Just thinking about that 1,500 foot bombing altitude and imagining that flight.
Only four months after Pearl Harbor and here are these guys in a handful of
planes flying across Tokyo at mid-day in bright sun (the first plane launched
at 8:20 am ship time and picked up the coast 3hrs, 40 min. later skimming the
waves at 15-20 feet altitude. They stayed on the deck until nearing their
targets). It was Cherry Blossom time, so the Tokyo parks must have been
beautiful. They flew over a baseball game in progress. Ramon Lavalle,
commercial attache at the Argentine Embassy in Tokyo at the time of the attack,
wrote an account of the episode. He heard an air raid siren, and went up to
the roof of the embassy in time to see four B-25s thunder past so close he felt
he could have reached out and touched them. They stirred up quite a windstorm
as they passed, blowing drying clothes and airing futons from bamboo poles and
bowling over the cart of a goldfish vendor. Some people waved at the planes,
some ran for cover. Most just looked up and stared. After they had passed the
air was hot with the smell of burned gasoline and oil. There were distant
explosions. People looked at one another but said nothing; it was a police
state, after all. When he went back downstairs, one of the local-hire embassy
staffers, standing looking out the doorway, muttered, "Now the real war
begins." Lavalle, who had come to Tokyo two weeks earlier after four months in
Hong Kong, thought this was an inane comment until he reflected that for the
Japanese population, the statement was true. Of course it really wouldn't be
until the B-29s came.


Chris Mark