The World War 2 Suicide Mission that Doesn’t Get Enough Attention – History-Compute

1 Comment

1. Fred Thornton
   July 6, 2024 @ 12:10 pm

   Sorry, but this is a poor telling of the tale with many errors. To begin with, many of the photos are of the Boing B-17, not the Mitchell B-25 that was actually used…an easy spot since the 25 was a twin engine medium bomber* while the famous “Flying Fortress” had four! For a much better account read the memoir, that became a movie, “Thirty seconds Over Tokyo” told by a fellow who flew the mission and made it home alive… missing a leg.

   The actual turning point of the mission was a Japanese fishing trawler that spotted the Hornet 200 miles from the planned launch point. The innocent trawler never got off a warning, no one knows if it even had a radio, it was blown out of the water in only minutes by the heavy cruisers escorting the Hornet. But with one of America’s few capitol fighting ships at heavy risk deep in enemy waters the mission was launched immediately without enough fuel to compensate for the additional distance to their intended landing points.

   This article implies that Doolittle’s surprise attack raiders would face the same level of air defense over Japan that the 8th’s major daylight raids 1did over Germany… something that never happened.

   Confused is what I am… why write revisionist history on something like this?

   *WW2 warbirds were an early passion of mine… just for the record the B-25 was not a sitting duck against the Japanese fighters of the day. Tough, agile, honest and most of all fast (fuel allowing) it would have been overmatched in a dogfight, but a hit and run? Hold its own nicely as later events demonstrated. Many of the 25’s survived Ww2 to labor deep into the 20th century doing everything from hot shot freight to fighting fires to feeding cattle stranded in a blizzard.