Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (42 page)

The door suddenly sprang open and another fisherman appeared. The airmen watched the excited whispers among the Chinese. Through sign language the fishermen made clear to Thatcher that Japanese patrols now searched the island for a downed plane. His only hope was to abandon the four injured aviators and escape. Thatcher looked at the others: Lawson, Davenport, McClure, and Clever, immobile and in pain.

“No,” Thatcher made clear with a headshake.

Lawson looked up at one point to see a Chinese man dressed in heavy shoes, Western-style pants, and a shirt open at the collar enter the hut. The new arrival inspected each of the injured airmen, paying careful attention to uniform buttons and insignia. Lawson wondered whether he planned to sell them to the Japanese.

“Me—Charlie,” the stranger finally announced.

Lawson and the others felt stunned to encounter an English-speaking local, pelting him with questions.

“Me—Charlie,” the man repeated.

Davenport repeated the phrase Jurika had taught them.

“Melican,” Charlie said with a nod.

Through a mixture of pidgin English and sign language the airmen learned that the nearest hospital was several days away; Chungking, even farther. “Many day,” Charlie informed them. “Many.”

The men struggled to communicate as the night waned and dawn approached. Charlie finally left, promising to return soon to help. Lawson ordered Thatcher to return again to the plane to attempt to recover the first aid kit and morphine.

“Yes, sir,” the gunner said.

Thatcher arrived at the beach to find that the tide had washed much of the bomber’s wreckage up on the shore, though the
engines remained in the water. The gunner picked through the debris, finding only a few scattered packs of waterlogged cigarettes. He saw no sign of the first aid kit. “The nose was just a mangled mass clear back to the bomb bay,” he later wrote in his report. “It was only by the hand of God that any of us got out of there alive, let alone all of us.”

CHAPTER 15

We must always give our best, and when we die we want to feel that our life has been lived as fully as we could have lived it.

—BILLY FARROW, UNDATED LETTER TO HIS MOTHER

SKI YORK’S BOMBER CLOSED
in on Russia after an uneventful flight across the Sea of Japan in which the airmen saw only a single freighter; otherwise the two pilots and navigator feasted on a candy bar split three ways.

“What do you think we ought to tell these people when we land?” York asked. “Think we ought to tell them who we are and what we’ve done?”

“Let’s wait till we see if they already know,” Emmens suggested.

Shortly before 5 p.m. the cockpit windshield framed the distant coastline, where dark mountains climbed up out of the sea, putting an end to the day’s fears of running out of gas over the water. “Lord,” Emmens wrote, “what a welcome sight!”

Armed with poor maps, the airmen feared making landfall over Japanese-occupied Korea, just fifteen miles south of Vladivostok. Navigator Nolan Herndon studied the coastline and confirmed the bomber had reached Russia. The plane buzzed the rocky coastline, where the airmen felt relieved to spot no antiaircraft guns.

The bomber passed an airdrome
with as many as forty navy planes parked on the tarmac, prompting the pilots to realize that the sooner the bomber was on the ground, the better. “You can’t fly around over the seaboard area of a country at war,” Emmens wrote, “without someone in that country eventually doing something about it.”

The bomber buzzed a second, smaller field, and the airmen spotted several buildings. A few men stood outside dressed in long black coats. A fighter dove out of the sky overhead just off the bomber’s right side.

“For Christ’s sake,” Emmens said, “let’s get our wheels down to let him know we’re going to land and he won’t have to
shoot
us down.”

The fighter hugged the bomber’s tail until touchdown. Relief washed over the crew, who had flown for more than fourteen hundred miles across hostile territory and open water. “Now, at last, dry, good ground,” Emmens wrote. “It was a wonderful feeling.”

York taxied over toward a parked plane, hidden under camouflage netting.

“Leave fifteen degrees of flaps down and let’s take a look at these jokers to see if they’ve got slant eyes,” York said. “If they have, we’ll take off straight ahead!”

The fliers studied the faces of the men on the ground, which confirmed that the bomber was in Russia and not in Japanese-controlled territory. York and Emmens pulled the flaps up, locked the brakes, and killed the switches, listening as the aircraft fell silent. A dozen Russians, all dressed in long black coats with black leather belts, gathered off the bomber’s wingtips. The fliers relaxed upon seeing the Russians all grinning.

“You guys stay in the ship and keep me covered—just in case!” York said as he climbed out.

“We’ve got you covered,” Emmens answered, pulling his pistol out and opening the side window. “By the way, do you know any Russian?”

“Hell, no.”

York approached the Russians. Emmens heard laughing and watched as the grins morphed into wide smiles. York looked back and shot his copilot a smile, which the fliers interpreted as a positive sign and climbed out to join him. York kept repeating the need for gasoline, which none of the Russians understood. Three older and obviously higher-ranking Russians approached from a nearby office, prompting the others to scatter. York asked the leader whether
he spoke French, but got only a shrug. Emmens then asked whether he spoke German, only to receive a blank stare in return.

“Americansky,” the Russian asked.

The raiders confirmed and everyone laughed.

The Russians ushered the fliers to an unheated office in a rundown building, inviting them to sit in chairs while the leader barked into a phone. The men waited, deciding not to say anything about bombing Japan until the American consul arrived and could advise them. Half an hour later the Russians escorted them across the field to another equally decrepit building. The sun had set and the temperature dropped.

The Russians led the men into a large office with a desk at one end and a large conference table in the center. Another Russian arrived moments later with a world map that measured roughly four by five feet, tacking it to a wall. The leader pointed to the map. Reluctant to admit having bombed Japan, York pointed to the Aleutians, tracing a route across the Sea of Okhotsk to Vladivostok. “Good-will flight,” he said.

To the airmen’s relief the Russians appeared to buy it and for the next hour attempted to engage the fliers in small talk, even bringing in a portable gramophone at one point to play music, along with a chess set and decanter of water.

The door finally swung open, revealing a young officer dressed in a fur-lined cap and jacket. The raiders immediately recognized him as a pilot, who in all likelihood had just landed. He motioned for York to repeat the story of his flight.

“This guy’s no dummy,” he said as he rose from his chair.

York repeated the story of his flight from the Aleutians. The Russian officer listened intently and then shook his head and put his finger on Tokyo. York again traced the fictitious route, this time prompting the Russian to laugh. “Not sneeringly,” Emmens later wrote, “more as if he were enjoying a good joke.”

“I guess that guy wasn’t fooled,” York said when he finally sat down.

About 9 p.m. a colonel arrived, accompanied by a civilian translator. The Russian officer shook hands with each of the raiders and welcomed them to Russia. York stuck to his story of flying from the Aleutians, prompting the colonel to congratulate the men on the successful completion of such a long and difficult flight.

“Colonel, we would like to make our rendezvous
with other ships in Chunking,” York said. “Do you have hundred-octane gasoline here?”

“Yes, such a question will be decided soon,” he answered through the interpreter. “But now you must be hungry and tired.”

The interpreter told the men that a room had been prepared in the building for them to spend the night. After each raider printed his full name and rank on a piece of paper, the interpreter escorted the fliers upstairs to a large room with five cots. The bathroom was down the hall, equipped with a bar of soap and a single towel. “It was like the Three Bears,” Emmens recalled. “There were five of us. They had five cots, five little tables between the cots, five chairs at the end of the bed, and that’s all.”

The interpreter returned for the airmen at 9:45 p.m., informing them that dinner was ready. He led the fliers downstairs to a large room set up with two tables, covered with wine and liquor glasses as well as platters of pickled fish, caviar, black bread, and various meats and cheeses. Servers poured clear liquid into each raider’s glass.

“A Russian always begins and ends his meal with vodka,” the colonel said through the interpreter. “I toast two great countries, the U.S. and the USSR, fighting side by side for a great common cause.”

The fliers downed the vodka, which Emmens noted by the third sip felt as though “someone had drawn a hot barbed wire across my tonsils.” The dinner was foreign to the airmen, but delicious after the long day.

Each time the fliers asked about fuel, the Russians brushed them off. York leaned over to Emmens toward the end of the meal. “I think we should tell this guy the true story,” he said. “I’ll get him and the interpreter and we’ll go upstairs.”

Emmens watched soon thereafter as York asked the interpreter whether he might speak alone with the colonel. The three left, returning fifteen minutes later.

“In behalf of my government, I congratulate you for the great service you have rendered your country,” the colonel announced. “You are heroes in the eyes of your people.” The colonel raised a glass of vodka to toast the raiders. “To your magnificent flight today and to the victorious ending of the war for both our great nations!”

The men returned to their room after dinner, bellies full and heads swimming with vodka. “When we went to bed that night,” York would later tell investigators
, “we were fully confident we were going to leave the next morning.”

One of the men began snoring in two minutes. “I thought about home and my wife and wondered how I could let her know we were all right,” Emmens recalled. “I wondered how the other fifteen planes had fared. Had they all met as little opposition as we? Had they all proceeded to their destination, and were they all together somewhere in China, celebrating, that night? All but us? Had we actually bombed Japan that day and were we really in Russia? Or was all this a dream?”

PILOT DONALD SMITH HIT
the Chinese coast twenty-five minutes earlier than he expected and barely ten miles north of his planned landfall. Fog and rain slashed visibility to zero with a ceiling of barely three hundred feet. The approach of nightfall only made his challenge worse. Smith spotted the outline of a mountain climbing up out of the sea dead ahead and banked right, increasing his throttles so that he could climb and head back out to sea. Smith estimated that he had two hundred gallons of fuel—enough to fly for another two hours—but he found that his engine gave him little power. The left started to cough. He knew the
TNT
would not remain in the air much longer.

“Brace yourselves,” Smith announced over the bomber’s interphone. “I’m going to set her down in the water!”

The airmen hustled to trade out parachutes for Mae West life vests, as Smith buzzed the coast of an island about four hundred yards from shore. He rolled back his side window, noting that the water appeared calm with no whitecaps. Engineer Ed Saylor in the rear of the plane slipped his winter coat on over his life vest, sat with his back against the turret tank, and wrapped his arms around the footrest. Bombardier Howard Sessler climbed atop the navigator’s table, bracing his feet against the steps leading into the cockpit while holding on with his arms to the bars overhead.

Smith planned to make a wheels-up landing. He cut back on the throttles and ordered the flaps down at 110 miles per hour, slowing to 85. As the plane skimmed the wave tops, copilot Griffith Williams killed the switches.

The bomber glided down tail first in the water, giving the crew only a slight jolt. A second later the nose came
down with barely any more impact than the tail. The plane sliced through the swells like a ship, making a gradual swing to the right before it finally came to a stop. The landing smashed the fragile Plexiglas nose, and cold seawater now poured inside, flooding the cockpit up to the seat level, but the wings rested atop the waves, giving the crew precious minutes to escape.

Smith, Williams, and Sessler climbed out the top hatch. Smith went back to retrieve the life raft, then kicked out the glass in the navigator’s compartment, fishing out the crew’s gun belts and rations. Saylor tried to squeeze out the rear escape hatch, but realized he couldn’t fit with his thick jacket. He had no choice but to shed the cumbersome coat and then dive through the muddy water, swimming out from under the plane. Doctor Thomas White remained inside the sinking bomber despite calls from the others to escape. White tuned out such demands and instead hurriedly salvaged his gun and emergency medical kit, passing them out one of the side windows.