Others agreed.
“The most opposition we had was from a group of Japanese kids playing on a beach,” another later quipped. “We passed over them at about twenty feet and they threw stones at us.” Even the veteran aviator Doolittle, in his more sober analysis, confessed his shock at the weak defense entrusted with guarding such an important target as Tokyo. “I was amazed at the small number of enemy fighters,” he later said. “We were opposed by only about one-tenth of the fighter opposition we had anticipated.”
The raid not only exposed Tojo’s poor decision not to employ a more rigorous domestic defense but also the complacency that had developed in the wake of months of lightning successes. “The over-all picture is one of inadequate defense,” noted one American report. “The warning system did not appear to function; interception by fighters was definitely cautious; and anti-aircraft fire, responding slowly, did not reach the intensity one would expect for so important a city as Tokyo.”
On board the bombers that flew on toward China, euphoria over having survived such a perilous mission seized some of the men. “As we paralleled the south coast of Japan, we had lunch and relaxed. It had all seemed a little unreal to me and I don’t think any of us really realized that we had just made our first real bombing run,” Carl Wildner recalled. “It had almost been like a training mission. It was a beautiful day in Japan and I felt like a tourist wanting to land and see the sights on the ground.” A similar scene played out on board Billy Farrow’s bomber. “We sang songs and kidded each other a lot about what daring young men we were,” Robert Hite and Jacob DeShazer later wrote, “because, actually, the bombing wasn’t anything at all.”
Tensions remained high for others.
“Wow!” Dean Davenport exclaimed as the Ruptured Duck rounded the southern coast of Kyushu for the push to China. “What a headache I’ve got.”
Others experienced a similar release, including mission doctor Thomas White. “About this time I sat down and had a good case of the shakes,” he remembered, “a reaction to all the excitement and suspense.”
But the excitement was far from over.
The Hari Kari-er buzzed a Japanese picket boat as the bomber headed out over the East China Sea. Gunner William Birch opened fire with the machine guns, spraying the patrol. “Just as Birch cut loose,” Reddy wrote in his diary, “our right engine began to cough & sputter, throwing flames clear out the front of the nacelle.” Greening and Reddy both hit the mixture control at the same time, which regulated the ratio of fuel and air. “It soon stopped but none too soon to suit any of us,” Reddy wrote. “I’m sure that they would have had no mercy on us if we had gone down there.”
The crew of the Whirling Dervish looked down three hours out of Tokyo and spotted two Japanese cruisers and a battleship. One of the cruisers opened fire, first with antiaircraft guns, then with the main battery. “One of the shells landed so near it sprayed water all over our plane,” gunner Eldred Scott recalled. “There I was, firing back with a .50 caliber machine gun. Might as well have had a cap pistol.”
With the added gas cans and fuel tanks empty, the airmen could smoke cigarettes, which helped ease the tension. Saylor uncapped his bottle of snakebite whiskey and took a long pull, the only time in his career he ever drank on duty. He had earned it—and he wasn’t alone. Lawson, McClure, and Thatcher toasted the mission in the cockpit of the Ruptured Duck.
As the minutes ticked past and the adrenaline wore off, attention turned to the question of fuel: would the bombers have enough to reach China? “Up until now, we had been flying for Uncle Sam, but now we were flying for ourselves,” pilot Edgar McElroy wrote. “We had not had time to think much about our gasoline supply, but the math did not look good. We just didn’t have enough fuel to make it!”
That reality now hit home for many. “My feelings of exhilaration soon evaporated and I once again felt the same stomach knot as when we left the Hornet,” added Jack Sims, Hilger’s copilot. “The odds of reaching the Chinese coast were considerably against us and we didn’t think we were going to survive with hundreds of miles to go over hostile territory, land and sea.”
Airmen furiously computed the distance and fuel consumption, then ran the numbers again, hoping against all odds. “By stretching our calculations to the utmost, we knew our gasoline would run out some 250 miles short of the Chinese mainland,” bombardier Robert Bourgeois wrote. “It seemed certain that we were headed for the end. All we could do was just fly on and hope for a miracle.”
Even Doolittle, the amazing airman who time and again had pushed himself and his aircraft to the limit, faced the same fate as his men when navigator Hank Potter informed him that he expected the bomber to run out of gas 135 miles short of China. “I saw sharks basking in the water below and didn’t think ditching among them would be very appealing,” Doolittle recalled. “Fortunately, the Lord was with us.”
“We’ve got a tail wind,” Potter suddenly announced.
The headwind the bombers had long battled now turned into a twenty-five-mile-per-hour tailwind that pushed the planes toward China, lifting the spirits of the exhausted aircrews. “For the first time since morning we knew that we had a chance of seeing the night out,” Jack Hilger confided in his diary. “We were all pleased and proud of the success of our bombing but now we were like a bunch of kids for we knew we had a chance to live long enough to tell about it.”
As the bombers closed in on China late in the afternoon, the weather began to deteriorate. The beautiful skies turned overcast as fog settled in and raindrops pelted the cockpit windshields. Visibility declined further as night approached. The low fuel light glowed on most instrument panels, rekindling earlier worries. “Chances of reaching land were almost nil,” Sims recalled. “It felt like walking the last mile.”
Doolittle feared he might not make it. “See that the raft is ready,” he ordered bombardier Fred Braemer. “We’re going to keep going until we’re dry.”
Copilot Dick Cole studied the water below. The change in color from blue to brown indicated the presence of mud and sediment, the discharge of a river. The cockpit windshield now framed a sliver of land in the distance.
“There it is,” Paul Leonard yelled. “Damned if I don’t feel like Columbus.”
The charts showed mountains as high as five thousand feet, but Doolittle didn’t trust the maps. Crossing the Chinese coast, he pulled back on the yoke, climbing up to eight thousand feet. He went on instruments and looked down at the occasional twinkle of dim lights far below, unaware that the same tailwind that had rescued him and his men from a watery grave had stymied the desperate efforts to ready the airfields. Doolittle tried to raise Chuchow on 4495 kilocycles, but got no answer. The airfield was nestled precariously in a valley twelve miles long and just two wide. “Without a ground radio station to home in on, there was no way we could find it,” Doolittle wrote. “All we could do was fly a dead-reckoning course in the direction of Chuchow, abandon ship in midair, and hope that we came down in Chinese-held territory.”
“We’ll have to bail out,” Doolittle announced to his crew, ordering Leonard to go first, followed by Braemer, Potter, and then Cole. Doolittle would jump last. “Got it?”
“Got it, Colonel,” Leonard replied.
Doolittle addressed his navigator. “When we get as close as you think we are going to get to the airfield, we will leave the airplane.”
Potter folded up the navigator’s seat and table and yanked open the hatch as Doolittle switched on the bomber’s autopilot.
The time to jump arrived.
“Get going,” Doolittle ordered.
Leonard and Braemer left the plane within seconds of each other at 9:10 p.m., followed two minutes later by Potter.
“Be seeing you in a few minutes, Dick,” Doolittle said to Cole, helping to free his copilot’s parachute from the seat and then patting him on the shoulder.
Cole hovered over the hatch, staring down at the dark void. “I was one scared turkey,” he r
ecalled. “Being in an airplane that was about to run out of fuel and looking down at the black hole that would exit you into a foreign land, in the dark of night, in the middle of bad weather was not exactly what one envisioned when enlisting.”
Cole vanished out the hatch, leaving Doolittle alone in the bomber. He had flown for thirteen hours and traveled 2,250 miles. The legendary pilot had accomplished the impossible: he had bombed the Japanese capital for the first time in that nation’s history. Doolittle thought he had enough fuel for maybe another half hour, but he couldn’t be certain. The decision was made; it was time to go.
He shut off the gas valves and dropped through the forward hatch.
The night swallowed him.
Doolittle’s jump marked the third time he had been forced to bail out of an airplane to save his life. He drifted down through the darkness worried about his ankles, which he had broken fifteen years earlier in Chile. He feared he might snap them again if he landed too hard. Doolittle hit the ground and bent his knees to cushion the blow, only to find that he had landed in a rice paddy filled with night soil, fertilizer made from human waste. He climbed out of the paddy and unhooked his parachute.
Doolittle spotted a light emanating from what appeared to be a small farmhouse. He hiked over and banged on the door, repeating the phrase that Jurika had taught him. “I heard movement inside, then the sound of a bolt sliding into place,” he later wrote. “The light went out and there was dead silence.”
Cold, wet, and filthy, Doolittle wandered on, finding a small warehouse. He went inside and discovered an elongated box perched atop two sawhorses. Peeking inside the box, he discovered a dead Chinese man. He set off again and soon came upon a water mill that offered him shelter from the rain. He spent most of the night performing light calisthenics to keep warm.
Other members of his crew endured similar experiences. Cole yanked his parachute’s rip cord so hard that he hit himself in the face and gave himself a black eye. “First you hear the roar of the airplane and then it’s just like that; it’s quiet,” he recalled. “I tried using my flashlight, but it was like being in fog, and it just reflected back. You couldn’t see anything. I thought I would be able to see the ground, but I couldn’t do it.” Cole drifted down, his chute snagging atop a pine tree. He managed to untangle it and fashioned a hammock to spend the night, grateful he had made it down safely. “I was in all one ‘scared piece,’” Cole wrote, “and I do mean scared.”
Leonard landed on the side of a hill near the top. He rolled up in his parachute and slept until morning. Potter likewise landed on a mountainside and sprained his ankle. He slipped off his parachute and spotted a path in the dark. He started down the mountain until he realized it was futile to walk out at night. The navigator stretched out under a tree, pulling his goggles over his eyes to block the rain. Braemer did the same. “Couldn’t see,” the bombardier wrote in his report. “Crawled about 20 ft. down hill, got no place, went uphill 20 ft. past chute, got no place. Came back to chute, cut some from shroud lines. Rolled up in it, put arm around bamboo tree and went to sleep.”
DEAN HALLMARK ROARED JUST fifty feet above the waves, afraid to fly any higher and risk battling a fierce headwind. The weather had started to deteriorate about a hundred miles from the Chinese coast. He pressed on even as a heavy fog soon slashed visibility to zero. The pilot of the Green Hornet planned to make landfall around Hangchow Bay, a move that would allow him to follow the river south toward Chuchow. He had long since disabled the nagging low-fuel light, hoping that he had a least a few more miles worth of gas. He asked navigator Chase Nielsen how much longer to the coast.
“Three minutes,” Nielsen answered.
Hallmark spotted the coastline through the dark and pulled back on the controls, intending to fly as far inland as possible before the crew bailed out. Bill Dieter remained in the nose, resisting Hallmark’s suggestion to climb out. “No,” the bombardier insisted. “I’d better stay down here because then if I see a building or a tree sticking up or something maybe I can warn you soon enough so you don’t run into it.”
The bomber bore down on the coast just as the left engine cut out. Seconds later the right coughed—then quit.
The Green Hornet fell silent.
“Prepare for crashing landing,” Hallmark yelled.
Nielsen didn’t even have time to buckle his safety belt. “Well,” he thought as the plane plunged. “I won’t have to use this parachute.”
The left wing struck the water first, snapping off. The fuselage then hit and the bomber’s belly split wide open, like a gutted fish. Nielsen heard Dieter scream and saw water rush up over the nose. “All went black momentarily,” the navigator recalled. “When I came to, I was standing in water up to my waist and was bleeding from gashes on my head and arms. My nose hurt and I knew it was broken. The two pilots were gone and so was Dieter from the nose section. Not only was Dean Hallmark gone but so was his seat, which had catapulted right through the windshield.”
Nielsen grabbed the crash ax and smashed out the top window of the navigator’s compartment. He climbed atop the fuselage along with copilot Bob Meder. Hallmark struggled to free himself from his cockpit chair and then joined them. “The gunner was crawling out of the back, and he was bleeding all down his face. He had a big hole in his forehead,” Nielsen recalled of Donald Fitzmaurice. “The bombardier finally came up under the wing, and he was in an awful mess. I don’t think he was using either arm.”
Meder yanked the release to inflate the life raft, but the cable broke off the air cartridge. The aviators scrambled to tie themselves together as waves battered the filleted fuselage, tossing them into the water. Hallmark ordered the men to stay together and swim to shore. The rain poured down and the waves churned. The fliers yelled out in the darkness, hoping to locate one another, but the voices soon fell silent and the men drifted. “I thought about my family,” Nielsen recalled. “I began to worry about whether my navigation had been accurate. Were we only a few miles off the coast of China or a couple hundred? I prayed that I was right but was overcome by doubt.”
Nielsen wasn’t sure where to swim. He fired his .45 automatic to alert the others, but the ammunition was water logged. He unbuckled his gun belt and let it drop. He had studied the tidal timetables on board the Hornet and assumed the seas would eventually deposit him on shore. “I figured there was no use in trying to swim because you don’t know which way you’re swimming. You can’t see the coast. You can’t see anything. And if you swim you might just be swimming toward the open ocean,” he said. “So I floated for awhile, and floated, and finally I ran into some fishing nets that had been hung on some bamboo poles about eight inches in diameter.”
Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, but Nielsen knew the nets signaled he was close to shore. He thought about waiting for the fishermen to come and retrieve him, but realized the owner of the nets might be Japanese. Nielsen swam on until he heard the sound of breakers. He put his feet down and touched the bottom. Making his way to shore, he discovered his legs wouldn’t work, so he crawled, but the waves would break over him and pull him back toward the water. He refused to give up. “I crawled until I figured I was past the tide line and then I collapsed completely,” he wrote. “I was fagged out. Everything, my mind and body, was numb. All I wanted was sleep.”
THE RUPTURED DUCK CLOSED in on the Chinese coast, skimming just fifty feet above the wave tops. The heavy fog and rain clouded the windshield and forced pilot Ted Lawson to roll back his side window to see out.
“I think we ought to go a little farther south,” navigator Charles McClure said as the bomber cruised past one of the many islands that guarded the coastline. “It must be all occupied along here. I can’t tell much about anything, with this visibility.”
The plane pressed on south as McClure’s frustration mounted. “I don’t think we’ll ever find anything this way.”
Lawson felt he had no choice but to pull up and go on instruments, a move that would
allow the crew to bail out. He eased back on the controls and the Ruptured Duck began to climb even as Lawson continued to wrestle with his decision to abandon the bomber. This was not how he had hoped to conclude what had so far been a flawless mission. A break appeared in the clouds, offering the aircrew a glimpse of long white sandy beach below. Lawson estimated that the Ruptured Duck still had about a hundred gallons of fuel. If he could land the bomber on the beach, the crew could wait out bad weather, lift off at dawn, and find the airfield.
Lawson nosed the plane down and twice buzzed the concave beach. He saw no logs that might chew up the bomber, and the rain appeared to have pounded the sand down hard enough to support the Ruptured Duck’s delicate nosewheel. “It was by all means,” he wrote, “the best thing I had seen for twelve hours or more.”
The crew rushed to trade parachutes for life jackets as Lawson lowered the flaps and wheels and aimed up for the beach, whose crescent shape meant the bomber had to come in over the water and then bank to land. He was approaching at 110 miles per hour when both engines coughed, then died, just a quarter mile from shore. Lawson hit the throttles and pulled back on the stick, desperate to keep the nose up.
Just as McClure reached up to grab the aircrew’s pistols, the wheels struck the wave tops, and he heard the horrible sound of metal ripping. “We’re crashing,” the navigator thought with disbelief.
The Ruptured Duck dove, then flipped upside down. The impact threw the bombardier Bob Clever headfirst through the nose of the plane and catapulted Lawson and copilot Dean Davenport out of the cockpit, still strapped in their seats. McClure crashed with his shoulder into the armor plate before he, too, landed in the water.
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 30
