Doolittle Raid: The First Audacious U.S. Strike on Tokyo

The Doolittle Raid saw 16 US B-25 bombers hit Tokyo and other targets in Japan on 18 April 1942. This was the first time that Japan's home islands had been bombed since Japan's infamous attack on Pearl Harbor the previous December, an act of aggression which had brought the United States into the Second World War (1939-45). Although the damage of the Doolittle Raid was slight in the grand scheme of the Pacific War, it had demonstrated a feature common to most theatres of a conflict already three years old: that no cities and no civilians anywhere were safe from air attacks.