Doolittle Raid

After Pearl Harbor, the United States planned a strike on the Japanese home islands by Army medium bombers launched from an aircraft carrier, chiefly to raise morale. The raid was led by Lt. Col. James H. Doolittle; the sixteen B-25s were carried on USS Hornet, escorted by a task force under Vice Admiral William F. Halsey that included the carrier USS Enterprise. After the task force was sighted at about 06:44 on 18 April 1942 by the Japanese picket boat No. 23 Nitto Maru, the sixteen B-25s were launched about ten hours earlier (some Japanese-language accounts say about seven) and some 170 nautical miles farther from Japan than planned, taking off between 08:15 and 09:16. Flying at low level, they bombed targets in Tokyo, Kawasaki, Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya and Kobe around midday on 18 April 1942.

Material damage was limited. At Yokosuka the submarine tender Taigei, then being converted into the light carrier Ryuho, was hit. Figures for Japanese casualties differ by source: Japanese-language accounts commonly give 87 dead (nine of them reportedly killed by Japanese anti-aircraft fire), more than 460 injured and over 110 houses destroyed, while English-language accounts often cite about 50 dead and some 400 injured. The dead included a Waseda Middle School student hit by machine-gun fire in Tokyo and a pupil of Mizumoto National School in Katsushika.

All sixteen aircraft were lost: fifteen crashed or were abandoned over China and one landed in Soviet territory, where its crew was interned. Of the 80 airmen, three died in the crash landings and eight were captured by Japanese forces; three of these were executed in Shanghai on 15 October 1942, one died of illness in captivity on 1 December 1943, and the remaining four were freed only after the war ended in August 1945.

Although militarily minor, the raid shocked the Japanese leadership, reinforced the Navy's determination to carry out the Midway operation, and led the Army to launch the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign from May 1942 against Chinese airfields within reach of Japan. For the United States it was a major propaganda success early in the war. The sources consulted for this entry do not mention any regular memorial observance in Japan dedicated to the victims of the raid, so none is described here.