Warbird Information Exchange

Halpro was a brave but sort of inept attempt to do too much too far away with less than complete discipline and execution of planning or follow through of the plan., too much improvisation and lack of knowledge of basic things like where the flak guns were located, low level attack with flak on the hills surrounding the targets, equals duck shoot.

The Dams raid was a stroke of genius and technical excellence but it's doubtful if one person, civilian or military,in one Hundred really knew what Harris and 617 had accomplished once it was made public and since they didn't see an immediate change in the persecution of the war, most of the effect was wasted on John Q. Public.

What he said, but I wouldn't consider the Doolittle raid to be "fully successful" ... successful yes, not fully successful. IMHO

It is hard to say if the Doolittle raid was "fully sucessful", but it did achieve the primary goal of boosting morale, while failing the secondary goal of providing bombers to China. ...

I don't know if the British press printed a headline the day after the raid on the dams in 84 point type, but every front page of every newspaper in the U.S. carried some version of TOKIO HIT above the fold in the blackest or most vibrant red ink the paper owned in the biggest type set they had or could carve overnight.

The end objective was to boost morale on 'our' side and hopefully disenchant 'them guys', didn't work as the more you try to bomb me out of existence, the stiffer becomes my resolve to resist. That mental attitude as demonstrated by Russian soldiers who would fight to the death for the piece of dirt they were standing on flummoxed the Germans. Later the Germans adopted the same attitude when the German skies were black with Allied aircraft.

Was the delivery of bombers to China a serious objective? It's not one I was aware of.

Subject: B25B Special Project
To: Commanding General Army Air Forces

Should the Russians be willing to accept delivery of 18 B-25-B airplanes, on lease lend, at Vladivostok our problems would be greatly simplified and conflict with the Halverson project avoided.

Transcribed from hand-written memo submitted to Commanding General Army Air Forces (Gen. H. Arnold, USAAF). The memo is microfilmed at the National Archives
HyperWar Foundation

All three operations under discussion certainly had a greater or lesser propaganda element, but none were just part of the strategic bombing offensive per se.

Here's a aviation history question to consider. When taking three great bombing operations of W.W.II:
- The 617 Squadron raid on the German dams (The Dam Busters raid),
- The Dolittle Tokyo raid and
- The Polesti raid,

It seems 'delivery' wasn't an objective of the task, just a possible solution to 'logistical misplacement'.

In the first month after the United States entered World War II, the Air War Plans Division put forth a plan to establish a major fighting air command in Burma to turn back the Japanese' sweeping advance into China. That new command was to be designated the 10th Air Force, and in mid-January Operation Aquila was employed to begin the initial buildup necessary to establish that command. Operation Aquila was a 5-point program designed to provide fighters, bombers, and a supply chain to the theater.

....The bomber element of the new 10th Air Force was to originate from two separate, highly secret projects.

The first was a volunteer group of B-25 pilots under command of Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle. The twenty-six medium range bombers were tasked with making a carrier-borne assault on Tokyo in what would become Doolittle's famous Tokyo Raid. Theirs was a two-part mission. After making the historic attack on the Japanese capitol, the raiders were to fly to China where pilots, crews and their B-25s were to be absorbed by the 10th Air Force. (It was the loss of all 26 bombers that distressed Doolittle to the belief that he would be court-martialed, despite the success of the first part of his mission.)

Long-range bombing missions in the China-Burma theater would be carried out by a group of twenty-three B-24s under the command of Colonel Halvor "Hurry-up Harry" Halverson. This was the element that became known, by those few planners aware of its existence, as the Halpro Group (Halverson Project.) The group was tasked with flying EAST to reach China after completion of the Doolittle Raid. From their airfields in China, the Liberators would be within bombing range of Tokyo and able to continue the work from the west of Japan, that Doolittle's men started from an aircraft carrier east of the islands.

Yes it was