"Immediately after Japan's December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt sought to restore the honor of the United States with a dramatic act of vengeance: a retaliatory bombing raid on Tokyo itself. In those early days of World War II, the very notion of an attempt by America - which was ill prepared for any sort of warfare - to make a direct assault on Asia's military superpower was almost inconceivable.

But FDR was not to be dissuaded, and at his bidding a squadron of scarcely trained army fliers, led by the famous daredevil Jimmy Doolittle, set forth on what everyone regarded as a suicide mission.".

"The First Heroes is the story of this extraordinary mission, one of the most daring episodes of World War II. Although the Doolittle Raid became the basis for the classic 1944 film Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, this moment in history is surprisingly unfamiliar today. To give these heroes their due, Craig Nelson interviewed twenty of the surviving participants and researched more than forty thousand pages of books, periodicals, and archival documents.

The fact that 90 percent of these men came home alive was little short of a miracle, as was the way their efforts revived the morale of the nation and helped convince the world that the Allies might eventually triumph."--BOOK JACKET.