Replies

The Time Machine
A parody.

By Victor Davis Hanson, October 18, 2001

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?