‘How do you tell a man that he will be killed tomorrow?” With that question Michel Paradis begins his story of the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo during World War II and of its immediate aftermath, when the Japanese executed three airmen for the raid and subjected five others to prolonged suffering. A postwar trial was supposed to punish the tormenters—and that story, too, is part of Mr. Paradis’s superb “Last Mission to Tokyo.”
He tells us that the question was in the mind of Sotojiro Tatsuta, warden of the Jiangwan Military Prison near Shanghai, on the night of Oct. 14, 1942. One suspects that Mr. Paradis gives the Japanese officer a bit more credit for compassion than he deserves, but that does nothing to soften the impact of the three executions that follow. “A single bullet,” we are told, would “break through their foreheads, scramble their brains, and leave nothing but paperwork.” And it was indeed a single bullet, one for each man.
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