Just four months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, eighty U.S. Airmen, known as the Doolittle Raiders, pulled off a daring attack on Japan. Caught by surprise, the Japanese were unprepared for enemy bombers to strike their homeland, especially in broad daylight. Greater than the damage inflicted, the raid had a psychological impact on the Japanese and their leaders. The military pulled troops and equipment back from the war zones to protect Japan. The raid boosted the morale of the Allies and instilled hope that the enemy was not invincible.
After the Doolittle Raiders bombed Japan, fifteen of the sixteen crews flew to China and either crash landed or bailed out of their planes. By way of a centuries-old communication system, news of the bombing in Japan spread quickly across the Chinese countryside.
The Japanese had brutally occupied parts of China for many years, and the Chinese rejoiced over the news that their enemy’s homeland had finally been attacked. When the “giant” Americans floated down or crashed into their world, the Chinese eagerly escorted the Raiders away from the occupying Japanese forces and to safety far from the coast.
The Japanese quickly figured out the areas where the Raiders had landed and sought to capture them. Although most of the crews were spirited away to safety, the survivors from two crews were caught and imprisoned. Their stories can be found here and here.
Because the Chinese aided in the escape of most of the Raiders, the Japanese retaliated with a vengeance. The first order of business was to capture and occupy for one month the areas in China from which air raids could be launched against the Japanese homeland. Japanese Emperor Hirohito ordered his army in China to totally destroy military installations, air fields, and important lines of communication in these places. But the Japanese did so much more. They spent three months wreaking havoc in the Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces where the Raiders had landed.
Courtesy of the Official Site of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders
Japanese soldiers forced four thousand Chinese to dig eight-foot wide, three-foot-deep trenches on the runways of the airfields that were the most threat to Japan. This forced the U.S. to cancel planned follow-ups to the Doolittle Raid. One hundred thousand Japanese troops “attacked every town with a link to Doolittle’s crew.” The Raiders had given gifts and trinkets to those who helped them, but the Japanese used this evidence to single out the helpers for the harshest torture before killing them. One farmer who had helped a Raider was wrapped in a kerosene-soaked blanket and his wife was forced to set him on fire. In addition, the Japanese soldiers—
- Drowned children
- Beheaded women and babies
- Looted and burned towns and villages
- Raped any woman between the ages of 10 and 65
- Bayoneted or burned to death many orphans and the aged
- Wrecked electrical plants and pulled up railroad lines
- Slew thousands of pigs, oxen, and other farm animals
- Set crops on fire
- Destroyed bridges and roads
- Shot anyone or anything that moved
- Threw dead bodies into wells, contaminating village drinking water
- Chalked “Christ is defeated” on the wall of one torched church
- Conducted over 600 bombing runs
- Destroyed everything in their path
- Spread destruction over some twenty thousand square miles
- Slaughtered at least 250,000 Chinese
Eventually the Japanese soldiers spread their vengeance much farther inland, stopping only a few days’ march from Chunking, the capital of free China.
Many years before, the Japanese had built a three-square mile complex in Manchuria to develop bacteriological warfare. They conducted their experiments on humans they had taken prisoner, including Americans. This clandestine outfit was secretly known as “Unit 731” and employed 3000 scientists, doctors, and technicians. Before the arrival of the Doolittle Raiders, the Japanese had already “turned loose its specially bred fleas and rats to spread bubonic plague among the people of Changde and Ningbo in central China” (Nelson) and had dropped anthrax-bacillus bombs on the town of Anta.
By 松岡明芳 Courtesy of Creative Commons from Wikimedia Commons
In retaliation for the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese “sprayed cholera, typhoid, plague, and dysentery across southeastern China” in June and July of 1942 (Nelson). During one operation, the wind changed at the last minute and seventeen hundred Japanese soldiers contracted and died from disease, and ten thousand more were injured.
It was later learned that the Japanese had planned to spray the Allied forces in the Philippines with a 1000 kilograms of bubonic-plague-infected fleas, but the Allies surrendered first. The Japanese had also planned to attack the U.S. soldiers at Saipan with their “full arsenal of bacteriological weaponry,” but the U.S. won the battle quickly and thwarted the Japanese.
At the end of the war, the United States captured Unit 731 and continued the research into biological warfare. The Japanese unit chiefs shared “their research findings in exchange for release from prosecution” (Nelson). The U.S. Army built millions of bombs which contained several deadly toxins, but in 1972, “seventy-one nations jointly agreed to outlaw biological warfare, and President Richard Nixon ordered the weapons destroyed” (Nelson).
Japan also launched attacks on the U.S. mainland in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid.
Sources:
The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory by Craig Nelson (Viking, 2002)
Target Tokyo: Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)