Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (55 page)

TED LAWSON’S CONDITION
continued to deteriorate. He suffered a terrible night on April 25, forcing Doc White to give him a blood transfusion. The doctor recruited Griffith Williams to serve as the donor, since he and Lawson shared type A blood. “I had no means of doing a proper crossmatching so had to take the chance of sub-groups and a reaction,” White later wrote in his unpublished memoir. “We had the expected trouble with clogging needles and syringes, but managed to get in 150 cc the first try and later after cleaning and boiling the outfit, 200 cc on the second try. Ted seemed stronger afterward.”

Missionary Frank England held a prayer service at the hospital the next morning for the aviators, and
then White accompanied England to his home, where he built a modified Rodger Anderson splint to help Lawson’s leg. “Installing the splint was a painful process,” White wrote, “but immobolizing the knee joint and elevating the leg made him more comfortable and I hoped would improve drainage.”

The magistrate brought the aviators a large basket of oranges, while other municipal and military officials arrived with gifts of raisins, grapefruit, wine, and canned butter. A group of children came from a town forty miles away to deliver 450 eggs.

On April 27 Smith, Williams, Sessler, Saylor, and Thatcher departed via sedan chair for Chuchow, leaving behind White and the injured airmen. “We all sent letters out with them,” White wrote. “We felt pretty lonesome after they had gone.”

Lawson continued to struggle, prompting White the next day to give him chloroform and operate on his leg to enlarge his wounds and improve drainage. The procedure almost proved too much for Lawson. “Ted stopped breathing,” White wrote. “I had some anxious moments before we could get him going properly again.”

The surgery appeared to help. The next day White dressed his wounds, which he noted in his diary looked much better. Afterward he went into town, where he bought a thermos for $120 and twenty tablets of sulfanilamide for $40. Lawson’s reprieve proved short-lived. By May 1 his leg again looked bad, leading White to grind up his entire supply of sulfanilamide tablets into power, which he applied to his wounds.

A local doctor from the Plague Prevention Unit and Public Health Hospital at Kinwah arrived with morphine, more sulfanilamide, and a blood transfusion kit. White went to work immediately. Both Clever and McClure were still weak, so rather than take a full pint from either, he took just enough from both to give Lawson 500 cubic centimeters. “Lawson no better,” White wrote in diary on May 3. “I’m afraid he’ll lose that leg.”

White wired Chunking the next day after the Sunday service to see whether it might be possible to dispatch a seaplane that could land on the river, but he received no response. “By Monday Lawson was in such poor shape that it was evident that both his leg and his neck could not be saved,” White later wrote. “So we decided to amputate.”

The doctor appeared next to Lawson’s bed on May 4. The pilot sensed White’s sudden unease and asked whether he planned to take his leg.

“Yeah,” the doctor said. “I think so.”

White was stoic; the situation, nonnegotiable
. “Doc didn’t ask me how I felt about it,” Lawson later recalled. “So, after a bit, I said I wished he’d get started. All I could think of now was getting rid of that damned thing.”

“That’s all I wanted to know,” White answered.

The Parkers entered and tried to comfort Lawson with talk of his wife and soon-to-be-delivered baby, while Chen explained that the men planned to use spinal anesthesia, an ampoule of novocaine smuggled out of Shanghai at White’s request.

Lawson tried to joke that the surgery would make him walk with a shoe with high instep, but White failed to answer. He knew then the doctor planned to amputate more than just his foot and ankle. He pressed White on where he planned to cut.

“Above the knee,” he said. “I’ll leave you as much as I can.”

Lawson asked why he couldn’t cut lower.

“If I did that, I might not get enough off. Then there would have to be another one,” White said, “and your system couldn’t take it.”

The men rolled Lawson on his side, and White injected the novocaine into his lower spine. Attendants moved him onto a stretcher and carried him to the second-floor operating room in a nearby building.

Mrs. Smith sterilized the packs and instruments, many of which, White noted, were of 1890s vintage. She and Chen then scrubbed in along with White. Lawson would be awake during the surgery, but numb from the waist down.

The surgical team used drapes to block off the infected part of Lawson’s left leg and cinched a tourniquet as high on the thigh as possible. “We had to make our skin incision about the middle of the thigh in order to get a decent margin of healthy tissue above the infected area,” White later wrote in his memoir. “I made fairly large skin flaps and undercut each layer of muscle as I came to it. The large vessels were clamped and tied as we came to them, though because of the tourniquet they naturally didn’t bleed. The large nerves were dissected up a short ways and cut.”

Lawson remained awake as the doctor worked. “I couldn’t see any blood, or feel anything. But I knew he was cutting,” he later wrote. “I could see his arm moving and see him lift my leg up so he could cut underneath.”

Sensation started to return to the
toes on Lawson’s right foot. He told White that he could feel his ankle. The anesthetic was wearing off—and there wasn’t any more. Two Chinese nurses came alongside Lawson and held his wrists down.

Lawson watched as White prepared to saw off his leg. “Doc stepped away and walked back quickly with a silver saw,” he wrote. “It made a strange, faraway, soggy sound as he sawed through the bone. Except for the tugging fear that I was coming back too soon, the actual amputation was almost as impersonal to me as watching a log being sawed. I could hear the different sounds of the saw as Doc’s elbow bent and straightened, bent and straightened and the teeth went through thicker and thinner sections. Then there was an almost musical twink, and deep, deep silence inside me as Doc laid aside the saw. The Chinese nurses let go of my wrists. The nurse on the right walked around to the left side of the table. She picked up the leg by the ankle. The other nurse picked up the other, thicker end. I watched the two nurses carry it out the door.”

White beveled the edges of Lawson’s bone and then began to close the wound layer by layer, using raw silk suture ties. More sensation returned to Lawson’s right leg, making the pilot nervous.

“Just a few more now,” White assured him.

Lawson watched the doctor’s arm rise and fall with each suture.

“Just one more,” he said and then finished.

White gave Lawson another blood transfusion. He had tapped out his type A donors, so he used his own. It was fortunate in that his blood was type O, commonly known as the universal blood type because it can safely be given to anyone. “The next day,” White wrote, “Ted was better. He was comfortable for the first time since the accident and was lucid for the first time in weeks.”

The news of the May 6 surrender of American forces on Corregidor arrived as Lawson convalesced, a sad final chapter to the five-month struggle to hold the Philippines.

The following day White noted with alarm that Lawson was running a low-grade fever, leading the doctor to give him a second pint of his own blood, but Lawson continued to deteriorate. The next day his stump was infected, he stopped eating, and he grew delirious. White could do little more than change his dressing—the wound continued to discharge pus—and give him an intravenous injection and morphine.

Lawson fell into a semiconscious state
plagued by the same bad dream. “It was screwy,” he said. “I thought I was in a small rowboat, off the coast of China. I was rowing and making good time, but someone would always make me change into another boat. The new boat would have no oars. I’d tried to get back in my old boat, but I could never find it. I’d find a lot of rowboats but they’d have no oars.”

The other aviators watched in alarm as one of the Chinese hospital attendants entered Lawson’s room with a Bible. “He is very sick,” the attendant told the men. “Maybe he won’t be here long.”

The news rattled Lawson’s fellow fliers. “We were all solemn and silent,” McClure recalled, “hoping he would come thru.”

Chen got a lead on some sulfathiazole, which White encouraged him to pursue. That Sunday, May 10, $410 worth of the drug arrived, the answer to White’s prayers. He started Lawson on the drug immediately, then removed the stiches from his leg. The stump had healed, but still showed some signs of infection. “Lawson’s temperature normal for the first time!” White wrote in his diary the next day. “Seems on the mend.”

White helped him out of bed twice and let the pilot rest in a chair. Lawson continued to improve, so much so that a week after his surgery he could drink milk, which the Chinese had boiled, poured into a bottle, and lowered into a well to cool. He followed that with strained soup and mush. A local carpenter made him crutches.

White busied himself filling teeth and doing eye exams. “Had three more dentistry patients and three eye patients!” he exclaimed in his diary. “Opthalmoscopy and retinoscopy by candlelight!” He even had time to whittle a dagger and buy stamps for his collection, while the locals presented each raider with a cane inscribed, “A keepsake to the officers of our friends and allies of the American Air Force.” “Whatever people can say about the unsanitary conditions, etc., of the Chinese, no one can ever complain about their hospitality,” White wrote in his diary. “They are great people.”

The other airmen found ways to keep busy as Lawson healed. Through Davy Jones the men learned that most of the raiders had survived, and other news came over the hospital’s radio, which could pick up station KGEI in San Francisco. McClure cheered the success of his beloved St. Louis Cardinals, who would go on to beat the New York Yankees that summer in the World Series, while all the men rejoiced at the news of the American
Navy’s victory over the Japanese in the Battle of the Coral Sea. “We whooped and yelled like Indians when we got the score on that one,” McClure later wrote. “Any time we could hear of bad fortune for the Japs the day was a success.”

Japanese bombers droned overhead daily, en route to attack other towns, a constant reminder of the enemy’s advance. White knew time was running short and began to make preparations to press on to Chuchow. The locals threw a farewell feast for the raiders, complete with nine courses and five extras that began with roast watermelon seeds, followed by buffalo, pork, and even shark fins. “It looked like white rubber,” McClure recalled of the delicacy, “and tasted the same.”

The Japanese onslaught continued; the airmen were out of time. “News not so good. The army and the banks have already left town!” White wrote in his diary on May 17. “Have to leave tomorrow, rain or shine.”

The men woke early on the morning of the eighteenth to find it cold and rainy. Exactly one month had passed since the raid on Tokyo. White dressed Lawson’s stump, while others helped him into a pair of trousers, the left pant leg pinned up. The aviators then climbed into sedan chairs, pulling oilcloths over them to keep dry

“I want to show you something,” Chen said to Lawson.

The porters carried the airman around the hospital and set his chair down alongside a wooden coffin. “It was a new one, made by the same Chinese carpenter who had made my crutches,” Lawson wrote. “It was to have been mine.”

The airmen set off in the rain, accompanied by the Smith family, Chen, porters, and armed escorts. “We crossed the pontoon bridge over the river and headed up the valley,” White wrote. “We followed the river, crossing and recrossing its stream many times, sometimes on bridges, more often by ferries—small boats poled by coolies or towed across by ropes. The countryside was lovely and green and as the day progressed it slowly cleared and we dried out.”

The men broke for lunch at 2 p.m. and then set out again. “Many of the hills along the way had beautiful old pagodas on them,” White recalled. “New patches of rice seedlings looked like rich lawns. Occasionally we would pass through a small grove of young pine trees. It was very interesting and beautiful country.”

The aviators stopped that night at the Smiths’ house. White redressed Lawson’s leg and sent a cable to Chungking
. “En route Chushien with four injured officers,” he wired. “ETA 22 May. Request plane meet us.”

The Smiths remained behind as the aviators set out again the next morning, despite protests from the fliers to evacuate. “The spirit and pluck of these people,” White wrote, “never ceased to amaze me.”

“See you in Chungking,” Mrs. Smith said.

The Japanese advance forced the aviators to hurry; traveling the next several days in rickshaws and sedan chairs, winding past rivers and through the mountains. “It seemed to me,” Lawson said, “that I could feel the very breath of the Japanese on my neck.”

The hospitality at each stop was grand, including Boy Scouts who awaited them at one village with banners that read, “Welcome to American Air Heroes.”

White’s winded rickshaw driver often fell behind the others, prompting his fellow fliers to shout, “Shift him into high-blower!”

“It’s no use,” the doctor replied. “He’s conked out. I’ve got to hit the silk!”

Transportation improved as the men reached more populated areas, allowing them to trade in the rickshaws and sedan chairs for a 1941 Ford station wagon, complete with bullet holes from a Japanese strafing. “One had evidently went through the windshield and gone through the back of the driver’s seat,” White wrote. “It had been neatly patched but it gave us something to think about!”

Most of the raiders piled into the station wagon, but White loaded Lawson into the back of a charcoal-burning truck, believing the injured pilot would be more comfortable stretched atop three blankets. The vehicles traveled only at night, so as to avoid air attacks by Japanese planes. “Every time we’d hit a bump, and we must have hit a million, I’d leave the floor. The next bump would get me coming down,” Lawson later wrote. “I used both my hands to keep what was left of my leg from banging. That didn’t help much. It just thumped and bled and throbbed.”