Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, 1943-44
The lead role, playing Col. Jimmy Doolittle, was given to Spencer Tracey, one of M-G-M's best assets. He had already won two Academy Awards for for Captains Courageous (1937) and Boys Town (1938), and in 1942's Woman of the Year, Tracy had begun his long co-starring and off-screen romantic partnership with Katherine Hepburn. By the time the film went into production, now-General Doolittle had been promoted to General of the "Mighty Eighth" Air Force in Europe.
Because this was a biographical picture about the exploits of commanding general and a revered national hero, every word of the script was very carefully reviewed by the War Department. The opportunity for a factually-based film about the Doolittle Raid came when M-G-M acquired the rights to the first-hand account, serialized in Collier's Magazine on the first anniversary of the Tokyo raid. Written by Lieutenant Ted W. Lawson, who piloted "The Ruptured Duck," one of the sixteen B-25s that crash-landed on the Chinese coast. Lt. Lawson lost his mangled leg in a Chinese hospital, and eventually returned to his supportive wife stateside.
The production files for Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo provide a direct window on the OWI - BMP - Hollywood propaganda machine. Thanks to the thorough record-keeping of M-G-M, the production files include a complete paper trail of this story's journey from a draft memoir by Lawson to the film's eventual release in November of 1944, a release that coincided precisely with the beginning of the massive B-29 incendiary campaign against Japanese cities.
Thirty Seconds, by any measure, was a co-production by the War Department and M-G-M. It became a vehicle to leverage the heroism of the Doolittle Raiders as the image for Americans to consume about the full strategic air-power attack on Japan, set to begin in November with the first test raids, and then in March, when winds were highest for maximum fire spread. Indeed, precisely because Doolittle was opposed to Giulio Douhet's anti-civilian doctrine, he was the perfect cover for the urban area bombing campaign led by the Douhetian Ernest LeMay, which began in those months.
Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg committed their top talent, beginning with Dalton Trumbo, at that moment Hollywood's highest-paid screenwriter, to adapt the Collier's stories. Mervyn LeRoy had been directing M-G-M's top films with its leading stars since producing and co-directing The Wizard of Oz in 1939: Norma Shearer (Thalberg's wife), Robert Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, and Lana Turner.
A heart-throb for women and a role model for men, Spencer Tracy also resembled the real General Doolittle. They were, in effect, two leading culture heroes: one would portray the other. Ted Lawson's story was an ideal blend of personal and geopolitical. In 1940 Lawson had been studying aeronautical engineering at Los Angeles City College when he enlisted in the Army Air Force, trained as a pilot, and was deployed on early missions in the Pacific with the new B-25 medium bomber, called "Mitchell"s in honor of America's first Douhetian and founder of U.S. air power, William "Billy" Mitchell. He had just married and begun to plan a domestic future when he volunteered for the "extremely dangerous" (but unnamed) mission, hand-picked by Jimmy Doolittle. They story follows the elaborate preparations of the B-25 crews, who practiced taking off from extremely short landing strips without being told why. Eventually, aboard the U.S.S. Hornet en route to Japan, the crew is briefed by Lt. Col. Doolittle on the nature of the targets and the operation in all of its details. Lawson's non-fictional account is in fact an eyewitness account that gives us insight into moral framework of the very beginning point of the U.S. air campaign against Japan. Lawson--and eventually the M-G-M film--were quite explicit about the question of killing civilians.
Given the minute attention to the "line" being promoted by the OWI regarding civilian casualties, the exact shape of the film's message regarding civilians as targets, along with deletions and editing, merits careful scrutiny. In Lawson's manuscript for the serialized Collier's account, the dramatic moment of revelation came during an all-crew meeting in the assembly room of the Hornet, in which Doolittle "cleared his throat and said, 'For the benefit of those of you who have been guessing, we are going straight to Japan. We're going to bomb Tokyo, Yokohama, Kobe, Osaka, and Nagoya."
Lawson then introduces a crucial character, Lt. Cmdr Stephen Jurika, U.S.N., who had been Naval Attaché based in Tokyo for years and served as target expert for the mission: Jurika spoke on the history of Japan and China. He went into detail about the political setups of the countries, told us of the differences between the military and the peasant classes of Japan, the psychological differences between Chinese and Japanese, … and physiological differences."
Later, during a meeting in which the airmen were poring over maps with Doolittle and Jurika, Lawson recounts the following, apparently spontaneous incident, in which both Doolittle and Jurika discuss the use of incendiaries and the bombing of civilian neighborhoods with the crew:
"I know that town like a book,’ he’d [Jurika] say, and give us the location of this or that factory or plant. Finally we selected three targets in a reasonably straight line, and close together, and began the long job of memorizing their characteristics….Doolittle also told us we would carry another bomb, a 500-pound incendiary, something like the old Russian ‘Molotov breadbasket.’ This would have to be dropped, also from a low altitude, on obviously flammable sections of the city. The flammable [p. 36] section should be as near as possible to the other targets, so that we could let the incendiary go and then dive down out of the range of the antiaircraft fire. ‘If you can start seven good fires in Tokyo they’ll never put them out,’ Jurika promised us. ‘I know that Tokyo fire department very well. Seven big scattered fires would be too much for it to cope with.’
Doolittle interrupted one of these discussions about incendiary work. ‘It’s possible that some of you may be opposed to killing defenseless civilians…even Japs,’ he said.‘Naturally, you’re going to kill some of these people if you’re going to bomb their cities.If any man here feels that he can’t do this, I wish he’s drop out. It won’t go against him. I’ll understand.’
When nobody spoke up, Jurika had something else to say. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about setting fires in flimsy-looking sections of Tokyo,’ he said. ‘The Japanese have done an amazing job of spreading out some of their industries, instead of concentrating them in large buildings. There’s probably a small machine shop under half of these fragile-looking roofs.’
Before this manuscript reached Collier's. War Department censors deleted (crossed-out) this entire passage with their red pencil. The complete original draft is in the M-G-M files, with the red pencil labeled "War Department"). Clearly, Lawson had touched upon the most sensitive issue in air war strategy, and the War Department was not ready let this issues go public in the spring of 1942. If Lawson's memory and account of this ship-board conversation in April of 1941 is accurate, then Jurika was voicing an already well-known observation about Japanese cities: that they were particularly vulnerable to fire, and that an out-of-control fire could be initiated with little difficulty.
Most probably, the War Department censors, whose job was mainly to eliminate public disclosure of information useful to the enemy, sought to suppress this passage because it represented real air strategy then in the planning stages for the ultimate attempt to defeat Japan through air power. Also prominent in this excised dialogue is an early rehearsal for the "necessary killing" of civilians and the master alibi: the "line" that Japanese war production was subcontracted-out to thousands of small shops hidden beneath the "fragile-looking roofs" of the "obviously flammable sections of the city." Doolittle's seemingly spontaneous warning about the need to kill "innocent civilians" is followed by Jurika's reassurance that the little houses are really weapons factories.
Dalton Trumbo had already produced a draft of the screenplay by the 14th of April 1943, more than a month before the first installment of the Collier's articles began on 22 May 1943. The second and third installments of the series ran in the 29 May and 5 June issues. In late December of that year, he joined the Communist Party. “I hope this doesn’t sound as some might interpret it,” Trumbo explained decades later to his biographer Bruce Cook: but the growing reaction against communism—and in Hollywood the formation of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals—convinced me that there was going to be trouble. And I thought I wanted to be part of it if there were.” (Cook: 147-9) If he joined the Communists only in December, months after completing the script, how can we be sure of his ideological convictions from March to August of 1943? The answer is pretty evident from the rest of his explanation to Cook in 1970: I didn’t want to have the advantage of those years of friendship and then to escape the penalties. Now that may sound odd. I don’t think it’s of at all. That was part of my motive. If they hadn’t been my friends, I wouldn't have joined.” (Cook: 147-9)
It seems from this that Trumbo’s views were consistent for years, and his affinity for the Communists was certified during the production of this film, when the script was largely out of his hands in any case. His primary mission, it seems, in 1943-4 period was to join the fight against global fascism. While in San Francisco writing speeches for the U.S. Secretary of State Stettinus, he joined a correspondent’s tour of the Pacific War. Trumbo actually flew a B-25 combat mission as an observer, on a bombing run against the Japanese island of Kyushu. When cloud cover made this attack impossible, the crew dropped their payload on the small island of Kikai Shima instead. Trumbo showed nothing but enthusiasm about this action. (Cook 1977: 155-7). In the HUAC investigations of Hollywood begun in 1947, Trumbo would be hounded by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he refused to talk. As one of the "Hollywood Ten," he was convicted of contempt of Congress and served 11 months in a federal penitentiary. After his release, he and his wife moved to Mexico, where he ghost-wrote many forgettable, but also several major screenplays, including Roman Holiday, starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
Trumbo's ultimate punishment for his leftist convictions is ironic, given his faithful work to implement the OWI's official line and cover-up of atrocities. The fear of leftist, communist screenwriters was based on an exaggerated belief in the power of movies to brainwash the masses—not to mention a naïve view of how movies get written in a corporate environment. The governments of all major powers saw movies as vital means to manage their masses—with mass culture. Thirty Seconds was produced to be a propaganda movie, based on the OWI’s Movie-maker’s Manual, so through the archive of successive treatments and scripts, we can observe precisely how Trumbo executed the OWI manual with a particular emphasis on its Anti-fascist doctrines.
This page has paths:
- Target Tokyo: Los Angeles and Accountability for U.S. War Crimes in Europe and Japan, 1943-1945 Phil Ethington
- Target Tokyo: An American War Crime Phil Ethington
- Shadows: The Metropolis of Visual Culture, Mass Media and Global Power Phil Ethington
- Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Phil Ethington
- Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles and Its Places in Global History, From the Pleistocene to the Present Phil Ethington
