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LIEUTENANT STEPHEN JURIKA JR. met Doolittle and his men on board the Hornet to brief them about what to expect in the skies over Tokyo and Japan. Few in the Navy could compete with the thirty-one-year-old’s expertise. Jurika had grown up in the Philippines, where his father had settled after the Spanish-American War, operating a plantation on Sibuco Bay, on the southwestern tip of the island of Mindanao. His adolescence was filled with exotic tales most children found only in adventure books. He had learned to swim and sail in azure seas infested with sharks, hunted cobras that nested in abandoned coconut shells, and even shot crocodiles in leech-infested swamps. The ethnic diversity of his childhood friends reflected the Philippines’ historical role as the crossroads of Asia—a mix of Filipino, Chinese, Spanish, and Japanese, all languages Jurika picked up. As he grew older, his parents sought to further broaden his experience, sending him to boarding school in the Japanese city of Kobe and later in Shanghai, China.

When Jurika finished high school at fourteen, his father encouraged him to attend Stanford University, hoping he would return to the Philippines to run the family business, but Jurika balked. He had wanted to be a naval officer since he was a child, but even though he was an American citizen, he had no congressman or senator who could appoint him to Annapolis. Jurika had no choice but to enlist, serve two years, and then sit for the academy’s entrance exam. He faked his age and joined the Navy at just fifteen. Jurika went on to graduate from the Naval Academy in 1933 and to serve on the cruisers Louisville and Houston, playing bridge on the latter against his commander in chief during Roosevelt’s 1934 voyage to Latin America. Jurika later earned his wings, flying torpedo bombers for several years off the carrier Saratoga. The head of naval intelligence wrote Jurika in 1939, asking whether he was interested in serving as an assistant naval attaché in Tokyo. Jurika jumped at the opportunity.

The few attachés worked out of the embassy, collecting intelligence on the Japanese Navy. Much of the information came from open sources, ranging from newspaper articles to the Navy’s annual ship construction budget, debated each year in parliament. Other times Jurika traveled south to Kobe to surreptitiously photograph the launches of new ships, reserving a fourth-floor room at the Oriental Hotel with a view of Mitsubishi’s sprawling shipyard, which employed a wartime peak of almost 23,000 workers to hammer out freighters, submarines, and naval auxiliaries. Every three months the attaché hopped an American President Line ship south to the Philippines to log his required hours in a cockpit, persuading the skippers en route to steam near Japanese shipyards, which often used scaffolding and netting to block views from shore. Other days Jurika attended air shows—he once got to sit in the cockpit of a Mitsubishi Zero fighter—or played golf next to air stations so he could clock takeoffs and landings.

As the war in China raged—and tensions between Japan and America increased—authorities ramped up efforts to crack down on American spying. Military police interrogated Japanese guests who had visited the homes of the attachés, a move that discouraged locals from befriending the Americans. Meanwhile, police began to shadow the military diplomats. When Lieutenant Commander Henri Smith-Hutton rode the train past the naval base at Kure, the attendant entered the compartment, lowered the shade, and demanded that the embassy’s senior naval attaché leave it shut. When the train stopped in Hiroshima—home to a large Japanese Army base—attendants again lowered the shade, this time barring Smith-Hutton from even leaving the compartment. “Tokyo is really a city of the living dead; so different from last year!” Jurika wrote in an October 1940 letter. “Most of the American and British women and some of the men have gone, and now everyone else is packing or about to pack.”

Despite the added challenges, Jurika soldiered on, broadening his sleuthing into an area that would make him a vital asset to Doolittle’s mission. “As an aviator I was interested in more than just ships,” he recalled. “I became interested in targets.” Oil depots, chemical plants, and blast furnaces—the beating heart of any steel mill. The industrial might that powered a nation and its war machine, Jurika knew, would prove the Achilles’ heel in a life-and-death struggle—and in Japan’s capital and sprawling suburbs, the studious attaché found such industry everywhere. “Each time I drove from Tokyo down toward Yokohama, going through the fantastic industrial district of Kawasaki, I would take a different route and go by the petro-chemical factories, the chemical factories, the iron and steel mills, and see for myself where these big things were located, factories that covered hundreds of acres,” Jurika said. “It was really unending, just one succession of one big factory after another, all the way down.”

Jurika and his colleagues realized in the summer of 1940 that they had no target maps of Japan or its principal industries. Some of that information, the officers discovered, was available through books and commercial brochures, published by steel mills, silk factories, and shipyards. The intelligence officers collected detailed land maps—printed by the Japanese government—that pinpointed homes, roads, and principal thoroughfares. Armed with the commercial data, the officers fleshed out the maps, labeling important industries and even specific buildings. “We started to fill in a host of what we considered primary targets, first, in the Tokyo area, and then on down through Kawasaki to Yokohama, where we identified the shipbuilding, the tank farms for fuel oil and gasoline, some major wharves, bridges that were strategic in the sense that the main Tokkaido line would cross, or tunnels where bombs could be dropped and possibly obstruct traffic for a considerable period.”

But the American naval attachés, more accustomed to sizing up new ships and armament, struggled to complete the target maps, prompting Jurika to turn to an unlikely ally—the Russians. Though the Soviet attachés largely kept to themselves, despite Tokyo’s vibrant diplomatic social scene, Jurika managed to befriend assistant Russian naval attaché Ivan Egoricheff one day on a local tennis court, scoring an invitation to lunch. When Jurika arrived at the Russian embassy, Egoricheff escorted him to his office, seating him next to a potted palm as he handed him a glass of straight vodka. Jurika took a few reluctant sips of his noontime cocktail, watching as his host downed his own drink. “When he went over to fill his,” Jurika remembered, “I dumped mine into the flower pot.” Egoricheff repeatedly refilled both drinks, and Jurika continued to feed his to the palm, never drinking more than a quarter of his vodka. “By the time I’d had one drink,” Jurika recalled, “he’d had four.”

Over lunch the officers complained about how difficult it was to pick up any real intelligence in Japan.

“We know that you get along much better with the Japanese than we do,” Egoricheff observed.

Jurika insisted he must be joking. After all, America was on the verge of war with Japan. “Do you read the newspapers?” Jurika asked.

The Russian officer confessed that he didn’t believe the papers. Despite the tensions between the two governments, Egoricheff repeated his view that American attachés enjoyed friendlier relationships with the Japanese and had better intelligence on the Imperial Navy. But maybe there was something America needed. What did Jurika want in exchange for details on Japanese ships?

Without compromising his hours of spying on launches and timing takeoffs, Jurika knew he could hand over information on the Japanese Navy he had culled from newspapers and magazines, all unclassified open-source intelligence that was available to anyone willing to dedicate the time to hunt for it.

“Well,” Jurika said, “I’ve only recently begun to think in terms of some future day when we might want to know the location of a tank farm or shipbuilding or something like that.”

“Ah,” the Russian attaché replied. “We have all that information down. We’ve been collecting that type of information for years.”

That was the news Jurika wanted to hear.

“I’ll give you what you want to know,” Egoricheff continued. “Where do you want to start?”

Jurika’s answer was simple: Tokyo.

ANCHORED AT THE HEAD of Tokyo Bay and in the shadow of majestic Mount Fuji—an active volcano rising to more than twelve thousand feet—spread the sprawling capital of the empire of Japan. Tokyo served not only as the national seat of government and power but also as Japan’s great commercial, industrial, transportation, and communications center, with the nation’s top hospitals, universities, department stores, museums, and theaters. According to the 1940 census, the population had hit 6,778,804, making Tokyo home to one out of every ten Japanese and the third-largest city in the world, behind only London and New York. Divided into thirty-five wards, Tokyo stretched out across more than two hundred square miles; the density in some wards topping more than 100,000 people per square mile—a figure almost ten times that of Washington, D.C.

But Tokyo proved an urban planner’s nightmare. Factories, homes, and stores were all crowded together. Areas classified industrial turned out to be densely populated, while homes often doubled as workshops. Visitors complained that the layout of city blocks failed to conform to any decipherable plan, complicated by the fact that streets often went unnamed, forcing residents to direct one another via nearby major intersections. A further challenge emerged from the city’s practice of numbering properties not on the basis of a geographical sequence along a street but by the order constructed. A residence built on the site of a demolished property would retain the original address, a procedure that only exacerbated the confusion as Tokyo’s density soared. One street had no fewer than a dozen homes—all with the exact same street number.

These quirks complicated navigation in a city that on the war’s eve counted a staggering 1,057,921 homes, shops, schools, and government buildings. A network of buses, electric trains, and even a subway—albeit with only nine miles of lines—shuttled an army of commuters throughout the teeming capital. Workers at more than 45,000 factories and small workshops churned out products ranging from textiles and ceramics to machines and tools. There were two dozen banks in Tokyo, and the port welcomed an average of fifty ships each day. Wealthy patrons strolled along the Ginza—Japan’s tony shopping avenue, dubbed the Broadway of Tokyo—where stores whisked customers between floors on escalators and in high-speed elevators. Others flocked to motion picture palaces that competed against traditional Kabuki and Noh theaters.

The Imperial Palace occupied the heart of this congested city. Protected by wide moats, ancient walls, and towering pines, the 531-acre compound and home of the forty-year-old emperor Hirohito was the largest open space in all of Tokyo, eloquently described by one American newspaper reporter as “a piece of heaven in which dwells a god in human form.” A few blocks south sat the Imperial Diet, a Western-style political palace that housed Japan’s bicameral legislature. Workers toiled for nineteen years to complete the $8.5 million parliament building—hailed as Japan’s largest public structure—with 390 rooms spread across 597,000 square feet. The marble walls, carpeted corridors, and numbered elevators—as well as a central tower capped with a pyramid—prompted reporters to compare the Diet to Madison Avenue’s Metropolitan Life Insurance Building and the Bankers Trust Company skyscraper on Wall Street.

But Japan’s transformation from isolated island nation to modern power proved far from complete. New arrivals accustomed to the magnificent ports of San Francisco and New York found themselves underwhelmed—if not outright appalled—by the capital’s rough and unpolished appearance. Tokyo represented a dichotomy, a city that straddled centuries with a wealthy Western veneer of shiny offices and wide boulevards loosely covering a primitive and agrarian past. How could a nation strong enough to seize control of one-tenth of the globe still have open sewers in some districts of its crowded capital? “It is a city old and new, backward and ultra-modern, Oriental and Occidental,” observed one American newspaper reporter. “Stately Buddhist temples rise serenely against a background of smoke stacks. Shiba Park boasts the temples and tombs of the Shoguns as well as a modern swimming pool.”

New York Times correspondent Otto Tolischus, who arrived aboard the SS Coolidge at daybreak on February 7, 1941, captured in his diary his impressions of the roughly twenty-mile drive from Yokohama to downtown Tokyo, a city permeated by the nauseating odor of rotting fish. “Both sides of the road were lined with dirty, dilapidated, ramshackle wooden shops and shacks, which had nothing in common with the pretty doll houses pictured in Japanese scenes at home. The people looked equally poverty-stricken. Most of them shuffled about in dirty kimonos or a bizarre array of Western dress, and most of them, though it was winter, walked about in bare feet shod in wooden clogs. Farmers, driving lumbering oxcarts, were completely in rags, sometimes covered with a raincoat made of straw. Ragged were also the innumerable children—tiny but chunky half-naked urchins,” Tolischus observed. “Shantytown! That was the only word I could find for the scene. I looked at my companions, who smiled; they had seen that astonished look on the faces of other new arrivals.”

More than four years of war with China had reduced the stream of imported luxuries to a trickle, replaced by a flood of tin boxes carrying the ashes of Japan’s war dead. Scrap drives, food rationing, and fuel shortages abounded as the nation diverted all resources to the war. Tokyo was not spared. Guests hiked up the stairs at the landmark Imperial Hotel—designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright—after the elevators stopped running in an effort to conserve electricity. The government discouraged travel and forbade dancing—an activity deemed out of touch with the nation’s wartime mood—shuttering the city’s eight large dance halls and more than one hundred nightclubs. Residents nursed rationed beers and guarded pet dogs and cats, often netted and killed for the promise of warm fur to insulate gloves. “I’ve seen housewives,” wrote Wall Street Journal reporter Ray Cromley, “wait in line all morning to get two carrots, in another line all afternoon to get one sardine, and go away bragging at their luck.”

American war planners knew that Tokyo made an especially inviting target for a surprise air attack for reasons far greater than the city’s role as Japan’s capital and hub of industry. Tokyo was cursed with an Achilles’ heel, a fatal design flaw laid bare before the world at two minutes before noon on September 1, 1923. That warm Saturday morning, as residents headed to beach and mountain getaways, a 7.9-magnitude earthquake struck. The ground swayed and groaned before a sudden roar raced across the city, the chorus of collapsing offices, hotels, and restaurants. Police in neighboring Yokohama estimated that the quake toppled no fewer than ten thousand structures—one out of every ten in the city. But the earthquake and the forty-foot tsunami that slammed ashore proved to be only the start of Tokyo’s nightmare. Ruptured gas lines and toppled stoves triggered an inferno—fueled by the strong winds of an approaching typhoon—that feasted on the region’s dense mix of homes and shops built of little more than brittle wood and paper.

Terrified residents fled to the few parks as collapsing bridges and marching fires cut off exits. Some slathered their faces in mud to prevent their skin from burning, while sparks ignited the hair of other, less fortunate souls. Many dove into canals and ponds, only to drown among the tangled masses or boil as fires superheated the water. Of the 44,000 who had crowded onto the twenty-acre field of the Army Clothing Depot near Tokyo’s sumo stadium, only 300 survived, many consumed by the unique phenomenon of a fire tornado. Henry Kinney, editor of the monthly magazine Trans-Pacific, later described the horror he witnessed from a hilltop above. “Yokohama, the city of almost half a million souls, had become a vast plain of fire, of red, devouring sheets of flame which played and flickered. Here and there a remnant of a building, a few shattered walls, stood up like rocks above the expanse of flame, unrecognizable,” he wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. “It was as if the very earth were now burning.”

The conflagration that burned for forty-six hours destroyed Yokohama and most of Tokyo, claiming an estimated 140,000 lives—more than Japan lost in the Russo-Japanese War. Though an earthquake had triggered the 1923 fire, incendiary bombs could just as easily spark the next blaze. To limit the spread of fire, engineers added six major avenues—each 120 feet wide—and cut more than one hundred other streets through the dense city. Workers constructed several large parks and fifty smaller ones to serve as firebreaks and refuges for victims, while Tokyo’s newly rebuilt business district sported Western earthquake and fire-resistant technologies. But the lessons proved short-lived. The economic depression that dragged from 1927 to 1931 prompted officials to relax building regulations, a situation made even worse in 1938 when steel was banned for private construction. The Tokyo that Doolittle now set his sights on—much like the city destroyed nineteen years earlier—consisted of 98 percent wood and paper. “If you can start seven good fires,” Jurika promised the men, “they’ll never put them out.”

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The men learned about the ordnance that would be used in the mission. Each plane would carry four bombs for a total of 2,000 pounds. Most would carry a mix of 500-pound M-43 demolition bombs and M-43 incendiary clusters made up of 128 four-pound bomblets designed to scatter over an area 200 feet by 600 feet.

“You will drop the demolition bombs in the shortest space of time, preferably in a straight line, where they will do the most damage,” Doolittle advised. “Avoid hitting stone, concrete, and steel targets because you can’t do enough damage to them.”

A pilot popped up and asked about targeting residential areas.

“Definitely not!” Doolittle warned. “You are to look for and aim at military targets only, such as war industries, shipbuilding facilities, power plants, and the like. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by attacking residential areas.”

He reiterated his admonition not to bomb the emperor’s palace. “It’s not worth a plane factory, a shipyard, or an oil refinery, so leave it alone.”

One of the pilots asked what Doolittle would do if his plane were hit.

“Each pilot must decide for himself what he will do and what he’ll tell his crew to do if that happens,” he answered. “I know what I’m going to do.”

A silence hung over the men before the pilot asked the logical follow-up.
“I don’t intend to be taken prisoner,” Doolittle replied. “I’m 45 years old and have lived a full life. If my plane is crippled beyond any possibility of fighting or escape, I’m going to have my crew bail out and then I’m going to dive my B-25 into the best military target I can find. You fellows are all younger and have a long life ahead of you. I don’t expect any of the rest of you to do what I intend to do.”

The gravity of the raid sunk in for many. “We figured there was only a 50-50 chance we would get off the Hornet,” Nielsen remembered. “If we got off, there was a 50-50 chance we’d get shot down over Japan. And, if we got that far, there was a 50-50 chance we’d make it to China. And, if we got to China, there was a 50-50 chance we’d be captured. We figured the odds were really stacked against us.”

Each combat crew member received a pistol, a parachute knife, an extra clip of ammunition, one day’s type C field ration, a flashlight, a full canteen of water, a Navy gas mask, and a hand ax. Not all of the gear passed muster. “I went through that box of 1911 pistols,” remembered pilot Edgar McElroy of his .45. “They were in such bad condition that I took several of them apart, using the good parts from several useless guns until I built a serviceable weapon. Several other pilots did the same.”

The airmen sat through myriad other classes and lectures. Jurika drilled into them the important Chinese phrase “Lusau hoo metwa fugi,” or “I’m American.” He furthermore taught them that the easiest way to distinguish a Japanese soldier from a Chinese one was to look at the toes. “The Japanese wore tabi, which separates the big toe from the other four toes,” he recalled. “The Chinese have all their toes together.”

Greening continued to hammer the airmen on gunnery, firing on kites from the stern of the Hornet. One of the airmen who worked the hardest was Staff Sergeant Edwin Bain, tapped to join Jack Hilger’s crew just before the Hornet left port after the original gunner was hospitalized.

“Know anything about a tail gun?” Doolittle asked him.

“Nossir,” Bain replied. “I’m a radioman.”

“That’s what you were!” Doolittle told him. “You’re a tail-gunner now.”

Other times the fliers studied meteorology and practiced celestial navigation with the help of Hornet navigator Commander Frank Akers by shooting star shots with a sextant from the deck and from the bomber’s navigator compartment. Mission adjutant Major Harry Johnson was impressed by the diligence of the aircrews, as evidenced by his report: “Pilots plotted and replotted courses with their navigators until I feel most of them could have almost discarded their maps.”

Along those lines Doolittle cautioned crews on how best to dump the extra fuel tins. “I don’t want you to throw them out as they’re used,” he instructed. “If you do, it will leave a perfect trail for the Japanese to follow back to the carrier. Use up the stuff in the cans first, of course, but save them and dump them all together. The Navy has been great to us. Let’s show our appreciation in whatever way we can.”