Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (76 page)

The four convicted Japanese landed in Tokyo’s Sugamo Prison to serve their sentences, where the former general Sawada lobbied American officials to release Okada and Tatsuta, who he argued were only following his orders. The duo’s incarceration, he wrote, tormented his “heart day and night.” “Since this was the tribunal of the Japanese Army which I had ordered and summoned in accordance with the order from my superior,” Sawada wrote in 1949, “I should be responsible for all the consequences arising therefrom, and it has been a tremendous pain for me that my subordinates were punished for that matter in line with myself.” Sawada, Okada, and Tatsuta would walk free on January 9, 1950, having served a total of just 1,365 days.

Yusei Wako was found guilty again in December 1948, this time for overseeing the beheading of eight B-29 airmen in June 1945—he personally decapitated two—and for his assistance with the execution of eight others that August. The commission this time sentenced Wako to death, a punishment Douglas MacArthur commuted in July 1950 to life in prison at hard labor. Even then he would not serve his full term, but was paroled in 1956, serving just six months for each man he was convicted of helping kill. Wako’s prison record shows he spent most of that time crafting musical instruments and farming. On an application for clemency the prisoner who had helped kill twenty American airmen outlined a future career path that in all likelihood startled the review board. “I intend,” Wako wrote, “to become a lawyer, public prosecutor or a judge.”

WAR CRIME INVESTIGATORS
likewise doggedly pursued former general Sadamu Shimomura, who had replaced
Sawada as the commander of the Thirteenth Army on the eve of the raiders’ execution, reportedly personally signing the airmen’s death order. In December 1945, investigators orally requested that American authorities in Tokyo arrest him. General Douglas MacArthur’s staff refused. Not unlike other suspected war criminals whom American officials would prove reluctant to prosecute, Shimomura had become a valuable asset in postwar Japan. He served as the nation’s minister of war, working closely with American authorities to demobilize the army. He had given an important speech in October, publicly falling on the sword as he argued that Japanese military leaders must apologize for all of the military’s transgressions. “It is common knowledge now that extermination of militarism and the military clique is being voiced both at home and abroad,” he said. “Looking back on the past, this is only a natural consequence.”

To American investigators in China, none of this mattered. If Shimomura played a role in the execution of the raiders, he should be prosecuted. In a January 3 memo Lieutenant Colonel John Hendren Jr., an assistant staff judge advocate, argued that evidence showed Shimomura had replaced Sawada at the time of the execution and had even issued the instructions to Tatsuta for how the deaths should occur. It would be unfair to try only Sawada if both generals were culpable in the trial and execution. “It is believed that if permission is not given to try Shimomura that Sawada should not be tried,” Hendren argued. “If these two top Generals are left out of this case it will appear to the Military Commission and the public that we are attempting to hold junior officers for offenses which they were ordered to commit on command of higher authority.”

War crimes investigators filed a formal request for Shimomura’s arrest on January 11, 1946. MacArthur’s staff again refused, this time claiming the case would be considered from an “international standpoint.” Investigators filed a second arrest request on January 23 and followed up with a visit to Japan, arousing the international press. Now MacArthur’s staff had no choice but to allow the arrest of Shimomura, who was interned at Sugamo Prison on February 9, 1946. Rather than hand him over to stand trial in March alongside the other four defendants, MacArthur’s staff put up a fierce defense of the former general, tracking down hotel receipts and witnesses
who might exonerate him. In the end, Brigadier General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s chief of intelligence, fell back on the defense that Shimomura was simply following orders. “As the final decision for the execution of the fliers had been made by Imperial General Headquarters, Tokyo, on 10 October,” Willoughby wrote in a memo, “the signature of the Commanding General 13th Army on the execution order was simply a matter of formality.”

Willoughby’s argument, of course, was the same made by the other four defendants, yet the court still tried and convicted them. His long delay did in the end accomplish its goal. “The War Crimes mission in China is about to close,” Major Ralph Hinner wrote in September. “Further action by this Headquarters with respect to trial of General Shimomura is no longer possible. Accordingly, this Headquarters is not disposed to take any action in the case.” Willoughby personally oversaw the details of Shimomura’s secret release, which involved bypassing the required written instructions from the Japanese government as well as the stealth elimination of his name from the prison’s daily reports. A private sedan would pick him up at the prison and drive him to his home in Ichikawa at noon on March 14, 1947, before officials sent him away “to a quiet place for a few months.” The man who had allegedly inked his name to the execution order of Doolittle’s raiders in the end would never serve another day in jail. “It is directed,” orders stated, “that this release be given no publicity.”

EPILOGUE

Immortality will always be theirs.

—HOWARD PYLE, ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT TO DWIGHT EISENHOWER, 1955

ON THE EVE OF
the Tokyo raid, as his seventy-nine men crowded around him on board the
Hornet
, Doolittle had made a promise. “When we get to Chungking,” he told them, “I’m going to give you all a party that you won’t forget.”

But the airmen had trickled into Chungking in waves, and the party never materialized. Doolittle held a reunion in 1943 in North Africa for about two dozen of the fliers, but that was not the party he wanted to have, not the party he had promised.

So with the war over—and the last of his airmen home—Doolittle sent a letter to his raiders. “Now seems to be the right time to have our get-together and I, for one, would appreciate nothing more than a chance to swap handshakes, yarns and toasts with the old, original gang,” he wrote in November 1945. “I plan to throw a dinner with all the food you can eat and whatever liquid you choose to float the food on.”

The first reunion in Miami the weekend of December 15, 1945, started a tradition that would carry on for nearly seven decades. The responses were overwhelming as telegrams and letters clogged Doolittle’s in-box.

“I
will be there with bells on,” Davy Jones wrote. “In fact, I’m going in training this week so that I will be in good drinking shape by the time the 15th rolls around.”

“General, I want to see those men and be at that party so badly that I can taste it,” replied Shorty Manch.

“You may count on me,” wrote Ross Greening, “unless the Empire State Building falls on me.”

The prospective party gave pause to Chase Nielsen, still adjusting to his new life as a free man. “When I realize that I am the only one left of the crew on my ship,” he wrote, “I feel almost alone, but exceedingly lucky.”

Of the eighty men who roared off the
Hornet
’s deck, sixty-one had survived the war. The raid had claimed the lives of Leland Faktor, Bill Dieter, and Don Fitzmaurice. The Japanese had executed Billy Farrow, Dean Hallmark, and Harold Spatz, and Bob Meder had starved to death in prison. Twelve others had died in the war: Bob Clever, Bob Gray, Denver Truelove, Donald Smith, Richard Miller, Ken Reddy, Edwin Bain, George Larkin, Eugene McGurl, Omer Duquette, Melvin Gardner, and Paul Leonard. The last was Doolittle’s trusted crew chief, who the day after the Tokyo raid had stood amid the B-25’s wreckage on the Chinese mountainside and assured his commander he would not only make general but receive the Medal of Honor.

Doolittle was with Leonard when he was killed in 1943 in Algeria, hit by a bomb in a German attack on the airfield. “The softening point of this tragedy is that he never knew that it was coming and never knew that it hit him,” Doolittle explained to Leonard’s widow in Denver in what he later described as “the saddest letter I ever wrote.” “If he had to go it was the way he would have preferred, quick, clean and painless.” Doolittle spared her the awful reality of what the bomb did to her husband, though the horrible scene would haunt the general for decades. “I found what was left of Paul. It was his left hand off at the wrist, with a wristwatch still in place. This was all that remained of the wonderful boy who had tried to cheer me up in China in my saddest moment,” he wrote. “Paul’s loss was my greatest personal tragedy of the war.”

That April 1942 Doolittle and his raiders had accomplished the impossible, taking off at such a great distance that most knew the chance of survival was slim at best, yet the airmen still managed to bomb Japan and
escape. That more were not captured or killed is miraculous, saved only by a tailwind that pilot Harold Watson later described as the “hand of heaven.” The Tokyo raid had not only buoyed the morale of a wounded nation, but postwar records and interviews with senior Japanese leaders would reveal the raid’s effect on the plans to capture Midway, an unintended consequence that would yield the mission’s greatest success. The June 1942 battle, which cost Japan four aircraft carriers, shifted the balance of power in the Pacific, setting the stage for America’s offensive drive across the Pacific. “The carrier action at Midway,” concluded the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, “was perhaps the decisive battle of the war.”

But the raid came at great expense. Claire Chennault, leader of the Flying Tigers, later complained that the intense secrecy cost the mission all the bombers. Had he been informed of the operation, Chennault wrote, radiomen could have talked Doolittle’s men down to friendly airfields. “My bitterness over that bit of bungling,” he wrote, “has not eased with the passing years.” That in part led to the government’s deception, keeping secret the loss of the bombers and the capture of two of the crews. But the greatest toll, of course, came in the human and property losses suffered by the Chinese, a consequence of the raid that American leaders knew was a possibility yet decided was worth the risk. The estimated 250,000 Chinese killed was a by-product of the raid that drew far too little notice by the American public at the time and in the years since. “The invaders made of a rich, flourishing country a human hell,” wrote one Chinese journalist, “a gruesome graveyard, where the only living thing we saw for miles was a skeleton-like dog, who fled in terror before our approach.”

At that first reunion in Miami, the raiders swam, drank, and enjoyed the camaraderie of old friends. They returned to Miami in 1947 for a second reunion. Nielsen asked Doolittle whether he might invite the prosecutors from the war crimes trials, which had recently wrapped up in China. The party proved a raucous good time, as evidenced by the memo the following morning from the hotel’s night attendant:

The Doolittle boys added some gray hairs to my head. This has been the worst night since I worked here. They were completely out of my control.

I let them make a lot of noise in 211 but when about 15 of them with girls went in the pool at 1:00 A.M. (including Doolittle) I told them (no swimming allowed at night) Doolittle told me that he did not want to make trouble and that they were going to make one more dive and would leave. But they were in the pool until 2:30 A.M.

I went up twice more without results. They were running around in the halls in their bathing suits and were noisy up until 5:00 A.M.

Yes, it was a rough night.

More than two dozen raiders would autograph that complaint, which is now preserved in the archives of the Air Force Historical Research Agency at Maxwell Air Force Base, in Montgomery, Alabama. They had such a great time that they would continue to gather yearly until 2013, skipping only 1951 and 1966 because of the Korean and Vietnam wars. At each reunion they would reach out to the families of the men killed, reminding them that their sons were not forgotten. “Bill is here with us in spirit just as he is with you today,” they wrote to Farrow’s mother during the first reunion in Miami. “He will ever be with us through the years to come.”