The Doolittle Raid -How a mere 16 tons of bombs changed WW2!

at the Salone in your fighting he's the biggest man I've ever seen I wouldn't want to fight him that's why no one will remember your name Hori have you gone mad there is no gorge we had now for you a treat what's the render or death an age of freedom and oh no the 300 Spartans give the last breath to defend it it's an amazing thing about war that an act of symbolism can be almost as important as the guns or the bombs themselves this is a story how merely 16 tons of bombs changed the entire course of a World War and what's even more remarkable is that every single bomber that took part in this raid was lost a 100% loss rate there are a few events in history where an attack loses 100 percent of its planes and still could be called a success for the European theater it was reckoned that the loss rate of merely 5% per mission was unsustainable for a bomber force I mean let me just give you this as a ballpark number for the world war 2 as a whole there are about 50 million dead and 50 million tons of munitions used meaning that for the whole of world war 2 for every dead person which will say weighs about a hundred kilos it took about ten times their body weight of explosives of munitions to kill them so in these ballpark figures what can you expect from 16 tons of explosives to kill maybe 16 people how could that ever be significant especially when looked in the numbers towards the end of the war where the Allies were laying waste to anxious cities typically dropping 3,000 tons of bombs at a time yet without question more was achieved by these mere 16 tons of bombs and even look stranger at the time these may 16 tons of bombs was right on the limit of what the US military could do I am of course referring to the Doolittle raid now Doolittle himself was a remarkable guy in his own right he was a test pilot with an impressive string of achievements to his name now after Pearl ha but America really was on the backfoot in the Pacific Theater virtually every battleship of the Pacific Fleet was out of action leaving nearly three Virgin carriers to counter their six Japanese veteran carriers Pearl Harbor was a devastating blow both militarily and psychologically the sentiment was pretty well summed up by Churchill in all the war I have never received a more direct shock as I turned and twisted in bed the full horror of the news sank into me there were no British or American Capital ships in the Indian Ocean or the Pacific except the American survivors of Pearl Harbor who were hastening back to California over the vast expanse of the waters Japan was supreme and we everywhere were weak and naked now should be said that the guy who organized the Pearl Harbor raid Yamamoto was also a clever guy and from the other side he'd had grave misgivings about the blow against Pearl Harbor and had predicted that he would be able to run amok for six months to a year after which he had no long-term hopes of victory because he had seen the industrial might of America and this prediction you will see he's stunningly prophetic now America had a problem they wanted to strike back against Japan but with what and what they came up with was remarkable they were gonna take two of their surviving aircraft carriers and load one them up with medium bombers and they were gonna take it halfway around the world and bomb Japan with it and then they were gonna fly the Bombers on to China while the carriers hightailed it back to safety now there were many practical elements to this the Americans had worked out that they could take these medium bombers off from a carrier a marker was set up on Eggland's airstrip to simulate the takeoff deck of a carrier the crews had to get their b-25s airborne in 450 feet or less but the landing on a carrier was simply out of the question at this time in the war America was actually fairly advanced in carrier operations and typically had custom-made planes for their carriers but these were land-based bombers not designed to be used on a carrier the whole thing was done in an amazingly short period of time merely four months from the conception of the idea to the planes actually launching now Doolittle had gone through the specs of the planes and had worked out the best plane for the job the b-25 Mitchell no one had ever taken off a fully loaded b25 and less than 500 feet it also chosen the most experienced squadron he could that through those planes had given them lots of practice at short takeoffs nonetheless the very first time an American bomber took off from an American aircraft carrier was when Doolittle himself in the deep Pacific floored it and headed for Japan well maybe I'm gonna get ahead of myself at the downside of course of medium bombers is they couldn't be put beneath deck meaning that the Hornet loaded with b-25s sell out under the Golden Gate Bridge in plain sight it also meant that the Hornet couldn't be used for regular carrier operations so that in the mid Pacific the wholly hooked up with the enterprise which was gonna provide air cover for the entire task force but the most obvious downside of medium bombers is they couldn't carry many bombs indeed they only carried about one ton of bombs each and further it hot to get the necessary fuel on the planes and give them the most range possible they had to strip almost everything out of the Bombers including the tail gun to replace it with a kid you not a couple of broom handles painted black which from a distance credibly looked like machine guns 16 tons of bombs against an entire nation it was purely symbolic operationally insignificant but this strike led to a sequence of actions that was the very turning point of the Pacific Theater now the Americans had every intention of not losing these bombers and landing them in China where they could be further used however things didn't quite go as planned and the task force was detected about 10 hours before they were planning to launch on the morning of April 18 1942 the task force was cited by Japanese patrol boats the boats were quickly destroyed but they could have transmitted a position report nonetheless the Americans decided launch a couple hundred miles short of their planned take-off point now they knew that would make getting to China tough nonetheless they flew in low and then claimed only to drop their bombs we came in on the day we pulled up to about 1500 feet to bomb in order to make sure that we weren't hit by the fragments of our own bomb they encountered almost no resistance which is hardly surprising as far as the Japanese were concerned America was five thousand miles to the east the last thing they expected was relatively short range medium bombers flying in from the east but resistance or not the real problem for the Flyers is that they had launched early and there wasn't enough fuel to get them to China however fortunes smiled on the Raiders and they had a 20-mile tailwind for almost the entire trip which just about made up for their lack of fuel when they arrived at China it was getting dark and the majority of them had to simply parachute out abandoning their aircraft only one aircraft actually landed which was in Russia where it was interned every single aircraft that took part in the raid was all lost you see the Japanese had long claimed that the home islands would never be bombed that their military was going to provide an impenetrable wall of defense nonetheless that also kept up with regular air raid drills to keep a positive military sentiment at a high fever pitch among already highly martial eyes population the raids however couldn't be hushed up so they were portrayed as an act of indiscriminate barbarism bombing innocent civilians even though asked with Pearl Harbor the targets had been overwhelmingly military or industrial in nature the raid was almost as flawless as you can expect from dropping a mere 16 or so tons of bombs on a nation the size of Japan or what do you expect from 16 tons of bombs now Doolittle the bleeder of the raid had expected to be court-martialed because the mission had been a dismal failure with catastrophic losses which on paper militarily it was America had sailed a task force consisting at almost the entire Pacific Fleet useful capital ships all the way across the Pacific some 10,000 men 6000 on the two carriers at about four thousand on the cruisers and destroyers preparing meals for three thousand men was a project on a truly grand scale sailing for over two weeks some 5,000 miles to take 16 medium bombers each one of which was lost in the rain a hundred percent loss rate to drop merely 16 tons of bombs on Japan which at the time was thought to have kill about 10 people 16 planes made in America and transported halfway around the world to kill merely 10 Japanese yeah you can see how at the time Doolittle might have been disappointed by this however that's not how it worked out the psychological impact was huge it was a Peter ku for America it was a huge morale boost and rather than getting court-martialed Doolittle was given the Congressional Medal of Honor and promoted who cared about the cost across America this was seen as payback for Pearl Harbor now in military terms and on paper there was simply no comparison the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor with some six aircraft carriers sporting some 360 aircraft each one of which carrying about half a ton of bombs so 200 odd tons killing about two and a half thousand people although about half of those would do to win the battleship Arizona bluer the Doolittle raid was one aircraft carrier launching sixteen planes with sixteen tons of bombs killing some ten people although after the war that number went up to about a hundred but it really didn't make any difference in the impact that it had the home islands had been shown to be vulnerable to the whole world they'd shown that American bombers could fly over the Emperor's Palace incidentally they were given strict instructions not to bomb or shoot at the Emperor's Palace as actions would have been sensed the Japanese and prolonged the wall it's just an interesting thing ever how symbolism worked they tied the friendship medals that they've given to the Japanese to the bombs Japanese medals awarded United States officers for humanitarian age of the Japanese people are returned attached to 500-pound bomb medals given to some ex Navy enlisted men by the Japanese in 1908 were affixed to bombs by Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle they were to be returned by his Raiders to Japan with a loud bang but weren't so crazy about the symbolism to actually try and bomb the Emperor or his palace I made no one will bomb the Imperial Palace because I felt it would do little damage and it solo the Japanese nation together better than any other thing that could happen now the Japanese mounted the huge attempt to capture the Flyers and were brutal to the Chinese in the process killing tens of thousands of them and for all of that in the end they only managed to capture about 10 percent of the aircrew with the remaining 90% eventually making it back to America it also rattled the Japanese that the Chinese air bases might be used to mount attacks on Japan causing them to divert huge resources to countering this threat it also caused the Japanese to keep substantial numbers of their aircraft for the defense of the homeland weakening their strike forces elsewhere all of that despite the fact that the Americans had no intention of repeating this symbolic act it caused the retention of aircraft in Japan for the defense of the home islands when we had no intentions of hitting them again seriously in the near future but most importantly the scene it had put on the Japanese Navy who had not only failed to prevent the raid failed to protect the Emperor but had failed to intercept the retreating warships and although every single plane on the raid was lost not one of them was due to the actions of the Japanese military that convinced Yamamoto to try and push his area of influence further into the Pacific to the Aleutian Islands and to a tiny almost unknown athol of Midway Island were almost six months to the day after Pearl Harbor three American carriers served by good intelligence the element of surprise and an outrageous slice of luck sent the cream of the Japanese fleet to the bottom but how one of the most decisive naval battles in history when from the Japanese robustly shooting out wave after wave of American planes after the sky with no damage to the Japanese fleet to within five minutes the core of the Japanese fleet the cream the pride of their mobile attack force burning in ruins is a story for another day and that is the story of the Doolittle raid now if you enjoyed that make sure to give this video a thumbs up and say what you thought about it and if you really like this video and want to see more like it you can consider supporting this channel through patreon and I'll leave the links with 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Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 382,062

Rating: 4.8935537 out of 5

Keywords: doolittle, raid, ww2, bomb, japan, propoganda, crazy, war

Id: 213FMgXaa6M

Length: 15min 37sec (937 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 16 2018