Last Mission to Tokyo The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice

effect, do not make a case for anarchism. She has some sympathy with the effort to use law to “order the world.” Or, at least she identifies with efforts to reclaim valuable materials from those efforts. Grand leaders making grand law may indeed be sending their messages into the void, but those messages in time return, often in ways that would have surprised (and perhaps dismayed) the original authors. They are reclaimed at the street level. The grand statements get into the hands of not-so-grand people and encourage and become rallying-points for resistance to oppression.

Yes, Pirie says in her concluding chapter, “Hammurabi was a ruthless warlord who wanted to bequeath a benign image for posterity,” and others who have used much the same tone since his day have been birds of the same feather. But, she adds, “once laws set out a vision that people believe in, they can also be used against any power-holder who tries to ignore them. This is what gives law its ability to both legitimate and limit power.”

Much may be said about the note of optimism there. But I will do none of it. I have set out the broad arc of the argument of this book. Like the oft-cited arc of the universe, it bends toward justice, though it takes its time.

This book is worthy of study and contemplation, both of its particulars and in its themes. Its ambition, and much of its execution, is worthy of something more: admiration. 

Christopher Faille has written on a variety of legal, regulatory, and financial issues for decades. He was an early reporter with Lipper HedgeWorld and has contributed to Forbes, Hedge Fund Law Report, and Alternatives Watch.

By Michel Paradis

Simon & Schuster 2020 480 pages, $28.00

Reviewed by Jon M. Sands

“How do you tell a man he would be killed tomorrow?” Last Mission to Tokyo asks this question twice: at the start and toward the end. The question, although asked in the same place, Shanghai, was asked four years apart—in 1942 and again in 1946, in two different courtrooms, by two different military justice officers, one Japanese and one American. The question frames this remarkable account of two war crime trials—first, the Japanese military trials of eight American Doolittle airmen captured after the raid in Tokyo, and second, the U.S. military trials of four Japanese officers charged with executing three American airmen. The first trial lasted an hour, and the second trial lasted 17 days. Last Mission to Tokyo recounts the verdicts and itself delivers a definitive historical verdict.

Michel Paradis’s book misleads only in its title. One thinks it is another history of Lt. Colonel James Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo on April 14, 1942, a daring long-distance bombing in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. But it is much more. The raid, which did scant damage, became a propaganda victory for the United States and proved highly embarrassing to Japan. The book becomes an account and a deliberation of vengeance, what passes for justice in each court, and what constitutes fairness to enemy combatants. We do not need another twice-told tale of the raid, as brave as it was; we do need this evenhanded recounting of the role that trials play in the historical record.

Paradis, a lawyer, scholar, and pundit, served on the U.S. Department of Defense Military Commissions Defense Organization, dealing with court cases arising from Guantánamo Bay after Sept. 11, 2001. Full disclosure: I am part of a defense team for a defendant in Guantánamo charged before the Military Commissions, but I don’t know Paradis. Paradis brings a sensitivity to the varied reasons for such tribunals, the many motivations of governments and various institutions, the roles of counsel and judges, and the human stories of the participants.

We know of Doolittle’s raid as brave and sacrificial, launched from an aircraft carrier that was in harm’s way, with Tokyo barely within the range of the bombers. We know how the bombing occurred and of the explicit instructions to target military installations rather than civilians. (The Pacific campaign eventually culminated in firebombing air raids on Japanese cities.) Paradis describes the view of the Japanese populace, which was shocked and angered by their civilian casualties, which included children in school. It was the first-ever successful foreign attack on the homeland. The military, which controlled the government and country, reacted with fury.

When two bombers in the Doolittle raid, on fire, crashed in Japanese-held China, and the airmen were captured, vengeance was forthcoming. The airmen were starved, beaten, and tortured. Japan quickly passed the Enemy Airmen’s Act, which made bombing raiders against Japanese-held territories and Japan itself criminal acts. Orders from on high were to try and execute attacking airmen. So much for the laws regarding prisoners of war.

The airmen’s trials were held in Shanghai. They were show trials, with the proceedings not translated, no real defense permitted to be raised, and the verdict foregone: death. In a show of mercy, five airmen were spared, but three were chosen for execution. They were William Farrow, Dean Hallmark, and

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Harold Spatz. How does one decide to seek death for injustice in war and tell a man that he is going to die tomorrow? The warden charged with the execution was troubled about the proceedings. However, there had been a verdict and sentence, and he was ordered to carry it out.

Four years later, again in Shanghai, a U.S. military tribunal held court. Before the tribunal stood Shigeru Sawada, Yusei Wako, Ruyhei Okazaki, and Sotojiro Tatsuta. The last was the warden who was charged with executing the American airmen. All four Japanese men had supervised the executions. The last was the warden charged with executing the American airmen. The U.S. War Crimes Office was both prosecuting and defending. The prosecution team was composed of three lawyers, and the defense team had two. The book concentrates on the lead lawyer for each side. The lead prosecutor was Robert E. Dwyer, a graduate of Harvard Law School, a bit too old to have been drafted, but he did his duty nevertheless. Dwyer came from a political family from upstate New York; he was ambitious and was in Shanghai, looking to move into the spotlight. The lead defense counsel was Edmund J. Bodine, who served as a pilot in the war but had transferred into the office because he’d met a girl he fancied, a Russian refugee working as a translator. Everyone was being sent home in 1946, except those in the War Crimes Department, and this was his ticket to stay. His credentials? A Georgetown undergraduate, he was affable and athletic (good enough to consider pro baseball), and he had taken night law classes at Fordham before dropping out to join up. Good enough for the military: his file declared him a lawyer. Joining him was a young captain.

Paradis admirably chronicles the proceedings. Both Dwyer and Bodine were less than perfect, but they sought justice in the best sense. Paradis is masterful at recounting the investigation, strategies, and tactics. He makes the contrast with the Japanese proceeding stark.

Drawing from the transcripts, memoirs, interviews, and news accounts, Paradis makes the American proceedings gripping. The themes employed, the evidentiary twists and turns, the drama of introducing the ashes of the deceased and the differing tones and terror of the defendant’s testimony, the defendants’ blaming higher-ups, and the use of “only following orders” defense (this was after Nuremberg), which entailed claiming not to have known that the proceedings were a sham and therefore unlawful—these are all spellbinding. This book is every bit as compelling as the best of courtroom dramas. Yes, we can handle the truth when told like this. The verdict is surprising and affirming.

How do you tell a man he is going to die? How do you prosecute soldiers for doing their duty? Do verdicts that shock us undermine, or validate, the system? Paradis presents these questions but does not provide definitive answers. But he creates a sense that justice was done and leaves the reader with pride at the proceedings, however flawed they were.

Some footnotes. Bodine went on to defend other people charged with war crimes. Bodine finally got his law degree in 1951. His military career stalled as a result of McCarthyism because he married a White Russian refugee and had been in China. Later, as a practicing lawyer, he defended those of the LGBQT military community who had been accused of immoral acts or being a security threat.

After the verdict, Dwyer met with the warden he had prosecuted. His act will impress the reader with his sensitivity. He went on to prosecute other war crimes cases. It took a toll. He drank himself to death in 1947. Bodine was a pallbearer.

In the prosecution’s case for the death of the Doolittle airmen and the torture of others, Dwyer stressed the barbarism of the acts, including waterboarding. The account in the record is horrifying. Six decades later, the United States engaged in torture and waterboarding. Indeed, at a recent Guantánamo Military Commission verdict, the military jury asked for leniency because the defendant had been tortured and waterboarded and the military code besmirched. The juries chastised the government’s treatment as “a stain on the moral fiber of America” and as “a source of shame.” 

Jon Sands is the federal public defender for the District of Arizona.

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