Short essay to be revised if needed

The book Thirty Seconds over Tokyo begins discussing the early life of Captain Ted Lawson. Lawson is a pilot and loves to fly airplanes, but his dream job is to be an aeronautical engineer. Lawson’s wife name is Ellen, and he loves her deeply. Lawson said that she is the only thing that kept him alive when he almost drowned after his plane crashed and even when he had one of his legs amputated. Lawson joined the Army as a flying cadet only for the experience that the Army could give him. He wanted to learn more about planes, and Lawson desperately wanted experience. He had no idea what he had gotten himself into. The morning that changed Lawson’s life forever, was when he heard the news about .



On , was attacked. This was not a good day for the . On this day, Japanese secretly bombed a naval base in . This military strike by the Japanese navy caught the by surprise. They did not see the attack coming. The Americans thought that was their only enemy at the time. This early morning attack caused the to become involved in World War II. They could not let the Japanese get away with bombing . It simply could not happen. So the planned a secret attack against the Japanese, known as the Doolittle Raid. The Japanese did not have a clue what was about to happen.



The three men who played the biggest role in the raid were Davey Jones, Captain York, and Jimmy Doolittle. To give the mission a chance to be successful volunteers were needed, so member of the Navy were called upon to volunteer and they did. Jones told them that it was a secret and dangerous mission and that they would be out of the country for two or three months. Days later, the volunteers met with Jimmy Doolittle in Eglin Field. Doolittle told them about the mission but did not go into details. However, he did tell them that it was a secret and that no one else could know about the mission; not even their wives. The men had no idea that they were going to bomb cities in .



Training for the mission was very difficult and sometimes it took all day and all night. The volunteers had to practice dropping bombs from very low attitude, taking off in the shortest possible distance, navigation, and especially shooting. Another thing that was required for the mission was memorizing cities and geographical landmarks where they were planning to bomb. The planes had to fly extremely low to escape observation, aircraft fire, and to be accurate. Preparation for the mission started in January of 1942 and took about three months. , , , , and were the cities in that the Americans planned to bomb.