Plot
In February 1942, the United States Army Air Forces plan to retaliate for the Pearl Harbor attack by bombing Tokyo and four other Japanese cities. Lt.Col. James Doolittle (Spencer Tracy), the leader of the mission, assembles a volunteer force of aircrews, who begin their top-secret training by learning a new technique to make their North American B-25 Mitchell medium bombers airborne in the short distance of 500 feet or less, to simulate taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. After depicting the squadron's 10 weeks of hazardous training at Eglin Field, Florida and Naval Air Station Alameda, the story goes on to describe the raid and it's aftermath.
While en route to Japan, the Hornet's task force is discovered by a Japanese submarine, which has radioed their position. It is sunk, and the bombers are forced to take off 12 hours early at the extreme limit of their range. After their successful attack on Japan, all but one of the B-25s run out of fuel before reaching their recovery airfields in China. As a result, their crews are forced to either bail out over China or crash-land along the coast. Lawson's B-25 unexpectedly crashes in the surf while trying to land on a beach in darkness and heavy rain. He and his crew survive, badly injured, but then face more tremendous hardships and danger while being escorted to American lines by friendly Chinese. Enroute, Lawson's injuries require the mission's flight surgeon to amputate one of his legs. The story ends with Lawson being reunited with his wife Ellen in a Washington, D.C., hospital.
Read more about this topic: Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)