Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (46 page)

They stopped at a large house in a meadow with grazing cattle. A motley band of guerrillas loitered outside, armed with a mix of guns from all over the world, each decorated with bright colored tassels. Lawson wondered how these impoverished fighters could resist the temptation to sell the injured Americans to the Japanese. “One of the toughest-looking men in the bunch now got up and advanced on me as I lay there, too exhausted from the trip over the hill to care what he would do to me,” he recalled. “He reached down quickly toward my mouth and when he pulled his hand away I felt a lighted cigarette between that part of my lips which still met. I tried to smile back at him, but I felt more like crying. Maybe from relief. Maybe shock. I don’t know. Anyway, I closed my eyes now and I thought that wherever I was I was among good men—men who were fighting for about the same thing I was fighting for.”

The injured men were sipping boiled water when one of the guerrillas charged up the path, warning that the Japanese were advancing. The guerrillas picked up the airmen and set off, this time at a trot escorted by half a dozen armed guards. The group passed through a village and then boarded a flat-bottomed boat, which McClure estimated was twelve feet long and five feet wide. A single man propelled the boat with a pole down a canal. “It was hard not to moan incessantly now, even though the warm sun felt good,” Lawson recalled. “We passed slowly down the canal for a couple of hours, the only sound being the thump of the pole against the back of the boat and the occasional jumble of conversation from the guerrillas. Sometimes the canal became so narrow that we could have reached out and touched the sides. Sometimes the limbs of overgrowing trees made the silent boatman bend low
. I just lay there, hurting, and wondering what lay at the end of this ride and how I’d ever be able to walk when the ride did end.”

The group disembarked later that afternoon, and the guerrillas carried the injured aviators through rice paddies. McClure spotted others perched on higher ground, serving as scouts. The men reached a ridge, overlooking a bay where a Chinese junk sailed toward the beach. Only then did Lawson realize the men had crashed on an island. As the guerrillas carried the men toward the junk, a Japanese gunboat charged around the promontory, prompting them to drop the injured aviators in a ditch. The men peered over the embankment at the gunboat. “With sick, mingled fears I watched it come up briskly to the side of the junk. I could hear the Japanese questioning the men on the junk,” Lawson recalled. “It was torture to lie there in the ditch, waiting. Physical and mental torture. The Japanese must have spotted us, I reasoned. They must be wild to catch us, for certainly they had been informed of the raid and our route to China. They surely had found the plane by now. They would make one of the men on the junk tell.”

Moments later, to Lawson’s surprise, the gunboat backed up and charged off. The guerrillas waited until the boat vanished, then darted across the beach, sloshing through the shallow surf to the waiting junk. Lawson and the others tumbled over the side, coming to rest in a mix of sawdust and bilge water. The guerrillas climbed in after them. Chinese sailors rolled down the lattice blinds over the side as the boat set off around 6 p.m. The pain and the spring heat—coupled with weak winds—made the voyage unbearable. “We moved along like a snail,” Lawson recalled. “We groaned and began begging for water. Any water. When it seemed as if there wasn’t another breath of air to gulp in that darkening hole, it began to rain. The guerrillas understood about the water, then. They picked up bowls they found on the junk and set them out in the rain. They’d reach them in to us and we’d gulp the cool rain water and hand them back for more.”

As he had done the night before, Thatcher moved among the injured fliers, helping make each as comfortable as possible. The dried blood that caked Bob Clever’s scalped head blinded the bombardier, but Thatcher felt reluctant to wash his wounds and risk exposing him to infection. Clever’s headfirst exit through the bomber’s nose had so jarred his back that he could not sit up
. “Only after getting tired of laying in one position for awhile would he ask me to help him move into a different position,” Thatcher later wrote. “For instance if he was laying on his back he would want me to help him move over on one side. His being able to sleep and get some rest helped a lot.” McClure, whose right arm had begun to turn black, suffered the opposite. “With this injury of his shoulders he was unable to lay down; had to be sitting up all the time,” Thatcher wrote. “He could not get any sleep either.”

Lawson likewise continued to battle his injuries. His left thigh and ankle oozed blood and grew increasingly numb. “He tried to sleep but it was almost impossible,” Thatcher observed. “He was in such intense pain all the time.”

Exhaustion finally overtook him.

“Don’t let them cut my leg off,” Lawson mumbled.

Davenport shook him awake. “You were having a nightmare.”

Lawson made Davenport promise that if he passed out he would not let any doctor cut his leg off.

The junk reached a guerrilla hideout about midnight, scraping against a dock as the boat came to rest. A couple of the guerrillas hopped off the boat, pointing at their mouths to communicate the intent to collect food. Thatcher followed them up to a house, retrieving a bowl of noodles topped with egg slices. “I was pretty darned hungry,” he wrote, “but couldn’t eat very much of the stuff.” The guerrillas gave him a bowl for each of the others, as well as spoons, sparing the injured aviators the use of chopsticks. To wash it down the men provided a jug of rice wine. McClure refused to eat, but Lawson managed to gum down a few egg slices. Much as he wanted the wine to numb his pain, the battered aviator couldn’t drink it. “It was like raw, uncut alcohol,” he recalled. “It burned my busted mouth and torn gums like lye.”

The junk set out again after only about twenty minutes, sailing on into what McClure would later describe as “the blackest night” he had ever known. Thatcher once again resumed his nursing duty. The twenty-year-old gunner had been awake now for fully thirty-six hours, bandaging wounds and helping to feed and comfort his injured mates. The exhausted corporal once again set out his cup and a few saucers to try to collect rainwater; the demand for his services remained constant. “Lawson was wanting water all the time because his throat was dry from the blood in his mouth where his teeth
had been knocked out. I didn’t think that terrible night would ever end,” he later wrote. “The most disheartening part of the trip was that we understood the guerrillas to say it would only take two hours but it took two days.”

The boat tacked west through the night. Clever was the only one of the four who was able to sleep. The others hovered in various states of semiconsciousness, never far from their pain. Lawson lifted the lattice blinds around daybreak and saw that the junk had reached the Chinese mainland and now headed up a wide river. The boat sailed on as morning turned into afternoon, finally docking late in the day at a settlement. Thatcher set off to find a telegraph office, eventually wiring word of the crew’s fate to Chungking. New porters helped offload the injured aviators—this time on more standard stretchers—and hauled them to the magistrate’s headquarters, arriving close to dark. “I was carried on a flat board,” McClure recalled. “The pain of the shoulders was at its height and with lack of food I certainly was not a genial person to be near.”

The guerrillas set the injured men down on a patio, where Lawson noted that China Relief posters plastered the walls. From inside he heard someone speaking accented English. A bespectacled Chinese man walked out and extended his hand. “Anything we got is yours,” he said to Lawson. “We know what you have done.”

Lawson told him that the men needed a doctor, anesthetic, and sedatives—demands that elicited an unfortunate sigh from his host. “They had nothing at this station, except bandage and a little food and water,” Lawson recalled. “Not even a sleeping pill, not even an aspirin tablet or any kind of antiseptic. No doctor, of course.”

The locals fed the men boiled rice and water and helped bathe the aviators. All modesty had long since vanished. “Sitting in one of the anterooms,” McClure recalled, “a Chinese girl, whom I suspected was a nurse, helped me out of my clothes and I stood in the wooden bucket while she gave me a complete bath.”

Nurses washed the caked blood from Clever’s face, allowing him to see for the first time since the crash. Others cleansed McClure’s infected right ankle, which he found now under attack by a “man-eating bug.” Nurses removed the belt and necktie tourniquets from Lawson’s left leg and then carefully cleaned the pilot, discarding the filthy quilt he had clung to since they were in the fisherman’s hut. Attendants gave the men
heavy blankets, but sleep remained elusive, despite the exhaustion of battling pain without the aid of morphine for two days. “I didn’t get much rest,” McClure recalled. “I still had to sit most of the time with my hands on my knees and I seemed to be forever developing new pains.” Lawson suffered the same. “I tried to go to sleep,” the pilot later wrote. “But I just lay there full of pain, everything on me wanting care.”

Dr. Chen Shenyan arrived at the magistrate’s headquarters at about 3:30 a.m., after a grueling twelve-hour journey on foot. The graduate of Ting-nan Medical College, a private institution in Shanghai, had received a phone message at 3 p.m. the preceding day, requesting he come right away to help care for five injured American aviators. Chen and his father owned the En-Tse Hospital, about forty miles up the road in Linghai, a former missionary clinic the family had purchased from the Episcopalian church a decade earlier. Chen had heard the air-raid alarm on the afternoon of April 18, but had not thought much more about it until he received the message the afternoon of April 20. The doctor quickly packed a small surgical kit, grabbed a colleague, and departed just thirty minutes later for the half-day trip.

Chen surveyed the airmen’s injuries. He found McClure sitting up, unable to lie down because the severity of his pain made it difficult for him to breathe. Both of the navigator’s arms were severely swollen and numb, and he could barely move them. Davenport had cut up his right leg and left hand and lost considerable blood. So had Clever. Lawson clearly had suffered the worst. He had shattered his left knee joint and lacerated wounds covered his face and lower jaw. “There was a compound fracture of the mandible with the loss of 8 teeth,” Chen noted, “all on the right side.” The crash was so violent that Lawson had not only lost his canines and incisors but also his upper and lower molars. “He also had multiple wounds of the left leg and foot,” Chen observed, “and was unconscious for a considerable length of time.”

Chen needed to move the men to his hospital. He dressed the wounds as best he could and then phoned four missionary friends in Linghai. He was going to require help.

A lot of help.

The group set off at 8 a.m. on April 21 to cover the forty-mile return trip, with Lawson on a stretcher and the others in sedan chairs. “We were given a royal send-off,” Thatcher wrote, “with a band and everything.” A company of Chinese troops,
standing at attention, lined the path out of the village, saluting as each airman passed. “It brought a lump to a fellow’s throat,” Lawson recalled. “Those of us who could, returned the salute. I wondered if there was ever a more grisly parade.”

The journey once again proved arduous as the porters climbed the steep and rugged terrain. “At the top of a ridge we halted for tea and were offered—of all things!—cookies,” McClure later wrote. “This homelike touch was another morale builder as well as a hunger killer.” The morning gave way to afternoon as the injured airmen continued to suffer. “There were times when I thought I could not stand one more jolting bounce,” Lawson recalled. “When I felt I’d have to cry out and ask them to leave me behind, I’d suck on the bitter oranges and try to concentrate on the way the juice burned my mouth, the number of seeds the oranges had, and other things, so I wouldn’t think about the leg and arm and hands. I couldn’t pass out.”

Night soon fell. The porters trekked onward, navigating through rice paddies before arriving late that evening at Chen’s hospital.

“You’re safe here,” George Parker, an English missionary, told the men.

Lawson asked about medical supplies.

“You’ll get more care than anything,” Parker answered. “We have an antiseptic fluid, a little chloroform and bandage. Nothing else.”

To the injured airmen that was relief. “It was a hospital now—a real hospital and real medical care at last!” McClure wrote. “It had iron beds with real springs. Best of all it was sanitary. What a pleasure it was to dare to drink cold water.”

Thatcher was exhausted. For days he had cared for the
Ruptured Duck
’s injured crew, helping the men escape to safety. He shunned any credit, pointing instead at what his injured mates had endured. “It was forty miles and took us twelve hours,” he wrote in his final report. “I can’t see how Lawson was ever able to stand it.”

CHAPTER 17

I had many things to thank God for at the end of that day.