Songfacts®:

• Pere Ubu's debut single, this was actually originally written by A Rocket from the Tombs – the infamous Cleveland rock band who counted among their number future Ubu vocalist David Thomas.
• David Thomas' apocalyptic lyrics take a pilot's-eye view of The Doolittle Raid, an air raid by the US on the Japanese capital Tokyo and other places on Honshu island during World War II. It was the first air raid to strike the Japanese Home Islands and was the result of a desire expressed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, that Japan be bombed as soon as possible to boost public morale after the disaster at Pearl Harbor.
• David Thomas told Uncut in 2015 about this seminal art punk single: "It's probably the last time I ever wrote in a straight narrative form. The title was taken from a book (by Ted W Lawson and Robert Considine about the 1942 Doolittle Raid), there was a movie (based on the book) in the 1940s.
• Rocket from the Tombs bassist Craig Bell told Uncut: "The song is based on a true story, and it goes from the moment of taking off to the moment flying over the city to the moment of just drifting back off into history - because some of those guys didn't come back. It was a one way ride."
• Synthesiser player Allen Ravenstine told Uncut: "I was always interested in aeroplanes - I've just retired from being an airline pilot - and I especially like the sound of a rotary engine. And those Second World War airplanes with those big rotary engines, it's just a lovely sound. So the minute I heard the title of the song and what was going to be involved, the only thing that ever occurred to me was the sound of an aeroplane engine and also the radio bit at the end, that notion of a radio transmission with the frequency being in and out of tune, the static… I used just my ElectroComp 200 synth - it would have been the only thing I had."
• Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was also the title of a film from 1944 that's also about the Doolittle Raid. It stars Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson, and Robert Walker and was written by Dalton Trumbo, who was the subject of the 2015 film Trumbo.
• In the line, "Dark flak spiders bursting in the sky," "flak" is slang for antiaircraft fire.