Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (41 page)

Nielsen grabbed the crash ax and smashed out the top window of the navigator’s compartment. He climbed atop the fuselage along with copilot Bob Meder. Hallmark struggled to free himself from his cockpit chair and then joined them. “The gunner was crawling out of the back, and he was bleeding all down his face. He had a big hole in his forehead,” Nielsen recalled of Donald Fitzmaurice. “The bombardier finally came up under the wing, and he was in an awful mess. I don’t think he was using either arm.”

Meder yanked the release to inflate the life raft, but the cable broke off the air cartridge. The aviators scrambled to tie themselves together as waves battered the filleted fuselage, tossing them into the water. Hallmark ordered the men to stay together and swim to shore. The rain poured down and the waves churned. The fliers yelled out in the darkness, hoping to locate one another, but the voices soon fell silent and the men drifted. “I thought about my family,” Nielsen recalled. “I began to worry about whether my navigation had been accurate. Were we only a few miles off the coast of China or a couple hundred? I prayed that I was right but was overcome by doubt.”

Nielsen wasn’t sure where to swim. He fired his .45 automatic to alert the others, but the ammunition was water logged. He unbuckled his gun belt and let it drop. He had studied the tidal timetables on board the
Hornet
and assumed the seas would eventually deposit him on shore. “I figured there was no use in trying to swim because you don’t know which way you’re swimming. You can’t see the coast. You can’t see anything. And if you swim you might just be swimming toward the open ocean,” he said. “So I floated for awhile, and floated, and finally I ran into some fishing nets that had been hung on some bamboo poles about eight inches in diameter.”

Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, but Nielsen knew the nets signaled he was close to shore. He thought about waiting for the fishermen to come and retrieve him, but realized the owner of the nets might be Japanese. Nielsen swam on until he heard the sound of breakers. He put his feet down and touched the bottom. Making his way to shore, he discovered his legs wouldn’t work, so he crawled, but the waves would break over him and pull him back toward
the water. He refused to give up. “I crawled until I figured I was past the tide line and then I collapsed completely,” he wrote. “I was fagged out. Everything, my mind and body, was numb. All I wanted was sleep.”

THE
RUPTURED DUC
K CLOSED
in on the Chinese coast, skimming just fifty feet above the wave tops. The heavy fog and rain clouded the windshield and forced pilot Ted Lawson to roll back his side window to see out.

“I think we ought to go a little farther south,” navigator Charles McClure said as the bomber cruised past one of the many islands that guarded the coastline. “It must be all occupied along here. I can’t tell much about anything, with this visibility.”

The plane pressed on south as McClure’s frustration mounted. “I don’t think we’ll ever find anything this way.”

Lawson felt he had no choice but to pull up and go on instruments, a move that would allow the crew to bail out. He eased back on the controls and the
Ruptured Duck
began to climb even as Lawson continued to wrestle with his decision to abandon the bomber. This was not how he had hoped to conclude what had so far been a flawless mission. A break appeared in the clouds, offering the aircrew a glimpse of long white sandy beach below. Lawson estimated that the
Ruptured Duck
still had about a hundred gallons of fuel. If he could land the bomber on the beach, the crew could wait out bad weather, lift off at dawn, and find the airfield.

Lawson nosed the plane down and twice buzzed the concave beach. He saw no logs that might chew up the bomber, and the rain appeared to have pounded the sand down hard enough to support the
Ruptured Duc
k’s delicate nosewheel. “It was by all means,” he wrote, “the best thing I had seen for twelve hours or more.”

The crew rushed to trade parachutes for life jackets as Lawson lowered the flaps and wheels and aimed up for the beach, whose crescent shape meant the bomber had to come in over the water and then bank to land. He was approaching at 110 miles per hour when both engines coughed, then died, just a quarter mile from shore. Lawson hit the throttles and pulled back on the stick, desperate to keep the nose up.

Just as McClure reached up to grab the
aircrew’s pistols, the wheels struck the wave tops, and he heard the horrible sound of metal ripping. “We’re crashing,” the navigator thought with disbelief.

The
Ruptured Duck
dove, then flipped upside down. The impact threw the bombardier Bob Clever headfirst through the nose of the plane and catapulted Lawson and copilot Dean Davenport out of the cockpit, still strapped in their seats. McClure crashed with his shoulder into the armor plate before he, too, landed in the water.

Lawson came to moments later, still strapped in his seat about fifteen feet underwater, the roar of the engines replaced with total silence. He thought of his wife, Ellen, wishing he had left her money. He remembered his mother as well. “I’m dead,” he thought. “No, I’m just hurt. Hurt bad.”

Lawson unbuckled his safety belt. The crash had broken the dioxide capsule that triggered the pneumatic life belt, so he shot to the surface, the quiet replaced by darkness and driving rain. Lawson felt numb and disoriented, but he knew enough to unfasten his parachute and wade toward shore, the waves lifting him up. He banged into a solid object. He looked down only to realize it was one of the
Ruptured Duck
’s wings. The crash had torn the engine off. Lawson stared at the tangled wires and cables and felt nauseous as the gravity of the crash hit him. A wave pushed him forward, and he turned to spot the tail rudders rising out of the waves, an image that reminded him of tombstones.

He tried to crawl up on the beach, but the waves kept pulling him back out to sea. Finally a wave pushed him up on shore. Lawson rose and walked in a circle, his legs numb. He cursed himself over the crash only to realize that his voice sounded strange and muffled. Lawson reached up to feel his mouth. “The bottom lip had been cut through and torn down to the cleft of my chin, so that the skin flapped over and down,” he later said. “My upper teeth were bent in. I reached into my mouth with both of my thumbs and put my thumbs behind the teeth and tried to push them out straight again. They bent out straight, then broke off in my hands. I did the same with the bottom teeth and they broke off too, bringing with them pieces of my lower gum.”

Lawson stared down at his handful of teeth and gums before dropping them and trudged up the beach. Davenport appeared in front of him. He grabbed Lawson’s head and examined it.

“Good God!” Davenport exclaimed
. “You’re really bashed open. Your whole face is pushed in.”

Lawson asked his copilot whether he, too, was hurt badly.

“I think so,” Davenport said. “I don’t know.”

McClure came to underwater, estimating he was at least ten feet down. “I must go up,” he thought. “But where the hell is up?”

The navigator felt his feet touch the sand, and he kicked toward the surface and immediately popped through the waves in the chest-deep water. He started toward shore. “I reached out with one hand to help the wading with a paddle strike. To my astonishment I couldn’t get the hand above the water. I looked at the hand and arm. Then I decided to reach the other hand over toward the upper arm on the opposite side. That was a no go either,” he recalled. “Gradually I realized that both were broken.”

McClure found Clever in the shallow surf. The bombardier was woozy. “Help me in,” he pleaded with McClure.

“Can’t,” McClure answered. “I think both my arms are broken.”

“You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”

McClure said he wouldn’t.

“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Clever shot back. “Come help me!”

The two airmen shouted at one another in the surf. “He called me fighting names and I gave some back,” McClure wrote. “Then we looked at each other disgustedly and dragged ourselves out of the water to collapse on the beach.”

Dave Thatcher came to his senses in back of the
Ruptured Duck
. He had hit his head on impact, leaving a small gash on top of his head, one he felt would have been far worse had he not remembered to slip on his flight helmet right before the crash. Water rushed in through the gun turret, which in his disoriented state Thatcher thought was the rear escape hatch. He pulled the string on his life vest then tried to climb through the turret. Only then did he realize the bomber was upside down. He pushed out the escape hatch and climbed up on the belly of the bomber, making his way toward the smashed nose. Thatcher heard McClure call to him from the beach. The gunner stepped off the fuselage and into the waist-deep water, wading toward shore.

After he joined the others, two men appeared atop a nearby embankment. The gunner unholstered his pistol and aimed. “Should I shoot ’em?”

“Hell, no,” McClure answered. “They’re Chinese fishermen.”

“How do you know?”

“Well,” he said. “I’ve read the
National Geographic
magazine.”

The fishermen climbed down the
embankment and approached, dressed in conical hats and straw raincoats. A half dozen others appeared and followed them down. “Chinga,” one of the locals said, pointing to his chest.

The aircrew repeated the phrase Jurika had taught them, and the fishermen nodded. One of the villagers then made a show of counting the airmen. He then pointed to the plane, questioning whether there were any more.

The fishermen helped carry the battered airmen to a nearby hut, a feat that amazed McClure. “Under other circumstances, the man appointed to carry me off the beach would have been the basis for a joke,” the navigator later wrote. “He was a little bit of a squirt, hardly more than four feet tall and weighing not more than 100 pounds, wringing wet. But he backed up manfully and tried to take my arms over his shoulders—my weight was about 205. My pained expression stopped him, and I tried with such sign language as I had to tell him what was wrong. Then he backed up again with his back bent and I mounted piggyback with my hands resting on his shoulders. Somehow he made it to a house that must have been 200 yards away.”

Inside the two-room hut made of mud bricks and with a thatched roof, the fishermen helped Lawson, Davenport, and McClure to bed. Clever passed out on the floor. Thatcher set to work tending his wounded crew by the faint light of a single lamp. The prognosis was bad. Davenport had cut his right leg so bad between the knee and ankle that within a day he would not be able to walk. McClure’s injured shoulders had already begun to swell down to his elbows, making it difficult for him to use his hands. Within days his right arm would turn black. Clever sprained his hips and back so that he was unable to stand up and walk, forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees. Cuts above one eye and below the other caused his eyes to swell shut while his headfirst exit through the bomber’s nose had nearly scalped him. “The top of his head,” Thatcher wrote in his report, “was so badly skinned that half his hair was gone.”

Lawson was the most seriously injured. He had suffered a long deep gash just above his left knee, causing a serious loss of blood. The wound looked so bad that the airmen were
convinced his kneecap had been severed. Lawson suffered another short but deep cut between the left knee and ankle through which Thatcher could see the bone. His foot below the ankle was so bruised it would turn black within days, and he suffered another deep gash on his left arm. His face looked as if someone had slashed it with a razor, and by Thatcher’s count he had lost up to nine teeth. “If he’d only had one of these injuries it wouldn’t have been so bad, but with the four serious ones he lost so much blood it made him very weak,” Thatcher wrote. “I was afraid he would die or that gangrene would start in his leg before we reached a hospital.”

Thatcher used the bandage in the first aid packet on his gun belt for the large wound on Lawson’s knee. He then improvised, applying his handkerchief to the cut on Lawson’s arm. He had no choice but resort to dirty rags the fishermen gave him for Lawson’s other wounds as well as those of Davenport and Clever. Thatcher knew he needed more supplies. Later that night with the injured men settled, he took a lantern and returned to the plane, hoping to find the first aid kit stored in the
Ruptured Duck
’s tail. He reached the beach, only to discover that the tide had come in and submerged the bomber. There was no hope of finding the kit that evening. Thatcher would have to care for the others as best he could in what would prove to be a long night.

The shock of the crash wore off as the hours marched past. “My shoulder pains got worse. I couldn’t lie down and I couldn’t stand. There was no position that I could bear very long,” McClure said. “Thatcher, at my request, would lift my head carefully and leave it up a little while; then he would lower my head and let me rest my hands on my knees. Every movement was excruciating pain.”

The navigator thought he would feel better without his clothes. He ordered Thatcher to cut away his coat and shirt, but Thatcher was afraid to ruin them. McClure lashed out at the young gunner, who finally agreed to split the sleeve and cut across the lapels, allowing him to peel his coat off. Shock soon seized McClure. “I felt that my body was going to leap without my will from the bed. It is no exaggeration to say that I expected to go crazy,” he wrote. “After a little of this I passed out.”

McClure woke at one point in the night to hear Davenport pleading with one of the locals. “Hospital—soon,” he begged. “Get coolies—carry.”

Lawson likewise wrestled with his injuries
. With the help of the fishermen, he removed his ripped-up pants, anxious to inspect his wounds. “I had no idea that there would be anything wrong with my left leg except a bruise,” Lawson wrote. “It was cut from my upper thigh to my knee, and cut so deeply that it lay open widely enough so that I looked into it and saw the gristle and muscle and bone. It wasn’t bleeding badly—just oozing. My circulation probably had slowed down because of the shock and the cold. I just stared at it, hypnotized and detached. I had never seen anything like it.”