In the first weeks of nineteen forty two, the war in the Pacific was going about as badly for the Allies as it is possible for a war to go.
Pearl Harbor. The Philippines. Hong Kong. Singapore. One position after another falling, week after week, with no good news anywhere.
President Roosevelt kept asking his commanders a question they could not answer, which was how to bomb Japan.
It appeared to be impossible. Land-based bombers did not have the range, and there was nowhere close enough to fly them from. And carrier aircraft, which could get close, were small and short-ranged and would require the carriers to sail within a few hundred miles of Japan, which was suicide.
The idea came from a submarine officer on a staff, Francis Low, who was watching aircraft practise on a runway with the outline of a carrier deck painted on it.
He wondered whether it worked the other way round. Not whether a small carrier aircraft could fly a long way, but whether a large land bomber could take off from a carrier.
Landing was out of the question. A bomber cannot land on a carrier and never could. But taking off is a different problem, and if the aircraft never had to come back, it did not matter.
The bomber chosen was the North American B-25 Mitchell, a twin-engined medium bomber. Stripped of armour and spare equipment, loaded with extra fuel tanks in every space that would hold one, it might just get off a deck.
The man given the job of finding out was James Doolittle, who was one of the most famous pilots in America, a racing pilot and a genuine aeronautical engineer with a doctorate, and who was forty-five years old and had to argue his way into leading the mission himself.
Volunteers were asked for. They were told the mission was extremely hazardous and were told nothing else whatsoever, and every crew volunteered.
They trained at a field in Florida, and the training consisted almost entirely of one thing: taking off in the shortest possible distance. A line was painted across the runway and they practised leaving the ground before it, at absurdly low speeds, with the aircraft hanging on its propellers and shaking.
They also removed weight everywhere they could. The lower gun turret was taken out because it was heavy and unreliable. The expensive precision bombsight was removed and replaced with two pieces of aluminium worth about twenty cents, which was in fact more accurate at the low altitude they intended to bomb from.
To make up for the missing tail guns, two broom handles were painted black and stuck out of the rear of each aircraft, on the theory that from behind, at a distance, a fighter pilot would see two gun barrels and think twice.
Nobody was told where they were going until the ships were at sea.
Sixteen bombers were craned onto the deck of the carrier Hornet and lashed down. The Hornet sailed on the second of April and met a second carrier, the Enterprise, whose fighters would do the defending, since Hornet's own aircraft were trapped below by the bombers on top of them.
The plan was to sail to within about four hundred miles of Japan, launch in the late afternoon, bomb after dark and fly on to airfields in the part of China not under Japanese control, arriving at first light.
On the morning of the eighteenth of April, still about six hundred and fifty miles out, the ships were spotted by a Japanese picket boat, which got a radio message off before it was sunk.
So the choice was to turn back, or to launch immediately, two hundred miles further out than planned and ten hours early.
They launched. That decision meant every aircraft was now short of fuel for a flight that had already been calculated to the last gallon, and that they would arrive over China in the dark with no reserve.
Doolittle went first. The deck was pitching and there was a heavy sea running, and the signal officer timed the release so that the aircraft rolled forward as the bow came up. Every one of the sixteen got off.
They crossed the Japanese coast in the middle of the day, individually, flying at treetop height.
The damage they did was slight. Sixteen medium bombers dropping four bombs each is not a serious attack on a city, and everybody involved knew it going in.
The effect was not physical. Japan had been told, and had believed, that the home islands could not be reached. Now aircraft had appeared over Tokyo in daylight in the middle of a school day. Four fighter groups were pulled back from other theatres to defend the home islands, and stayed there.
It also, in a roundabout way, produced Midway. The raid strengthened the argument inside the Japanese navy for pushing the defensive perimeter further east, which is what took the fleet to Midway six weeks later, and what happened there is the subject of a later episode.
When Roosevelt was asked where the bombers had come from, he said they had flown from Shangri-La, the fictional hidden valley from a popular novel. It was a joke and it stuck, and a later American carrier was actually named Shangri-La.
All sixteen aircraft were lost. Not one reached an airfield. They ran out of fuel over China in darkness and bad weather, and the crews either bailed out or crash-landed. One aircraft, dangerously short of fuel, turned north and landed in the Soviet Union, where the crew was interned for over a year.
Five of the eighty men came down in the Soviet Union and were interned. The other seventy-five came down in eastern China, in the dark, in the rain, not speaking the language, with no idea where they were.
They were found by Chinese villagers and farmers, and almost all of them were taken in, hidden, fed, carried when injured, and passed from village to village and hand to hand, sometimes for weeks, until they reached safety.
One crew came down near a village where a man carried a badly injured airman on his back for miles. Doolittle himself landed in a paddy field and was helped by a farmer and then guided out. Several of the men were moved along a chain of dozens of people, none of whom could speak to them, all of whom knew exactly what the penalty was.
The penalty came. Japanese forces conducted a campaign through the provinces where the airmen had come down, searching for them and punishing the people who had helped. The scale of what followed is difficult to write about in a story meant to be read at bedtime, and the figures given for civilian deaths in that campaign run into the tens of thousands and beyond.
This is the part of the Doolittle Raid that is usually a footnote, and it should not be. Sixty-four airmen got home because a very large number of Chinese villagers made a choice, and a great many of them paid for it.
The raid was a tiny military operation with enormous consequences, almost none of which were the ones intended. It did negligible damage, it cost every aircraft, and it changed the shape of the Pacific war.
Doolittle was convinced, sitting in the wreckage of his own aircraft in a Chinese field having lost all sixteen bombers, that he would be court-martialled. He was promoted two grades and given the Medal of Honor.
The surviving Raiders held a reunion every year for seventy years, with a set of eighty silver goblets, one engraved with each man's name. At each reunion the goblets of those who had died were turned upside down. The last reunion was held in twenty thirteen, when four men were left.
Here is something to think about tonight. Everybody in this story knew the bombs would not do much. They went anyway, because of what it would mean rather than what it would destroy. When is doing something mostly for what it means still worth doing?