Doolittle Raid
둘리틀 공습
The air raid of 18 April 1942 in which sixteen US Army Air Forces B-25 bombers, led by James Doolittle, took off from the carrier Hornet and bombed Tokyo and several other Japanese cities. Its material damage was small, but it exposed a gap in the defences of the home islands and pushed forward Yamamoto's plan to attack Midway. China paid for it: in the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign the Japanese army laid waste some 50,000 km² and killed an estimated 10,000 Chinese civilians in the search for the airmen alone.
In depth
Short of fuel, the bombers crash-landed along the east China coast or their crews bailed out, and one landed near Vladivostok in Soviet territory; the Soviet Union, not at war with Japan, interned its crew under international law. Most of the 80 airmen survived with the help of Chinese civilians and soldiers, but eight were captured by the Japanese and three of them executed. The raid raised morale in the United States, and in Japan raised fear and doubt about the military leadership's ability to defend the home islands.
The Japanese army launched the Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign to keep the eastern coastal provinces from being used again for an attack on Japan and to take revenge on the Chinese people. People who had helped the airmen were tortured and killed, and the massacre that followed the Japanese entry into Nancheng in Jiangxi on 11 June was called "the Rape of Nancheng" by missionaries. As they withdrew, the Japanese spread cholera, typhoid and plague, and Unit 731 left paratyphoid and anthrax in contaminated food and wells.