The catastrophe at Pearl Harbor was followed by five months of further defeats as America surrendered one island fortress after another. In the atmosphere of unrelieved gloom that followed, Roosevelt and his military leaders decided to boost American morale by undertaking a daring offensive action against the Japanese home islands.

On April 18, 1942, the aircraft carrier Hornet, having been spotted by Japanese fishing boats about 650 miles east of Japan, was forced to prematurely launch Lt. Col. James H. "Jimmy" Doolittle and his sixteen B-25 bombers against their targets in the cities of Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya.

No American force had ever yet bombed an enemy capital city. No one was even certain that a B-25 bomber could be flown off the deck of an aircraft carrier. There was no easy way home. Since the B-25s could not be landed back on the Hornet, Doolittle's men would have to fly on into China, where they were to deliver the planes to American units then being formed. But the early launch forced fifteen crews to bail out or ditch their aircraft. One crew landed in Russia.

Here is the complete account of one of the biggest gambles and one of the most harrowing stories of courage and self-sacrifice to come out of World War II. What was supposed to be merely "thirty seconds over Tokyo" became an odyssey of escape that for some crew members lasted fourteen months and cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Chinese patriots. Glines tells the true story of Jimmy Doolittle's Tokyo raiders; their bold bombing mission against the Japanese empire; their long, desparate struggle to escape their pursuers through China; and how the raid altered Japanese thinking about the security of their home islands and induced them to withdraw forces from the perimeter of their far-flung empire.

Hard cover. 258 pages. Black and white archive photos.