Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (44 page)

“You’re in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army,” the interpreter announced.

DeShazer felt terrible.

“Aren’t you afraid?” the interpreter asked.

“What should I be afraid of?”

Roosters rallied Bobby Hite in the cemetery shortly before daybreak. The copilot of the
Bat out of Hell
had suffered a miserable night, trying to duck the rain while occasionally running in place to keep warm. He set off to find a friendly local. Barking dogs drove him away from the first few houses he encountered. Hite pressed on until he found a home without a dog. The family invited him inside. “I had a pocketful of Lucky Strike cigarettes and Mounds candy bars and about $5 in silver,” Hite recalled. “I was prepared to offer anything that I had for help.”

As the family feasted on his candy and the wife chain-smoked his cigarettes, Hite repeated the phrase
that Jurika had taught them. The husband then slipped on a shawl, a large hat, and wooden shoes before motioning for Hite to follow him. The aviator followed his host for twenty minutes through the rice paddies until he found a Chinese soldier. To Hite’s relief, the soldier spoke English. Hite paid the farmer his silver and watched as he set off to return home. He told the Chinese solider that he was an American and had come to help Chiang Kai-shek.

“Well,” the solider told him, “let’s get something to eat.”

The men started toward a cluster of homes just as fifteen Japanese soldiers charged out and surrounded him with bayoneted rifles. The soldiers searched Hite and confiscated his .45 and then with bayonets motioned him into the back of 1938 Ford truck, which galled him, and drove him half a mile to Nanchang.

Private First Class Tatsuo Kumano, who served in Japan’s Eighteenth Army in China, worked in the military’s press bureau in Nanchang. Kumano had turned in the night of April 18, only to have a fellow soldier later shake him awake, instructing him to report to the Nanchang Military Police Headquarters. The graduate of Saint Francis Xavier College in Shanghai, who spoke English, arrived to find Harold Spatz seated in a room barely eight feet by six feet with an intelligence officer. Kumano was instructed to sit and serve as the interpreter. The intelligence officer asked Spatz his name and rank and then pressed him for details of the mission, but the gunner rattled off a bogus story of flying off a mysterious island in the Pacific. Spatz chatted with the interpreter alone, telling him of his growing up in Kansas. Kumano told him of studying English.

Kumano’s work had only begun. Over the course of that night and the following morning, Japanese soldiers had rounded up all five of the airmen from the
Bat out of Hell
, each one now marched through the interrogation room.

After Spatz, officers brought in navigator George Barr, who refused to cooperate. “I am not saying anything.”

Then came Hite, but he, too, declined to talk.

So did DeShazer.

Billy Farrow came last, giving only his name and rank. “I am under oath,” he said, “not to reveal any military secrets.”

CHAPTER 16

When we hit the ground we could just as well have been some place in Arizona for all we knew of the whereabouts.

—FRED BRAEMER, BOMBARDIER ON PLANE NO. 1

DOOLITTLE
HAD
SUFFERED
a long night in the mill, performing calisthenics to fight off the cold while wrestling with the uncertainty of the mission’s outcome and the fates of his seventy-nine men. The fifteen bombers that had flown to China had all reached the mainland or the islands off shore. There amid the blinding fog and rain—and faced with the glow of the low-fuel light—aircrews had wrestled with the same dilemma as their commander. Outside of Ted Lawson and Donald Smith, only pilot Travis Hoover had attempted to land, putting his bomber down on a mud flat that had fileted the fuselage, but miraculously left not a single scratch on any of the fliers. The crew then torched the plane, watching it burn from a trench atop a nearby mountain.

The rest of the aircrews had done just as Doolittle, climbing high above the mountains in preparation to abandon ship. Men had slipped on parachutes and stuffed their pockets with emergency rations, Baby Ruth candy bars, and cigarettes. Others had filled canteens with water, and a few of the navigators sketched out rudimentary maps to pass around. Shorty Manch seized a 40-40 Winchester rifle, two .45 automatics, a .22 automatic, and a German Luger along with
an ax and a bowie knife. Last, but not least, he grabbed his phonograph. The men then yanked out the hatches. “It was the blackest hole I’ve ever looked at in my life,” recalled Davy Jones, who urinated on the cockpit controls before he bailed out. “I hated to do that more than anything else.”

Eight of the bombers had gone down in the general vicinity of the eastern airfields, while five others had crashed along the coast near Hangchow. Two had flown deep into the Chinese interior. Not a single plane—with the exception of York’s—had survived the mission. The forced bailout sadly claimed the life of gunner Leland Faktor, whose remains local villagers would find the next morning alongside the wreckage of the bomber. The jump and subsequent hard landings injured several others, including pilot Harold Watson, who broke his right arm after tangling it in his parachute shroud line. Navigator Charles Ozuk smashed into a cliff face, gouging his left shin, while gunner Edwin Bain hit so hard he broke a tooth and cracked another. Shorty Manch realized when he landed that all he had left of his phonograph was the handle.

Other airmen had come down in precarious positions, including gunner Eldred Scott, who landed in a tree. The darkness prompted most of them to forgo the risk of hiking out of the mountains and to curl up instead under parachutes and wait until dawn. Snakebite whiskey and cigarettes helped fend off the weather and fear; the latter may even have saved bombardier Waldo Bither’s life. “I lit a cigarette and remained very quiet,” he wrote in his report, “listening for a signal from some of the crew.” Not hearing any, Bither finished his cigarette and flicked it away, watching the glowing butt plummet into space. “I immediately decided not to try to move until daylight. I wrapped up in my parachute and in spite of rain and cold I was able to sleep very well.”

The aircrews that would awake on mountainsides, in valleys, or along the sandy beaches were spread across more than four hundred miles and several provinces, an area peppered with Japanese forces that within hours would be on alert for downed American aviators, some of whom had already been captured. The scattered crews now faced the challenge of reaching Chuchow and ultimately Chungking as dawn revealed just how primitive the region was, an impression best captured by Jack Hilger in his diary: “I had landed in the China of a thousand years ago.” The subways, buses, and cars that the men were accustomed to back home were here replaced by little
more than footpaths, burrows, and sedan chairs. Though the airmen had been warned on board the
Hornet
, few really grasped just what to expect. “I had the idea that I would reach this road and then walk to a gas station where I could use a phone to call for help,” navigator Hank Potter recalled. “None of us had ever been out of the U.S. or even away from home, for that matter. As far as I was concerned, the rest of the world was like the United States.”

Far from it.

Doolittle set off at daybreak on April 19, hiking down a worn path toward a village. The rain had stopped, but gray clouds crowded the skies. Before long, Doolittle encountered a local farmer who he quickly discovered spoke no English. The veteran aviator improvised, using his notepad to sketch a picture of a train. The farmer nodded and set off with Doolittle in tow, delivering the marooned airman to a nearby military garrison. Doolittle was relieved to meet a major who spoke a little English, though his relief proved short-lived when the Chinese officer demanded he hand over his pistol. Doolittle refused. He explained that he was an American who had parachuted into a rice paddy the night before. The major appeared doubtful, no doubt sizing up the filthy airman still caked in dried night soil. Doolittle worried he might be shot.

“I’ll lead you to where my parachute is,” he finally offered.

The major agreed.

Accompanied by a dozen armed soldiers, Doolittle retraced his steps. He reached the rice paddy, only to discover his parachute was gone. Doolittle felt the tensions rise as the major glared at him. He explained that the farmer he visited the night before could corroborate that he had appeared at his door, but to Doolittle’s shock, the farmer, his wife and even his two children denied ever having seen him.

“They say they heard no noise during the night,” the major told him. “They say they heard no plane. They say they saw no parachute. They say you lie.”

The Chinese officer had had enough. The soldiers approached Doolittle to seize his gun, just as two others emerged from a search of the farmer’s house, holding up his parachute. “The major smiled and extended his hand in friendship,” Doolittle recalled, “and I was thus admitted officially to China.”

Copilot Dick Cole rolled up his parachute at daybreak and with his pocket compass set out west. After
a few hours he picked up a trail and followed it until he ran into a Nationalist soldier, who led him to a small compound where Cole noted the Chinese flag fluttered. “He showed me a picture that somebody had drawn with a two-tailed airplane with five parachutes coming out,” he recalled. “I pointed to the next to the last one and that was me.” Chinese soldiers escorted Cole to the military garrison at Tien Mu Shen, where he was reunited with the artist of the sketch—Doolittle.

Hank Potter wandered down a mountain path at dawn until he reached a small village, where the locals welcomed him. One of the village elders sketched out Chinese characters on a sheet of paper that Potter couldn’t read, but the villagers were able to help the navigator pinpoint his location on a map. He looked up a few minutes later to spot bombardier Fred Braemer trotting down the same path. “When I saw him, I must say that my spirits rose,” Potter recalled, “because at least I had a friendly face.”

Potter’s novelty immediately vanished. The presence of two foreign airmen rattled the locals. One grabbed Braemer from behind and yanked his pistol from his shoulder holster as well as his knife. Others disarmed Potter.

“Let’s get out of here,” Braemer announced.

The airmen hurried out of town with five of the locals following them, armed with handguns, knives, and a rifle.

“Well,” Potter thought, “we are in trouble here.”

Half a mile outside the village the locals robbed them again, stripping the airmen of cash and watches. Potter lost both his navigational watch and a Hamilton wristwatch his parents had given him as a Christmas gift in 1940.

The disheartened airmen set off west again, running into a young boy who had been schooled by local missionaries. “Me China boy,” the youth announced, motioning for Potter and Braemer to follow him.

The aviators followed the youth to a house, where local adults soon crowded inside, offering the men tea and eggs. Both felt reluctant to eat, remembering the many warnings on board the
Hornet
.

“Well,” Braemer finally said, “hot tea can’t hurt you.”

A local guerrilla chief arrived, and the airmen told him that some of the locals had robbed them. The guns, knives, and even Potter’s navigation watch soon reappeared, but the airman decided to press his luck.

“Hey,” he said, “how about my other watch?”

The navigator realized the impoverished
locals probably questioned why he needed two watches, but Potter insisted, after all it was a treasured gift.

“We go,” one of the guerrillas finally said.

Paul Leonard had meanwhile set off at daybreak, hiking up a valley in search of his fellow fliers. The crew chief walked an estimated six miles before he turned back, running into four armed men. “One motioned to me to raise my hands while the other three proceeded to cock rifles,” he recalled. “One took aim.”

Leonard pulled out his .45 just as the other man fired. The airman fired two shots then turned and charged up a hill. He could see the men and others gathering below. Leonard decided to remain hidden and escape after dark.

About an hour and a half later, he saw a crowd march down through the valley. To Leonard’s surprise Potter and Braemer led the pack. He reloaded his clip and charged down the hill, only to discover the others were in the hands of friendly guerrillas.

“I didn’t know whether you were amongst the friends or enemies,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to stay up there alone again. I was going to join you.”

The airmen continued the trek, up a hillside, when a villager suddenly appeared next to Potter and handed him his Hamilton watch. The exhausted fliers arrived at the military headquarters that afternoon to find Cole and Doolittle.

The locals had meanwhile found Doolittle’s crashed bomber, which had gone down about seventy miles north of Chuchow. He and Leonard set off that afternoon to investigate the wreckage, hoping to salvage any gear or supplies. “There is no worse sight to an aviator than to see his plane smashed to bits,” Doolittle later wrote. “Ours was spread out over several acres of mountaintop.”