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

Columbia Law School lecturer Paradis debuts with a deeply sourced account of the aftermath of one of WWII’s most famous air raids. Under the command of U.S. Army Air Force officer Jimmy Doolittle, 16 planes bombed Tokyo in April 1942. Then, after crash-landing near Shanghai, eight crewmen were captured and tortured by Japanese soldiers. Three were convicted of “atrocities against civilians” in a show trial and executed; a fourth died in captivity. The surviving POWs were rescued from a Japanese internment camp on the outskirts of Beijing in 1945. The bulk of the book recounts U.S. military lawyer Robert Dwyer’s efforts to hold those responsible for the mistreatment and executions of the Doolittle Raiders accountable. Paradis painstakingly recounts Dwyer’s investigation and decision to prosecute four Japanese officers for torture and murder, and draws on transcripts, press coverage, war diaries, and interviews to recreate the trial, in which teams of American prosecutors and Japanese and American defense lawyers sparred over what constitutes a war crime. Though human elements of the story sometimes take a back seat to legal matters, Paradis persuasively argues that the case set a meaningful precedent for the Geneva Conventions. This finely wrought history rescues a dramatic WWII episode from obscurity. Agent: Rachel Vogel, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner. (July)