Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (62 page)

The Japanese came through again
days later, forcing Dunker to evacuate once more. This time the Japanese burned most of the town. “They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved. They raped any woman from the ages of 10–65, and before burning the town they thoroughly looted it. When they wanted something to eat they would shoot any hog that they saw, then cut off a few pounds of meat that they wanted at the moment, and then leave the rest of the animal on the ground to rot. There weren’t many cows, but those they saw they did the same to them,” Dunker wrote. “None of the humans shot were buried either, but were left to lay on the ground to rot, along with the hogs and cows. This part of the Japanese army were absolute barbarians. The men of the Roman Legions could not have been more barbaric.”

Dunker found the mission wrecked, though fortunately not torched like so much else in Ihwang. “Things were dumped out, turned over, broken, burned,” he wrote in a report to Bishop O’Shea. “All things of value were carried off.” The Japanese had gone so far as to smash Dunker’s typewriter and steal his razor, though he managed to salvage two bottles of beer in the basement that the soldiers had somehow missed, which the priest savored. “If you are unfortunate enough to have the Japs come your way, it would be a good thing to give them a wide path. Every town they enter is another Nanking on a small scale,” he warned O’Shea. “Absolutely no one would be able to stop them from dragging off young—and also not so young—women, and maybe when a dozen or more are through with her, to run a knife through her body.”

The destruction of Ihwang proved typical, even mild compared with the horror the Japanese visited upon some of the villages and towns in the provinces where Doolittle and his men had bailed out. Quinn returned to Yukiang after almost three months in the mountains. “The sight that met our eyes was appalling,” the bishop said. “Part of the town had been burned. As many of the townspeople as the Japs had been able to capture had been killed.” Father Vincent Smith echoed Quinn. “Death came in horrible forms,” he said. “We learned that with our own eyes.” Local villagers related for the priests some of those horrors. “Jap soldiers would stand on bridges being used by refugees streaming into the interior,” Quinn wrote. “As the aged Chinese would pass by, Jap soldiers would push them off the bridge and into the water. Those who could not swim, of course, drowned; those who
could swim afforded tragic targets for Jap riflemen.”

Quinn returned to the mission to find that the three-story residence of thirty-three rooms had been reduced to charred timbers and ashes. Soldiers had looted or smashed all the windows, doors, and furnishings of the mission’s church and three schools, even tearing down the altars. The biggest tragedy involved Father Verdini, who had remained behind with several dozen orphans and elderly unable to travel. “In a pond, in the garden, we found Father Verdini’s body,” Smith recalled. “Nearby were the bones of the orphans and the aged men and women. Few met the merciful death of a bullet.” The Japanese had bayoneted many. Two of the dead had been burned to death, used as “human candles.” The scattered remains of as many as forty others who had sought refuge at the mission littered the garden. “The total number,” a church report stated, “cannot be ascertained for certain, because no one escaped.”

The walled city of Nancheng would prove one of the worst hit after the Japanese marched in at dawn on the morning of June 11, beginning a reign of terror so horrendous that missionaries would later dub it “the Rape of Nancheng.” Soldiers rounded up eight hundred women and herded them into a storehouse outside the east gate, assaulting them day after day. “For one month the Japanese remained in Nancheng, roaming the rubble-filled streets in loin clothes much of the time, drunk a good part of the time and always on the lookout for women,” wrote the Reverend Frederick McGuire. “The women and children who did not escape from Nancheng will long remember the Japanese—the women and girls because they were raped time after time by Japan’s imperial troops and are now ravaged by venereal disease, the children because they mourn their fathers who were slain in cold blood for the sake of the ‘new order’ in East Asia.”

At the end of the occupation, Japanese forces systematically destroyed the city of fifty thousand residents, bringing in technical experts in fields ranging from communications to medicine. Teams stripped Nancheng of all radios, while others looted the hospitals of drugs and surgical instruments. Engineers not only wrecked the electrical plant but pulled up the railroad lines, shipping the iron out through the port at Wenchow. The Japanese lastly sent in a special incendiary squad, which started its operation on July 7 in the city’s southern section. “Broken doors and partition boards were
placed in the center of every house according to plan and kerosene was poured over,” wrote the
Takung Pao
newspaper. “A long torch was then applied from the outside. When there was a high brick wall between two houses, torch was applied on the next one. There was a group of soldiers assigned to this task for every street and lane and larger buildings. This planned burning was carried on for three days and the city of Nancheng became charred earth.”

The Japanese spared little in this summertime march of ruin, driving what Claire Chennault later described as a “bloody spear two hundred miles through the heart of East China.” Enemy forces looted towns and villages of precious rice, salt, and sugar, even stealing honey and then scattering hives. Soldiers devoured, drove away, or simply slaughtered thousands of oxen, pigs, and other farm animals; some wrecked vital irrigation systems and set crops on fire. At other times troops burned wooden water wheels, plows, and threshers and stole all the iron tools. Along the way the Japanese destroyed bridges, roads, and airfields, reducing some twenty thousand square miles to smoldering ruins. “The thoroughness of the Jap work of destruction is amazing!” wrote one unnamed clergyman. “Beyond Words!” Dunker would later echo that sentiment: “Like a swarm of locusts, they left behind nothing but destruction and chaos.”

Outside of this punitive destruction came stories of sadistic torture and murder, including the abduction of a thousand boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen whom the Japanese enslaved as orderlies and later shipped to Nancheng to be trained as spies. In Yintang troops smashed headstones and dug up graves, plucking the jade rings off the fingers of the dead; in Linchwan soldiers tossed entire families down wells so that the bloated bodies of the dead would contaminate the village’s drinking water. One woman crawled out and later described how nine members of her family had drowned. Soldiers did the same in Ihwang, murdering several generations of a schoolteacher’s family. “They killed my three sons; they killed my wife, Angsing; they set fire to my school; they burned my books; they drowned my grandchildren in the well,” he recalled. “I crawled out of the well at night, when they were drunk, and killed them with my own hands—one for every member of my family they had slaughtered.”

In the town of Kweiyee soldiers raped the mayor’s niece twelve times, tied her naked to a post, and burned
her body with cigarettes. Troops in Nancheng tore the hair off the head of an albino child, while others in Samen sliced off the noses and ears of villagers. “I cannot tell you the full story of the brutalities inflicted on these helpless people, on men, women and children, even upon babies,” Smith recalled. “No civilized mind can conceive the tortures which were inflicted on all. Whole towns of from 15,000 to 20,000 people were wiped out, the populace killed and the homes and places of business leveled by fire.” Father George Yaeger recounted similar atrocities. “The whole countryside reeked of death in every form,” he later told reporters. “From some of the villagers who had managed to escape death we heard stories far too brutal and savage to be related. Just one charge was not heard—cannibalism. But outside of that take your choice and you can’t miss the savage nature of the Japanese army.”

The Japanese refused to spare religious institutions or the clergy. Troops beat and starved French priest Michael Poizat so badly that he died within a month. “You want to go to heaven, don’t you?” soldiers asked Father Joseph Kwei before cutting his head off with a sword. The Japanese looted or wrecked two-thirds of the Vincentian’s twenty-nine missions or parishes, many burned or totally destroyed. On the wall of one torched church the Japanese chalked, “Christ is defeated.” Vandenberg would describe the destruction he found on his return to Linchwan. “It was a fearful sight,” he said. “Our priests house, schools, and orphanage had been burned. Our stone church was still standing but its interior was a shambles. The Japs had chopped up the altars, torn down the pulpit and wrecked the sacristy. The feet and the hands of statues of Christ, Mother Mary, and the saints had been slashed off and the eyes gouged out.”

The Japanese reserved the harshest torture for those discovered to have helped the Doolittle raiders. In Nancheng soldiers forced a group of men who had fed the airmen to eat feces before lining up a group of ten for a “bullet contest,” testing to see how many people a single bullet would pass through before it finally stopped. In Ihwang the Japanese found Ma Eng-lin, who had welcomed injured pilot Harold Watson into his home. Soldiers wrapped him in a blanket, tied him to a chair, and soaked him in kerosene. The Japanese then forced his wife to torch him. Troops likewise burned down the hospital of a German doctor who had helped set Watson’s arm. “Little did the Doolittle men realize,” the Reverend Charles Meeus later wrote, “that those same little gifts which they gave their rescuers in grateful acknowledgement
of their hospitality—parachutes, gloves, nickels, dimes, cigarette packages—would, a few weeks later, become the tell-tale evidence of their presence and lead to the torture and death of their friends!”

A missionary with the United Church of Canada, the Reverend Bill Mitchell traveled in the region, organizing aid on behalf of the Church Committee on China Relief. Mitchell gathered statistics from local governments to provide a snapshot of the destruction. The Japanese flew 1,131 raids against Chuchow—Doolittle’s intended destination—killing 10,246 people and leaving another 27,456 destitute. Enemy forces likewise destroyed 62,146 homes, stole 7,620 head of cattle, and burned 30 percent of the crops. “Out of twenty-eight market towns in that region,” the committee’s report noted, “only three escaped devastation.” The city of Yushan, with a population of 70,000—many of whom had participated in a parade led by the mayor in honor of raiders Davy Jones and Hoss Wilder—saw 2,000 killed and 80 percent of the homes destroyed. “Yushan was once a large town filled with better-than-average houses. Now you can walk thru street after street seeing nothing but ruins,” Stein wrote in a letter. “In some places you can go several miles without seeing a house that was not burnt. Poor people.”

But Japan had saved the worst for last, summoning the secretive Unit 731. A clandestine outfit, Unit 731 was led by Major General Shiro Ishii, a fifty-year-old doctor and army surgeon who specialized in bacteriology and serology. Flamboyant and outgoing, Ishii once developed a field water filtration system, demonstrating its effectiveness by urinating in it and then guzzling the output. He was one of Japan’s early proponents of bacteriological warfare. The operation that had begun almost a decade earlier in an old soy sauce distillery in Manchuria had since grown into his personal bacteriological empire, occupying a three-square-mile campus near the town of Pingfan. Shielded from prying eyes behind towering walls and electric fences, some three thousand scientists, doctors, and technicians toiled in the secret compound that boasted its own powerhouse, rail access, and even airfield. To disguise the true nature of the unit, the Japanese publicly labeled it the Epidemic Prevention and Water Supply Unit of the Kwantung Army.

Researchers with Unit 731 focused on such diseases as anthrax, plague, glanders, dysentery, typhoid, and cholera, determining which ones would be best suited for
bacteriological warfare. At full capacity Ishii’s so-called death factory could crank out more than 650 pounds of plague bacteria a month, 1,500 pounds of anthrax germs, 2,000 pounds of typhoid, and more than 2,200 pounds of cholera. To test these awful germs, Ishii’s scientists experimented on humans, from bandits and communist sympathizers to spies and the occasional Russian soldier. The Japanese often kept kidnapped subjects in a special holding cell under the consulate in Harbin, transferring them to the unit headquarters at night in vans. At Pingfan, Ishii’s older brother Takeo ran the secret two-story prison, through which six hundred men and women passed each year. As a macabre souvenir the Japanese even kept one Russian subject pickled in a six-foot jar. “No one,” recalled one of the unit’s senior leaders, “ever left this death factory alive.”

Experiments ran the gamut from pressure chambers and frostbite to injecting humans with horse blood, but most focused on bacteriological warfare. Researchers fed prisoners cantaloupes injected with typhoid, chocolate laced with anthrax, and plague-filled cookies. At other times the Japanese staked prisoners down and set off nearby bacteria bombs. In one of the more horrific practices, pathologists autopsied living prisoners without anesthetic, which doctors feared might affect the organs and blood vessels. A former medical assistant later recounted the autopsy of a Chinese prisoner infected with plague. “The fellow knew that it was over for him, and so he didn’t struggle when they led him into the room and tied him down,” he said. “But when I picked up the scalpel, that’s when he began screaming. I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then he finally stopped.”

Researchers struggled to devise the best delivery mechanism for a bacteriological attack. Strong air pressure and high temperatures generated by bombs killed many germs, making it difficult to use common ordnance. During his travels before the war in Europe, Ishii had developed a fascination with the plague, which had spread via fleas, a natural yet effective delivery system. Since the plague still occurred throughout Asia, Ishii realized that by employing it he could disguise a biological attack from the enemy. Researchers at Unit 731 set out to breed fleas in some 4,500 nurseries or incubators that allowed the parasites to feast on rodents, churning out as many as
145 million fleas every three to four months. Ishii tested those theories in the summer of 1940 around the Chekiang Province port of Ning-po, dropping some 15 million plague-infested fleas from a low-flying airplane. Of the ninety-nine people ultimately infected, all but one died. A thrilled Ishii released a documentary film of the operation.