A Calculated Risk

General Arnold briefly described the proposed secret, joint Army-Navy operation against Japan. Doolittle immediately volunteered to take over the program, modify the planes and train the personnel. Arnold gladly accepted, but wanted Jimmy only as a planner, not a pilot to lead the raid.

Despite Arnold's wishes, Doolittle deliberately wrote himself into the script as pathfinder. To facilitate bombing at night, he would fly the first B-25 off the carrier and precede the others to illuminate Tokyo with incendiaries as a beacon for following bombers.

Doolittle drafted a summary reading, "The purpose of this special project is to bomb and fire the industrial center of Japan." In predawn darkness, a Navy aircraft carrier would sneak within 400 to 500 miles off the Japanese home islands and launch up to eighteen Army medium bombers, each loaded with four 500-pound demolition and incendiary bombs. Relying on surprise and low altitude flight to elude enemy air defenses, the planes would attack at first light or by night military and industrial targets in Tokyo, Yokohama, Osaka, Kobe and Nagoya. Because carriers could not recover ten-ton aircraft, the raiders would escape westward toward Asia, landing at fields in China or Russia. Doolittle estimated the chances of success for the mission at fifty-fifty.