Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (53 page)

“If we can do it once, we can do it again—and again,” added the
Pittsburgh Press
. “We have sweat and bled. Now it is her turn.”

The
New York Times
called it a “blow at the heart of the Japanese Empire.” “For 2,600 years Japan’s warriors have suffered no invaders on the sacred soil of the homeland.
Now they have suddenly swarmed out of the sky,” the paper wrote. “A reverse so striking and portentous is bound to reverberate throughout the Orient.”

Many news outlets characterized the raid as a reprisal for Japan’s horrific attack in December. The Associated Press went so far as to describe it as a “balm for the wounds of Pearl Harbor and Bataan,” while the
Los Angeles Times
suggested that Japan “consider this another installment on our debt to her.”

Amid the celebration and demands for more attacks, other editorial voices cautioned Americans to temper expectations, pointing to the long fight still ahead. “Encouraging as the news is, it will be a mistake for our people to give it too much weight,” wrote the
Chicago Daily Tribune
. “Japan is a powerful nation.” The
Boston Globe
agreed. “Satisfaction felt in this country because of this daring exploit should not lead us to forget that air attacks of greater power and persistence will be needed before there is any real diminution of Japan’s strength,” argued the paper. “The trail blazers have marked out the way, but the task ahead remains formidable.”

CHAPTER 19

Don’t forget, America—make sure that every flier that comes here has a special pass to hell, and rest assured it’s strictly a one-way ticket.

—TOKYO RADIO, APRIL 21, 1943

THE AIRCREWS TRICKLED IN
day after day to Chuchow. Davy Jones and his men arrived first on April 19, followed by the crews of Bill Bower, Ross Greening, and Jack Hilger. Sometimes an entire crew arrived; occasionally, just a single aviator. By the time Doolittle appeared on April 26, fifty-six airmen had been found. After days alone in the Chinese wilderness the reunions among friends were heartfelt, a sentiment best captured by Hilger in his diary. “It was like a homecoming and we were all as happy as kids,” he wrote. “There’s nothing like a familiar face in a foreign country.”

Arrival in Chuchow capped an exotic adventure for most of the raiders, who had hiked down out of the mountains, often aided by Chinese guerrillas, villagers, and even a few foreign missionaries. “Everywhere we went we were the center of attraction and everyone seemed to know all about us,” navigator Carl Wildner recalled. “We were oddities as well as celebrities.” In many cases the Americans found themselves welcomed in villages and towns by local politicians and military leaders; a few even held parades. That was the case for
Jones and his copilot, Hoss Wilder, who stepped off a train in Yushan to find a beaming gentleman dressed in Western clothes at the forefront of a crowd of hundreds. “I am Danny Wang, mayor of Yushan,” he announced in English. “This reception is in your honor as American heroes!”

The raiders had marveled at the ancient walled cities of Iwu and Kuangfeng, the latter’s cobblestone alleys rubbed smooth by more than a millennium of passing footsteps. “It was the kind of Chinese city I had read about,” Hilger wrote in his diary, “but never really believed in.” Others, such as navigator Eugene McGurl, were shocked by the poverty and sickness he witnessed: “Signs of every known disease could be seen even on smallest children,” he wrote in his journal. “Shops were dens of filth & disease.” Though gunner Adam Williams went so far as to shoot and roast a pheasant, many of the others choked down the local cuisine, from rice and greens to delicacies like fried snake and boiled pigeon eggs. Navigator Clayton Campbell even got a special taste of what he referred to as chow dog: “The Chinese pluck the hair from a dog like feathers are plucked from a chicken and the animal is cooked with the skin on.”

At Chuchow the Chinese housed the aviators at barracks about ten miles from the airfield, complete with a bomb shelter dug out of rock. Local officers translated newspapers with datelines from London, Berlin, and Tokyo that recounted the raid’s success, and they spoiled the American aviators with long-saved luxuries of condensed milk and tinned beef and even the last of the two-year-old canned butter. The after-action reports and personal diaries of the raiders universally praised the warmth and aid of the Chinese, to many of whom the raiders gave trinkets as small tokens of appreciation, from cigarettes to pocket change. One of the pilots gave his white silk parachute to an engaged missionary couple so that she could use it to fashion a wedding dress. “These people are the most sincere, grateful, and just plain wonderful people I have ever seen,” Jones raved in his diary, “and they have been fighting for 5 years.”

The celebrations were tempered by the confirmed death of Leland Faktor. The Chinese had stripped the gunner naked—no doubt to salvage his clothes—and carried him out of the wilds lashed to a long pole, much like a slaughtered animal. Rumors circulated that two other bodies had been spotted along the coast and three more discovered in the wreckage of a plane. Reports indicated the Japanese had captured at least a few of the aviators, while others had suffered
serious injuries, including Lawson. Many of the fliers saw such injuries firsthand when Charles Ozuk limped into Chuchow, a scene captured by Joseph Manske in his diary: “He had the worst cut in his leg I’d ever seen in my life.” Some of the fliers blamed the losses on the Navy for forcing them to take off early, rechristening the
Hornet
with the diminutive nickname the Housefly.

The airmen passed the days playing poker. Davy Jones, whose mustache had grown so long that he earned the nickname Fu Man Jones, lost seven dollars in a single night. Other times the aviators swapped stories of their adventures in China, trying to outdo one another. “When we met up,” Hank Potter recalled, “each had a story of a horrible ordeal and wanted to tell it. But none of us wanted to listen because we all had one of our own.” One such tale that would even find its way into an official report concerned a sergeant, found after two days in the wild by a Chinese couple. The family invited the airman home, fed him, and then put him to bed. Much to the exhausted aviator’s surprise, the couple climbed in with him. “He was so tired that he didn’t even mind when the man took care of his husbandly duties,” the report stated. “If they didn’t mind his presence, he sure as hell didn’t care, just so they didn’t keep him awake.”

Japanese bombers pummeled Chuchow daily in retaliation for the raid, forcing the aviators to spend long hours crowded inside the shelter. The Chinese had no forces to counter the attacks, and the American fliers felt frustrated to sit idly by as the enemy returned again and again. “We called our home the Chu Chow bombing range,” Ken Reddy wrote in his diary, “for that is all it amounted to—practice for the Japanese.” Bill Bower agreed. “It’s a crime,” he griped in his diary. “No sign of opposition. Just one airplane would be all we need. Too bad one of us couldn’t have landed.” The men emerged each day to see the horrific results of the Japanese assaults, particularly the strafing attacks against civilians. “Frequently, bodies were stacked like cordwood along the roadside until they could be taken away for burial,” Greening later wrote. “It was a depressing sight to us. We hadn’t encountered anything like this before.”

Under Greening’s command the first group of twenty raiders—each presented with a new white silk shirt—climbed aboard a train the evening of April 25 to begin the first leg of a four-day journey west to Chungking. The aviators crowded inside
wooden berthing compartments and were soon asleep in the hard narrow bunks. “The rails don’t click, they jolt,” Bower complained in his diary, “but it’s much better transportation than that of last week.” Chinese trains ran largely at night to avoid Japanese attacks, so at dawn the raiders disembarked at Ying-tan, enjoying a delicious breakfast at the Catholic mission with a Dutch priest and Father Bill Glynn of Chicago; these were some of the same missionaries who had helped Harold Watson and Edgar McElroy. “Ham and eggs,” Bower wrote, “but best of all cornfritters with brown sugar and molasses.”

The aviators crowded aboard a rickety bus after breakfast and set off on an eleven-hour trip over dirt roads that would cover barely 150 miles, stopping for the night in a nice hotel in the ancient city of Ning Lee. “The courtyard outside is without a doubt the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in China,” Jack Hilger wrote in his diary when he visited a few days later. “There is a small lake with a pavilion and bridge and the entire courtyard is shaded by an immense camphor tree which must have a spread of 200 feet. The full moon shining through completes the effect and makes all of us lonesome.” The raiders enjoyed the newfound luxury even if the hotel still depended on oil lights. “I got my first Chinese shave here,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “If you don’t stop them they shave your ears, nose, forehead, and between your eyes.”

The raiders set out again early the next morning for another long and tiresome bus ride, passing through miles of uncultivated lands void of even cattle or sheep. The bus stopped in Toho, where the fliers dined with a local commissioner and met the governor, before pressing on to Kian, spending the night of April 27 in a new hostel operated by the American Volunteer Group under Claire Chennault. The journey began again early the next morning in a new bus, which crossed several rivers on ferries before reaching a hotel in Heng-yang near midnight. Chungking planned to dispatch a cargo plane to collect the raiders, giving the airmen time to relax that morning. Bower sunbathed, while Reddy enjoyed the spoils of war, a scene he described in his diary: “I rode a Japanese horse, bareback, as the saddle had not been captured, just to say I had been on one.”

A C-47 buzzed the hotel the afternoon of April 29, promising an end to the long journey. “When it flew over with our insignia on the side we all shouted with joy,” Reddy wrote. “It was the most beautiful sight we had witnessed in China
.” Colonel Clayton Bissell, General Stilwell’s air operations officer, greeted the airmen as they climbed aboard. The plane never shut down its engines, but roared back into the skies, arriving less than three hours later in China’s wartime capital. Perched atop a promontory between the Yangtze and the Chia-ling Rivers, Chungking was a damp and weathered city whose hot and humid climate left the walls coated with a green slime. Mosquitos clouded the air, while armies of rats and cockroaches marched through narrow streets and alleys that reeked of rotting food, urine, and feces. “There was no escape from the stink that attacked our nostrils at every turn,” one American nurse would later write. “A thin fog hovered around the city; the moisture undoubtedly made the smells more pungent.”

The improvised capital had long been battered by the twin ills of poverty and war. The
Time
and
Life
magazine publisher Henry Luce visited in 1941, writing that it was impossible to “distinguish between the great masses of bomb-rubble on the one hand and, on the other, shacks, temporary structures and ordinary homes of the poor.” The Japanese had launched routine raids against Chungking—the world’s first capital to suffer systematic bombings—almost as soon as the Nationalist government arrived, pummeling the city from 1939 to 1941 no fewer than 268 times. The single most savage attack had occurred the afternoon of May 4, 1939, when the Japanese killed 4,400 people and injured another 3,100, an assault witnessed by missionary and author Robert Ekvall. “The city of Chungking boiled in a sudden upheaval of flying wreckage and black dust,” he wrote. “By nightfall the entire horizon was red with fires that threatened to burn the rock of Chungking clean of human life and habitation.”

The war-torn city—named the most bombed spot on Earth by
Life
magazine in March 1942—showed those scars, prompting one reporter to colorfully compare the clobbered capital to Pompeii. Bombs and fires had leveled and blackened many of the city’s buildings—some rebuilt up to half a dozen times—while the acrid stench of wet ashes hung heavy in the air. Air-raid sirens screamed daily, forcing the city’s half million residents to crowd inside twelve hundred shelters dug deep into the sandstone cliffs, the largest a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel that could accommodate up to twenty thousand people. “Downtown Chungking was all bedlam. The narrow streets crawled with people cawing like flocks of hungry crows,” observed Frank Dorn, one of General
Stilwell’s top aides. “The people in the streets, for all their weary smiles and courage, looked whipped and beaten down by the years of struggle that had driven them to this ant hill of a city as a last refuge. Despair was etched deeply in their eyes, profiles, and sagging shoulders.”

The raid against Tokyo eleven days earlier had given Chungking a brief moment of celebration. Residents had crowded around radios, listening to Japanese broadcasts, while Chinese newspapers quickly sold out of extra editions, the ink barely dry. Movie theaters flashed details up on screens, drawing cheers from the audiences. Firecrackers exploded in the skies, while residents stopped Americans on the street to congratulate them. Government officials even declared the day of the attack a holiday. “The nightmare of the Japanese militarists can be shattered only by bombs,” announced Ho Ying-chin, Chungking’s war minister. “These raids on Japan proper are only the beginning.” Just as Americans had hungered to avenge Pearl Harbor, so, too, did the Chinese desire payback for years of bombing. “We have been waiting almost five years for this day,” one resident told the Associated Press. “We are glad that the Japanese people know at last the din of bombs and the smell of explosives.”