3.+Doolittle’s+Raid

Kim Stover In April 1942 my Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle decided it was time to get revenge on Japan. It was a daring mission to raid Tokyo and other Japanese cities. There were 16 of us bomber crews. We all volunteered to take part of this risky task. We used medium size bombers and we took off of an aircraft carrier called hornet. Doolittle chose for us to use the twin-engined B-25B Mitchell planes because they could be in the air within 500 feet. There were a lot of ships involved in our mission too. We rode the Hornet and met up with the Enterprise, Another large war ship. On our journey we were escorted by two cruisers, eight destroyers, two tanker, and two submarines. We were spotted by a Japanese patrol boat sooner than we expected. The ship was immediately destroyed and sunken but we assumed they already put a word in about us. We assumed correctly that they told them we were on our way however the Japanese citizens did not believe this rumor. However not taking any chances this made us launch off the boat a few hours earlier than planned. After all 16 of our planes successfully launched all the ships quickly returned to Pearl Harbor. When we were flying to Tokyo we did not cross paths with any Japanese fighter planes or anything of that matter therefore Japan was very surprised when we attacked them. We all dropped our bombs right on our targets. People panicked and no one knew we were coming. The bombing was an instant success but we had no time to watch, with the fuel getting low we had to start heading towards China to land in a safe area. One of our planes had no hope in reaching China. It landed in the Soviet Maritime region. After landing they were arrested by the Soviet authorities. At this time the authorities were neutral and they helped that plane return back to the United States by the way of Iran. The other 15 planes flew on to China. The flight from the United States to China took about 15 hours. The planes were running very low on fuel. We failed to find our landing area therefore we decided to abandon our planes and parachute out. Three men died after this jump. Eight of our men were captured by Japanese people. Three of them were executed by the Japanese and another died in jail. The rest of us survived with help of local Chinese citizens.Knowing that the Japanese people executed my fellow soldiers made me very upset and it made me want to fight even harder against the Japanese. Once we got word to the United States that over all the bombing was a success the spirits of the Americans were back up. []

Works Cited  "The Doolittle Raid: April 18, 1942." __USS Enterprise CV-6__. 18 Mar. 2009 .

"Doolittle Raid on Japan, 18 April 1942." __Naval History and Heritage Command__. 18 Mar. 2009 .  "The Doolittle Raid." __World War 2 Insightful Essays__. 18 Mar. 2009 .