When asked about the Doolittle Raid over Tokyo in April 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt played coy with the press, claiming the bombers had taken off from “Shangri-La,” a fictional location in the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon.”
Corgi, on the other hand, is happy to report that the 16 B-25 Mitchell medium-bombers actually flew off the deck of the USS Hornet, and that 2017 marks the 75th Anniversary of the Raid. While they have replicated other aircraft involved in the Raid, their latest warbird pays homage to one of the lesser known B-25 Mitchells, one known as “Hari Kari-er” (AA35313), which was piloted by Captain Charles Greening.
The Doolittle Raid, also known as the Tokyo Raid, on Saturday, April 18th, 1942, was an air raid by the United States of America on the Japanese capital, Tokyo, and other places on the island of Honshu during World War II, the first air strike to attack the Japanese Home Islands. It demonstrated that Japan itself was vulnerable to American air attack, served as retaliation for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, and provided an important boost to American morale. The raid was planned and led by Lieutenant Colonel James “Jimmy” Doolittle of the United States Army Air Forces.
Sixteen B-25B Mitchell medium bombers were launched without fighter escort from the U.S. Navy’s aircraft carrier USS Hornet deep in the Western Pacific Ocean, each with a crew of five men. The plan called for them to bomb military targets in Japan, and to continue westward to land in China-landing a medium bomber on Hornet was impossible. Fifteen aircraft reached China, but all crashed, while the 16th landed at Vladivostok in the Soviet Union. All but three of the 80 crew members initially survived the mission. Eight airmen were captured by the Japanese Army in China; three of those were later executed. The B-25 that landed in the Soviet Union was confiscated and its crew interned for more than a year. Fourteen complete crews, except for one crewman who was killed in action, returned either to the United States or to American forces.
After the raid, the Japanese Imperial Army conducted a massive sweep through the eastern coastal provinces of China, in an operation now known as the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Campaign, searching for the surviving American airmen and inflicting retribution on the Chinese who aided them, in an effort to prevent this part of China from being used again for an attack on Japan.
The raid caused negligible material damage to Japan, but it achieved its goal of raising American morale and casting doubt in Japan on the ability of its military leaders to defend their home islands. It also contributed to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto’s decision to attack Midway Island in the Central Pacific – an attack that turned into a decisive strategic defeat of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) by the U.S. Navy in the Battle of Midway. Doolittle, who initially believed that the loss of all his aircraft would lead to his court-martial, received the Medal of Honor and was promoted two steps to brigadier general.
