Jimmy Doolittle

Roberto da Silva Rocha, university professor and political scientist

Jimmy Doolittle

The North American army of Brancaleone, was an operation without any strategic objective, nor tactical objective, nor military, nor political, just a meaningless media action that risked the lives of the brave commanders of Jimmy Doolittle, all volunteers and suicides of the north air force America during World War II.

Without a military force prepared to launch an attack 15,000 kilometers away in Japan, the US needed to show the Japanese that it could hit Japan with a surprise air strike.

The reason for the American attack on Japan at that time was to give a psychological response to the Japanese who made a very successful attack on the port of Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian archipelago with about 408 planes, six aircraft carriers and dozens of ships and submarines that secretly left Japan and attacked the US 10000 km away destroying dozens of US navy ships, 380 planes and killing more than 3000 military personnel in a single day in just 4 hours of air raid.

So, as the US Navy prepared to counterattack Japan which would have taken the Navy a few months to prepare and repair and replace the warships sunk, destroyed and burned during the Japanese attack, the US President decided that they must do something immediately. , then, a US navy aircraft carrier prepared itself with a group of suicide aviators to take off with maximum and minimum fuel, weapons and unnecessary weight, with only a few bombs that would be dropped on the capital of Japan, and since they could not approaching japan the fuel limit would not be enough for the planes to return to the aircraft carriers or land safely on land and the only safer place would be Chinese territory dominated in part by the Japanese and turn around to escape the enemies on land or not die over the Sea of Japan.

The forces that fight defending Ukraine escapes from a Brancaleone force and looks at all like Jimmy Doolittle's saga where the meaning of fighting seems just an effort with no strategic effect, no tactical effect, no political effect, no objective consequences just an action for internal psychological effect for the satisfaction of a military propaganda without rational and material consequences, a useless and stubborn sacrifice, desperate exhausting.

Governments sometimes do meaningless things.

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político