The April 6 missile strike on the Shayrat Airbase in Homs, Syria, has provoked a week of debate on everything from its legality to its political significance. The only thing about which everyone agrees is that as a tactical matter, it did very little. The 59 Tomahawk missiles were dropped on the largely empty airbase. The runway was apparently left unscathed, a fact Assad made symbolic use of the following day by launching his air force from Shayrat to continue the attacks on his own country. And that was befitting the strike, whose value was also apparently meant to be symbolic. But what message did it send? And was it effective?
That a military action might be nothing more than symbolic by no means suggests that it is illegitimate or useless. Tomorrow, April 18, is the 75th anniversary of perhaps the most effective and yet merely symbolic military action in U.S. history. On April 18, 1942, Colonel James Doolittle led a squadron of 16 medium-range Army bombers off an aircraft carrier in the Pacific for the first bombing run over Japan during the Second World War.
The so-called Doolittle Raid also did very little physical damage. Altogether Doolittle’s Raiders dropped less than 10 tons of ordnance on targets in Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe. That is less than a single B-29 would carry in the firebombing raids that characterized the final year of the war. The damage to Japan’s war-fighting production was minimal. Yet, the Doolittle Raid is among the greatest military successes of the entire war.
How the raid was viewed in 1942 is obscured by Japan and Germany’s unconditional surrender little more than three years later. But the first months of the war were an unmitigated disaster for the Allies, particularly in the Pacific. Following the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan rapidly prevailed in Malaya, the Philippines, and in the major cities of Hong Kong, Shanghai, Singapore, and Manila.
A previously secret intelligence report on the public’s morale, prepared the week before the Doolittle Raid was carried out, concluded that “the final, long-delayed American relinquishment of Bataan Peninsula to the Japanese invaders came as a climax to a week of almost unbelievably bad news.” The report expressed concern that in “most of the newspapers there seemed little tendency to equivocate about the gravity of these reverses. The headlines were black and unhappy.”
Japan for its part was ever more confident in its divinely ordained invulnerability. Japan had not been successfully attacked in recorded memory, and Kublai Khan was the last even to get close. Despite vastly superior numbers and modern weaponry, including gunpowder, Khan’s army was nevertheless annihilated by a typhoon as it attempted to sail across the Sea of Japan in 1281. This freakish weather event was written into Japanese lore as the “kamikaze,” or divine wind.
But it was not just superstition that gave Japan’s war cabinet its sense of invulnerability. The army’s rapid press west and south across the Asian continent, its neutrality with Russia to the north, and the vastness of the Pacific Ocean to the east seemed to put the mainland of Japan safely beyond the limits of 1942 military technology. No airplane could carry enough fuel and weaponry to mount a meaningful attack on Japan and then return to a place safe enough to land. As a consequence, the Japanese Army spent little attention or resources on defending the mainland.
The Doolittle Raid succeeded because it confounded Japanese expectations. The long-range bombers of the day were slow, bulbous aircraft that typically required thousands of feet of runway to get into the air. It took heroic re-engineering efforts over the course of months as well as the Army Air Force’s willingness to sacrifice 16 multimillion dollar airplanes, just to make the Doolittle Raid technically possible. It was not something that could be readily repeated. But if it worked, the Japanese had no way of knowing that.
And work it did. Through a combination of Japan’s poor air defenses and the Doolittle Raiders’ extraordinary luck, not a single plane was lost over Japan. The damage to Japan’s warfighting capacity was not materially significant, but it was widespread across major industrial centers and impossible to disregard.
The raid also occurred in the middle of the afternoon, when millions of Tokyo residents were out enjoying one of the first nice spring days. The Doolittle Raiders buzzed and dove, swooped and bombed, unmolested by any meaningful resistance from the Japanese Army over the course of a 15-minute air show put on for the whole of Tokyo.
In the United States, the message the Doolittle Raid sent was electrifying. The Japanese mystique had been broken. The war was winnable. And the Roosevelt administration was, despite all previous evidence to the contrary, capable of taking the fight to the enemy.
In Japan, the shock lured the war cabinet into completely (and catastrophically) revising Japan’s military strategy. Japan’s invulnerability was not merely a point of national pride, it was the principal source of political legitimacy for the country’s governing militarist faction. In getting the Emperor’s permission to initiate war against the United States in the first place, the militarist leaders had personally promised the Emperor that Japanese mainland would remain untouched by war.
By embarrassing the militarists, the raid exposed deep cultural and political divisions within Japan’s ruling elite. Most Japanese, particularly those in the urban centers that had just been attacked, already chafed under the militarists’ affected machismo and ineptness at the more mundane aspects of governance. If the militarists could not even protect downtown Tokyo, the home of the Emperor, from an attack conducted in broad daylight, what good were they?
The exposure of Japan’s vulnerabilities provoked its war cabinet into a single-minded obsession with destroying the U.S. carrier fleet. The lack of aircraft carriers, it was believed, would be the best insurance against another air raid. This, in turn, led to the hastily planned and poorly executed Battle of Midway, less than two months later, in which Japan lost four of its carriers, 250 airplanes, and more than 3,000 men. With its loss at Midway, Japan would permanently relinquish its control of the Pacific.
Even more disastrous was the war cabinet’s over-correction when it came to homeland defense. Prior to the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese Army had gained overwhelming air superiority throughout Asia. Internal Japanese government documents show that, fearing another embarrassing raid, the army redeployed vast quantities of its air power back to protecting the mainland. In battle after battle, Japan refused to deploy these reinforcements to the front, lest the mainland be unprotected. This, in turn, left vast numbers of Japan’s best airplanes and most experienced airmen effectively grounded until the very last year of the war. But by then it was too late. Japan’s weakness at its ever-shrinking perimeter enabled the Allies to island-hop their way ever closer until the Japanese mainland was an easy return-flight for the American B-29.
The Doolittle Raid was a publicity stunt whose tactical significance was infinitesimal relative to its cost. But it was nevertheless one of the most consequential military actions of the entire war. And if we consider why, the lessons are illuminating. The raid defied expectations about U.S. military capabilities. It left the Japanese uncertain about the U.S. future intentions. And—most crucially—it debunked the governing myth upon which Japan’s ruling militarists depended for their own legitimacy: that the Japanese would always be safe inside Japan.
These criteria are helpful in assessing the possible effects of military strikes that may seem purely symbolic, like the one on Shayrat Airbase. On the one hand, the fact that the Trump administration was willing to reverse the president’s long-touted intention to cede Syria to Assad and Russia, regardless of the consequences, has undeniably provoked a reassessment of U.S. intentions. Was it a one-off strike for the television cameras? Or does it portend greater U.S. involvement? The uncertainty itself can be unsettling to adversaries.
On the other hand, nothing about the strike exceeded standard expectations of the United States’ war-fighting capabilities. More Tomahawk missiles were fired, for example, on the rudimentary training camps in Afghanistan that President Bill Clinton targeted in retaliation for al Qaeda’s 1998 Embassy bombings. If anything, the Shayrat strike confirmed the unfair, but widely held, conventional wisdom that the United States is only willing to fight from a safe distance.
More troubling is how the Shayrat strike might bolster, rather than undermine, the governing myth that has been essential to the Assad regime’s political legitimacy for nearly half a century. Where Japan’s militarists depended upon a perception of invulnerability, the Assad family depends on quite another governing myth.
Since the coup that brought the family to power in 1970, no Syrian believes that he or she will always be safe inside Syria. Syrians died by the thousands in the Yom Kippur War, the uprising in Hama and its brutal suppression, and the ongoing civil war born of the Arab Spring. The Assad family has remained in power throughout, no matter the international pressure, the red-lines crossed, or how deadly it gets for the Syrian people.
Assad’s governing myth is based on resilience, not invulnerability. He and his family can weather anything; even an attack by the most powerful military on earth. And by launching his squadrons from Shayrat Airbase the very next day, Assad himself sent an unmistakable message.
