Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Read Free

tunes from Honolulu’s KGMB radio station that emanated from the Akagi ’s receivers only confirmed that the Americans on that volcanic archipelago a few hundred miles south had no clue of the steel typhoon that bore down on them; pilots would go so far as to dance clumsy hulas that mocked America’s ignorance.
    Aircrews on the Japanese task force’s six carriers rose as early as three thirty this first Sunday morning in December. Many had spent the journey east across the Pacific studying silhouettes of American carriers, battleships, and cruisers along with detailed maps, including a six-square-foot scale model of Oahu and one of Pearl Harbor. Others had climbed into the cockpit to grip the controls or peered through the bombardier’s sight so as not to forget the feel of combat. Fighter pilot Yoshio Shiga had painted eight watercolors of a temple. Certain he would not survive the attack, Shiga arranged a private showing for his fellow officers on the carrier Kaga . That same fear no doubt triggered the destroyer Akigumo ’s executive officer to close his eyes night after night and to dream about his wife, Fumiko, and the couple’s children. Many of the airmen spent the final hours before the dawn attack penning letters home to wives and parents, enclosing fingernail trimmings and clips of hair.
    The airmen dressed in clean loincloths, pressed uniforms, and special thousand-stitch belts, a traditional bellyband in which wives, mothers, and sisters stood on corners to solicit passersby to contribute a stitch, each one considered a prayer for good luck. The thirty-nine-year-old Commander Mitsuo Fuchida, who would lead the air attack on Pearl Harbor, slipped on long red underwear and a red shirt. He felt that if he were wounded in the raid the color would camouflage his blood and not demoralize his troops. The aircrews paused alongside portable Shinto shrines to pray for victory and sip sake before sitting down to a special breakfast of red rice with okashiratsuki , sea bream cooked with thehead and tail, and so-called victory chestnuts known as kachiguri . The apprehension that flooded the carriers resonated back home in Japan, a sentiment captured in Ugaki’s diary. “We await the day with our necks craned,” he wrote. “What a big drama it is, risking the fate of a nation and so many lives!”
    Nagumo’s carriers battled angry waves some 230 miles north of Oahu, pitching as much as fifteen degrees, while sea spray soaked the flight decks crowded with planes parked wingtip to wingtip. One hundred and eighty-three fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes would lift off in the first wave, followed by a second strike of 167. Across one of the bombs someone scribbled a message in chalk: “First bomb in the war on America.” The propellers roared to life—audible even on the decks of the escort ships—spewing blue exhaust. The faint light of dawn punctured the clouds and illuminated the eastern horizon as the carriers increased speed and swung into the wind. Sailors waved hats and erupted in cheers as the first plane roared down the flight deck, followed seconds later by another then another. The same scene played out across all six carriers as one after the other the planes swarmed into the skies. The moment Nagumo and his superiors had long awaited had finally arrived. There was no retreat.
    War had come.

CHAPTER 1

    Air raid on Pearl Harbor. This is not drill.
    —U.S. NAVY RADIO MESSAGE, DECEMBER 7, 1941
    PRESIDENT FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT WAS enjoying a late lunch in his White House study Sunday afternoon, December 7, 1941. The fifty-nine-year-old three-term president had transformed the parlor off his second-floor bedroom—a room where Thomas Jefferson played his violin and Abraham Lincoln read the Bible—into a cluttered study that reflected his lifelong love of the sea. Model ships ranging from river packets and square riggers to a modern destroyer adorned tables and the fireplace mantel, while Currier and Ives