70 years ago a brave group of army pilots , trained in secret, and were stealthly loaded aboard the USS Hornet, then again stealthly approached the coast of Japan before being spotted by a Japanese picket boat 650 miles from the mainland, fearing their position had been compromise they still decided to continue the mission and loaded extra fuel can onto the planes, then did what said could not be done, flew their B-25 medium range bombers off the pitching carrier deck, flew at wavetop level, and attacked the very heart of Imperial Japan then flew on to China. All the planes crashed in China, some were captured, some were killed, but most with the help of the Chinese, who were eager to help anyone who was at war with hated Japan, made it back to the US. While the actual damage inflicted was slight, the psychological impact on both sides of the Pacific cannot be underestimated. For the US it was a massive moral boost happening only 4 months after Pearl Harbor. It gave the America people hope that their enemy was not invulerable, that they could be attacked. For the Japanese, the impact was immediate and demoralizing, their leaders had sworn that no enemy bombs would ever fall on the land of the Chrysanthinum Throne, yet bombs HAD fallen, and only a few miles from the Imperial Palace. It forced the Japanese to withhold military forces for homeland defense, weakening overseas forces. The Chrysanthinum Kingdom was not, as their leaders declared, invulerable, it was the first loss of credibility for a hubristic Military that would be reinforced within a few months when the first US Naval offensive at Midway crushed the pride of the Imperial Fleet. Still perhaps the best movie about this subject, and still very watchable today, Thirty Second Over Tokyo, remains the most accessable way to learn about this story, if you have the time the book version is an excellent read.