Description

THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO by Craig Kodera LIMITED EDITION PRINT: 1000,Image Size: 34″w x 13″h., Published: April 1992.Signed in the original by Ted W. Lawson. Countersigners: Gen. James H. Doolittle, Col. Dean Davenport, Lt. Charles L. McClure and S/Sgt. David J. Thatcher.

Ted Lawson and his crew were aboard the sixth airplane to be launched from the aircraft carrier USS “Hornet” and the title of this painting comes from Ted. There’s a passage in his book of the same name in which he said, “We only spent thirty seconds over Tokyo.”The Raiders came in at treetop or water-level all the way from the carrier into Tokyo Bay, hopping over the hills. When they got to the target points, just before dropping the bombs, they hopped up to 1500 feet above sea level, opened the bomb bay doors and starting dropping their bombs.Their targets were all along the waterfront of Tokyo Bay. Lawson said that from that distance, it looked a lot like Los Angeles. Their last target was the Mitsubishi Aircraft Factory. Then they dropped from 1500 feet and went back down to the deck and Lawson vividly recalls flying past a train and seeing the engineer’s fact in the locomotive. They were really low.It was almost a “piece of cake” mission, despite all the build-up and concern. The Raiders almost made it to the very end but most of them had to crash land on the Coast of China.

Craig Kodera
Aviation is this artist’s living. Painting is a joy and a choice; not his career. Craig Kodera career is as an airline pilot, so each of his paintings reflect an intimate knowledge of how it feels to fly and what it looks like out the cockpit. “I paint what I see,” he says,”and my office window is at 35,000 feet.” An appreciation of aviation came easy, since Kodera was raised in what he terms an “aviation family,” which included an uncle who flew with the famous Doolittle Raiders during World War II. At an age when most teens were trying to ace the driver’s test, Kodera had earned his private pilot’s license. A love of painting also came early. Kodera started seriously studying it at fourteen. He graduated from UCLA with a degree in mass communications and spent a year as a commercial artist before joining the Air Force Reserve, where he was assigned to the Air Rescue Service and then the Strategic Air Command. There his knowledge of air war history grew while he logged literally thousands of hours flying. Eventually Kodera left the service and joined American Airlines. When he isn’t flying, he’s usually painting. His artwork is part of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum permanent collection and hangs in many museums. He is also the charter vice president of the American Society of Aviation Artists, a member of the Air Force Art Program and serves with the Los Angeles Society of Illustrators.