316 THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO
story of the Doolittle Raid, the U.S. retaliatory airstrike against Japan four months
after the Japa nese attack on Pearl Harbor.Background
On the morning of 18 April 1942 16 B-25B Mitchell twin- engine medium bomb-
ers were launched from the aircraft carrier USS Hornet (CV-8) about 650 nautical
miles off the east coast of Japan. Commanded by Lt. Col. James H. “Jimmy” Doo-
little, the planes set off on a top secret mission to bomb targets in Tokyo and other
Japa nese cities in order to (1) retaliate for the Japa nese attack on Pearl Harbor four
and a half months prior, (2) boost American morale, and (3) demonstrate that Japan
was vulnerable to air attack. The plan was to land the bombers in China after the
raid; landing them on an aircraft carrier was impossible. Unfortunately, the planes
had to launch 170 miles farther out than was originally planned when the task
force was spotted by a Japa nese patrol boat. After bombing their targets in Japan,
all 16 B-25s ran out of fuel well short of their recovery airfields in China and either
crashed on land or ditched at sea. Of the 80 airmen deployed (5 to a plane), 3 were
killed in action and 8 taken prisoner by the Japa nese (of which 3 were executed,
1 died in captivity, and the other 4 eventually repatriated). With every bomber
lost and damage inflicted on Japan minimal and easily repaired, the Doolittle Raid
was, for all practical purposes, an abject and costly failure. It was, however, a
resounding propaganda success that lifted American morale when news of the
raid was splashed across Amer i ca’s newspapers on 19 May 1942. In January 1943,
one of Doolittle’s pi lots, Capt. Ted Lawson— who lost a leg in the raid— began to
write a book about the mission entitled Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo with the help of
newspaper columnist Bob Considine. Lawson and Considine spent four nights
and two days at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., sketching out the story
but were not allowed to publish it until after detailed information on the raid was
released by the War Department on 19 April 1943, a full year after it occurred. The
book- length story was first serialized in six successive issues of Collier’s magazine
(22 May–26 June 1943). In early July Metro- Goldwyn- Mayer producer Sam
Zimbalist secured the movie rights from Lawson and assigned Dalton Trumbo
to adapt Lawson’s story to the screen. After meeting with Lawson and other mili-
tary officials in Washington, D.C., Trumbo came to the conclusion that the raid
had been staged for propaganda purposes only. Accordingly, he fashioned a pro-
pagandistic script that emphasized the skill and heroism of the bomber crews
and the heroic role that Chinese guerillas played in rescuing their American
allies from the clutches of the Japa nese, the latter point meant to refute the
notion pushed by the Hearst newspapers: that the conflict in the Pacific was at
base an Oriental- Occidental race war (Ceplair and Trumbo, 2014).Production
The filmmakers received the full cooperation of the U.S. Navy and U.S. Army Air
Forces (USAAF) and worked closely with Air Force chief Henry H. “Hap” Arnold,
Jimmy Doolittle, Ted Lawson, and other airmen who participated in the raid to
achieve a high degree of authenticity. Location shooting took place at Mines Field