Nighttime Book Discussion--Target Tokyo by James M. Scott

Nighttime Book Discussion--Target Tokyo by James M. Scott

In December 1941, as American forces tallied the dead at Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt gathered with his senior military counselors to plan an ambitious counterstrike against the heart of the Japanese Empire: Tokyo. Four months later, sixteen U.S. Army bombers lifted off from the deck of the USS Hornet on a one-way mission to pummel the enemy’s factories, refineries, and dockyards and then escape to Free China. The Chinese suffered the worst, victims of a retaliatory campaign by the Japanese Army that claimed an estimated 250,000 lives and saw families drowned in wells, entire towns burned, and communities devastated by bacteriological warfare. Here are indelible portraits of the young pilots, navigators, and bombardiers, many little more than teenagers, who raised their hands to volunteer for a mission from which few expected to return.