Michel Paradis-LAST MISSION TO TOKYO: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice

In 1942, freshly humiliated from the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt demanded a show of strength against the Japanese. Jimmy Doolittle, a stunt pilot with a doctorate from MIT, came forward and led eighty young men on a seemingly impossible mission across the Pacific. Dubbed “The Doolittle Raiders,” they struck the mainland of Japan and permanently turned the tide of the war in the Pacific.

But their legendary l mission wasn’t the end of the story. In his debut history, LAST MISSION TO TOKYO: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raiders and Their Final Fight for Justice (Simon & Schuster), legal scholar and historian Michel Paradisuncovers one of the last untold stories of a seminal moment in World War II: the pair of trials in Shanghai that determined the future of legal and military history. With incredible and gripping detail, he recounts the dramatic aftermath of the Doolittle mission, which involved two lost crews captured, tried, and tortured at the hands of the Japanese; the dramatic rescue the survivors in the last weeks of the conflict; and the international manhunt and trial led by two dynamic and opposing young lawyers - Major Robert Dwyer, a prosecutor determined to bring justice to the Raiders, and Lieutenant Colonel Edmund Bodine, assigned to defend the Japanese - who were forced to confront the questions of what constitutes a fair trial, when we should show mercy to our enemies, and right and wrong in the fog of war.

The result is a heart-stopping, perspective-shifting courtroom drama that opens our eyes to a final act in the story of the Greatest Generation. Like compelling World War II histories such as Lucky 666 and Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, LAST MISSION TO TOKYO is a thrilling war story meets courtroom drama that also offers a deep dive into the Japanese perspective that fans of Clint Eastwood's "Letters from Iwo Jima" will find fascinating.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michel Paradis is a leading human rights lawyer and national security law scholar. He has won high-profile cases in courts around the globe and worked for over a decade with the US Department of Defense, Military Commissions Defense Organization, where he led many of the landmark court cases to arise out of Guantanamo Bay. He also holds the position of Lecturer at Columbia Law School, where he teaches on the military, the constitution, and the law of war. He received his doctorate from Oxford University and his law degree from Fordham Law School. He has appeared on or written for NPR, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic Foreign Policy, Lawfare, America, The Intercept, and the late Weekly Standard. He lives with his family in Manhattan. Learn more at www.michelparadis.com and follow him at www.twitter.com/michelparadis