First covert flight over Tokyo after Pearl Harbor attack described in new book
LOS ANGELES —
Three months after Pearl Harbor, a mission to photograph industrial targets in and around Tokyo was flown by U.S. photo-recon planes. The story is told in “Top Secret Flight” by Dale W Cox.
So secret was the project that it was never revealed in any military history nor reported to the American public. The source of this information was a captain in the Army Air Corps. An eyewitness, he was based at Wright Field in the Engineering Division in charge of modifying three B-17s into the first U.S. photo-recon planes. Their mission was to provide aerial photos of Japan for the planned Doolittle raid.
Before the war, the Japanese had been paranoid about foreigners filming military targets and in January 1942, there was not a single aerial photo of Japan in America.
Flights of this distance, a total of 18,000 miles in three stages, had never been attempted. The longest ever flown before 1942 was Lindberg crossing the Atlantic in 1927—3,600 miles. The longest flight by a standard B-17 was only 2,500 miles.
The flight was so classified that the Air Corps captain was not cleared for any operational facts; he did not know the names or numbers of the crews, the take-off dates nor the final results. Regular military channels were deliberately uninformed and intentionally not cleared.
Nor was President Franklin Roosevelt informed until after the Doolittle raid ... launched one month after obtaining the photos. The success of the Doolittle raid is said to have raised the morale of the American people.
Fifty years later, the Air Corps captain, now a vice president of Lockheed, retired. His last job was as director of the famous Skunk Works. He subsequently revealed his WW II participation to a friend, Dale Cox, whose novel, “Top Secret Flight,” is based on the complexity of planning a preemptive strike against Japan in January 1942.
The author, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, was pilot of a photo-reconnaissance plane during the Korean War, overflying China for the CIA.
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Al Stewart
Interesting, but makes since. I mean they did have some inteligence on the areas where they were planning to bamb as they tried to avoid some hevily populated areas and hospitals. So They had have some type of info of where to send the plans. I'm surprise they had the tech to do recon so high up at that time.
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TinMadDog
It was an amazing feat.
But the real news here is that the American government can keep secrets from the people for over 70 years with no good reason, and it seems like I am the only person angry about it. I don't know, maybe some of you get a kick out of having your government bend you over a table and its way with you?
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gaijinTechie
How much were they trying to avoid civilian casualties with the very indiscriminate firebombings later on?
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Fadamor
They're still struggling to wade through the morass of classified stuff that should have been declassified long ago. They've been trying to streamline the process a bit and apparently are starting to make some headway.
Previously, before a document could be declassified, EVERY department involved in the document had to review each piece of paper and give their stamp of approval that the document could be declassified. This resulted in few documents actually making it through that gauntlet to be declassified. New rules are now in effect where a BATCH of similar documents are bundled together and a representative document of the batch is reviewed. If the representative document is green-lighted for declassification, the whole batch is declassified. In short, things should be getting better with regards to secrets being kept long past their usefulness.
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evilsushi
@GaijinTechie
It was WW2, there were no precision munitions at the time. Everything was pretty indiscriminate. That's why so much ordinance was dropped. It took hundreds bombs to do the same as one smart bomb could do today even though they have equivalent or less explosive power.
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gaijinTechie
That's beside the point. The factories and workshops the Americans wanted to destroy were small shops scattered all around, among the civilian housing. When American spies reported that the wooden buildings were pretty closely built, they decided to destroy everything with fire bombs. The Americans were screaming bloody revenge for Pearl Harbour, that's why nobody questioned the use of incendiary devices in heavily populated civilian areas.
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Fadamor
Yep. Firebombing was very effective and was put into place after the allies had experienced how tenaciously Japanese soldiers fought over every island after the war had turned against them. The civilians of Japan continued to churn out weapons and other material for the war effort, so once their cities came into range of our bombers, the civilians and the factories they worked at were bombed. They were treated no differently than the German civilians were (i.e. Dresden), yet to hear some people talk you'd think the Japanese were the ONLY ones that were firebombed during WWII.
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