Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor

by Scott, James M.

  The aviators stopped that night at the Smiths’ house. White redressed Lawson’s leg and sent a cable to Chungking. “En route Chushien with four injured officers,” he wired. “ETA 22 May. Request plane meet us.”

  The Smiths remained behind as the aviators set out again the next morning, despite protests from the fliers to evacuate. “The spirit and pluck of these people,” White wrote, “never ceased to amaze me.”

  “See you in Chungking,” Mrs. Smith said.

  The Japanese advance forced the aviators to hurry; traveling the next several days in rickshaws and sedan chairs, winding past rivers and through the mountains. “It seemed to me,” Lawson said, “that I could feel the very breath of the Japanese on my neck.”

  The hospitality at each stop was grand, including Boy Scouts who awaited them at one village with banners that read, “Welcome to American Air Heroes.”

  White’s winded rickshaw driver often fell behind the others, prompting his fellow fliers to shout, “Shift him into high-blower!”

  “It’s no use,” the doctor replied. “He’s conked out. I’ve got to hit the silk!”

  Transportation improved as the men reached more populated areas, allowing them to trade in the rickshaws and sedan chairs for a 1941 Ford station wagon, complete with bullet holes from a Japanese strafing. “One had evidently went through the windshield and gone through the back of the driver’s seat,” White wrote. “It had been neatly patched but it gave us something to think about!”

  Most of the raiders piled into the station wagon, but White loaded Lawson into the back of a charcoal-burning truck, believing the injured pilot would be more comfortable stretched atop three blankets. The vehicles traveled only at night, so as to avoid air attacks by Japanese planes. “Every time we’d hit a bump, and we must have hit a million, I’d leave the floor. The next bump would get me coming down,” Lawson later wrote. “I used both my hands to keep what was left of my leg from banging. That didn’t help much. It just thumped and bled and throbbed.”

  The station wagon in contrast proved a smooth ride. “It was a real luxury,” White recalled, “to lean back on the leather cushions and whiz down the road at ten to twenty times the speed at which we had traveled for the previous five days!”

  The aviators could hear explosions in the distance behind them. Lawson asked Chen, who rode with him in the truck, what they were.

  “Japanese too close,” he replied. “So Chinese blow up road behind us, just after we pass.”

  The men arrived in Lishui the night of May 21 at one of the airfields the raiders had tried to reach the night of the raid. The Chinese had been forced to blow up the field to keep the Japanese from seizing it. No plane would come for them now. The fliers turned in, but awoke at 3 a.m. to the news that Japanese forces were bringing mechanized gear over the same roads the Chinese had just destroyed.

  White dressed Lawson’s stump, and the raiders set out a little after 4 a.m. in a small camphor-burning bus with a driver whose love of the horn soon earned him the nickname Johnny Beep-beep. “The bus’s brakes were only third in importance in his mind. The horn was first and the steering wheel second,” Lawson recalled. “He was the damndest driver I ever saw. Nothing bothered him, including our yells.”

  They stopped that night, May 22, at a local mission. Lawson was too exhausted to participate much in the feast and soon went to bed, wondering aloud why he found the same overpowering smell everywhere he slept.

  “It must be some sort of national disinfectant the Chinese use,” he told himself.

  White administered a dose of morphine to ease his pain and only then could Lawson bring himself to admit the truth about the stench. “It was my leg, not disinfectant,” he later wrote. “I had been trying to kid myself.”

  The men reached Nancheng about 2 a.m. on May 24, only to learn the airfield there had also been destroyed. “We had talked of little else for two days except getting the plane there,” Lawson wrote. “Now it would have to be Kian.” They took small consolation in the fact that the Nancheng headquarters at least could offer them iodine, a precious commodity that none of the fliers had seen in the five weeks since the crash. “All of us were welted and sore with bedbugs and lice,” Lawson recalled. “I still had the bed sores on my back. Doc dabbed all of us from head to foot.”

  They slept late the next morning and enjoyed a much-needed day of rest. White wrote a few letters, and Clever’s battered face had healed enough that the bombardier attempted to shave. “It was his first crack at a straight edge but he made out all right,” White observed. “At least he didn’t cut his throat.”

  At about six the following morning the fliers set out in another Ford station wagon, arriving twelve hours later at an American Volunteer Group hostel. The Flying Tigers had moved on from Kian, leaving behind a radioman and a few Chinese employees. The news was the same as before. “There was no plane. The field was gone,” Lawson recalled. “We were numb with disappointment.”

  They had no choice but to press on to Heng-yang, picking up an overnight train bound for Kweilin, where the fliers settled into an American Volunteer Group hostel. Lawson continued to suffer. “It was a battle to keep from giving him morphine,” White recalled. “There are times when a doctor must be cruel in order to be kind. So I had to let him suffer quite a bit of pain to keep from making an addict out of him.”

  The days ticked past as the fliers awaited a plane to fly them out. Lawson had suffered a brutal six weeks. He had survived a violent crash in the surf, endured a battle with gangrene, and the primitive amputation of his left leg. His personal agony was incalculable, but now, after forty-six days, rescue was finally at hand. On June 3 a DC-3 with U.S. Army Air Forces markings appeared in the skies overhead. The raiders erupted in cheers. The airfield was a few miles away, and the hostel’s jeep was already down there. Half an hour later the airmen heard the drone of the vehicle’s engine and looked up to see their fellow raiders Edgar McElroy and Davy Jones, the latter armed with a medical kit. “I knew I’d start crying as soon as I heard Davy’s voice,” Lawson wrote, “and damned if I didn’t.”

  CHAPTER 20

  I was beaten, kicked and pummeled pretty regularly by the Japanese and systematically starved every day.

  —GEORGE BARR, MAY 12, 1946

  THE CREWMEN OF THE Green Hornet were not so lucky. The plane carrying Chase Nielsen, Dean Hallmark, and Bob Meder touched down in Tokyo at 7 p.m. on April 25. Guards ushered the men into cars, and after an hourlong ride the fliers arrived at the headquarters of the gendarmerie, whose brutal reputation was best described in a 1942 intelligence report. “The gendarmerie is the worst element in the Japanese Armed Forces,” the report stated. “They have no respect for man, woman or child. Gambling, narcotics, kidnappings, deliberate murder, prostitution, graft of all kinds and terrible torture are all in the day’s work. They will even deliberately kill their own nationals to create an incident if this is the only excuse they can find to obtain the end they desire.”

  Once inside, guards removed Nielsen’s blindfold, exposing to him a bare room that contained only a table and three chairs. He was joined by an unarmed Japanese civilian. Nielsen was still handcuffed, but a guard stood by the doors. The civilian told him his name was Ohara and that he was a graduate of Columbia University.

  “But Ohara is an Irish name,” Nielsen said.

  “I realize that,” he answered. “But it is still my name.”

  Nielsen guessed the short-statured Ohara was in his late twenties and appeared confident to the point of cockiness. He started to rattle on about baseball, talking about how much the Japanese worshipped Babe Ruth. The interrogator then changed topics. “I suppose you know Tokyo was bombed last week?”

  “It was?” Nielsen replied, feigning surprise. “Who did it?”

  Ohara chatted again about sports, but this time Nielsen interrupted him. “What do you think about President Roosevelt?”

  “I’d like to hit him in the face with a rotten tomat
o,” Ohara barked.

  “You can say that now that you’re back in Tokyo,” Nielsen said with a smile.

  Ohara assured Nielsen he would not be mistreated. “You can play baseball and golf and enjoy the hot baths of Japan.”

  Nielsen would soon learn how far from the truth that assurance was.

  The door opened, and a Japanese officer with short hair entered. Ohara left, replaced by a short baldheaded interpreter who Nielsen estimated was in his midsixties. He told Nielsen and the other airmen he had graduated from Stanford University and spent thirty-five years in Sacramento, working as a lawyer for Japanese farmers along the West Coast. Nielsen would spend a lot of time with the interpreter, who began every sentence with a stock answer. “Well, well,” he would always say, “we’ll have to see about that.” Nielsen and the others soon nicknamed him Well-Well.

  “I made a fortune,” Well-Well said, “and came back to Japan to retire, but they cleaned me out and here I am.”

  The questioning began again. Where did Nielsen come from? Had he bombed Tokyo? Was he stationed in China or the Philippines?

  The interrogation by three guards, two reporters, and the interpreter dragged on until about 4 a.m. as the Japanese alternatively slapped and kicked the American aviator, whose legs were tied and hands bound behind the chair. The abuse reopened the wounds on his shins, causing blood to run down his legs.

  Guards finally hauled the exhausted airman back to his cell, a cubby barely four feet wide and eight feet deep with a latrine in the corner. Nielsen collapsed atop the grass mat with several blankets and slept until 7 a.m., when guards brought him a breakfast of watery rice and a cup of miso soup.

  The interrogation began again right after breakfast, but Nielsen refused to offer more than his name, rank, and serial number. “We didn’t get the brutal treatment we’d received right after we were captured,” the navigator later wrote. “A more subtle form of torture began at Tokyo—the endless days and nights of solitary confinement in stinking, filthy cells with just enough food to keep us alive.”

  The other airmen suffered the same. “The first two weeks, it seemed like they interrogated us about twenty-four hours a day,” Bobby Hite recalled. “They would run us in and out of the cell and we didn’t know if it was night or day, really. The main thing they seemed to want to know was, where in the world did we come from?”

  The interrogator’s intent was to wear down the aviators—and as one boasted to navigator George Barr, “Japanese method scientee-fic.”

  The scientific method, the red-haired New Yorker discovered, was a sucker punch; one such hit would cost him most of his hearing in his right ear.

  The Japanese likewise walloped Nielsen on the back with a black rubber hose, prompting him to ask one day about the unusual choice of weapon.

  “Hose don’t make marks,” the interrogator responded.

  “Well,” the bombardier thought, “what difference does it make if you’re going to kill us whether we’ve got marks on us or what?”

  The airmen were often shocked by how much the Japanese knew, prompting Barr to wonder, “Is it chance or is their espionage better than we had suspected?”

  Jacob DeShazer recalled one such experience that floored him.

  “You were the bombardier,” one of the interrogators pressed him. “You know all about the Norden bombsight. We want you to draw us a picture of that Norden bombsight. Put the knobs on and show us how it’s built.”

  “You know,” DeShazer replied. “I’m one of the worst persons. I can’t draw anything, even a house.”

  “You can surely draw a picture of an airplane.”

  DeShazer sketched an intentionally terrible picture. “That’s an airplane,” he said. “That’s about the best I can do.”

  The interrogators weren’t dissuaded. “You should be able to make some kind of picture of that bombsight.”

  Then to DeShazer’s surprise one of the interrogators picked up a pencil and drew the bombsight. “It was just perfect,” the bombardier recalled. “I could tell there wasn’t a thing out of order.”

  “Is that a Norden bombsight?” the interrogator asked.

  DeShazer felt there was no use denying; the Japanese clearly had nailed it. “It sure is,” he confessed.

  The long days of interrogation and abuse coupled with endless hours of solitary confinement wore down the aviators. The Japanese forced them to wear leg irons with just a few inches of chain that hobbled the airmen at all times, even in their cells. “Sanitation facilities were worse than primitive,” Nielsen said. “There was no water in the cell. The toilet was a hole in one corner. I tried to get permission to wash my hands and face and teeth and ‘Well-Well’ said he’d see about it, but nothing happened.”

  The only reprieve came from a few curious guards who attempted to chat with the airmen in broken English, mostly asking about American actors such as Gary Cooper, Dorothy Lamour, and Jean Arthur. The airmen welcomed even that scant interaction. “Nothing is the hardest thing in the world to do,” Nielsen later wrote. “I just sat in my cell—no exercise, nothing to read, no radio, no nothing.”

  Others agreed. “We had just come out of a full American life with all kinds of goodies,” Hite recalled, “good food, good life, and suddenly we were in a solitary cell and were being harassed, slapped, and kicked. Our rations were meager, and we just wondered if the world was going to hold together.”

  Well-Well pestered the captives. “You can’t smoke or drink now,” he told Nielsen. “So you will lose all of your bad American habits.”

  Nielsen fired back: who said those were bad habits?

  Well-Well just grinned.

  The Japanese had managed to locate at least one of the downed bombers, salvaging maps and charts that interrogators laid out before the captured fliers. Nielsen spotted stationery with the aircraft carrier’s crest and name. His heart sank.

  “What’s a Hornet?” the interrogator asked.

  Nielsen attempted to explain that it was a bee that stung, but the Japanese officer didn’t buy it. Instead the interrogator produced a crew list of each plane and pointed to Doolittle’s name at the top. “Do you know him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, we captured him several days ago,” he said. “We killed him.”

  “Oh.”

  The interrogator ran his finger down the list until he hit crew six. He stopped beside Nielsen’s name. “I know you know this guy,” he said.

  “Yes,” Nielsen admitted.

  “Your friend, George Barr, the red-haired guy,” the interrogator continued. “He told us all about it.”

  “Oh, he did?” Nielsen said, though he didn’t believe it. “Why don’t you tell me, and then I’ll tell you whether he is right or not?”

  “Oh, no, you tell us.”

  Nielsen felt it was futile. The airman had resisted for weeks, but he believed there was no point in holding out any longer; to do so invited only more beatings, abuse, and agony, particularly now that the Japanese had found some of the mission’s most vital records. “We confessed to bombing Tokyo, told them the areas we had bombed and confessed of leaving an aircraft carrier,” Nielsen said. “Other than that, a small sketch of our life’s history—where we went to school, where we had our army training, that was all it consisted of.”

  The Japanese prepared statements allegedly based on the confessions and then read them back to the aviators, who never saw actual English translations. Nielsen recalled that his statement as read to him noted only that he had bombed steel mills; there was no mention of targeting civilians or schools and churches. The others recalled similar statements. The Japanese demanded the men sign them, each one dated May 22. Nielsen refused, but after the Japanese threatened him, decided it wasn’t worth a fight.

  The airmen’s confessions proved far different from the ones the Japanese claimed the men made. Excerpts of the alleged statements that the gendarmerie forwarded to General Hajime Sugiyama proved so outlandish and contradictory
as to be almost unbelievable. On the one hand, they painted the raiders as incompetent cowards, so terrified of Japan’s powerful fighters that they dropped bombs on any target and fled. This was intended, no doubt, to cover up the incredible defense failures that had allowed sixteen bombers to penetrate the homeland, pummel the capital, and escape unmolested. On the other hand, the alleged confessions portrayed the airmen as bloodthirsty marauders who wanted to kill women and children, statements Japan could use against them in future criminal proceedings as well as in the court of world opinion.

  “What were your feelings when bombing Nagoya?” an interrogator asked Hite, according to excerpts of his alleged statement.

  “I thought it natural to drop bombs without locating the targets, destroying civilian houses and wounding civilians. I thought that this was one of the objectives of guerrilla warfare,” the Texan supposedly answered, characterizing America’s tactics with the same language the Japanese government had used in the press to describe previous carrier raids. “While bombing I was filled with feelings of fear and thought it would be much more prudent to drop the bombs anywhere as quickly as possible and flee. At that time I thought it was too much for me to bomb accurately.”

  “Did you fire your guns while fleeing from Nagoya?” the interrogator continued.

  “I did not mention this point before today but, honestly speaking, five or six minutes after we left the city, we saw a place that looked like a primary school and saw many children playing,” he allegedly said. “The pilot lowered the altitude of the plane rapidly and ordered the gunner to get prepared. When the plane was in the oblique position, the pilot ordered us to fire; therefore, we fired at once.”

  Billy Farrow’s supposed confession echoed Hite’s.

  “Although you say that you aimed at military installations, in reality you injured innocent civilians?” the interrogator asked.