by Chris Oakley

Part 11

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Pearl Harbor was one of the bloodiest attacks in American history. Some 2100-plus American servicemen were killed in the course of that grim day, and one can only imagine how much higher the casualty toll might have been had the Japanese strike force succeeded in achieving complete surprise when they launched their assault on the U.S. Pacific fleet headquarters. Even without such surprise, however, they managed to inflict considerable damage on American naval capabilities in the Pacific region. Some of the U.S. Navy’s finest combat vessels, including the battleship USS Arizona, were lost in the attack. Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander-in-chief at the time of the attack, ended up having to resign his commission as a result of the Japanese carrier strike; popular opinion and a wide-ranging inquiry by Congress blamed him for failing to make the best possible use of intelligence data which might have made it possible to stop the Japanese from reaching Pearl Harbor at all. Even today, decades after new information came to light exonerating the admiral, he is still heavily criticized for mishandling the tips which reached his headquarters in the days and weeks prior to the attack.

One of those tips concerned the development of the "Long Lance", a kind of torpedo invented by the Japanese specifically to operate in Pearl Harbor’s shallow depths. Admiral Kimmel made the critical mistake of waiting too long to advise his senior commanders at Pearl of news that the IJN had recently created an air-deployed variation of the lethal missile; timely communication of this data might well have made the difference in strengthening the anti-torpedo defenses at Pearl against the Long Lance. It might also have enabled the U.S.  Pacific Fleet to deploy the appropriate countermeasures sooner.

As it was, hundreds of American sailors perished at the hands of this devastating new weapon. When the Long Lances were released from the torpedo bombers in the first wave of attacking Japanese planes, most of them found their marks with no difficulty whatsoever; three of them simultaneously hit the battleship Arizona, blasting massive  gashes in her hull and trapping at least 800 of her crew below decks as she started to sink. When a fourth torpedo struck Arizona, the venerable battlewagon cracked in two and disappeared underneath the harbor’s surface, trailing thick clouds of smoke and oil every inch of the way.

Fortunately for the American cause the Japanese planes’ intended main target, the Pacific Fleet’s carrier contingent, was out at sea when the IJN attack force struck Pearl Harbor. Had even one of those carriers been sunk, it would have constituted a massive blow to U.S. interests in the Far East; had all the carriers been sunk, the war in the Pacific would have for all intents and purposes been over the day it began. As it was, Washington would start its war with Japan on the defensive as the damage inflicted on the U.S. Pacific Fleet by the Japanese carrier strike against Pearl would make it necessary for the fleet to concentrate the bulk of its resources on repairing the destruction the Japanese carrier planes had already caused and guarding U.S. assets in Hawaii, Midway, and the western coast of the U.S. mainland against possible future attack.

The smoke from the fires lit by the Japanese bombs that exploded at Pearl had barely started to clear when a grim-faced Franklin D. Roosevelt convened a joint session of Congress to recount the tragic facts of what had happened at Pearl and ask for a declaration of war against Japan. The declaration was passed with only one dissenting vote-- the overwhelming consensus among Americans at that hour was that Japan had committed an act of unprovoked aggression that had to be avenged as quickly and harshly as possible. As news of the U.S. declaration of war spread across the country and the world, White House officials learned from the British embassy in Washington that the Japanese had also struck at the British colony in Malaya.

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The IJN high command had hoped that by striking the first blow in the newly declared Pacific War between the United States and the Japanese Empire they would guarantee ultimate victory for Japan. But this would turn out not to be the case-- in terms of the respective industrial capacities of the combatant nations the US had a decisive advantage, meaning that it could recover from the blows inflicted on it by Japan much more easily and quickly than the Japanese would be able to recuperate from the damage they would suffer at the hands of the Americans.

And in fact, even as the sailors of the U.S. Pacific Fleet were burying their dead from the Pearl Harbor attack, preparations had already started for a retaliatory strike against the Japanese homeland. A special air combat task force organized and led by U.S. Army Air Corps colonel James H. Doolittle was dispatched to the Far East to carry out a mission that the Japanese government boasted was impossible: bombing Tokyo. While the task force would have to wait a few months for the opportunity to fulfill such an objective, when it finally did come they took full advantage of it.

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Colonel Doolittle’s first order of business for the impending air strike against Tokyo was to determine the most feasible means of carrying out such an attack. One of the more exotic proposals which crossed his desk was an idea to modify a contingent of B-25 medium- range bombers and launch them off the deck of an aircraft carrier to hit the Japanese capital. It was a risky proposition, but one which Doolittle thought might have a better chance of succeeding than the more conventional bombing ideas broached so far. Once Doolittle had made up his mind to go with the B-25 option, the next major priority was to modify the bombers so that they could reach their designated targets as quickly as possible and carry extra fuel that would allow them to reach sanctuary on the Chinese mainland once the bombing was over; this meant stripping the planes of their defensive armaments and much of their more sophisticated equipment.

On August 15^th, Colonel Doolittle received final authorization from the War Department to proceed with the Tokyo raid. The next day the carrier USS Hornet, carrying the B-25s tasked for the raid along with their flight crews, set sail for the Japanese coast; knowing it would spell disaster for the bombers’ mission if the carrier were to be spotted before it reached its assigned launching point, Doolittle arranged for the Hornet to take the most roundabout path possible to the Japanese home islands.

The game was almost given away when a Japanese fishing trawler sailed close enough to one of Hornet’s destroyer escorts to get in radio communications range. Fortunately for Doolittle’s mission, the destroyer spotted the trawler before it could sight her and sank it with a pair of salvos from her forward guns. It took hours for the trawler’s lone surviving crewman to reach shore and inform Japanese naval authorities of what had happened, and by then the bombers had long since hit their targets and Hornet and her destroyer escorts were steaming for home at full speed. The lead plane in the bomber formation reached Tokyo just in time for the start of the noon lunch hour at most industrial plants and business offices; most civilians weren’t even aware an air attack was in progress until civil defense wardens started frantically sounding the warning sirens right after the first American bombs crashed into their targets.

Anti-aircraft gun crews did what they could to try and stop the raiders, but it was like trying to soak up Tokyo Bay with a sponge. The B-25s flew too high and too fast for the gunners to get a clear shot on them; it wasn’t until the bombers had left Japanese airspace and reached the Chinese mainland that any of the U.S. aircraft would finally go down-- and then it was because the planes had run out of fuel, not any efforts on the part of Japanese air defenses. And to add insult to injury for the Tojo government, all but a handful of the U.S. airmen managed to elude capture and make it to safety at a naval base in Australia.

Tojo’s propaganda machine did everything it could to downplay the American bombing raid, but the shock of enemy planes having been able to strike at a nation which had previously thought itself to be invulnerable to air attack made Japan’s civil population start to  question if another, more devastating air assault on their country might not be too far off. And they weren’t the only ones concerned about such matters: in Moscow, where preliminary drafts of plans for war against the Western Powers were being readied under the watchful eye of Comrade Stalin, the Soviet military’s most senior air defense commanders worried it might be possible(if as yet unlikely) that the same bombs which had just dropped on Tokyo might someday also fall on Vladivostok or Murmansk....