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Newsflash!
April 1, 1942
America
Strikes Back!
Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle's Sixteen Bombers Take Off
From Hornet to Bomb Tokyo!
 ead the National
News Roundup of American Reactions to the Marvelous Doolittle Raid!
ABC's Peter
Jennings offered the following commentary from preliminary reports
filtering in from Nationalist forces inside China.
It is not all
clear to Americans tonight that Colonel Doolittle and his crews
always enjoyed clear visual bombing over Tokyo. Clouds and antiaircraft
firing — some of the surviving pilots are reporting to our
Chinese sources — may have caused "weaving," made
still worse by pilot panic or inattention. Yet all 16 crews, ABC
News has been told, were under strict orders by Colonel Doolittle
to drop their bomb loads despite clear and advanced warnings of
inclement weather, resulting in significant but undisclosed collateral
damage. Japanese sources tell ABC News that perhaps 50 civilians
were killed and an undisclosed number of were wounded.
Whether Admiral
King was aware of this "drop, don't verify" order —
or, in fact, himself gave it — is something we are now investigating.
Would it not be ironic that four months after we were surprised
and suffered noncombatant deaths at Pearl Harbor, American warplanes
in a similar fashion bombed unexpectedly and indiscriminately —
resulting in a similar or even much greater loss of civilian life?
Yet another — but perhaps not the last — of the ironies
of this, America's most perplexing and in some sense paradoxical
war.
Stanley
Fish, dean of the College of Liberal arts and Sciences at the
University of Illinois at Chicago, cautioned against seeing the
raid in terms of moral retribution.
We must realize
that one man's freedom fighter is another's terrorist. We construct
Doolittle as a brave hero, but to the men and women he bombed he
was a mere terrorist. There can be no independent standard for determining
which of many rival interpretations of this raid is the true one.
What we must
not do is to fall back on some absurd notion of absolute and enduring
values like truth, freedom, and democracy, but rather we can and
should invoke the particular lived values that unite us and inform
the institutions we cherish and wish to defend — which, of
course, are neither absolute and enduring, or at least I don't think
they are. Which is not to say that Chicago under the Japanese would
not be necessarily a different place from what it is now, inasmuch
as Japanese imperial lived values and cherished institutions could
in theory by some sort of objective standard be different, as for
example in my ability — or my children's at some future time
— to make this statement freely.
Philip
Wilcox Jr., former U.S. ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism
in the Clinton administration, cautioned about initial American
enthusiasm over a dramatic military effort that he described as
little more than a catharsis for public outrage and demands for
action.
Until this
rash response, we were at a critical lull in a precious four months
of reasoned sobriety, a sort of equilibrium where Pearl Harbor could
be seen in terms as a response to our own prior indifference —
or in fact hostility — to the legitimate aspirations of the
Japanese people. But with Mr. Doolittle's theatrics we are entering
a cycle of violence, where the root causes of this conflict will
not be addressed by bombing in some sort of endless tit-for-tat.
Such ill-planned strikes have never solved anything, but only encouraged
yet another rejoinder. The U.S. must realize that, notwithstanding
our great power, indeed because of it, we cannot dictate respect
and cooperation. The bombing will make war overt, and we can only
wonder about the effect of collateral damage on attitudes of those
in the streets of Tokyo toward America. Bombing will not eliminate
the ideology of Japanese militarism nor its often inchoate and diffuse
operations. We must not commit the fallacy of treating past Japanese
terrorism as pure evil in a vacuum.
The Reverend
Jesse Jackson was interviewed at the Pan-Am terminal in JFK
airport in New York. In the light of the unexpected and unannounced
bombing, there was a great deal of confusion surrounding his planned
peace trip to Tokyo. Jackson pleaded for "hands across the
Pacific" to stop the "madness," and concluded:
Stop the guns
and save our sons. Keep peace alive and don't let the planes dive.
Don't be in fearo of the Zero or Emperor Hiro. Let our planes drop
more for the poor, and make less of a mess. Now is a time not to
Doo-little, but Doo-lots. Talk truth to power, and don't cower.
Oliver
Stone , noted film producer, pointed out the significance of
the prior Pearl Harbor raid:
We have failed
completely to understand Pearl Harbor. That attack was pure chaos,
and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or
events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening.
But Doolittle? His bombing had none of the Japanese verve; it was
redundant, silly, unimaginative, predictable, hardly chaotic at
all — completely unspectacular.
Ted Koppel
of ABC's Nightline questioned the purpose and method of the
American attack:
Am I correct
in saying that the B-25s could take off from the Hornet,
but in fact could not land there on return? And did the attack
in truth depart prematurely from what appears to be a single
carrier, with only one other in reserve? And are not B-25s
land-based bombers that are poorly suited for operations from the
rolling deck of a carrier? I find all this difficult to accept —
and we await clarification from Mr. Doolittle himself. Is our desire
for revenge such — there seems to be very little effort at
targeting key industries in Japan — that we in effect sent
our airmen on what appears tantamount to a suicide raid?
And did Colonel Doolittle really promise, as was reported, to crash
his plane and crew into a target should his own bomber become disabled?
And is either such proposed ramming or indiscriminate bombing now
the official policy of the Roosevelt administration? And if so,
why and on whose orders? Tonight the raid has clearly left more
questions raised than answered.
Former national-security
adviser Sandy Berger put the Doolittle Raid in a larger strategic
perspective:
It is consistent
with our own administration's past policy of reciprocal action,
albeit with a sort of reckless escalation that brings with it the
acknowledgment of greater risks and potential for destabilization
in that most critical part of the world. Our relationship with the
Japanese is sort of like that arcade game with the stick and the
moles. Every time they pop up like they did at Pearl Harbor, we
are going to knock them back down a little bit. After they get a
little sore, they will know the rules of the game, and keep well
within inside parameters that we can live with.
Susan
Sontag, acclaimed novelist, called for Americans to write Congress:
Do we call
this courage — itself a morally neutral idea? Whose courage
— theirs or ours, the pilots or the bombed? Flags on houses?
Burlesque and sexist art on the nose of bombers? A frenzied society
that has abandoned self-reflection and given itself over to the
logic of war? Is anyone in America listening? Is there a sane person
left at this hour thinking of the children who were incinerated
by this carpet bombing? These were not rose petals raining down
upon the innocent of Japan, but rather postcards of American death.
I cannot accept the moral equivalence of an attack on our soldiers
at Pearl Harbor with a desperate lashing out against Tokyo. The
blood of Japanese women and children is on our hands. Who is the
real April Fool?
Oprah
Winfrey, syndicated talk-show host, pleaded to the American
people not to adopt the politics of hate:
America needs
to know exactly WHO Mr. Doolittle was bombing and WHY. Does anyone
in this country UNDERSTAND Bushido? Do you realize it has
everything to do with family and tradition, and very LITTLE to do
with war? Do we understand that our Japanese brothers
and sisters in Tokyo are just like us — that there is
a Red Cross in Japan, yes, and a Boy Scouts as well as Little Leagues?
Is there anyone in our book club that has not read some haiku?
Christopher
Hitchens, columnist and noted social critic, sounded a rare
note of support:
We are in a
war with evil. This was a very symbolic and much-needed raid in
the first real offensive against fascist aggression in the Pacific.
And we should congratulate these brave American pilots for risking
their lives to stop the sort of wide scale Japanese butchery of
the innocent that has been going on in Asia for years. Bravo, Colonel
Doolittle.
Contacted
at Columbia University, Edward Said, analyzed the larger
cultural forces propelling what he called the "Doolittle dialectic."
The raid only
clarifies what many of us have suspected about the American intent
in this so-called war — a sort of surrogate and quite desperate
defense of European colonialism and nineteenth-century hegemony.
Are we, in fact, with this act of aerial piracy not proxies for
French and British imperialism? Among many Western colonialists
there is a deep and abiding — may I say fear and hatred? —
of what they have construed the Other into as the "Oriental."
If we are to continue to lash out like some wounded predator when
we take a blow — to some, no doubt, well warranted and much
needed — we should not be surprised in the following days to
see a coalescence of sorts throughout the Asian World. People of
color in Manila, Nanking, and Seoul will not be cheering this desperate
act of misplaced braggadocio; indeed, they may well seek an alternative
construction of resistance, a Co-Prosperity Sphere of sorts to facilitate
solidarity against Western economic exploitation and now military
aggression.
Gerry
Spence, celebrated trial lawyer and best-selling author, warned
of unforeseen legal ramifications to come:
In theory,
as much as it might disturb Americans, this act makes Mr. Doolittle
legally culpable in a number of most unfortunate but fascinating
ways. An indictment, a preliminary hearing, a disinterested jury,
and a judge from a neutral country — yes, indeed, all this
is necessary if we are going to accept the principle of equal justice.
There will be a need for prudent and experienced American jurists-perhaps
compensated by League of Nations Funds — to step up to the
international docket of justice. I can envision a World Court at
which the Japanese pilots at Pearl Harbor and those who followed
Doolittle will equally stand trial as perpetrators of death from
the air. Of course, there must be culpability as well in the civil
sense. And the families of the 50 killed by Doolittle have a perfect,
a legal right, through proper legal representation, to press their
wrongful death suits in American courts.
Former President
Clinton, speaking at a corporate retreat, offered an immediate
statement of unqualified support:
It is absolutely
critical — and I want to focus on this point like a beam of
light — that we back the president. There was no other moral
choice for Americans. We must not ask whether we struck too soon,
whether there were Japanese envoys on the way to America at the
time the order was given, whether the causes of this war were in
part due to this administration's earlier inattention to the region,
whether there was a chance at creating a neutral zone in the Pacific
that respected the legitimate aspirations of the Japanese people,
whether four months of reflection after Pearl Harbor rashly gave
way to fury, whether…
Jerry
Falwell, president of Liberty Baptist College, sought to place
the raid in a very complex and nuanced religious context:
Aren't bombs
to be expected for a society that rejected God? After all, Japan
turned its back on God long ago when they killed and expelled our
courageous Christian missionaries. Perhaps Colonel Doolittle's bombs
will do what God's typhoons and earthquakes have not. I just pray
to God for the Japanese people now to wake up and accept Biblical
scripture.
Dick
Morris, former political adviser to President Clinton, analyzed
the domestic ramifications of the raid:
This was in
fact a brilliant stroke! — and a harbinger of things to come.
President Roosevelt knew, as few others have grasped, the psychological
and political effects of planes silhouetted against Mt. Fuji. Think
of those visuals! I can envision — and here I am quite willing
to be considered a lunatic prophet — subsequent raids, perhaps
in less than three years, in which literally thousands of newly
crafted gigantic multi-engine bombers — now perhaps already
on the drawing boards, B-22s, 27s, 29s or such — torch Japanese
cities with deadly new incendiary explosives.
And there's
more. Once the "Doolittle Factor" comes into play, there
may well be some terrible weapons on the horizon that will unleash
the power of the cosmos — all of it posing huge political risks
for any president bold enough to play a wild card from a full deck.
When told
of the largely negative American reactions, a bewildered Colonel
Doolittle purportedly was terse in his reply to his critics:
My God! What
planet are these nuts from?
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