Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott

blunt. “That’s it,” he confessed. “A man doesn’t face death twice.”
    A sense of failure haunted Arnold for the next four years until he finally conquered his fear and climbed back into a cockpit. Over the years, Arnold advanced up the ranks, often in spite of himself. The maverick spirit that propelled him to risk his life in flimsy early airplanes made Arnold bristle at authority, drawing the frequent wrath of his superior officers, one of whom went so far as to hurl a paperweight at him. Arnold even clashed with Roosevelt in the spring of 1940 over Allied aircraft sales, resulting in the president’s threatening to send him to Guam and exiling him from the White House for nine months. Despite his bullheaded personality—as well as his notoriously poor administrative skills—few could help admiring the tenacious general. The zealous advocate of American airpower, who had learned to fly in an Ohio cow pasture under the watchful eye of the local undertaker, had over three decades helped shape aviation’s fundamental mission of bombardment. “The best defense,” Arnold wrote, “is attack.”
    Arnold had walked out of Roosevelt’s December 21 meeting with an order to bomb Japan but no clear path on how to execute such a mission. The general knew from experience that that was Roosevelt’s style. “Once the President of the United States agreed upon the general principles,” Arnold once observed, “he relied upon his Chiefs of Staff to carry them out—to make plans for the consummation of these general ideas.” But the challenge Arnold faced was that his forces in the Pacific had been decimated in the opening hours of the war. Of the 231 planes assigned to the Hawaiian air force, only 79 still worked. The Japanese likewise had wiped out half the Far East air force in the Philippines. The immediate demands for airplanes had reached a climax, as Americans feared further attacks on Hawaii, Alaska, and even the West Coast. “Every commanding officer everywhere needed airplanes to stop the Japs from attacking his particular bailiwick,” Arnold later wrote. “They all wanted heavy bombers and light bombers; they wanted patrol planes and fighters.”
    Arnold struggled to balance his limited resources with the increased pressure to take the fight to Japan. Ideas for how to avenge Pearl Harbor flooded Washington—a California tire dealer had even offered a $1,000 reward to the first flier to hit Tokyo. Though well-intentioned, most of the proposals showed little understanding of the logistics involved, from the great distances to the fuel and range limitations of American aircraft. Some of the ideas bordered on the absurd, including the recommendation that America drop bombs into volcanoes to trigger eruptions that might “convince the mass of Japanese that their gods were angry with them.” The Fort Worth Star-Telegram ’s president, Amon Carter, a close friend of Roosevelt’s aide Edwin “Pa” Watson, suggested one of the more novel ideas: tap commercial airline pilots to fly four-engine bombers to Tokyo via Alaska. “It could, with proper secrecy and press censorship, be made in the nature of a surprise, the same as they gave our men in Pearl Harbor,” Carter wrote. “Five hundred planes carrying from two to four thousands pounds of bombs could blow Tokio off the map.”
    Other ideas emerged from discussions between senior British and American officers. In a Christmas Eve conference with chief of air staff Sir Charles Portal, the British officer outlined his vision for an attack. “In his opinion,” Arnold wrote, “attacking Japan was a Navy job, that the carriers, even at this early date, could sneak up to the vicinity of Japan and make the same kind of attack that the Japanese had made on Pearl Harbor.”The mission would involve no more risk than the Japanese took at Hawaii, Portal argued, yet it would force the Japanese Navy to return to home island waters, relieving pressure on the