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The Landmark series for children, both American and World, is a wonderful, with few exceptions, collection of books written in the 1950s and 1960s and published by Random House. The publisher chose well-known authors, some of whom were novelists and some of whom had not written for children before, and had a historical consultant for each title to make sure that the writing was accurate. There are 122 American Landmark books and 63 World Landmark books. The reading level is fairly broad, intended for upper elementary to early high school levels. The books were intended to convey sound history or biography but in such a manner as to not detract from the intrinsic interest of the story, as history textbooks often do, but to bring out the fascination and drama of the history or historical character being discussed. History is at heart a series of stories, especially at this level, and should be told as such. For the overwhelming majority of the 185 titles, this effort was successful.
Number 35 in the American Landmark book series is Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, by Ted Lawson and Bob Considine. Several of the Landmark series started out as books for adults that were edited to become a suitable Landmark book. Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is one of them. In early 1942, not long after the disaster at Pearl Harbor, Colonel James Doolittle, who had been a champion of air power since the 1920s and was a famous pilot in his own right, proposed a daring air raid on Tokyo. The raid was designed to show the Japanese enemy that even though Japan had piled up success after success in the months after the attack at Pearl Harbor, they would not always have the war go their way and in fact were not even safe in their own capital city, home of their sacred Emperor. B-25 bombers, which were not designed to take off from an aircraft carrier, were loaded on the USS Hornet, after special training of the pilots. The secret mission had begun. Captain Ted Lawson was one of the pilots on the raid.
The story of the raid itself, although quite exciting, is almost overshadowed by Captain Lawson’s running out of fuel, crash landing just off the coast of China, and the odyssey of getting himself and his crew home with the help of Chinese partisans. The Doolittle raid was an important part of the early war against Japan in World War II, and the Landmark book does a good job of educating the reader about the raid. There was even a good movie adapted from this book in the 1950s, which may be worth watching.