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These are the times that try men’s souls.
The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.
Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.
—Thomas Paine December 23, 1776
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Following the December 1941 Pearl Harbor disaster and the subsequent losses of Guam and Wake Island to the Japanese, the United States had its back against the wall in the spring of 1942. Washington desperately needed two things: time to rearm its military as much as possible and a gesture of defiance that would show the enemy, and also a fence-sitting Soviet Union, that America was still in the fight.
Attacking the Japanese homeland seemed to fulfill both needs.
Such an affront could derail Tokyo’s offensive actions and curtail imperial momentum in the Pacific. This would buy some time for the United States, while undeniably demonstrating to Japan and her Axis partners in Berlin and Rome that the Second World War was far from over. A daring plan to raid Japan from the air was passed to Major General Henry Harley “Hap” Arnold, chief of the U.S. Army Air Forces, who chose Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle to lead the mission. “Daring” because success hinged on doing what the Japanese considered impossible: Doolittle and his pilots would fly Army land-based bombers from an aircraft carrier far beyond the range of any expected attack.
Unfortunately, the carrier task force was detected by Japanese ships, and Doolittle was forced to launch from nearly twice the planned distance away from their targets. Fuel would be critical, if not impossible, but the Army pilots never hesitated. Sixteen B-25 Mitchells swept in from the Pacific east of Japan and caught the Japanese completely by surprise. Fifteen of those bombers hit objectives around Tokyo and other cities before roaring off at rooftop altitude toward China, where they hoped to land safely.
One Mitchell did not.
Plane 8, piloted by Captain Edward J. York, never made it to Tokyo. Instead, after crossing the Japanese coast, York and his copilot, Lieutenant Robert G. Emmens, headed northwest across Honshu and then across the Sea of Japan for the Soviet Union, where they landed and were interned for over a year. Reasons given for this extraordinary deviation range from the dubious to the ridiculous, yet the myths cloaking the only Doolittle bomber that actually landed after crossing Japan have endured for over eight decades.
This is not another account of the Doolittle Raid, but rather a close examination of the last enduring mystery connected to it: the flight of the raid’s eighth bomber to Russia. In order to provide, at long last, a realistic explanation for this flight, this book analyzes the raid and examines its historical context, which is crucial to understanding why one of the Mitchell bombers flew to the Soviet Union rather than China.
For over eighty years the reason given was lack of fuel, which is technically true but contrived, and only a fraction of the story. Why was that aircraft, B-25 #42-2242, the only aircraft to fly off the USS Hornet with unmodified carburetors that caused such a problem? Why were Ed York and Bob Emmens the only pilots on the raid to have maps of Russia? Some published accounts of the Doolittle Raid put Plane 8 over Tokyo before it diverted to Russia, but that, like so much official accounting of the raid, is not true.
Plane 8 never flew within fifty miles of downtown Tokyo—and never intended to do so.
Courtesy of a Mr. Makoto Morimoto, an extraordinarily talented Japanese researcher, I have also included the actual bomb impacts for most of the Doolittle Raiders in this book. This evidence shows that, contrary to official after-action reports and colorful, but fictional, accounts of the mission, most of these detonated nowhere close to the planned or reported locations. In no way does this detract from the courage of those sixteen bomber crews; I have flown combat missions deep inside enemy territory, and even in modern warfare, with high-quality digital maps, GPS targeting, and amazingly accurate weapon systems, there is always a mist from the fog of war. How much foggier was it, then, for these men who did not have updated maps or targeting photos, men who had been navigating with marginal magnetic compasses at low altitude for hours over the open ocean, men who then attempted to hit targets they’d never seen and with only seconds to find them?
It was not possible to conduct accurate battle-damage assessment because no American aircraft would be over Tokyo again for two more years. The raid occurred during a very dark time in the history of the United States, and people needed heroes, which these men were. In fact, no one was especially interested in the actual results of the mission. It served its original psychological purpose against a determined, ruthless foe and, as you will read, purposes beyond that. If the primary targets were missed, the bombs still fell on Japan, and barely four months after Pearl Harbor this was just fine with the America of 1942.
Whenever possible, I quote first-person dialogue directly from primary sources and consult contemporary eyewitness accounts. I include plausible and verifiable accounts regardless of the observer’s country of origin to give a balanced picture of the events, rather than one slanted from a purely American angle. My purpose, as in many of my other works, is to simply set the record straight and make the truth known to the reader. History told inaccurately is not history—it is fiction or, worse, propaganda.
In the case of Plane 8’s vanishing act, there is no smoking gun. Doolittle himself had no written orders for the raid, nor did Ed York for his mission to the Soviet Union. There wasn’t the time or the need. America was engaged in a literal life-and-death struggle, with a fanatical enemy at her throat, and a few quietly spoken sentences were all that was required to initiate the raid. However, as you will discover, when the circumstantial evidence is combined with post-mission intelligence debriefings and examined through a combat pilot’s eyes, holes in the official story begin to show. Small ones, to be sure, but when taken together they grow large enough to strip away the façade and reveal the purposes behind Plane 8’s extraordinary deviation to Russia.
I encountered many inconsistencies with both the official records and debriefs, as well as in Robert Emmens’s book Guests of the Kremlin. Some authors accepted these accounts at face value, dug no further, and produced wildly inaccurate accounts of both missions. Other authors admirably strove to relate the truth, and did so to the extent this was possible. I discovered many of these inconsistencies were due to the elapsed time between the event and the writings, but others were deliberate obfuscation by officers who had sworn to keep a secret. Secrets, and a man’s word, were taken more seriously than they generally are now, and Ed York and Bob Emmens were professionals who had given their word not to disclose the purpose behind their flight to Russia.
Robert Arnold, General Hap Arnold’s grandson, told me his father once said, “someday, I’ll tell you about Ski York and your grandfather.” Unfortunately, the elder Arnold passed away before he could do so, and both Emmens and York carried the secrets to their graves, insisting there was no “mission” to the Soviet Union.
