Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (64 page)

May soon gave way to June and
then July as the interned crew stewed in the dacha. “We were completely shut up in that house,” York would later complain to American authorities. “We were never allowed outside of it.” The supplies began to run low. Cigarettes soon vanished—forcing the raiders to roll their own using Russian tobacco and the newspaper
Pravda
—followed by meat. Meat suddenly returned, but then vegetables vanished—all, of course, except cabbage. Even vodka grew scarce as news of the war on the German front only worsened. “Food and cigarette shortages were quite common now. We would go for days without meat or vegetables, or sometimes both,” Emmens later wrote. “Some days we had only rice and cabbage.”

A Russian newspaper in early August carried a story about twenty-three members of the raid receiving decorations in Washington. The news shocked the crew. “Were there only twenty-three survivors? Or were the rest still overseas?” Emmens later wrote. “The plan had been that all of us would return to the United States immediately following the raid. Twenty-three was a peculiar number to mention. Maybe the article was wrong. We didn’t ask the questions because there could be no answer.”

The men grew increasingly bored and restless. The plan to have them out in three weeks never materialized, nor did the weekly updates from the embassy, leading the raiders to consider other alternatives.

“What do you think our chances would be of escaping?” York asked Emmens one day as the airmen sat on the dacha’s steps.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “It sure would be a help if we could speak the language.”

“I think there is no intention on the part of these people of letting us out of here and therefore no possibility of our own people getting us out,” York continued.

“I think you are right.”

A German reconnaissance plane appeared one day in the skies high overhead, followed by the thunder of antiaircraft fire from Penza that sent a piece of shrapnel through the dacha’s tin roof. Russian antiaircraft guns began to fire regularly as the war moved closer.
Pravda
ran a map in August that showed that Saratov had been bombed, a city not far from Penza. This occurred around the time that an official package arrived with long underwear, a sign that the airmen weren’t going home anytime soon.

Mike disappeared for most of the day on August
15, returning that night just as the raiders finished dinner.

“We are leaving,” he announced. “We must pack everything right after we have finished eating.”

“Where are we going?” York asked.

“You’ll find out!”

THE JAPANESE PULLED THE
eight captured raiders from the
Green Hornet
and the
Bat out of Hell
from their Tokyo cells on June 16. The wounds on Chase Nielsen’s battered shins had long since grown infected, as had the myriad bedbug and lice bites that covered his body after fifty-two days in a filthy cell. For once the navigator wasn’t blindfolded, and he stood blinking in the bright sunlight. When his eyes adjusted, he spotted his fellow fliers. The aviators couldn’t talk but flashed each other grins and the thumbs-up sign. The Japanese loaded the trussed-up Americans aboard an overnight train south to Nagoya. “The coal soot,” DeShazer recalled, “made us look as though we had been living in a pig sty.” Guards in Nagoya prodded them up the gangway of a small ship bound for the Chinese port of Shanghai. On their June 19 arrival guards once again blindfolded the aviators and carted them off to the infamous Bridge House jail, better known to most as the “dreaded ‘Hell Hole’ of Shanghai.”

Located off Szechwan Road in the heart of Shanghai, the cream-colored Bridge House served as the headquarters of the Special Service Section of the gendarmerie. The Japanese took over the seven-story stone apartment building in 1937, converting the basement and ground floor into primitive cells made of wood and concrete where “the walls,” one captive recalled, “oozed a cold, clammy moisture.” Up to forty prisoners crowded into each cell, the only contents a corner bucket that served as a latrine. A single overhead light burned day and night. Guards forbade any talking and forced prisoners to either kneel or sit cross-legged all day. Only at night could the captives lie down, but even then conditions were miserable. “We all slept, most of the men with large pus-filled sores covering their thin-clad bodies, packed like sardines against each other on the hard wooden and damp concrete floor,” recalled American Alfred Pattison. “So small was the sleep space that when one man moved all men had to move with him.”

Prisoners broiled in the summer heat
and froze throughout the winter. A starvation diet of watery rice and a few ounces of bread caused fillings to fall out of teeth, and some inmates suffered vision loss. One Chinese prisoner starved to death after going twenty-five days without food. Filth was another constant. There were no baths, no haircuts, no shaves. Prisoners filed down their fingernails by rubbing them against the concrete walls. The Japanese refused to provide females with sanitary napkins, leaving them with bloodstained legs and dresses that served as a source of endless amusement for the guards. Fleas, lice, and centipedes swarmed the cells, and rats often tugged at the hair of sleeping captives. Disease was rampant, from dysentery and tuberculosis to leprosy. The communal latrine forced others to witness the horrific and untreated venereal diseases some prisoners suffered. “I had no idea when entering Bridge House,” recalled one captive, “that I was going to one of the worst prisons in the world.” An American intelligence report was more blunt: “it is truly a hell on earth.”

“The guards,” one captive later testified, “seemed to be have been selected for their callowness and brutality.” The Japanese punched one prisoner so hard it drove his dentures into the roof of his mouth, while guards bashed others with rifle butts, hung them up by their thumbs, and bent fingers backward until the digits snapped. Captors used cigarettes to burn the bottoms of hands and feet—some as many as five hundred times—and even shoved them up nostrils. “It isn’t so bad,” one American would later tell reporters, “because the membranes inside the nose put out the cigarette and you don’t feel pain very long.”

Some guards jammed metal and chemical spikes under fingernails, set up mock firing squads, and waterboarded prisoners, adding pepper, salt water, and even kerosene to the mix. A few of the tortures were perverse. One of the guards played with a captive’s genitals, squeezing his testicles, while others burned the skin off a prisoner’s penis and testicles with a cigar. Another prisoner endured iodine poured down his urethra. “The torture chambers were immediately overhead,” recalled William Bungey, a British civilian. “We could hear the cries of the victims day and night.” “The screams,” added another, “were so terrifying that I had to put my fingers into my ears to try not to hear.”

“Are you a Christian?” one of the torturers asked an American prisoner, who answered in the affirmative
. “Then let’s see if your God can help you now.”

The Japanese burned a cross on the prisoner’s chest with a cigarette.

A British employee of Shanghai Telephone Company, Henry Pringle, endured 114 days at the Bridge House in 1942, during which time he suffered one of the prison’s more notorious forms of torture. “I was seized and strapped down on two benches,” Pringle would later tell war crimes investigators. “Three pairs of handcuffs were used to secure my feet to the benches and thin cords were used to tie down my body and arms. My shirt was then opened and water was sprayed over my stomach, face and chest, after which the man named Suzuki applied an electrical shocking electrode to my body, one electrode being placed on my navel and the other alternately on the nipples, lips, throat, ears, nose and head. The pain was excruciating. My torturers seemed to be highly amused at my cries and contortions as they roared with laughter.”

American journalist John Powell, the editor of
China Weekly Review
, spent five months there after the outbreak of the war. His weight plummeted from 145 pounds to just 70, while his bare feet froze and turned gangrenous, forcing doctors to later amputate both up to the heels. “I wouldn’t say it was terrible,” Powell said upon his release. “We got off with our lives.” Not everyone would be so lucky, including British officer William Hutton, imprisoned in a nearby interrogation substation at 94 Jessfield Road. The Japanese beat him, stripped him naked, and hogtied him so tight the cords bit into his flesh. Hutton went mad in just two weeks. “He was in a pitiable condition, stark and staring, filthy and stank,” recalled fellow prisoner John Watson. “Hutton was dripping saliva at the mouth, trying to imitate various animals.”

He died two days later.

To the eight captured Tokyo raiders, Bridge House was now home. The Japanese forced the new arrivals into cell no. 6, already packed with fifteen other prisoners of various races and nationalities. Guards would move the others out after several days—no doubt to isolate the raiders as well as limit knowledge of their presence. Until then, the exhausted airmen searched out spots to sit on the floor of the filthy cell, which measured barely twelve feet by fifteen feet. The poor health of the other prisoners shocked the airmen. “A Jap and a Chinese were on the floor, nearly dead from dysentery
,” Nielsen later wrote. “It was impossible to sleep. We simple leaned against each other and tried to rest.”

Allied prisoners in neighboring cells were anxious to learn more about new arrivals, all but one of whom appeared to stand well over six feet tall. The men were clearly aviators, dressed in khaki trousers and windbreakers. All sported heavy beards; some of the prisoners would recall George Barr’s bright red hair.

Frederick Opper, an associate editor with the
Shanghai Evening Post
who had languished in the Bridge House since March, listened as the newcomers attempted to make conversation with others in the neighboring cell.

“What’s Shanghai like?” he heard one of the men ask. “I always wanted to see it but not this way.”

The next morning guards led the new prisoners to a spigot outside. Prisoners in nearby cells struggled for a glimpse. As the raiders walked past Opper’s cell, one used his hand to imitate a bomber, swooping down just as he said “Tokyo.”

“We grinned cheerfully and gave them a thumbs up signal,” Opper later wrote. “They grinned back, about the sole means of communication we had.”

Since the raiders had already confessed, the Japanese spared them the torture other prisoners endured but little else of Bridge House’s misery and discomfort. “The building was infested with rats, centipedes, lice, bed bugs, fleas, every other kind of bug that walked, crawled or jumped,” Nielsen recalled, noting that the rats soon proved to be the worst. “We maintained a guard at night to keep them from biting us. They’d crawl into our cell, big fellows and awfully bold. We didn’t try to kill them because we were afraid they’d crawl away and die, and that would make the stench worse. One big female rat had a lot of little ones and we used to watch them crawling around.”

Guards liked to wake up the raiders at night and force them to stand. Other times the airmen witnessed them beat fellow prisoners. One even hit Bobby Hite once with a sheathed sword. “It was the first time that I had ever been in such a wicked environment,” DeShazer recalled. “There is bad in America, but the bad in America does not begin to compare with that which we observed.” The distress was exacerbated each night when the raiders heard American
music waft across the bustling city, the same popular tunes the fliers would have heard that last night in San Francisco at the Top of the Mark. Tears welled up in Hite when he heard the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” “It was hard to take,” he recalled, “and think that here we were, we could hear music like that, and then to realize where we were and what had happened to us.”

Days turned into weeks and then months as the fliers wallowed in filth. Hite reminded Farrow that he had invited him to join his crew. “Bill, I don’t know,” Hite told him one day. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come with you.” The fliers were at least thankful to be together. “We would have gone stark mad if it were not for the opportunity to talk,” Nielsen later wrote, though the airmen had to be careful not to be overheard. “We talked plenty. We used to talk about football and baseball and things we’d done in our lives, and we talked about food. Brother, how we talked about food. We’d plan meals we’d order if we ever got out—thick, juicy steaks and plenty of pie and ice cream.” The uncertain future prompted deeper discussions. “We talked a lot about religion,” Nielsen recalled. “A fellow thinks a lot about God at a time like that.”

Diarrhea coupled with a diet of wormy soup and stale bread continued to weaken the airmen, many of whom soon developed beriberi, a painful thiamine deficiency caused by malnutrition. Hite found that he could press on his leg and leave a dimple in the muscle; another one of the airmen went seventeen days without a bowel movement. Dysentery hit Dean Hallmark hard in the middle of August. “He had no control over his bowels whatsoever and he could hold nothing in his stomach,” Nielsen said. “We had to continuously help him. He was just at a state where he didn’t know he was there or what was going on.”

The men had lost so much weight and body fat that sitting for hours on the hard wooden floors proved painful, causing boils to erupt on their hips. To help comfort Hallmark, who was ravaged by aches and fever, the men took turns holding his head in their laps. “He wanted me to sing songs to him,” Hite recalled. “He wanted to remember all of the tunes and things that he had heard through the years.”

Faced with their precarious fate, the raiders scratched a message on the wall of cell no. 6, one that a British prisoner would later commit to memory and relate to investigators upon his release in August 1945:

“Notify Chief of Army Air Corps, Washington, D.C.”