Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (65 page)

The Japanese finally came for them
on August 28, after the airmen had endured seventy days in Bridge House. Hallmark was by then too weak even to walk, so Billy Farrow and Bobby Hite carried him out on a stretcher, loading the Texan into the back of a truck. The Japanese transported the handcuffed raiders to Kiangwan Military Prison on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Guards marched the fliers into a courtroom that measured approximately thirty feet by sixty at about 2:30 p.m. Lieutenant Colonel Toyoma Nakajo, who served as chief judge of the Thirteenth Army military tribunal, perched behind a desk on a dais. On either side sat associate judges First Lieutenant Yusei Wako and Second Lieutenant Ryuhei Okada. Prosecutor Major Itsuro Hata and a court reporter flanked the judges, while armed guards stood watch in the rear and at the doors along both sides of the courtroom.

Hallmark remained on his stretcher, his condition so poor that Nielsen suspected he didn’t know what was happening. “The flies buzzed around and covered his face,” the navigator recalled. “He was too weak to brush them away.”

George Barr likewise was so exhausted that he collapsed, prompting the Japanese to provide the red-haired navigator a chair. The other six airmen stood, but after seventy days in a cell, they all struggled with balance.

The airmen were not provided with any defense counsel or allowed to call any witnesses. No one even informed them of the charges against them or offered them the opportunity to enter a plea. “As a matter of fact,” Nielsen would later tell war crimes investigators, “we didn’t even know it was a court martial.”

The judges ordered each man to describe his education and military training. The airmen mumbled
through. Fellow prisoner Caesar Luis Dos Remedios, whose father was Portuguese and mother Japanese, served as the translator.

Barely half an hour into the proceedings Hata made his brief closing argument. “It is evident that they are guilty in a view of military law,” the prosecutor said. “Therefore I request that the penalty be death.”

All three judges agreed.

“What is it?” Nielsen asked the interpreter of the punishment.

“The judge has ordered that you not be told of your sentence.”

Guards ushered the seven healthier prisoners into cells no. 2 through no. 8 at Kiangwan Military Prison, while Hallmark returned alone to cell no. 6 at Bridge House, now occupied mostly by Chinese and a few Russian prisoners. His health continued to deteriorate. Dysentery had reduced Hallmark’s five-foot-eleven-inch frame to a skeleton; his eyes were sunken and his cheekbones protruded above his filthy beard. He spent his days lying on the floor, dependent upon fellow prisoners to lift him onto the latrine. “His bowels,” recalled his cellmate Alexander Hindrava, “would just move themselves.” When pressed by war crime investigators to describe Hallmark’s weight, Hindrava would later note that he weighed “only as much as his bones.”

The seven other raiders settled into individual cells at Kiangwan that measured five feet wide and nine deep, with floors made of wood, walls of concrete, and a single window eight feet off the ground. A hole in the corner served as the latrine. Prisoners had a grass mat and several blankets to sleep on—albeit infested with lice and fleas—while rations consisted of white rice and soup three times a day. Each man was allowed a bath once a week and a haircut every thirty to forty-five days, though the fliers still wore the same tattered uniforms from the mission. Guards allowed the raiders to be outside for half an hour a day, but the weakened men had little energy for exercise. “We had nothing to read, no one to talk to, nothing to write with,” recalled Hite and DeShazer. “Torture isn’t limited to physical punishment. Solitary confinement in a filthy little cell can be more horrible than even the most fiendish physical torments.”

As the raiders languished in prison, Japanese military leaders wrestled with the question of their punishment. Ten days after the attack Hideki Tojo sat down with his senior military leaders to determine what to do with the airmen. Tensions ran high. Admiral Osami Nagano, the Navy chief of staff, had watched the attack
unfold in Tokyo. “This shouldn’t happen,” he declared at the time. “This simply should not happen.” Despite the government’s best efforts to play down the raid, many in the general public remained outraged, firing off angry letters to the Navy that only added to the combustible situation and made Captain Yoshitake Miwa take to his diary to question the patriotism of such individuals: “Should they deserve to be Japanese?” In the April 30 election one anonymous voter went so far as to cast his ballot for Doolittle over Tojo, jotting down on his ballot, “North American Aircraft, Banzai!”

General Hajime Sugiyama, the Army chief of staff, humiliated that Japanese forces had failed to shoot down a single bomber, had fumed over the attack, going so far as to threaten to court-martial every single air-defense commander. For Sugiyama the question of what to do with the captured airmen had an easy answer: execute them all. He made that demand directly to Emperor Hirohito, who reprimanded him. Sugiyama likewise pressed his case to Tojo, who also found the raid reprehensible. “It was not against troops but against non-combatants, primary school students, and so forth,” Tojo later said. “We knew this, and since this was not permitted by international law, it was homicide.” Despite that view, the war minister was reluctant to execute the raiders, even as he understood the intense public pressure that the attack had provoked. “This was the first time Japan had been bombed,” Tojo testified after the war. “It was a great shock. Public feeling ran very high.”

Others shared Tojo’s reluctance, including Sugiyama’s subordinate Lieutenant General Moritake Tanabe, though the vice chief of the general staff would later change his mind, no doubt under pressure. Lieutenant General Heitaro Kimura, the vice minister of war, likewise agreed with Tojo, fearing that such executions would only jeopardize the welfare of Japanese residents in the United States. Top commanders on the ground in China—Lieutenant General Shigeru Sawada of the Thirteenth Army and General Shunroku Hata of the China Expeditionary Army—also voiced opposition, maintaining the airmen should be afforded the rights of prisoners of war. Not everyone was even convinced that the civilian deaths were intentional. Major General Ryukichi Tanaka singled out the case of the shooting of a primary school student. “I believe it was due to a mistake,” he later said. “That is, the plane took that child for a soldier or something.”

Tojo’s meeting on Tuesday, April 28, adjourned
without a decision. Sugiyama pressed forward with his plan to try the raiders in China before a military commission. General Hata not only opposed such a plan but went so far as to tell his aides that he would be as lenient as possible on the raiders. He directed his chief of staff to spell out his concerns in a letter to the vice chief of the general staff. Rather than simply write back, Sugiyama dispatched an emissary, Colonel Arisue. The colonel made it clear that Sugiyama not only demanded a trial but expected the death sentence. “Arisue was sent,” Tanaka recalled, “to notify Hata that he was to do as he was ordered and that no theory or logic on his part with reference to this case would be accepted by Tokyo.” Staff officer Colonel Masatoshi Miyano echoed Tanaka. “At no time were we permitted or were we in any position to either alter or change any of those decisions or to offer our own recommendations,” he said. “Tokyo assumed control of the entire matter.”

Japan had failed to ratify the 1929 Geneva Convention, which would have provided the airmen the traditional rights of prisoners of war. At the same time it had no legal mechanism to carry out Sugiyama’s demands. In an effort to punish Doolittle’s men and discourage any future raids, legal experts that summer drafted the Military Law Concerning the Punishment of Enemy Airmen, or what would more commonly be known as the Enemy Airmen’s Act. In a July 28 message to Hata’s chief of staff, Sugiyama’s staff asked for a delay in the airmen’s trial—and the scheduling of the subsequent execution—to make sure the law could be put in place. The ex post facto law, which went into effect on August 13, stipulated that any enemy airman who killed civilians or even destroyed private property in an air raid over Japan or its territories could be shot. As soon as the judges handed down the death sentence, Sugiyama went back to Tojo and demanded that the airmen’s executions be carried out immediately.

Tojo remained reluctant to execute all eight of the airmen. He decided to go over Sugiyama’s head. On October 3 the war minister went to see the emperor, pleading his case to Hirohito’s senior adviser Koichi Kido, who recorded the conversation in his diary. “At 11:30 Premier Tojo came to see me in my room and requested me to inform the Emperor regarding the details of the treatment of American prisoners who participated in the raid last April 18th,” Kido wrote. “From 1:05 to 1:15 I reported to the Emperor as Premier
Tojo requested.” Tojo’s message, as he later related in an affidavit for the war crime trials, was to compromise: “Being fully aware of His Majesty’s gracious concern on such matters, I, as the War Minister, after an informal report to the Throne,” he wrote, “took measures to have the death penalty of five of the prisoners commuted.”

The Japanese worked out a precise plan over the next week, spelled out in a message dated October 10 from Sugiyama to Hata. Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz would be shot, whereas the death sentences of Hite, Nielsen, Barr, Meder, and DeShazer would be reduced. “The five whose death sentences are commuted are hereby sentenced to life imprisonment. They are adjudged war criminals and as such should receive no consideration as prisoners of war,” the orders stated. “In no case will they be repatriated as prisoners of war in the event of an exchange of prisoners.”

The job of carrying out the execution fell to Sotojiro Tatsuta, Kiangwan’s warden and chief guard. Tatsuta had grown up in a poor family in Ishikawa Prefecture, on the western coast of Honshu, concluding his education after only primary school. He joined the Army in 1923 as a court reporter and worked his way up by 1938 to the post of warden. Over the course of the war the father of four—two sons and two daughters—would participate in as many as fifty executions. He now set out to prepare the logistics for one of those. On October 14 Tatsuta ordered workers in the carpentry shop of the Thirteenth Army’s regimental headquarters to build three crosses and then three coffins.

By that point, Hallmark was over the worst of his dysentery, though he still needed help just to stand and use the latrine; he was so swollen, in fact, that it was impossible to distinguish the last three toes on his feet. He repeatedly told fellow captives that if only he could leave Bridge House and go to a proper prisoner-of-war camp his health would improve. The same day workers started on the crosses, guards appeared at Hallmark’s cell door to transport him to Kiangwan. Fellow prisoners helped him out; he felt his prayers had finally been answered. That evening with the help of Remedios the warden directed Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz to sign several sheets of blank paper that would serve as receipts for the airmen’s belongings. Tatsuta then gave them additional paper on which to write final letters to loved ones back home, letters that would never be mailed. Though handwritten originals would vanish, investigators after the war would find
translated copies of the airmen’s final farewells.

Hallmark wrote to his parents and sister in Dallas. He had left Bridge House that day, believing his horrible ordeal was about to improve. Now he learned that within hours he would be shot. His shock over the sudden course of events showed. “I hardly know what to say,” the twenty-eight-year-old wrote. “They have just told me that I am liable to execution. I can hardly believe it. I am at a complete loss for words.” Hallmark asked his parents to please share the news of his fate with his friends. Even in his final hours he worried about his parents, particularly his mother, to whom he had once confided in a telegram, “All that I am or hope to be I owe to you.” “Mother you try to stand up under this and pray. And Dad you do the same and sister,” he now wrote. “I don’t know how to end this letter but will end by sending you all my love.”

Spatz wrote to his father in Kansas. His was the shortest of all the letters; just six sentences that barely totaled more than a hundred words. The twenty-one-year-old gunner told his father that he was entitled to all his personal property, which amounted to only his clothes. “I want you to know that I died fighting for my country like a soldier,” Spatz wrote. “I love you and may God bless you.”

Farrow’s letters were the most upbeat. The South Carolina native, whose father had once warned him that he lived in “a cold, hard cruel world,” had long struggled with life’s challenges, a fact that made him particularly protective of his family. “We’ve both been cheated of a decent home through our beloved drunken rot of a father,” he once wrote to his sister. “I’d fight a duel or walk through fire for you.” Farrow’s selfless instincts returned as he encouraged his mother and family to remain strong. “Here’s wishing you, Marge, all the family, and Lib a most happy future—please carry on for me—don’t let this get you down. Just remember that God will make everything right, and that I will see you all again hereafter,” the twenty-four-year-old wrote. “Life has treated us well as a whole, and we have much to be thankful for. You are, all of you, splendid Christians, and knowing and loving you has meant much in my life. So for me, and for America, be brave, and live a full, rich life, pray to God, and do your best.”

Farrow dedicated the final paragraphs of his three-page letter to his mother. “I know, Mom, that this is going to hit you hard, because I was the biggest thing in your
life—I say I am sorry not to have treated you with more love and devotion, for not giving you all that I could, and will you please forgive me? It is usually too late that we realize these things,” he wrote. “You are, I realize now, the best Mother in the world, that your every action was bent toward making me happy, that you are, and always will be, a real angel. So let me implore you to keep your chin up, like you wrote in your last letter that I always did—be brave and strong, for my sake. I love you, Mom, from the depths of a full heart.” He ended with the practical news that she could find his insurance policy in his bag. “My faith in God is complete,” he concluded, “so I am unafraid.”