Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (45 page)

Doolittle combed through the debris, but locals had already picked the bomber’s carcass clean, even plucking the brass buttons off one of his shirts. He dropped down next to one of the wings and surveyed the scene. The B-25 that had carried him and his crew in the skies over Japan had been reduced to little more than tangled metal, twisted cables, and shattered glass. He felt certain the other fifteen bombers had suffered similar fates, all low on gas and battling rain
and fog. Doolittle would be lucky if the others had even survived. “This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last. As far as I was concerned, it was a failure,” Doolittle later wrote. “I had never felt lower in my life.”

Leonard recognized the depth of Doolittle’s despair, writing in his diary that the veteran aviator was “disconsolate.”

“What do you think will happen when you go home, Colonel?” the crew chief dared to ask.

“Well,” Doolittle answered, “I guess they’ll court-martial me and send me to prison at Fort Leavenworth.”

“No, sir,” Leonard fired back. “I’ll tell you what will happen. They’re going to make you a general.”

Doolittle offered a weak smile, recognizing Leonard’s efforts to buoy his spirits.

“And,” the crew chief continued, “they’re going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor.”

Doolittle did not respond.

“Colonel, I know they’re going to give you another airplane and when they do, I’d like to fly with you as your crew chief.”

Doolittle felt tears in his eyes. “It was the supreme compliment that a mechanic could give a pilot,” he wrote. “It meant he was so sure of the skills of the pilot that he would fly anywhere with him under any circumstances.”

The men started to return, but darkness enveloped them. The Chinese major found a farmhouse where the men could sleep on the floor. The accommodation looked perfect to the exhausted aviators, who within minutes were asleep. Doolittle awoke later to hear strange guttural sounds. He reached out to feel bristles; he had managed to bed down in the spot of the family pig. He shoved the pig away and fell asleep again.

Doolittle arrived back at the governor’s house the morning of April 20 to learn that four other aircrews had been located. He requested that General Ho Yang Ling, director of western Chekiang Province, post lookouts along the coast, from Hang Chow Bay south to Wen Chow Bay. He also wanted all sampans and junks ordered to search for any bombers that went down at sea or along the shore.

Word reached Doolittle that at least some of his airmen had been captured along the coast and others near Lake Poyang
, the latter Billy Farrow’s crew. Doolittle had obtained $2,000 in Chinese money prior to leaving the United States and questioned whether that cash could be used to buy the captured airmen along the coast from the local puppet government. He also asked about seizing Farrow’s crew by force, a move the Chinese discouraged, given the high concentration of Japanese forces around Nanchang. Doolittle then drafted a wire to be sent to General Arnold through the embassy in Chungking. “Tokyo successfully bombed,” he wrote. “Due bad weather on China Coast believe all airplanes wrecked. Five crews found safe in China so far.”

The general hosted a banquet for Doolittle and his men, one that featured a large bowl of soup with a dead duck floating in it.

“Now you guys, don’t make any remarks. Eat what you have and don’t cause any problems,” Doolittle warned his men. “You are guests here now.”

The airmen needed to travel from Tien Mu Shen south to Chuchow as soon as possible, where they could hop a flight to Chungking. They climbed aboard the general’s boat, hiding in the cabin as the vessel set off on a winding journey along several rivers that ultimately would deliver them beyond the reach of the Japanese. The aviators peered out as the searchlights of enemy patrol boats pierced the darkness.

Missionary John Birch had fled his church in Hangchow after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese rounded up all the Americans in the area and put them into internment camps. The twenty-three-year-old Baptist, born to missionary parents in India and later raised in rural Georgia, had settled in Kiangsi Province, starting a new mission in Shang-jao. Birch had heard the news of the Tokyo raid over the radio just as he planned to set off on a preaching trip through the Ch’ien T’ang River valley. He stopped a few days later in the village of Yien Tung Kuan for lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river. A Chinese officer came inside and spotted the missionary, striking up a conversation in the hope of practicing his English. The officer commented that there were several Americans on the general’s boat tied up below. Birch protested that he must be mistaken, prompting the officer to point out the policeman in a black uniform standing guard on deck. Birch decided he had to check it out for himself.

“Have you any Americans on this boat?” the missionary demanded of the guard.

“No,” the policeman answered in Chinese.

“Are there any Americans in there?” Birch repeated, this time shouting.

Doolittle and his men crouched inside the cabin, listening to the exchange. “Well, Jesus Christ,” Paul Leonard blurted out.

“That’s an awfully good name,” Birch answered. “But I am not he.”

The door sprang open, and Birch spotted several bearded faces inside. “Come in here!” came the chorus.

Birch climbed inside the cabin and came face-to-face with Doolittle and his men. The aviators were thrilled to meet Birch, whose language skills and knowledge of the area would be assets. Doolittle briefed the young missionary on the operation and asked whether he would travel with them and help interpret. “Of course, I was glad to,” Birch later said. “The first time I’d associated with celebrities.”

Birch traveled with Doolittle to Lanchi, relating stories of the Japanese atrocities. The missionary confessed to Doolittle that he wanted to help American forces. Doolittle bade farewell to Birch, assuring him that he would recommend him up the ladder and asking him to remain ready to help other raiders. Doolittle and his crew then pressed on toward Chuchow, a journey that would involve rail, bus, and rickshaws.

The trip across rural China at times proved so exhausting that Doolittle at one point protested to his guide that he couldn’t go any farther.

“I will see if I can find a donkey for you to ride,” the Chinese officer volunteered. “You just wait here.”

The officer returned half an hour later from a nearby village. “Here,” he told Doolittle. “You can ride this donkey.”

Doolittle felt relieved, circling the donkey to inspect the animal. As he passed the animal’s backside, the donkey kicked him in the chest. The veteran aviator tumbled back down the trail, clutching his chest and gasping for air.

The Chinese officer volunteered a few added words of caution.

“He bites too!”

CHASE NIELSEN AWOKE ABOUT
8 a.m. on April 19 on the beach where he had collapsed after the
Green Hornet
had crashed into the sea the night before. On looking up, he spotted two vultures perched on a rock overhead.

“Good lord,” he thought. “The Jap high command is here already
.”

The sun was high, and only a few clouds drifted across an otherwise clear sky, a drastic change from the fog and rain that the aircrew had recently battled. The crew would have had no trouble finding Chuchow in this weather. “Why,” Nielsen wondered, “couldn’t it have been this way yesterday?”

The navigator surveyed his surroundings. He had collapsed the night before on the beach of a small bay. In the distance he spotted docks with a couple of patrol boats tied up. He could see the Rising Sun flags flying off the stern.

“Boy, this is a fine pickle,” he thought. “Here you are 6,500 miles from home, your aircraft carrier is gone, your airplane is sunk, you don’t know where your crew is, you’re in enemy territory and you don’t speak Japanese or Chinese.”

The news worsened.

Down the beach Nielsen spotted two washed-up bodies, both in orange Mae West life vests. He knew the remains had to be men from his crew. He pulled himself up and started toward them, crawling through the bushes that lined the beach. Nielsen parted some bushes and found himself staring at a pair of split-toed canvas-and-rubber shoes. His eyes drifted up to see laced leggings. “The next thing I saw was a rifle pointing right at my head that looked like the bore of a cannon,” he recalled. “It was that big around.”

“Stand up or me shoot!” the man ordered.

Nielsen considered his options. “I might be able to overcome him,” he reasoned, “but all he would have to do would be to squeeze the trigger.” Nielsen decided not to risk it and instead got to his feet.

“You Japanese or you American?” the man continued.

“You Chinese or you Japanese?” Nielsen countered.

“Me China.”

“Me American.”

On his feet Nielsen had a better view of the bodies. He recognized them, bombardier Bill Dieter and gunner Don Fitzmaurice.

The Chinese man noticed Nielsen’s gaze.

“They dead,” he said. “Bury them in hour. You go with me.”

The roar of boat motor interrupted the men, who looked up in time to spot a patrol boat charging around the bend.

“Japanese come,” the guerrilla said. “You run this way. If Japanese
catch us they kill us.”

The men set off on a trail through the brush, ducking into a bamboo thicket with a view of the Japanese base, where the boats soon docked. Nielsen asked him where he had learned English, and the guerrilla said he had picked it up as a cabbie in Shanghai.

Nielsen reached the garrison, where he found more than two dozen guerrillas, a ragtag operation. “It was a welcome sight but as a military garrison a far cry from anything I had even seen before,” he recalled. “Facilities were meager but the stench from human waste and rotten fish was outstanding.”

Nielsen was pleased to find Dean Hallmark there. The pilot’s leg was severely banged up from his exit through the
Green Hornet
’s cockpit windshield. He struggled to walk. Copilot Bob Meder arrived soon afterward.

The men returned to the beach that afternoon to bury Dieter and Fitzmaurice atop a small knoll near where the men washed ashore. The Chinese had fashioned simple wooden caskets, and the aviators laid the two men inside them dressed in their uniforms and packed in wood shavings. The waves crashed in the distance.

“Hallmark, Meder and myself each said a prayer over our beloved friends’ caskets and that was all the services consisted of,” Nielsen would later write to Dieter’s mother. “As then, I have many times since, with tears running down my face, regretted the fact that we could not linger longer and see a better service given, but the Japs were scattered all through that area and delay meant our capture.”

Two of the five airmen were dead.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the interpreter urged. “Japs come pretty soon. You hurry. Get away.”

The airmen covered the graves and returned to the garrison.

Nielsen and the others felt anxious to escape, but each time the aviators addressed the garrison commander, he stalled them. “Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”

“We felt we had to rely on the Chinese, but the longer we stayed the more certain we became that the Japs would catch up with us,” Nielsen later wrote. “We agreed we’d probably be executed if they caught us, but deep in our hearts we did not believe it. I never gave up hope and I don’t think the others did, either.”

One day passed.

Then another.

By late in the morning of April 21—three days after the crash—Nielsen knew the men had waited too long. A commotion erupted at the front gate.

“Japanese come,” a winded Chinese man announced to Nielsen and the other aviators. “Japanese come.”

The airmen slipped up toward the front gate, spotting what Nielsen estimated to be several hundred Japanese soldiers armed with rifles, bayonets, and hand grenades. “We talked briefly about making a run for it, but we decided we’d be shot down at once,” he recalled. “It was better to take a chance of the Chinese hiding us.”

The men ran back to their quarters, but the effort proved futile. “The Chinese led the Jap captain to us,” Nielsen later wrote. “I can’t blame those Chinese too much. They were out-numbered and out-gunned.”

The captain, who Nielsen noted had a moon-shaped face and a tiny mustache, spoke through an interpreter. “You now Japanese prisoner,” the enemy officer announced. “You no worry. We treat you fine.”

The men would soon learn otherwise.

DAVID THATCHER RETURNED TO
the hut around daybreak, soaking wet and clutching nothing but a carton of waterlogged cigarettes and a life belt. “I got to the plane,” the
Ruptured Duck
’s gunner announced. “But this is all I could find.”

The injured aviators now stirred. It had been a long night, and without morphine the pain throbbed; copilot Dean Davenport could no longer even walk. Charlie returned soon thereafter with an entourage of local Chinese men, who loitered outside the hut in the rain. Lawson noticed that some of the men carried ten-foot bamboo poles, while others hauled ropes and latticework squares. The men set to work, fashioning litters that consisted of a rope seat that dangled from a pole carried on the shoulders of the local laborers. Thatcher paid the fisherman ten dollars for four blankets, and the group set off just as the weather started to clear. McClure sized up his new transportation. “It was no comfortable sedan chair; it was a primeval makeshift,” he later wrote. “We had gone in a few hours from man’s most speedy transportation to his slowest.”

The travel proved arduous as the barefoot
Chinese labored under the weight of the injured airmen, particularly the 205-pound McClure. “They slipped in the mud frequently and every slip jolted my torn shoulders,” the navigator later wrote. “We were all disgusted. We kept hollering at each other. Why didn’t we have autos or a plane, or a carriage? Why hadn’t we been fed, and why hadn’t a doctor come? For one, I was too sore to reason about the facts as they were.” The overgrown path soon gave way to rice paddies and then verdant hills. The guerrillas slogged on, one step at a time as the minutes soon turned into hours. “As we rose to still higher ground, the men climbed mossy rocks as if they were steps,” Lawson recalled. “Their toes gripped the rocks like fingers. I hung on as I swung between them like a butchered hog.”