Doolittle is seated on wreckage to the right. Wreckage of Major General Doolittle's plane somewhere in China after the raid on Tokyo.

When the Japanese came into a town, “the first thing that you see is a group of cavalrymen,” Herbert Vandenberg, an American priest, would recall. Stories of the atrocities at Nanking, where the river had turned red from blood, had circulated widely. The missionaries knew of the potential wrath of the Japanese, having lived under a tenuous peace in this border region just south of occupied China. Details of the destruction that would soon follow-just as officials in Washington and Chungking, the provisional capital of China, and even Doolittle, had long predicted-would come from the records of American missionaries, some of whom had helped the raiders. The United States had neither boots on the ground nor faith that the Chinese military could repel any farther advances by occupying Japanese forces. The dramatic account of one of America’s most celebrated- and controversial-military campaigns: the Doolittle Raid. Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor At the time, Japanese forces occupied Manchuria as well as key coastal ports, railways and industrial and commercial centers in China. Survivor accounts point to an ulterior objective: to punish the Chinese allies of the United States forces, especially those towns where the American aviators had bailed out after the raid. The Japanese military ordered an immediate campaign against strategically important airfields, issuing an operational plan in late April, just days after the Doolittle raid.

American aircraft carriers not only could launch surprise attacks from the seas and land safely in China but could possibly even fly bombers directly from Chinese airfields to attack Japan. In the moments after the attack on Tokyo, Japanese leaders fumed over the raid, which had revealed China’s coastal provinces as a dangerous blind spot in the defense of the homeland. Long-forgotten missionary records discovered in the archives of DePaul University for the first time shed important new light on the extent to which the Chinese suffered in the aftermath of the Doolittle raid. This chapter of the Doolittle Raid has largely gone unreported-until now. American military authorities, cognizant that a raid on Tokyo would result in a vicious counterattack upon free China, saw the mission through regardless, even keeping the operation a secret from their Pacific theater allies. That generosity shown by the Chinese would trigger a horrific retaliation by the Japanese that claimed an estimated quarter-million lives and would prompt comparisons to the 1937-38 Rape of Nanking. After attacking Japan, most of the aircrews flew on to Free China, where low on fuel, the men either bailed out or crash-landed along the coast and were rescued by local villagers, guerrillas and missionaries. For the 80 volunteer raiders, who lifted off that morning from the carrier Hornet, the mission was one-way. Jimmy Doolittle, thundered into the skies over Tokyo and other key Japanese industrial cities in a surprise raid designed to avenge the attack on Pearl Harbor. Army bombers, under the command of daredevil pilot Lt.

Japan ww2 aftermath