Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (75 page)

Chase Nielsen likewise wrote to Bill Dieter’s mother in California, relaying the details of the
Green Hornet
’s violent crash in the Chinese surf, the injuries Dieter and Donald Fitzmaurice sustained, and the burial of the airmen the next day on the sandy knoll overlooking the beach. “Bill and Fitz were two simply grand fellows, and although we had not been acquainted very long we were all like brothers,” Nielsen wrote. “I have spent many hours in sorrow thinking of my dear departed friends. I know that you too Mrs. Dieter have been carrying a heavy burden. But I know the Gracious God who comforts all will help you to bear up under your load. I also pray that he bless you in every way and that he grant Bill the privilege of preparing a beautiful place of meeting and rest for all his loved ones in the Kingdom where we all will meet again.”

Nielsen gave the location of Dieter’s and Fitzmaurice’s graves to American forces in China in 1945. The Graves Registration bureau contacted him the next year, asking whether he would help find the remains. That spring Nielsen traveled back to that spot along the Chinese coast. Armed with shovels the men dug through the sand and found the wooden boxes the fliers had used to bury their friends four years earlier. “In each coffin with the remains,” Nielsen wrote Dieter’s mother, “was enough of their flying jackets left so as to identity each by the name plates.” May Dieter had grown close with Donald Fitzmaurice’s mother over the years as the women awaited word of what happened to their boys. The two mothers decided on a final request, which May Dieter outlined in a letter to Doolittle. The airmen had died together in the surf that night after the raid, and for the last four years they had lain side by side in graves in China. It would be a shame now to separate them. “Do you think,” she added, “it would be too much to ask to have them in Arlington?”

American investigators after the war set out on what might have first appeared a quixotic hunt to track down the remains of the executed fliers. Despite Tatsuta’s promise to the airmen that their ashes would be returned to the United States, the cremated remains of Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz languished in a Shanghai funeral parlor, where the Japanese had placed them on November
14, 1942. When the war ended, uniformed Japanese troops visited the funeral home, changing Hallmark’s name to J. Smith, Spatz’s name to E. L. Brister, and Farrow’s to H. E. Gande, a move designed to cover up the crime. A fellow prisoner and translator, Caesar Luis Dos Remedios, who worked with war crime investigators, located the remains. Though the Japanese had changed the names, Remedios discovered, no one had changed the birth dates, allowing investigators to link the ashes back to the raiders. Each box, nine inches long, nine wide, and twelve deep—covered by a flag—would serve as prosecution Exhibit C in the case of the United States of America versus Shigeru Sawada, Yusei Wako, Ryuhei Okada, and Sotojiro Tatsuta.

All that was left was to find the remains of Meder, who had died in Nanking on December 1, 1943. Captain Jason Bailey, a former agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation from San Francisco, visited Kiangwan in late September, accompanied by journalist Irene Kuhn. Guards had just invited the American investigators to enjoy a cup of green tea when Captain Maszumi Shimada appeared, clutching a small wooden box wrapped in a fine white silk. The silk was open at the top, and a label stenciled in black read, “USA Commissioned Officer’s Ashes.”

“These are Captain Meder’s ashes,” Shimada announced. “They have just arrived from Nanking. You will take them back to Shanghai with you, perhaps?”

Bailey was shocked. “None of us,” Kuhn later wrote, “was prepared for this.”

“Give the box to me,” Bailey ordered.

Shimada handed him the box, which he placed on his knees and stared down at silently. “I put out my hands,” Kuhn wrote. “Perhaps because I was a woman responding to some inner urging that, miraculously, this young man understood, he handed me the box without a word. I cradled it in my arms on my lap and bent my head to hide my face from the inquisitive Japanese around us. Not for worlds would I have let them see the tears that were in my eyes and that I was fighting desperately to hold back.”

The Japanese produced a second box, this one wrapped in unbleached muslin, which Bailey demanded opened. Shimada’s aide untied the muslin knot, opened the top, and handed the box to Bailey. Inside he found Meder’s personal effects.

“A book of traveller’s checks, $10 denomination each, Bank of
America, San Francisco,” Bailey read, pulling the items out one by one.

“A personal check book, National Bank of Fort Sam Houston. Last check, according to the stub, made out to the U.S.S.
Hornet
Mess—for $17,” he said. “The stub just ahead of that shows he drew a check to the Midland Mutual Life Insurance Co. for $21.25—premium on his life insurance policy. That was on February 2, 1942.”

Bailey produced a membership card to the Round Up Room of the Temple Hotel in Pendleton, Oregon, the home of the Seventeenth Bombardment Group, as well as a Phi Kappa Tau fraternity card from Meder’s days at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He also found a compass, comb, and Social Security card. “There was a picture of a very pretty girl,” Kuhn wrote, “smiling out at us from the discolored paper in the mildewed leather case the young Lieutenant had carried with him until the last.”

The raiders’ remains were eventually brought back home. Harold Spatz was laid to rest at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu. Hallmark, Farrow, and Meder’s ashes were buried in Arlington. Herb Macia captured the scene in a letter to Hallmark’s mother after he laid roses from his own garden on his friend’s grave. “Dean is buried between Bob Meder and Bill Farrow,” he wrote. “Their graves lie under a beautiful tree which shades and protects them.”

With the war finally over and the guns now silent, America and its allies convened the International Military Tribunal of the Far East, the Pacific counterpart to the Nuremburg Trials, which prosecuted German political and military leaders for atrocities. This years-long legal process ultimately led to the investigation and prosecution of more than five thousand Japanese defendants, including some of those involved in the trial and execution of the Doolittle raiders. Authorities arrested Hideki Tojo and Shunroku Hata, the former commander the China Expeditionary Army, both of whom would stand trial for other war crimes. Hajime Sugiyama, the former Army chief of staff and vocal proponent of the airmen’s execution, shot himself days after the war ended. Prosecutor Itsuro Hata had also died; so had Chief Judge Toyoma Nakajo.

Authorities arrested Shigeru Sawada. Hata had ordered the former commander of the Thirteenth Expeditionary Army in China to appoint the military tribunal that prosecuted the airmen. Investigators likewise arrested tribunal judges Ryuhei
Okada and Yusei Wako as well Sotojiro Tatsuta, the warden and executioner. The four defendants stood trial together at the Ward Road Jail in Shanghai in what prosecutor Lieutenant Colonel John Hendren Jr. told reporters would be an “open and shut case.” Opening statements began the morning of March 18, 1946. Unlike the case against the raiders, which had lasted barely half an hour, this one stretched on for nearly a month. Defendants were provided counsel, access to exhibits, and the opportunity to cross-examine witnesses. Defense lawyers even flew to Tokyo to search out witnesses and collect evidence. The record of the proceedings along with exhibits would ultimately run to some 750 pages and include a wide range of testimony, from Hallmark’s cellmates at the Bridge House to a doctor who described Meder’s death of malnutrition and Japanese teachers who witnessed the raid. Court members even visited the cemetery where the raiders were shot.

Nielsen served as the prosecution’s star witness, noting in a letter to Doolittle how the defendants cringed when he entered the courtroom to testify. A photo of Tatsuta bowing to him would later run in newspapers nationwide. “I sit here with tears in my eyes,” Nielsen wrote, “when I think what has happened to the ones who were in the Jap prison camps, and feel that I want to do what little I can to help those who came back and to help prosecute those who were responsible for the executing of the others.” Nielsen testified for several days, recounting in detail the plans and training for the mission, Doolittle’s strict orders to avoid all nonmilitary targets as well as his personal recollections of the raid. The
Green Hornet
’s navigator then recounted in painful detail the torture and punishment he and the others suffered after their capture in China, from the beatings and waterboarding to their forced confessions.

George Barr contributed testimony from Schick General Hospital in Iowa, a forty-three-page transcript ultimately included in the record. Hite and DeShazer in Washington likewise provided a joint four-page affidavit. Doolittle sat for questions at the Pentagon, resulting in a three-page transcript for the record in which he denied that any of his men had intentionally targeted schools or hospitals, as the Japanese had claimed. “Crews were repeatedly briefed to avoid any action that could possibly give the Japanese any ground to say that we had bombed or strafed indiscriminately,” Doolittle testified. “Specifically, they were told to stay away from hospitals, schools
, museums and anything else that was not a military target.” He did concede that Japan’s dense cities made it difficult to guarantee no civilian casualties. “It is quite impossible to bomb a military objective that has civilian residences near it without danger of harming the civilian residences as well,” Doolittle said. “That is a hazard of war.”

Prosecutor Robert Dwyer in his closing statement addressed the fallacy of the trial that had condemned some of the raiders to death and others to life in prison. “In all my life I have never seen, and I doubt whether I have even read, of any trial which was quite the mockery of justice that this one was,” he said. “The evil began when these men were placed before a tribunal, a tribunal of any kind, and secondly, once they were placed before it they had no more chance or opportunity of a fair and honest trial than I have with my right hand to stem the fall of Niagara’s waters, and these men having paid the supreme penalty, I say they stand here in spirit.” The prosecution asked the commission for the maximum punishment. “We have charged these men with the violations of the laws of custom and war,” he concluded. “We have proven it by a wealth of evidence and we close by asking for the death penalty against all four accused.”

The defense lawyers, in contrast, blamed the trial and execution of the raiders on officers higher up the chain of command as well as on Japan’s passage of the so-called Enemy Airmen’s Act. The defendants had simply followed orders. “Every detail was decided in Tokyo and the defendants in this case in their respective official capacity acted only mechanically,” Shinji Somiya argued. “They were nothing but the men of straw manipulated at the tip. They had entirely no freedom of will to do or not to do.” In his closing statement the lawyer begged the justices to show mercy, asking them to remember the words from the Bible’s book of Matthew: “I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.”

After deliberating for two days, the five-member commission decided to spare the lives of the defendants, agreeing that the men had only followed orders. “The offenses of each of the accused resulted largely from obedience to the laws and instructions of their Government and their Military Superiors,” the commission concluded. “They exercised no initiative to any marked degree.
The preponderance of evidence shows beyond reasonable doubt that other officers, including high governmental and military officials, were responsible for the enactment of the Ex poste Facto ‘Enemy Airmen’s Law’ and the issuance of special instructions as to how these American Prisoners were to be treated, tried, sentenced and punished. The circumstances set forth above do not entirely absolve the accused from guilt. However, they do compel unusually strong mitigating considerations, applicable to each accused in various degrees.”

The commission sentenced Sawada, Okada, and Tatsuta each to five years of hard labor. Wako received nine years, the tribunal reasoning that since he had prior legal training he was in a better position to recognize the airmen’s bogus confessions, yet he had accepted them without question. War criminals who could have swung at the end of a rope would instead walk free in just a few years. Although unable to increase the punishments, the reviewing authority blasted the weak sentences in August 1946. “The Commission by awarding such extremely lenient and inadequate penalties committed a serious error of judgment,” the review found. “It is clear that when they found the accused guilty of the capital offenses of mistreatment and murder under the laws of war, the penalties should have been commensurate with such findings.”

Reporters who covered the trial noted that the defendants appeared impassive as the commission read the lenient sentences, even as the Japanese defense counsel wept with surprise. A member of the defense team, Moritada Kumashiro, wiped away tears before addressing the court. “On behalf of the Japanese Counsel, I would like to express my hearty thanks to this Commission to the fair and sympathetic verdict in the case,” Kumashiro said with a choked voice. “We deeply appreciate everything that has been done.” The punishment outraged Americans across the nation. “Have you any comments on leniency court martial showed Japanese murderers of your son. Please wire collect,” the managing editor of the
Philadelphia Daily News
cabled Hallmark’s parents in Texas. “We will be glad to print any criticism you wish to make.” A handwritten note in the Hallmark family files captured the anguish of the airman’s mother. “In my estimation the representatives of our country have fallen down in avenging the murder of our son. I am amazed at the light sentence given the murders. We have heard from people all over the nation and they feel the same,” she wrote. “This won’t ever be forgotten.”

Few were as outraged as Chase Nielsen,
who had returned to China on a mission to seek justice for his friends. He promised Hallmark’s mother that he planned to protest the sentences with Doolittle, his senator, and even President Truman. “I thought if I went back to Shanghai to testify it would help but it looks as though I’ve been made a fool of,” he wrote. “I’ll do all I can Mrs. Hallmark as the death of my three buddies by execution and the loss of three more through the raid, means much to me and a 5 to 9 year sentence is not a just one.” Nielsen appeared to have calmed down almost two weeks later when he wrote to Dieter’s mother. “I am sorry justice could not see fit to even its sides for the Mothers and families of the three executed,” Nielsen wrote. “I feel I have done all in my power, and feel I have lost, but justice will be meted out some day yet.”