As far as the crew was concerned, this dash across Japan was a last-minute decision based on fuel. Nolan Herndon added his course corrections, which York largely ignored in order to hug the terrain. The pilot had his own map, made weeks earlier, that showed a straight black line from Cape Inubo over central Honshu to the west coast near Nagaoka. From there, the line continued past Sado Island and across the Sea of Japan to a circle drawn around a harbor on the far eastern edge of a Russian peninsula.
As Plane 8 headed for the saddle in the Yamizo Mountains, Jimmy Doolittle cleared western Tokyo at rooftop level in the haze. Rippling his incendiaries together, he initially banked hard to the west, dropped to roof level, then pushed the throttles up to hold three hundred miles per hour. Turning south, the colonel dipped through the foothills, passing east of a spur running off Mount Tanzawa, confident that he’d hit his target. Later analysis would show that Jimmy’s bombardier, Staff Sergeant Fred Braemer, also missed his primary target—not that it mattered at the time. There was indeed a park, but the adjacent complex he aimed for was the Toyama Military Academy, and Braemer’s incendiaries impacted four hundred yards south of the academy’s firing range in the Nishi Okubo neighborhood. Fires quickly spread, and a piece of debris killed a student seven hundred yards northeast at the Waseda Middle School.
Cresting a slope, Doolittle could now clearly see the wide blue sheen of Sagami Bay maybe ten miles away to his east. Following a river, Doolittle was threading the bomber through the foothills when they suddenly dropped away into a wide, flat valley. To his right, about the three o’clock position, a solitary triangular peak rose dramatically from the mist. It was striking: dark, almost black, from its base up to a gleaming snowcapped summit wreathed in faint clouds.
Mount Fuji.
No other landmark was as prominent in all Japan. Keeping the Mitchell at fifty feet above the flat valley, he figured the terrain would hide them from spotters and certainly from any radar—if the Japs even had any. This had been a concern in planning, but Army intelligence had no concrete technical information. Any radar, they had concluded, would be around Tokyo and once clear of it the chances of being found were small. That sounded fine from a warm office 6,700 miles away in Washington, but now, deep inside enemy territory and having just bombed their capital, it was not much of a comfort.
Hugging the foothills, Doolittle weaved south down the valley toward some higher terrain looming from the haze ahead. Abruptly, the ground again flattened, and as the haze rolled back, he picked up buildings from a small city and more blue water off the nose bordered to the east by a long peninsula. Suruga Bay, his map indicated, protected by the Izu Peninsula, so the town was likely Numazu. Roaring across the city, suddenly they were past the beach and over the bay. Edging the bomber a bit southwest, Jimmy could see a faint coastline off to his west curving back toward them. Four minutes later he spotted Cape Omaezaki, a hook-shaped spit of land that, according to his map, marked the southernmost edge of the bay. Truly out to sea now, he eased back on the yoke, climbed slightly, and smoothly banked up to the right.
Exhaling slowly, Doolittle rolled out heading 230 degrees, then walked the throttles back to lean out the mixture and save fuel. From this point, staying fifteen to forty miles offshore, there were some five hundred miles to cover before passing Cape Sata and the island of Yakushima. He would turn west from there, fly south of the Satsuma Peninsula, then west for another thousand miles across the East China Sea, and over occupied China to Chuchow. It seemed insurmountable now, at wavetop level just off the enemy coast. He took a deep breath. One leg at a time, mentally and physically. Glancing at the map again, Jimmy did the math in his head; about two hours and fifteen minutes to Yakushima, and then at least they’d be clear of mainland Japan.
Right now he’d settle for that.
Eighty-odd miles northeast of Doolittle, Bob Emmens could see a rugged, mountainous skyline, and as the lake disappeared aft, he felt the bomber lurch sideways as Ed York lined up on a gap to the right of a big peak.* Dropping back to fifty feet, Plane 8 roared northwest across the same flats Doolittle had crossed just thirty-five minutes earlier. Glancing down at York’s map, he figured they were about thirty miles from the “initial point,” or IP, which was a prominent landmark used to initiate a bombing run into a target. From this point, a time, distance, and heading were meticulously calculated to put a bomber in an optimum position for dropping its payload. Though officially assigned Target Number 331 in Tokyo, he and Ed York knew they were really dropping on a factory in the city of Utsunomiya, which lay nearly halfway across Honshu on the direct route to the Soviet Union’s far eastern Maritime Territory.
Nine minutes.
York had both hands on the yoke now and was leaning forward as he threaded Plane 8 through the mountains. On the upper pedestal between them both, throttles were forward of the halfway mark and the twin black PROP levers were full forward. Occasionally, York would drop his right hand to the red MIXTURE knobs and nudge them forward. After watching the instrument panel for a minute, Bob Emmens reached over and tapped the big round CYL HEAD TEMPERATURE gage. Both engines were in the high yellow arc, and the CARB TEMP gage was also climbing toward red. York nodded, and pointed down toward his copilot’s left thigh. There was no chance of icing at fifty feet over Japan in April, so Emmens reached down and slid both CARBURETOR AIR knobs aft, which opened the ducts to the outside air. Farther down on the floor between them, were the levers for the ENGINE COWL FLAPS, which he also opened. This would let relatively cool outside air flow over and through the engines, hopefully cooling them a bit.
Off both wings, the dark green hills seemed to compress as the valley narrowed. Left, then right, the Mitchell banked as York flew toward a saddle at the north end. Pulling up suddenly, he crested a cluster of small hills and both men floated up against their lap belts as he bunted forward to stay low. Grabbing the edge of the glare shield for support, Bob looked right, then left, then down at the map spread across his knees. The solid black route line was left of them as York purposely hugged the ground along the mountain slopes.
Suddenly a light gray ribbon appeared off the nose and both pilots pointed. Nodding again, York reached over and tapped the map. Emmens looked left and saw the road vanish into the foothills as Ed pulled back to climb a bit, then cranked the yoke over hard left. Arcing around the diminishing terrain, Plane 8 shot out onto a mesa about two miles square where tails from four mountain ranges formed a sort of crossroads. The road angled off to the northwest, and York banked left again to follow it, which Emmens knew would lead them to their IP: a bridge over the Kinugawa River. He couldn’t see the aircraft clock on the right-hand panel in front of Ed, but he flipped his left arm over and glanced down at a battered Bulova A-11–type watch that, like most pilots, he wore reversed with the black face on the inside of his wrist. Though the glass face was scratched from long use, he could plainly see the white minute tick marks outside of the white numbers on the face. Glancing at a scrawled number on his kneeboard, he did the math in his head: three and half minutes to the bridge.
About five feet below, and ten feet in front of the pilots, Nolan Herndon crouched in the Mitchell’s nose and stared at his own map. He’d rapidly plotted the new course suddenly passed from the cockpit, and had been catching up on the details since they’d made landfall. As the navigator/bombardier, Herndon would normally have been part of the planning for any low-level penetration into hostile territory, especially the IP-to-target segment. He’d done all that, in painstaking detail, for this mission—to target number 331 in Tokyo. Yet, not thirty minutes ago, York informed the crew they would not be bombing the aircraft plant but, because of low fuel, head northwest across Honshu for a bay on the east coast of the Soviet Union. Sergeant Ted Laban, the engineer, had said nothing about a leak or any problems transferring fuel, so this was unwelcome news to the navigator.
The Soviet Union. Russia. A far cry from his home in Texas.
The twenty-three-year-old navigator had enlisted on July 27, 1940, in Dallas, hoping to eventually become a pilot. By that time, general officers like Hap Arnold were well aware that war with Japan was increasingly likely, so after the fall of France the U.S. Army Air Corps expanded rapidly. After eleven months as an enlisted man and with two years at Texas A&M University behind him, Herndon was commissioned a second lieutenant on June 25, 1941. Stationed at McChord Field, he was there with the 89th Reconnaissance Squadron when the word went out for volunteers for the secret B-25 project—and now here he was, bouncing through the foothills somewhere north of Tokyo. Staring down through the glass, he could see rice paddies and dikes, also some houses that looked to be made from straw and mud. The navigator squinted at the penciled lines he’d drawn on his map after York named a Russian city as their destination. Like the Jap rising-sun emblem, headings radiated in all directions from Tokyo, because Herndon assumed they would proceed to Russia after bombing the capital—but the pilot had turned northwest as soon as they’d reached Cape Inubo. Frowning, he realized that meant Emmens and York already knew the course away from the cape to Vladivostok. It also meant Plane 8 had never been headed to Tokyo.
What in the hell was this really all about?
Making landfall on the Chiba Peninsula east of Tokyo, Lieutenant Robert Manning Gray of the 95th Bombardment Squadron was the third B-25 over the imperial capital. A square-jawed Texan from Killeen who wore cowboy boots, Gray had a degree in aeronautical engineering from the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (renamed Texas A&M in 1963) and named his B-25 Whiskey Pete after a favorite horse. Vowing never to become a prisoner of the Japanese, if forced down over the city Gray intended to get his crew out if possible, then “pick out the biggest building in Tokyo and stick Whiskey Pete right in the middle of it.” By now, scattered anti-aircraft batteries had realized the planes overhead were definitely not part of the citywide air-defense drill conducted that very morning, but were the enemy. They were Americans.
Gray cut across Chiba, recognized where he was, and crossed northern Tokyo Bay to the mouth of the Edo River. Following it northwest, he popped up to 1,450 feet; his first bomb hit the Kamakura residential area in the vicinity of an electrical substation. About twenty seconds later, 1.5 miles to the north, his second five-hundred-pounder impacted very close to the Kanamachi railway station in an industrial area containing a paper mill, chemical factory, and other targets clustered between the Naka and Edo Rivers. During the run-in, Gray later reported seeing “a burning oil tank … just west of the Ara Waterway,” which had to be Travis Hoover’s bombs near Arakawa. Continuing another mile north, Gray racked the bomber up on its left wing, came left to west, and sped across an open area of rice paddies between the rivers. The bombardier, Sergeant Aden Jones from Pasadena, California, saw an orderly quadrangle of white buildings that he took for an army barracks and fired his nose-mounted Browning .30-caliber as the Mitchell thundered past.*
Racing six miles across Tokyo, Gray saw the Nihon Diesel Kogyo Plant nestled just west of a bend in the Shinshiba River, then banked up hard to the southwest looking for the Tokyo Armory. Mistaking an enormous complex off his nose for the armory, he lined up on a huge collection of buildings that was, in fact, the Imperial Army Powder Magazine. But Jones released early, and the M-54 incendiaries struck six hundred yards northeast in the Iwabuchi residential neighborhood. Dropping back down to the rooftops, Bob Gray dashed over western Tokyo, then headed southwest toward the coast.
Sixty miles due north of Whisky Pete, Ed York walked the throttles back a bit to hold 250 miles per hour. Lighter now with so much fuel burned, the Mitchell wanted to fly faster, but gas was tight as it was, and four miles per minute was quick enough for what they had to do.
Japan flashed past, under, and around the cockpit, but neither pilot was interested in the details. Easing left around a rocky spur, the bomber again popped out over a fertile plain dotted with farms. York leaned forward, then pointed straight ahead. Craning his neck, Bob saw the road wind off across the flats and disappear toward a rising line of mountains. But to the right off the nose, maybe ten miles distant, he saw what attracted the other pilot’s attention. Pillars of thick gray smoke that were big enough to be seen at low altitude from this distance rose up against the hills.
During a quiet trip to Washington in March, York had planned the route across Honshu and collected the very sparse information available on military targets. Once he let Emmens in on the mission, they studied targets in Kashiwazaki and Jōetsu on the northwest coast, where they planned to exit Honshu, but that meant lugging two thousand pounds of bombs thirty more minutes to the coast. Another hundred miles, which would burn at least fifty gallons of fuel that Plane 8 did not have to burn. Once the two pilots decided on the route then the targeting choice was plain: Utsunomiya, the 400,000-person capital city of the Tochigi Prefecture, was really the only option. Old Army Map Service city plans showed a mine, salt warehouses, substations, a factory of some sort on the Ta River, and an extensive rail yard. West of the city there were military installations that included the 14th Division headquarters, with home garrisons for the 59th Infantry and 18th Cavalry Regiments. No one was certain if the target was a power plant or a factory, but it was of military significance and therefore fair game. If the bombs landed short they’d hit the rail yard, and if they went long there were official-looking buildings along the river. York didn’t really care at this point—he just wanted to drop his bombs, hit the enemy hard, and get out of Japan.
Reaching over with his right hand, the pilot pushed both red MIXTURE knobs all the way forward, left the PROP levers where they were, and then wrapped his right hand around the throttles. Winding left and right beneath the nose, the road suddenly straightened and he banked up to follow it.
There!
A river and a bridge. He frowned … there were actually two rivers coming together.* Glancing at the map he couldn’t tell, but the maps were so bad it didn’t mean anything. His Initial Point (IP), the last landmark prior to the target, was supposed to be a bridge over the Kinugawa River. Then a flat plain would appear, with a town about eight miles northwest.
“334 degrees to the target,” Herndon called.
Banking left as the foothills flattened and spread out, York had the impression that the terrain on the map didn’t quite match what his eyes were seeing. Neither did the heading. Not quite. Leaning forward, both pilots stared at the flat area ahead, and Emmens pointed left to the eleven o’clock position. Ski saw it—a dark smudge that had to be the town. Flicking the yoke, he corrected left to 314 degrees and wrapped his fingers back around the throttles.
It didn’t matter.
Eyes flickering inside, the pilot glanced at the OIL and MANIFOLD PRESSURE gages left of the console, then the airspeed indicator in front of his yoke: 250 … just below the 275-knot red line. A village flashed past, then a tree line, and as the bridge slid under the Mitchell’s nose Ed pulled back, kicked the rudder pedal, and twisted the yoke to the right. The bomber’s left wing lifted, and Plane 8 thundered over the river. Almost as soon as he banked, the pilot kicked the opposite rudder and brought the yoke back left to level out.
“Seven and a half miles to target,” Herndon’s voice came over the interphone. “One minute and forty-eight seconds.”
York and Emmens already knew that.
“Bandits … four o’clock high,” Pohl’s voice suddenly broke in. “Opposite direction.”
Twisting in his seat, Bob stared from the side window back and right above the wing, but couldn’t see anything. Even if the Japs saw them, they wouldn’t be able to stop the bombs from falling. Facing forward again, he saw another road slide beneath the nose, then ahead the green fields abruptly ended in the sprawling gray outskirts of a town. It was smaller than he thought, but Ski held up two fingers, then pointed at several lines of rising smoke.
Two miles. Thirty seconds.
“Two miles,” Herndon’s voice sounded nervous.
York’s eyes darted over his panel again, and he frowned. “Open your bomb bay doors Herndon.”
“Jesus.” He glanced at the other pilot. “That would be a fine thing at a time like this … to forget to open your bomb bay doors!”
Seconds later the Mitchell shuddered as the hydraulically actuated doors dropped open into the slipstream. Like scales on an immense emerald hide, an irregular patchwork of small farms fell away under the wings, and a darker green river snaked away north of the town. Pushing the throttles all the way forward, Ed pulled back on the yoke and Plane 8 soared upward. As the ground fell away, Bob felt horribly exposed. Naked. Surely every anti-aircraft gun was lining up on them to blow the bomber from the sky.
But no tracers arced into the clear air, and no ugly puffs wracked the Mitchell. Next to him, York’s face was deadly serious, but calm, as he craned forward and kept Plane 8’s nose on the smoke plumes.
