I very much doubt the US had any way of knowing whether the emperor was even residing at the palace at the time of the raid. Even if he was there, there surely would have been a sturdy bomb shelter they could have shoved him into in very short order. The odds would be astronomically against killing him.
But one question this raises to me – if the raid had killed him, would (could) they just cover it up? I’ve read all these stories that the vast majority of Japanese people never saw his face or even heard his voice until his surrender speech. I would think the US would know the truth in relatively short order through code breaking, but how long would it be until the Japanese people knew?
The Palace area is very concentrated - less than a square mile. It is the residence of the Emperor and most of the royal family. There would have been no reason for him to seek shelter until the bombs began to fall. I am not aware that any such shelter was thought necessary in 1942. The number of B-25s involved would have leveled the buildings.
The damage would have been visible to all. The possibility of killing the Emperor’s uncle would have been more important strategically.
Bombing the Palace would have brought the war to Japan in an iconic manner. It was what the man on the street wanted at the time. During WW2 there was no sympathy wasted on Japs and the Emperor was the focal point of American propaganda.
I think considering the difficulty in conducting this raid, aiming at military targets made the most sense, and I doubt any serious consideration would have been given to bombing the palace.
Not only that, there was uncertainty about what the speech meant; nowhere in it did he use the word surrender. From here:
Count me in on thinking it would have done nothing to help cause an earlier capitulation if it could have been accomplished. I have serious doubts about the ease of hitting the Imperial Palace; even low altitude bombing wasn’t very precise in WWII. If you look further down on wiki under impact:
The Americans were extremely concerned about fuel use, and they had none available for all the planes launched early to circle about and wait for the entire launch to be finished and then form up and fly anywhere as a group. So any attack would have been a string of individual planes bombing one at a time. If there air raid shelters, the bombs from the first one or two planes would be sufficient to get everyone moving into shelters.
As to whether shelters existed. I haven’t found confirmation of that yet. I did find this article about 18 air raid shelters being built in built in the former imperial residence in Kyoto, all completed by February 1942.
It stands to reason that if they were building such shelters on the grounds of the old and no longer used palace, they would have given even higher priority to shelters on the grounds of the in-use palace.
Also, could they have even hit the Imperial Palace? The planes were deliberately not outfitted with the Norton Bomb Sight.
Complete hijack, but I worked with a wonderful gentleman that was a translator. He grew up in the US until age ~14, then went back to Japan, served in the Imperial Guards, walked from Burma to Thailand at the end of the war to surrender, and then was one of the last Japanese to be repatriated from Thailand to Japan owing to his bilingual skills. All that said, he told the story of seeing one of the Doolittle plans fly over Tokyo.
I believe the Norden was for high altitude bombing, the B-25 was a low level bomber, and there were preparations to destroy it if the plane were shot down.
Most interesting to me (as I hadn’t really thought about it) was that it was planned to be a night bombing mission, as they were so concerned about the defenses the planes would face. There is brief commentary about the thinking that went into the timing of the mission, including that they expected that a daylight mission would be spotted and attacked before the planes ever approached their targets.
So, I would say, given the planned mission parameters, that an attack on a very specific site like the imperial palace was out of the question. It’s also pretty clear that the Army hardly expected to hit anything at all, given the difficulties of night bombing accuracy at the time. It says the accuracy and damage exceeded their wildest expectations.
You can also read from the individual reports that the crews were tossing bombs into large industrial complexes, and there is no particular sense that they either aimed at or were able to hit specific buildings. Of course, given that they had planned a night mission, this is completely understandable. But from what we know now about the results of night bombing from both the British and German attacks is that even with the highest tech ground-based navigation systems of the day to assist them, and even later with airborne ground-mapping radar, night bombing of specific targets was a miserable failure.
The B-25 was designed as a mid-level bomber, as was the B26, though early in the war circumstances often dictated low-level attacks for defensive reasons.
The B-25 was normally equipped with a Norden bombsight, which was removed from all the Doolittle planes, both as a security measure and as one measure toward weight saving. I don’t think the Norden would have been useful in the planned night attack.
Two wooden 50 caliber guns were stuck out of the extreme tip of the tail. The effectiveness of this subterfuge was indicated by the fact that no airplane, on the flight, was attacked from directly behind.
I always thought it sucked to not have a tail gunner.
I wonder why the turret gun problem hadn’t shown up before.
BTW, several hundred B-25 were modified specifically for low-level attacks, the so called B-25 Strafers. The link has a story about how the glass nose was removed in the field an replaced with an arsenal of 50 caliber machine guns for ground and shipping attacks. Some also had a 75mm. cannon installed. The article talks about a typical strafer having machine six guns, but I have seen pictures of them with as many as 12 (two columns of four guns each in the nose, and two more in housings attached to each side of the nose). Throw in the upper turret and you could have 14 forward firing very heavy machine guns, which could blow a hole through most anything.
To add to this they developed the tactic of skip bombing, which had bombs bouncing along the surface of the water until hitting ships. And they developed the 'parafrag", very small bombs dropped with parachutes and delay fuses in very large numbers, more or less the precursors to cluster bombs of today.
And to further the B-25 hijack just a bit more, the manufacturer (North American, also maker of the P-51) took the idea of the Strafer modifications from the field and built some of them in right at the factory with the G, H, and J models.
