When Japanese troops discovered a farmer who had helped the Doolittle flight surgeon, “soldiers wrapped him in a blanket, soaked it in kerosene, and forced his wife to set her husband on fire.” One Chinese man told the New York Times, “From some of the villagers who had managed to escape death we heard stories far too brutal and savage to relate. 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.”
Chiang Kai-shek later cabled Roosevelt about the revenge Japanese forces wrought on his people. “After they had been caught unawares by the falling of American bombs on Tokyo, Japanese troops attacked the coastal areas of China where many of the American flyers had landed. These Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman and child in those areas—let me repeat—these Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman and child in those areas.” Chiang did not exaggerate. In describing the campaign of retaliation in his memoirs, an American general later wrote, “A quarter million Chinese soldiers and civilians were killed in the three-month campaign.”
Two hundred and fifty thousand Chinese dead in three months. In six years of combat during WWII, France lost 108,000 civilians, Belgium 101,000, the Netherlands 242,000. This Japanese retaliatory operation, invisible to the world at the time, would take more lives than the later atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
But it didn’t end there. Japan was so outraged by the Doolittle Raid that it unleashed biological warfare. In 1935, the Japanese army had established the infamous Unit 731, an insidious biological research center where Japanese doctors experimented on Chinese civilians. “It was a testing ground for bacterial warfare, using captured human beings as living guinea pigs to be infected with bubonic plague, pneumonia, epidemic hemorrhagic fever, typhoid, and syphilis.” Hiroshi Matsumoto remembered how Chinese prisoners were injected with pathogens and their bodies were used as disease “incubators.” “After five to six months,” Matsumoto recalled, “these people produced the bacteria within their bodies so we were after their blood. The blood was removed by an incision in the groin vein. Every last drop was collected, with the person still—just—alive: The accompanying soldier, or the civilian war worker, stood on the chest and pressed down on the ribs, or jumped with all his weight, rather. He repeated it several times. The ribs were probably broken. I could hear them break. This way, the very last drop of blood was collected. This is what actually happened.”
In retaliation for the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese sprayed cholera, typhoid, and bubonic plague across East China, making Japan the only combatant of WWII to use biological warfare. The total number of casualties has never been determined, but the effects can be imputed from a chilling episode. “One report stated that during one assault, a last-minute change in the wind led to the death of seventeen hundred Japanese soldiers and the injury of ten thousand more.”
Not all the victims were Chinese. Eight of the Doolittle Raiders were captured by Japanese troops in China. Dean Hallmark, Bill Farrow, Harold Spatz, Chase Nielson, George Barr, Bob Hite, Jacob DeShazer, and Bob Meder would be the first of many to learn what the enemy thought of Flyboys.
“According to the Geneva Convention, all I can tell you is my name, rank and serial number,” Chase Nielson told his Japanese interrogator. The interrogator responded, “What’s the Geneva Convention? We’re fighting a war. Don’t you know that? We’re making our rules as we go.” Then the interrogator put his finger right up to Chase’s face and said, “I’ll tell you something else. I can kill you this afternoon and no one will ever know who did it.”
It is true that a Japanese representative had been one of the forty-seven signatories to the International Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War signed on July 27, 1929, in Geneva. But Japan never ratified the convention because of opposition back home. The convention condoned surrender by soldiers facing hopeless odds. Their names were to be taken and their relatives were to be told they were alive and well. But of course such rules ran counter to what the brutes running Japan’s military deemed proper. Surrender was not compatible with Yamato damashii: A young issen gorin had to fight to the death. “Even were he taken prisoner after being wounded and unable to move or unconscious, he could never again hold up his head in Japan. He and his family would be disgraced forever.” Historian Ikuhiko Hata summarized the view of the Spirit Warriors: “At the heart of the matter lay their belief that their own troops on being taken prisoner should forfeit all human rights. Inevitably this attitude was applied with equal vigor towards enemy POWs.”
Hirohito had made it clear that Japan would not respect international agreements. This was in contrast to past war declarations. At the start of the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894, Emperor Meiji had stated: “We command that our subjects make every effort in the performance of their official duties to ensure that international law is not transgressed.” Meiji’s later declaration of war against Russia had included a similar injunction. Officers were treated especially well. As one scholar has noted, “During the war 79,367 Russians were taken prisoner. They were detained in 29 POW camps throughout Japan and were well treated. Russian officers at the Kanazawa camp were even taken to an inn for entertainment. The Hague Convention was later to stipulate that POWs should be paid a salary equivalent to that of soldiers of the same rank in the forces of the country that was holding them. During the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian prisoners were paid double the amount paid to Japanese soldiers. After the war ended, all of the POWs were safely returned to Russia.” And Japan’s WWI declaration against Germany had said, “We also command all our competent authorities to make every effort in pursuance of their respective duties to attain the national objectives within the bounds of international law.”
But after Meiji, the Spirit Warriors ignored international conventions. Hirohito’s rescript declaring war against America stated, “The entire nation with a united will shall mobilize its total strength so that nothing will miscarry in the attainment of our war aims.” A call for compliance with international law was intentionally omitted. Japan’s first director of the POW Information Bureau said, “In the war with Russia, we gave them excellent treatment in order to gain recognition as a civilized country. Today such a need no longer applies.”
To the Japanese soldier, who was under orders to kill himself rather than surrender, an enemy POW had no honor. After all, he had surrendered alive when the honorable thing would have been to commit suicide. The emperor’s soldiers were astonished when captured American GIs requested that their families be notified through the Red Cross. The Japanese wondered what kind of lowlifes could raise their hands above their heads and then allow their parents to learn of their humiliation.
Glen Berry of Drinkman, Oklahoma, was twenty-six years old when he endured the horrors of the Bataan Death March. Years later Berry told me, “The Japanese soldiers told us they would take their own lives rather than surrender. So they thought we were just trash.”
Another Bataan survivor, Lester Tenney, described what happened to one such piece of trash:
At one point on the march, we were ordered to double time, or run, and try to keep up with a fresh group of guards. As we passed a group of Japanese soldiers, our guards ordered us to stop. When we looked over to where the group of soldiers were, we saw an American soldier kneeling in front of a Japanese officer. The officer had his samurai sword out of a scabbard. . . . Up went the blade, then with a great artistry and a loud “Banzai,” the officer brought the blade down. We heard a dull thud, and the American was decapitated. The Japanese officer then kicked the body of the American soldier over into the field, and all of the Japanese soldiers laughed merrily and walked away.
Japanese soldiers mistreated and killed Allied prisoners as a matter of course. And they expected such treatment if they ever fell into Allied hands. Kiyofumi Kojima, finding himself hopelessly surrounded by American troops in the Philippines, was one of the few Japanese soldiers in WWII to
surrender. In camp, the Americans fed him some tinned provisions. When he finished eating, a U.S. soldier approached, holding out a shovel. Kojima remembers:
He told me to dig a hole. I turned pale. When Japanese soldiers captured enemies, they always had them dig a hole, made them kneel down, and chopped their heads off. I looked around desperately for some place to run, but all I saw was a wall of iron, so I resigned myself to my fate. I stood up shakily and started to dig. I had no strength left and the soil was as hard as a rock. My hole was very shallow. I thought, this will never be big enough for me. But the soldier took away the shovel and simply threw [in] the can I’d been eating from, and ordering me to collect the rest from the others and bury them, too. I guess I looked stunned, so he added that it was a sanitation measure.
In the eyes of their captors, Doolittle Raider Chase Nielson and his fellow Flyboys had forfeited their honor. When he and his buddies wouldn’t talk, the torture began.
“The first thing they did,” Nielson recalled, “was to put pencils between my fingers, squeezing my hands and forcing the pencils up and down causing the skin to break.” One guard would crush the Americans’ hands as hard as he could while another yanked the pencils back and forth, popping out the knuckles.
Later, Nielson was hung up on a wall with his hands handcuffed behind him. Kempetei (secret police) officer Shintaro Uno recalled using this technique on Chinese prisoners: “The most excruciating torture is to tie their hands behind their back with a string and then hang them from a wall by that cord. All their weight is borne by their shoulders. It works better than beheading or strangling. If you use this method, ninety percent of them talk.” Hanging from the wall, Nielson found the pain shooting through his entire body so severe that he passed out within minutes. But he and his fellow Flyboys still wouldn’t talk.
The Kempetei were not finished. “The guard then brought in a large bamboo pole about three inches in diameter,” Nielson remembered. “This was placed directly behind my knees. I was then made to squat on the floor in this position like a kneel. One guard had hold of each of my arms, one other guard then placed his foot on my thigh and would jump up and down causing severe pain in my knees. . . . I felt that my joints were coming apart, but after about five minutes of that my knees were so numb I couldn’t feel anything else.”
And, of course, there was the torture used by American soldiers in Teddy Roosevelt’s imperial actions in the Philippines. “I was given what they call the water cure,” Nielson remembered. “I was put on my back on the floor with my arms and legs stretched out, one guard holding each limb. A towel was wrapped around my face and water was poured on. They poured water on this towel until I was almost unconscious from strangulation, then they would let up until I’d get my breath, then they’d start all over again. I felt more or less like I was drowning, just gasping between life and death.”
Radio Tokyo beamed taunts aimed at the American merchants who had dared to dispatch Flyboys to Rising Sun land: “Two can play at the same game of bombing. You know, you raid us and we raid you. It’s all part of the war. . . . And by the way, don’t forget, America, [you can be] sure that every flier that comes here has a special pass to hell. Rest assured, it’s strictly a one-way ticket.”
Now Japan and America were even. Both had scored surprise air attacks. Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid were the two events that most determined the tenor and approach of the entire Pacific war from that point forward. Both sides were now Others to each other, eager to issue those one-way tickets to hell.
CHAPTER NINE
Airpower
The Japanese had failed fully to appreciate the strategic revolution brought about by the increased capabilities of air power.
— “U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Report,” 1946
AS American citizens delighted in Roosevelt’s Shangri-Laremarks about the Doolittle Raid, their military braced for Japan’s response. Dwight Eisenhower, then deputy chief of staff for the Pacific and Far East, asked his intelligence arm for their assessment. They told him this loss of face by the Japanese would certainly mean they would retaliate forcefully. Ike was warned that “Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego would become a string of Pearl Harbors. Radio stations across California were ordered off the air so their signals couldn’t be used as targets by vengeful enemy bombers, and San Francisco’s bridges were shut down. The army, theorizing that Japan would immediately send planes to drop poison, shipped six hundred thousand gas masks to the Western Defense Command.”
The Doolittle Raid also dramatically shaped Japan’s overall strategy in the Pacific. The Spirit Warriors considered themselves first and foremost protectors of the emperor, in the tradition of the “barbarian-expelling generalissimo” shogun. Now gaizin airplanes had flown directly over the royal family, enraging and humiliating military officers. In their shame, the Warriors would overreach and employ a strategy that would reverse the course of the entire war.
At the time of the raid, the Japanese army and navy were locked in a bitter debate about how best to follow up their initial successes. The army wanted to consolidate their considerable territorial gains, but the navy wanted to finish off the job begun at Pearl Harbor and eliminate the American Pacific fleet once and for all. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander of Japan’s combined fleet, had been preaching the need for a “decisive battle” at Midway Island—an American atoll eleven hundred miles due west of Oahu in the mid-Pacific—where he would finish off the Americans just as the Russians had been destroyed at Tsushima. Yamamoto argued that Jimmy’s planes could only have been delivered by a carrier sailing near Midway. By occupying Midway, he could prevent any future air raids against Tokyo.
Politically, Japanese control of Midway would threaten Hawaii with invasion and provide a valuable bargaining chip to force America to negotiate a settlement. Militarily, attacking Midway could draw the U.S. Navy into a battle it was guaranteed to lose, dwarfed by Japan’s vastly superior naval power.
Faced with the threat of further aerial assaults on the Son of Heaven, the army accepted Yamamoto’s strategy. Midway would be taken and America’s Pacific fleet would be destroyed. The faint prospect of victory Yamamoto had only dreamed of before seemed to lie only one battle away.
Yamamoto dispatched nearly two hundred ships amid pomp and ceremony on May 27, the thirty-seventh anniversary of the Battle of Tsushima. The first faint hints of the Japanese plan were detected by that pipe-smoking man in the red smoking jacket and slippers at Pearl Harbor—Joseph Rochefort, still chief of the Combat Intelligence Unit. The Japanese naval code was so complex that Rochefort and his men could only read about 15 percent of all the intercepts. Still, 15 percent was better than nothing. After the Doolittle Raid, one term was frequently picked up: “AF.” Over many sleepless nights Rochefort wondered, what—or where—was “AF”?
Rochefort had a shrewd hunch. He guessed that “AF” was Midway Island, and in early May he baited a trap. He had the small Marine garrison on Midway radio in the clear that they were running low on fresh water. Two days later, Rochefort detected a coded Japanese message that “AF” was running out of fresh water. Bingo! Midway, he concluded, was the next target for the Japanese navy. Rochefort’s discovery would prove to be the single most potent intelligence success of the Pacific war.
On June 4, 1942, Japanese carrier planes from the naval force tangled with an attacking squadron of low-flying U.S. Navy carrier planes. Unbeknownst to the Japanese, an additional squadron of high-flying U.S. dive-bombers followed behind. The Japanese Zeroes were down low at deck level fighting off the first wave, so the second wave found the skies clear for an attack. The gods were with the Americans once again.
“All the way down there wasn’t a gun turned on me, nobody saw me coming,” remembered pilot Dick Best. “I pulled up and saw the first hit. . . . There was a solid column of smoke from bow to stern, at least 200 feet high above her. . . . It must have been an inferno below deck. . . . A carrier under des
truction. I can see it in my mind right now, the most impressive sight of the day.” In just five minutes the U.S. dive-bombers mortally wounded three Japanese carriers; they sank a fourth the next day. At Midway, Flyboys sunk four of the six carriers that just six months earlier had attacked Pearl Harbor.
Yamamoto’s gamble was a bust, and Japan had lost the “decisive battle.” Before Midway, Japan had six large fleet-class carriers to America’s three. With the loss of four aircraft carriers, damage to six other ships, and the loss of more than three hundred Japanese planes and their most experienced pilots, the Japanese navy was crippled. Five minutes of applied American airpower had turned the tide of the Pacific war. As historian David Kennedy has noted, “In the two years following Midway, Japanese shipyards managed to splash only six additional fleet carriers. The United States in the same period added seventeen, along with ten medium carriers and eighty-six escort carriers. Such numbers, to be repeated in myriad categories of war materiel, spelled certain doom for Japan, though it was still a long and harrowing distance in the future.”
But there were costs. During the Battle of Midway, Japanese sailors plucked three Flyboys from the water. Two were weighted down with chains and thrown overboard. The third was hacked to death with a fire ax.
On August 28, 1942, the eight Flyboys who had been captured after the Doolittle Raid were brought to a courthouse to stand “trial” for their “crimes.” “They announced, in Japanese, our so-called sentence,” Bob Hite said. “We didn’t really know what it was. The interpreter said, ‘They asked me not to tell you.’ With that, they dismissed us.”
On October 14, twenty-eight-year-old Dean Hallmark of Robert Lee, Texas; twenty-three-year-old Bill Farrow of Darlington, South Carolina; and twenty-one-year-old Harold Spatz of Lebo, Kansas, were told they had been found guilty of war crimes and would be executed the next day. The boys could not believe their ears.
Flyboys Page 14
