine Corps history add Osaka.

A Japanese picket boat sighted the task force on the morning of 18 April, and it had been agreed that the bombers would then go at once rather than endanger the carriers. They left about ten hours early, roughly 800 miles from Tokyo, and none of them reached the Chinese airfields.

Over China the bombers crash-landed or were abandoned by their crews, and Chinese led to safety forty-nine of the fifty men who parachuted and ten more who came down along the coast; Craven and Cate count fourteen crews that came through alive. York’s crew was interned in the Soviet Union. Of the men taken by the Japanese, three were executed on 15 October 1942, one died in custody and four were recovered at the end of the war.

Doolittle thought it far exceeded expectations, but the Navy’s official chronology calls the material damage small. Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies gives about 90 dead and more than 400 injured.

It lifted American morale, and American and Japanese official historians link it to Japan’s attack on Midway, Craven and Cate more cautiously than the Navy’s chronology. In China, Japanese forces seized the airfields in Chekiang and brutal reprisals followed; the historian James Carter estimates about 250,000 Chinese dead.