Given the tensions in the Far East, diplomatic sensitivities, and the need for plausible deniability for Roosevelt, the Army Air Forces, and Hap Arnold, believed a compelling reason would be needed for a bomber to land on Soviet soil. Battle damage was too unpredictable and was not guaranteed to occur. Navigation or instrument error was too sketchy; Japan’s landmarks were easy enough for orientation, and there were backups to magnetic dead reckoning such as celestial navigation. Mechanical issues would be noted by the rest of the crew, who were not in on the plan, and such problems might be remedied or cause for the mission to be scrapped.
For York, the most obvious solution was fuel.
It couldn’t be a self-created leak, because that would force an abort and, again, would be obvious to the crew. How, then, to have a real fuel problem that would permit bombing Japan but be serious enough to force a divert to the Soviet Union? Knowing, as he did, that the forty-eight carburetors on all twenty-four Mitchells (eighteen primaries plus six spares) had been adjusted and bench checked at Eglin Field to run extremely lean at low altitude, York hit on the solution.
Carburetors.
Each Wright-Cyclone engine utilized a floatless Holley 1685 HB-type carburetor that controlled the fuel-air mixture entering the combustion chamber. Essentially, pressurized fuel is suctioned into a low-pressure air chamber created by a shaped venturi, and the ratio of fuel to air, called the mixture, is set in the cockpit. The volume of this mixture flowing out to be burned in the combustion chamber is set by the throttles. A fuel-heavy mixture is rich, and one with more air than fuel is lean. Leaning the mixture saves gas, and as every pound of fuel was precious over the planned route, each Holley carburetor had been painstakingly modified to run “leaner” at low-altitude cruise settings. A leaner mix meant less fuel used per hour, and this was absolutely critical in giving the Mitchells the range to reach safe bases in China.
The modified carburetors produced a cruise fuel flow of about 65 to 70 gallons per hour for each bomber, whereas Plane 8’s unmodified engines consumed about 98 gallons per hour. In practical terms, over a nine-hour flight, York’s Mitchell would consume roughly 250 gallons more than the other raiders, resulting in a loss of at least 425 miles in range. This became more crucial when the raiders were forced to launch early on April 18 after the task force was detected, and without the Eglin carburetor modifications, none of the bombers would have reached the Chinese coast. Had Ski attempted to follow the other raiders, he would have run out of fuel over the East China Sea.
York, calculating the fuel burn for unmodified engines, figured they could make it to eastern Russia with approximately 150 gallons remaining, so if the tanks were inspected this would bear out their story. No blame could be attached to Washington, or even to himself as the aircraft commander—what choice was there but to land in the Soviet Union. In fact, the fuel tanks were inspected by the Russians and were found to contain roughly one hundred gallons. In a May 25 telegram to the U.S. secretary of state, Ambassador Standley made a very emphatic point of declaring the bomber landed “with only enough gasoline left to proceed about 150 miles.” Such a detail would not normally be prominently stated in an ambassadorial-level telegram to the secretary of state, so this was obviously included to give credence to the crew’s story and to alleviate potential diplomatic tension.
On March 25, twenty-two of the Mitchells departed Eglin for Sacramento, California, for final modifications, and en route they were to verify their performance and fuel numbers. Previously designated the Pacific Air Depot and the Sacramento Air Depot, by 1939 the field had been renamed McClellan, and was one of four primary maintenance, repair, and overhaul facilities in the Army Air Forces. It was the most convenient facility to finish removing any of the remaining lower gun turrets and installing the sixty-gallon-tank fuel cell that could be refilled in flight from five-gallon cans. New glass windows would replace the older Plexiglas type, and the cumbersome, unnecessary 230-pound liaison radios would also be removed. New hydraulic valves would be installed, and the older seat-type parachutes were to be replaced by the newer back-type model. One of the more important modifications was to replace the propeller blades that had been pitted and scratched during the past year. New Hamilton Standard constant-speed props were installed, which meant up to a 20 percent increase in airspeed at any power setting.
Interestingly, the afternoon before the raiders were to depart for Alameda Naval Air Station and the USS Hornet, Doolittle and “a couple of pilots” just happened to be in base operations when someone attempted to start the left engine on one of the Mitchells. The civilian mechanic “churned the prop, but couldn’t get the engine started,” Doolittle wrote. “There was a loud bang and backfiring with black smoke and flames pouring out of the exhaust stacks.” According to Doolittle’s account, he nearly threw the mechanic out of the cockpit, and was so enraged that he “used some expletives I hadn’t used before and probably haven’t since.”
Angry, the civilian retorted that he was just following procedures; anytime carburetors were adjusted or changed, the engines were required to be started and checked. It was also a USAAF regulation that all equipment changes were to be noted and recorded in the aircraft logbook—but that wasn’t done in this case, nor was there any accounting for the new carburetors leaving storage and being installed. Doolittle appropriately, and quite conveniently, went on record with the base commander, Colonel Clark, formally protesting the action, which, again rather conveniently, was only performed on a single Mitchell.
Plane 8—Ed York’s bomber.
“No mention was made,” Ski recounted in a 1943 memorandum to the assistant chief of air staff, “or notation made, to let us know that the carburetors had been changed.” To this rather implausible declaration, he added another lame statement: “I didn’t think it made any difference.”
All the pilots, especially Ed York, were aware that fuel was critical, and without meticulous planning and the modified equipment, no one was getting safely to China. Also, York was quite likely one of the pilots with Doolittle in base ops as Plane 8 coughed and backfired. Major Jack Hilger was there, later stating about the engine-start incident, “I don’t know what he told that fellow, but the air inside that cockpit turned blue.” Doolittle, Hilger, and York would have spent most of their time together ironing out details to ensure all the aircraft were in perfect shape, so even if Ski wasn’t present, it is utterly inconceivable that any pilot, let alone Doolittle’s chief of operations, would not have been told his engines had been tampered with. It is equally implausible that if this truly was an accident that the original carburetors would not have been immediately reinstalled, especially given that the bombers were departing for Alameda the following day.*
The final nail in this incident’s figurative coffin would be Sergeant Ted Laban. As the engineer, he should have been informed at once that the depot maintenance personnel had disassembled his engines, but he was not. In fact, the first Laban knew of it was aboard the Hornet when he noticed the carburetor serial numbers did not match the originals recorded in the bomber’s maintenance log. Laban duly reported this to York, who now publicly informed his commander. This is patently absurd since Doolittle (and York) had known about the switch since McClellan Field. Now, however, all the raiders knew about it—which was precisely the point of the playacting. It was far too late to do anything about the issue, and the groundwork was successfully laid for York’s subsequent divert to the Soviet Union.
This, too, was carefully considered.
First, the target. According to the planning documents and Jimmy Doolittle, Ed York was to lead the third flight of five bombers “to cover the southern part of Tokyo and the north-central part of the Tokyo Bay area.” Plane 8 made landfall close enough to Cape Inubo for the pilots to know exactly where they were, and therefore where Tokyo was located. Even if he had been off, as Doolittle was, York was highly experienced and would have turned southwest until he found another landmark. However, this was hardly necessary on a clear day like April 18, 1942, since Mount Fuji would have been visible along the entire shoreline, from Cape Inubo and as far north as the Mito area. The isolated, snowcapped peak would also be recognizable for most of the bomber’s course across Japan, until Ski dropped low in the mountains toward the Honshu coast.
Emmens actually noted, “Fujiyama reached skyward to our left,” which is exactly where it would be as they headed across Honshu, whereas if they were heading toward Tokyo, it would be directly off the Mitchell’s nose. Equally preposterous is to imagine that Ed York and Bob Emmens inadvertently turned some thirty degrees to the northwest, the wrong direction, toward the equally visible Japanese Alps rather than southwest to Tokyo. The only rational conclusion is that this was the correct heading for them to take since Plane 8 never intended to bomb Tokyo, and thus they never flew within fifty miles of the capital. During his 1943 military intelligence debrief, York was pointedly asked if he flew over Tokyo, and contrary to some published accounts of the raid, he confirmed that they did not overfly the city and never got within sight of it.
Where did they intend to drop their bombs, then?
Fuel was extremely critical, so there could be no wasted time flying around looking for a target of opportunity. Because of this and to minimize time over very hostile territory, neither could York deviate much from the straight-line course across Honshu. He would also want to drop his two-thousand-pound bombload as soon as possible to increase his potential airspeed and to reduce fuel consumption. Now, on such a course from Cape Inubo to the Niigata coast, there was only one city with easily identifiable, first-look targets of any military or industrial significance: Utsunomiya.
About sixty miles north of Tokyo on the edge of the Kanto plain, Utsunomiya was a major hub for the Tohoku and Electric main line railroads, as well as an electric-power distribution center for the Tochigi Prefecture. Aside from the rail yards, there was the Kakuwa Manufacturing Company, a major producer of aircraft parts for Nakajima Aircraft; the Nishin Flour Mill; and the Shimozuke Paper Mill. Utsunomiya was an Imperial Army center as well, with one of Japan’s five main air arsenals and an air training school. The 44th Division was headquartered just west of the city, along with the 18th Cavalry Regiment, the 20th Field Artillery Regiment, and a garrison hospital.
During another 1943 interview with Army Air Forces intelligence, York actually states that “they flew over the city of Utsunomiya.” This extraordinary admission lays to rest once and for all any doubt that Ski ever intended to strike Tokyo. Therefore, there is no alternative explanation for Plane 8 to be sixty miles north of the raiders’ primary target and heading in the wrong direction, except that this was planned from the beginning. If the decision to divert to Russia had been “spur of the moment,” then how did York identify the city, by name, in an intelligence debriefing after the fact? Obviously, because he planned the strike back in March and, in fact, made a special trip to Washington, D.C., to acquire whatever scanty information the military had on central Honshu.
The Army’s military intelligence section (MIS) had the available maps and target-area photos available in early 1942, and this was fairly thin material. It is revealing that York just happened to be in Washington during mid-March when he accidentally encountered Captain Davey Jones, who was the raiders’ designated navigation and intelligence officer, and Lieutenant Tom Griffin, navigator for The Whirling Dervish. Ski was cordial but never gave a straight answer as to why he was there, much less in the MIS. According to Griffin, Ed York was “evasive.”
As Doolittle’s operation’s officer, Ski had countless details to finalize at Eglin, and at this point in March he was not even officially on the raid. York had been “loaned” to Doolittle by Lieutenant Colonel William “Newt” Mills, commander of the 17th Bombardment Group, with the understanding that the pilot would not go on the raid. Mills was anticipating a move to Europe and needed experienced commanders. “You can’t have York,” Mills was adamant, “because he has just been made group [17th BG] ops officer, and we’re going overseas ourselves pretty soon, and I need him.” Doolittle strung Mills along all through March at Eglin Field stating “I need an operations officer too. Then he can come back.” This edged York closer and closer to the West Coast, where it would be too late to return him.
“Newt, old boy, I am going to need York out in Sacramento for a few days,” Doolittle told the other colonel in the third week at Eglin, and he kept up the charade during the raiders’ stay at McClellan. But as far as anyone else was concerned, Ski was not going on the raid until he flew Plane 8 to Alameda.
So—why would he be in Washington, specifically in the intelligence section, long before he was a designated pilot? The answer is that he was an official pilot and had been since Hap Arnold decided on the Russia mission. “York would have perfect for a ‘Hap’ project,” his grandson Robert Arnold explained. “He was a fellow West Point graduate with skills, character, and connections.” Ski was summoned directly to the chief’s office, and it was there the question was put to him—quite likely on the very day he was spotted by Jones and Griffin. Naturally, York accepted, and headed to Army Intelligence in order to begin his own planning. This is circumstantial, as nothing was ever put in writing, but that was not unusual for the time and place. These men all knew one another, or of the others, and Arnold was fond of verbal orders with minimal paperwork. He did the same thing with Doolittle regarding the raid. York was part of the plan from early in March; Hap and Jimmy both knew it, but no one else, including Bob Emmens, was aware of it. No other scenario explains the known facts and subsequent actions.
The story, then, and what Bob Emmens was originally told, was that they had been selected to replace one of two crews that had suffered an accident. On March 10, Lieutenant Richard Joyce landed B-25 #40-2254 at Ellington Field during a cross-country training flight and the nosewheel collapsed. The bomber was damaged, but Joyce was simply reassigned another aircraft and went on to fly the Tokyo mission in the number ten position. On March 23, the final day of training in Florida, #40-2291 stalled on takeoff and crashed. With the airframe damaged beyond repair, the pilot, Lieutenant James P. Bates, and his copilot, Lieutenant Roloson, were scrubbed from the mission. It was Ski York’s subsequent phone call to Columbia, South Carolina, that brought Bob Emmens and B-25 #40-2242, soon to be Plane 8, down to Florida. However, the replacement explanation is too thin. Even with the dismissal of the second accident crew, there were still eight additional crews that had completed the entire short-takeoff training, navigation, and bombing course at Eglin.
At this point, Doolittle’s number for the raid remained fifteen official mission aircraft, though he knew a sixteenth bomber would be required since York was going to Russia. If only another qualified crew was needed, Doolittle already had them, but he also already knew York had to go on the mission. “I roomed with Doolittle down at Eglin,” Ski admitted in his oral history. “So I got to know him pretty well.” It was during this time, no doubt, that many of York’s mission details were discussed and ironed out, starting with getting him on the lineup.
Flying as a replacement was what Emmens and the ad hoc crew were told, and this is what the copilot would later write in Guests of the Kremlin, proving that he, too, had a gift for obfuscation. York, on the other hand, stated, “No, that was not true at all. He [Emmens] was not in on this at all, the planning or anything, until the very last day.” What Ski meant by “or anything” is conjecture, and his words could imply either the Eglin short-takeoff training or Plane 8’s actual mission to Russia. As the copilot, Bob Emmens eventually had to be told the truth. The engineer and gunner would have no idea in flight of the bomber’s position, and Ski could fudge courses and headings to the navigator with no explanation.
But another pilot was something else. He would know exactly where they were and where they were going. Also, if anything happened to York, then the copilot needed to get the Mitchell to the target and on to Russia. This was not a problem as the two men knew each other quite well. Stationed at March Field together, they’d been neighbors as newlyweds, and their wives were good friends. Yet it wasn’t until Emmens got to Eglin that York asked, “Would you like to go with me?” This is also quite revealing since Ski was not yet on the raiders’ official roster, but he knew, of course, that Plane 8 was flying the mission. In any event, Bob Emmens did not hesitate, and replied, “I have nothing else to do.”
Where and how Emmens was informed of the plan will never be known; no records exist, or at least none have been found. Yet Ski would have told him about the Soviet Union, the planned carburetor switch, and their intended target in Japan. At seventeen minutes inland from Cape Inubo, Utsunomiya was ideal for all the reasons York discovered in Washington, and the fuel issue would make the impromptu “decision” to drop on the city perfectly believable.
Unfortunately, they missed it.
Though he could not have known it, and would not have cared if he had, York actually attacked the smaller, but similar, town of Nishi Nasuno twenty-three miles north of Utsunomiya. The error is not surprising—recall Ted Lawson believing he was over Tokyo, when in fact he bombed Kawasaki, and that was on a well-defined, geographically significant bay. Add to this that detailed, accurate maps of Tokyo and the surrounding areas were not available, much less maps for an obscure city deep within rural Japan. Both Utsunomiya and Nishi Nasuno lay within the Nasunogahara alluvial fan, which is dominated by the Kinugawa and Naka Rivers. It was a heavily agricultural area serviced by the Tōhuku Main Line that passed south to north over the plateau. Navigation in 1942 was problematic at best, and ingressing at fifty to a hundred feet aboveground does not give a pilot a usable, comprehensive view for a target area.
As the prefectural capital, Utsunomiya was, and still is, considerably larger than Nishi Nasuno, but this would not have been obvious at such a low altitude. Also, the town of Otawara is less than three miles to the southeast, and even in 1942 it was spreading toward Nishi Nasuno, so at a few hundred feet this easily could have been mistaken for the larger town of Utsunomiya. In any case, there was no time or fuel left for a precise comparison. The only real clue York might have noticed was that instead of the planned eighteen minutes inland, Plane 8 roared over the town twenty-three minutes after landfall at Cape Inubo. Based on the target photos taken by the Mitchell’s tail-mounted automatic camera, York entered the area from the southeast and had obviously followed the Naka River through the foothills of Mount Yamizo, believing it to be the Kinugawa River.
This orientation is logical given Emmens’s statement about a “single tall radio transmitting pole” directly ahead as they approached a “more thickly populated area.” He also describes a “single small airplane” approaching from the right, or northeast, of the bomber, which was in a left turn toward the river. The urban area was undoubtably the town of Otawara, and while the Japanese aircraft never spotted the Mitchell, it was quite likely in the landing pattern for IJAAF Kanemaruhara,* an airfield to the east across the Naka River. Incidentally, Utsunomiya had an army air base, named for the town, in a very similar position across the Kinugawa River.
Given that all the other B-25s crashed or were ditched, Plane 8’s film was the only target-area evidence ever recovered, aside from photos snapped from personal cameras. Long buried in the U.S. National Archives, these few frames show an area positively identified by the eminent Japanese historian Makoto Morimoto as within a thousand yards southeast of the Nishi Nasuno train station and rail yard. The town of Otawara and the Sabi River, which runs along its eastern side, can be clearly seen, as can the Nasu Takuyo agricultural school to the bottom right. So, too, can the well-known villa of Field Marshal Oyama, a national hero and founding member of the Imperial Japanese Army, be seen in the foreground a few hundred yards east of the first bomb’s explosion.
According to Emmens, their target was a “big factory installation with four puffing stacks,” and that fits the Kakuwa Manufacturing Company or Shimozuke Paper Mill in Utsunomiya—but this matches nothing in Nishi Nasuno. York was undoubtably surprised not to see the factory he planned to hit, but he believed the town off his nose was Utsunomiya and there was no time to reattack or troll for targets of opportunity. Ski visually acquired the only significant structure in the town, which was the train station and, according to Nolan Herndon, “He [York] designated it as the target.”
Impacting 185 yards southeast of the station, the five-hundred-pounder exploded in what was a farmer’s field in 1942.* The Imperial Army’s 14th Division Headquarters at Utsunomiya investigated the incident and compiled a report dated May 10, 1942, of the Nishi-Nasuno bombing, which reads, in part:
Damage-Tochigi prefecture: Enemy plane “North American” type appeared around Nishi Nasuno Station at about 13:03 from South, dropped bomb from height of 200–300 meters, flew away towards North. The bomb exploded in a farm field 30 meters south of house belonging to (Mr.) Isamu Yagisawa. Due to the blast door(s) and screen(s) were blown away, but since resident was not at home there is no human / livestock damage. Damage is 100 [JP] Yen: Bomb crater is diameter 9m, depth 2m so the bomb is estimated to be 100 kg class.
Another source states, “First arrival of American aircraft over Tochigi prefecture is 18th April Showa 17 (1942), the so-called Doolittle Raid. One B25 that bombed Tokyo had crossed the prefecture, and on its way dropping [a] bomb in a field nearby Nishi Nasuno Station.”
There is no doubt that Plane 8 hit Nishi Nasuno and that this was a case of misidentification by a crew that certainly intended to strike Utsunomiya. In Guests of the Kremlin, Emmens describes smokestacks and a factory, which was likely their intended target in Utsunomiya, yet there was no such building in Nishi Nasuno. This discrepancy was revealed in three lines of text buried within the June 1943 intelligence debriefing. Nolan Herndon stated, “Well, as the major said, we couldn’t see too dog-gone much,” which is not likely if you’re dropping on a factory with four stacks puffing smoke. But this is consistent with a low-profile target such as a train station, where the only visible clues would be converging tracks and steam rising from any locomotives present. Interestingly, Herndon also said he “saw the blast and the steam and smoke rising.”
