Mission to Tokyo: The American Airmen Who Took the War to the Heart of Japan
by Robert F. Dorr, Zenith Press, Minneapolis, Minn., 2012, $30.
Mission to Tokyo is better than Bob Dorr’s previous Mission to Berlin, which is saying a great deal. Dorr patterned his new book’s basic structure—a minute-by-minute account of a tremendously important air battle—on his previous work, but has improved upon it by deftly interlaying elements of history, strategy, personalities, equipment and tasks.
The incredible gamble that Twentieth Air Force commander Maj. Gen. Curtis LeMay took in ordering the night mission to Tokyo on March 9-10, 1945, had a great impact on the outcome of the war with Japan. America’s most expensive wartime investment, the $3 billion Boeing B-29 program had been integrated into the standard U.S. Army Air Forces doctrine of high-altitude precision bombing. Neither the airplane nor the doctrine was delivering the desired results in the Pacific, however. Part of the problem lay in the hazards of the mission, which involved long-distance flights over water at high altitudes subject to jet-stream winds. Those factors, combined with the often fatal idiosyncrasies of the aircraft’s engines and performance characteristics, rendered the raids inaccurate and ineffective. The Japanese began to dismiss the B-29 as costing the Americans more than it cost them. LeMay responded to the problem by ordering unarmed low-level firebombing attacks at night. The first test of this new strategy frightened his crew members and might well have led to disaster.
LeMay ultimately won his gamble, thanks to the performance of his men and planes. Dorr introduces readers to individual crew members, explaining each one’s trade. A master of incorporating first-person accounts into his narratives, he makes an inherently tragic story very human. He extends his sympathetic view to the Japanese victims of the raids who, brainwashed and impoverished, were loyal to a government that concealed from them the true status of the war and cared little about building bomb shelters, organizing firefighting units or caring for casualties.
Dorr captures the mood and tempo of wartime America in 1945, at a time when the nation had fully mobilized for war, creating magnificent new weapons and sending thousands of young men into battle. For many of its participants, the March 9-10 Tokyo raid would be not only their first combat mission, but also their last.
Mission to Tokyo sets a new standard for Dorr and raises the bar for other historians, particularly those who use Stephen Ambrose–style first-person accounts. It is beguiling reading, luring you in with personal details but also supplying a broad education on the times. Appropriate for both scholars and casual readers, Dorr’s new book is an important addition to World War II lore.
Originally published in the May 2013 issue of Aviation History. To subscribe, click here.
