“The Tokyo Sixteen” is a personalized, human-focused narrative of the pilots who flew the Doolittle Raid on April 18, 1942. This U.S. air raid launched from the Aircraft Carrier “Hornet” bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities just 4 months after the devastating attack at Pearl Harbor.  Instead of a broad strategic history, Rottiers structures the book around the individual stories of the sixteen pilots who undertook this high-risk mission, discussing their motivations, training, combat experiences, and fates.

It’s a cradle to grave mini bio of each pilot. It has biographical sketches of each pilot, highlighting their backgrounds and reasons for volunteering. It also includes an account of the secretive training, the bombing, and each crew’s fate in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. But only the pilot of each crew has his life story told after the bombing.

I enjoyed reading about each pilot’s background and their further war time service after the raid and after the war. Some retired from the military, some went into civilian life, and unfortunately, some paid the ultimate price along with some of their crew.

I am not sure, but I think the book was translated from another language to English with AI. It uses phrases and words a typical American would not use. And these are in some cases duplicated in other parts of the book. This threw me a little at first but if you ignore it, the book is a good read about the Pilots of the Raid.