But for Lieutenant Colonel Doolittle's Tokyo raid from Hornet (CV-8) on 18 April 1942 and the daring war patrols of Pacific Fleet submarines, this carrier foray was the United States Navy's closest approach to the Japanese home islands up to that point in the war.

While Ted Lawson was still recovering from wounds suffered in Doolittle's Tokyo raid, Considine finished Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.

Three civilian B-25s in warbird markings reenacted the training take-off sessions, with personnel from NAS Pensacola as flight deck crew representing that service's contribution to the Tokyo raid.

For comparison, the March 9-10, 1945 Tokyo raid by the USAAF, the most destructive firebombing raid in WWII, 16 square miles (41 km2) of the city were destroyed, and over 83,000 people are estimated to have died in the firestorm.

"9-25 March: Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle and a B-25 detachment of 72 officers and 75 enlisted men from Lexington County Airport, Columbia, South Carolina, were at Eglin Field in rehearsals for the Tokyo raid."

In April 1942, Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle and his crew crash-landed in China after the Tokyo raid.

When asked from where the Tokyo raid was launched, President Roosevelt coyly said its base was Shangri-La, a fictional paradise from the popular novel Lost Horizon.

Later, Col. James Doolittle includes Rafe and Danny on his Tokyo raid in a film that works best, A. O. Scott wrote in The New York Times, as "a loud symphony of bombardment and explosion juiced up with frantic editing and shiny computer-generated imagery."

Doolittle, awarded the Medal of Honor for his 1942 Tokyo raid, was the first military customer at the field on 9 October 1927.

In March 1942 Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle's B-25s arrived at McClellan for arming in preparation for their famous Tokyo raid.