Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (MGM, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, May 23) I watched an installment of Turner Classic Movies’ three-day program of war movies in honor of the Memorial Day holiday, which is officially commemorated tomorrow even though the actual date, May 30, is next Saturday. The film was Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, an elaborate 1944 MGM movie based on the Doolittle Raid against Japan on April 18, 1942 in which 16 B-25 twin-engined Mitchell bombers dropped incendiaries on Tokyo, Yokohama, and two other cities on the main Japanese island of Honshu. Doolittle was played in the film by Spencer Tracy, though it was really just a supporting role and he agreed to be in the movie as a morale booster for the American war effort and to support the careers of the young actors actually playing the flight crews, notably pilot Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) and gunner David Thatcher (Robert Walker). Lawson had actually co-written a memoir with pop journalist Bob Considine, also called Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, which was published in 1943 and served as the basis for the movie. The film was produced by Sam Zimbalist, directed by Mervyn LeRoy, and written by future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Dalton Trumbo. There are faint traces of Trumbo’s Leftist politics in the script, notably an interlude in which two of the characters express the since dashed hope that this will be the last war of all time. What’s most surprising about Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo today is how sentimental much of it is; Lawson is married to Ellen (Phyllis Thaxter), she’s carrying his child, and the first hour or so of the movie deals largely with their relationship and her insistence that he has to return from the secret combat mission alive so their kid can have two parents. Parallel to this domestic love story is a series of briefings from Doolittle on the need for absolute secrecy about the mission. LeRoy and Trumbo maintain the suspense about just what the mission is and why the flight crews are getting bizarre levels of training for it, including learning how to get a B-25 airborne in 500 feet of runway when they’re used to having three times that. They had to learn that because the planes were to be launched from aircraft carriers; the plan was to get the carriers as close to Japan as possible, fly the planes there, then land them again at presumably safe airfields in China, which was at war with Japan in 1942 (that had started when Japan attacked Manchuria in 1931 and the Chinese mainland six years later) and quite frankly not doing too well against the Rising Sun.

The film basically divides into three acts: the opening training sequences, the Doolittle raid itself, and what quite frankly is its best and most gripping dramatic sequence, the attempts of the stranded pilots and crews to get to safety in China ahead of the Japanese, who seemed to be gobbling one Chinese village after another. Just when the crew members seem to have a safe refuge, the Japanese surround it and attack it again. The Doolittle raid was greenlighted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as early as December 21, 1941, exactly two weeks after Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor. It was designed as a morale-booster for the U.S. and a morale-buster for Japan, aimed at shaking the confidence of the Japanese people in their military leadership. The flight crews taking on the assignment are told they will be away from their homes for at least three months, though most of them don’t think of that as a particular hardship since, aside from Lawson and one other participant, they’re all single. They are also repeatedly warned not to talk about the mission, since leaking even the most innocuous details about it could alert the ever-present Japanese spies. (They were nowhere nearly as ever-present as the American propaganda machine made out, but the fear that all Japanese-Americans were potential spies and saboteurs, which turned out to be racist B.S. concocted by U.S. military leaders, was one of the stated reasons for the mass internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.) And when they’re not training the American servicemembers are having so many sing-a-longs Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo practically qualifies as a musical. Among the listed songs are not only the service anthems and patriotic songs you’d expect (including a version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” sung in Chinese by a group of schoolchildren) but also “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” “I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” and even “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” which gets sung to Van Johnson and Phyllis Thaxter when Johnson’s colleagues realize they’re going to have a baby. There’s even a few allusions in Herbert Stothart’s background score to the title song of the 1943 musical Oklahoma!, a bit of a surprise given how notoriously protective Richard Rodgers was of his intellectual property.

The actual shots of the Doolittle raid and the havoc it was wreaking on Japan’s industrial base are quite well done model work – the film won that year’s Academy Award for special effects, and deserved it – and there are hints of Trumbo’s politics in his speech for Spencer Tracy as Doolittle when he says they have taken pains to avoid bombing civilian targets, though inevitably civilians will be killed in what today is called “collateral damage.” (Later, under the guidance of General Curtis LeMay, the strategy would shift to large-scale fire bombings of Japanese cities, deliberately targeting civilian populations, in an effort to end the war as quickly as possible. Estimates are that LeMay’s indiscriminate bombing raids on Japanese cities killed 500,000 Japanese civilians and left 5 million homeless. “I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal,” LeMay later acknowledged.) For me the final third of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was the most interesting part of the film, as all the crew members of the “Ruptured Duck” (the bomber piloted by Johnson’s character) survive their crash-landing off the Chinese coast but all but Thatcher (Walker’s character) are injured. Lawson (Johnson’s character) is severely wounded in his left leg and, not surprisingly, gangrene sets in and the leg eventually has to be amputated. When a group of Asian-looking people approaches the crew, Thatcher at first thinks they’re Japanese and is ready to shoot them, but they turn out to be sympathetic Chinese who lead Our Heroes to a small village, then to another and still another as each village in turn is overrun by the Japanese. The responsibility for their care is assumed by a father-and-son team of Chinese doctors (Hsin Kung and Benson Fong; usually during the war Benson Fong was stuck playing Japanese villains, so it was probably a relief for him to be acting a sympathetic character of his own nationality and true sympathies in the war), though the actual amputation is performed by “Doc” White (Stephen McNally, who like Fong was getting a break from his usual casting as villains), who’s able to score a limited supply of anesthetic, which itself creates a suspense issue as he has to work fast before the stuff wears off and puts Lawson in unendurable pain.

Among the things Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo gets right are the jocular but still real antagonism between the flight crews of the Army Air Corps (the U.S. Air Force didn’t become a separate service branch until 1955) and the sailors on board the Navy carriers that are taking them to launch their mission. There are also some intriguing cameos by Leon Ames as a former U.S. diplomat to Japan who’s brought in to warn the crew members of what’s likely in store for them if they’re captured by the Japanese; and Robert Mitchum as one of the crew members on another plane. Mitchum made this movie just before another war film, The Story of G.I. Joe, which would catapult him to stardom. The film ends with a quite poignant scene between Mr. and Mrs. Lawson; for reasons of personal pride he hadn’t wanted to see her again until he’d been outfitted with an artificial leg, but she had tracked him down and shown up anyway. In their reunion scene Lawson loses his balance and falls forward in a sequence that reminded me of The Big Parade (MGM, 1925) – the second highest grossing silent film of all time (after The Birth of a Nation) – which likewise featured a male lead (John Gilbert) returning home minus one leg. (The effects work to make Van Johnson appear as an amputee is excellent.) Col. Doolittle startles both Lawson and us when he tells Lawson that he has no intention of letting Lawson out of the service just because he’s lost a leg in combat, though just what he intends to have Lawson do to continue to support the war effort is unclear. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is very much a film of its time, what I call the portmanteau movie in which the producers’ strategy appeared to be to put in elements every audience member would like. Such films told you, “You don’t like this? Well, wait a bit and there’ll be something in the movie you will like.” It’s quite different from the way a story like this would be filmed today (though the 2001 Pearl Harbor likewise had a surprising degree of sentimentality – and it ended with the Doolittle raid, which as a New Yorker reviewer joked they probably brought in at the last minute after they realized Pearl Harbor was an American military catastrophe): as more or less straight action with just hints of the characters’ human emotions and drives.