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

by Scott, James M.

  The United States had neither boots on the ground nor faith that the Chinese military could repel a Japanese invasion. Details of the destruction that would soon follow—just as officials in Washington and Chungking, and even Doolittle, had long predicted—would come from the records of American missionaries, some of whom had helped the raiders. The missionaries knew of the potential wrath of the Japanese, having lived under a tenuous peace in this border region just south of occupied China. Stories of the atrocities at Nanking, where the river had turned red from blood, had circulated widely. “When the Japs come into a town the first thing that you see is a group of cavalrymen,” Herbert Vandenberg, an American priest, would recall. “The horses have on shiny black boots. The men wear boots and a helmet. They are carrying sub-machine guns.”

  Vandenberg had heard the news broadcasts of the Tokyo raid in the mission compound in the town of Linchwan, home to about fifty thousand people, as well as to the largest Catholic church in southern China, with a capacity to serve as many as a thousand. Days after the raid letters reached Vandenberg from nearby missions in Poyang and Ihwang, informing him that local priests cared for some of the fliers—Watson’s and Knobloch’s crews. “They came to us on foot,” Vandenberg said. “They were tired and hungry. Their clothing was tattered and torn from climbing down the mountains after bailing out. We gave them fried chicken. We dressed their wounds and washed their clothes. The nuns baked cakes for the fliers. We gave them our beds.”

  The arrival of the raiders worried Vandenberg and the other priests; Japanese forces were entrenched just fifty miles north in Nanchang. By late May reports circulated that those forces were on the move. Father Steve Dunker suggested Vandenberg set off June 1 for Hangpu—about twenty miles away—and take forty-five of the Chinese orphans over the age of ten. Fathers Dunker and Clarence Murphy would remain behind with about fifty Chinese girls who were too small to make the difficult journey. Each day the news worsened as Japanese forces closed in on Linchwan. On June 4 Dunker and Murphy decided it was time to get out. The priests packed a wheelbarrow of supplies and planned to set off to follow Vandenberg the next morning.

  But at 1:30 a.m. on June 5, Japanese soldiers arrived armed with machine guns. A heavy rain fell as troops pounded on the gate of the mission residence. The gatekeeper peered out the window and stalled, claiming he could not find the key, as he alerted the Americans inside. Dunker and Murphy darted from bed, slipped outside, and hid in the mission’s air-raid trenches in the garden. The soldiers forced the local priest Father Joseph Kwei to escort them through the entire compound, demanding that he open all the doors to facilitate the search. The soldiers looted the valuables and then trashed the church.

  “Where are the Americans?” the Japanese demanded.

  Dunker and Murphy stayed in the air-raid trench until about 4 a.m. and then shortly before sunrise grabbed a ladder, leaned it against the fourteen-foot wall, and started up. A sentry spotted them and opened fire just as the clergy hopped over the wall. The two priests escaped and trudged through the flooded rice paddies to join Vandenberg at Hangpu, arriving later that night exhausted and with blistered feet. On Sunday, June 7, while the three priests gathered with the orphans for services in the mission, machine guns rattled on the outskirts of Hangpu. The Japanese had caught up to them.

  “Come on!” Vandenberg shouted. “Run for your lives.”

  The orphans and priests fled again. “It was a mad screaming flight across swollen creeks up into the hills,” Vandenberg recalled. “At night we slept in the straw in a Chinese temple. We had no food.” The priests headed for the village of Ihwang, figuring that the Japanese would never go that far. “Ihwang was in the mountains; on the road to nowhere; unimportant militarily; hard to get to, etc.,” recalled Father Wendelin Dunker—Steve’s cousin—who had helped care for Harold Watson’s crew. “I just could not seem to believe that they would come there in any manner, shape or form.”

  News reached Dunker that the priests and orphans were en route, so he saddled his horse and rode out to meet them on the afternoon of June 8. Days on the run had left them exhausted. Though Dunker believed the Japanese would never come, he began to pack supplies and sent a man to hire a boat. If necessary, the priests could go to Ou-tu, about seventeen miles away, where the mission had a small church and school. The exhausted priests stretched out at 1 p.m. An hour later machine-gun fire rattled outside the north gate, followed soon by bullets zipping over the residence. Steve Dunker darted downstairs. “The Japs are here,” he shouted. “The Japs are here.”

  The priests and orphans charged out of the mission. Wendelin Dunker waited only long enough to grab a briefcase of cash before he followed the others. “Was out the back gate in about two minutes but at that I was the last one,” he later wrote in a letter to his parents. “Boy, oh boy, was this place emptied in a hurry!”

  The priests and orphans joined the local masses, who fled across the bridge out of town. “We thought we were fast but we were slow compared to a lot of the people in the town,” Dunker wrote. “There were hundreds and hundreds ahead of us and thousands behind.” He described the scene again in a letter to Bishop John O’Shea. “Believe me,” he wrote, “a record was made in getting out of town and across the river.”

  The Japanese pursued the escapees, opening fire on them. “Bullets whistled over our heads,” Vandenberg recalled. “As we ran we looked up on the mountainside where lay the gleaming wreckage of one of the Doolittle bombers. It was a fearful sight for we knew that we were paying a price for the work of that plane.”

  The priests hiked throughout the afternoon, resting that evening in the home of a local Catholic. “When we stopped to make an inventory,” Dunker wrote, “we were six priests with the clothes on our backs, some money, but not a thing else.” The priests not only had no supplies, but Dunker realized that in his escape he had failed to consume the Blessed Sacrament. “The more I thought of it,” he wrote, “the more convinced I became that it would be a relatively simple matter, and probably not too dangerous either, to return to Ihwang and get some things out of the residence, consume the Blessed Sacrament in the church, and do so without being caught by the Japs.”

  Dunker recruited three of the mission’s workmen and set out that night for the five-mile hike back to town. “The Lord was with us,” he wrote in a letter, “for we found one bridge unguarded.” The men slipped across and headed for the mission. “When I entered the back gate of the residence I could see no light of any kind in any of the buildings, nor could I hear any sound,” he later wrote. “I felt sure if the Japs were sleeping in any of the buildings there, they would have had guards, and likewise some sort of light somewhere. Nevertheless I approached the priest’s house very cautiously, and listened for any sort of sound. But not a sound was to be heard.”

  Dunker slipped inside the church, where he opened the tabernacle and consumed the Blessed Sacrament. He next went to the stable, stunned to find that the Japanese had left the mission’s two horses, though one soon ran off. Dunker and the workmen rounded up baskets of clothes, flour, and Mass wines that would be needed to survive in the hills, each tasked to carry as much as eighty pounds. Rather than use a saddle, Dunker draped five blankets over the horse, making his return comfortable “in body if not in mind.” “I had to ride pretty carefully tho,” he wrote, “for with all those things wrapped around the horse it was like riding an elephant in width if not in height.”

  Dunker and the workmen made it back to the others at daybreak. After breakfast the group set out again, reaching Ou-tu that night. Dunker’s money allowed the priests to buy rice and vegetables. Reports of the Japanese advance continued, prompting the group to press on to Ken-kwo-gee, a village of less than a dozen families where the missionaries owned a building that doubled as a chapel and priest’s room. “It was half way up a mountain, in a small valley, and the only way of getting to it was by a small path that wound through the mountains,” Dunker wrote. “We used doors, boards and
what not for beds, and for the first time in about a week felt relatively safe.”

  Dunker’s group wasn’t alone. Throughout the region foreign priests and villagers alike sought refuge from the Japanese fury in the mountains, including the California native Bishop Charles Quinn, the vicar apostolic of Yukiang. Quinn had met Doolittle when he passed through en route to Chungking. “We found a package of American cigarettes and were able to give each boy one cigarette,” he recalled. “I believe they appreciated them more than they did the breakfast.” Accompanied by eight priests and five Sisters of Charity, Quinn led some two hundred orphans into the hills about fifty miles from Yukiang. An Italian priest, Father Humbert Verdini, had begged to remain behind along with thirty-eight orphans, many of them children or elderly. Quinn relented, assuming that, since Japan had allied with Italy, Verdini would be safe.

  The journey proved difficult with small children and elderly nuns. “With haste we moved children, food, clothes from our residence,” recalled Father Bill Stein, “first by boat then by short stage to fit the traveling of the young people, moving farther than farther, trying to distance ourselves from town, and bringing us to the mountain vastness where we would hide.” The group settled first in an abandoned temple, but the locals feared Japanese reprisals and encouraged them to move farther, telling them of an abandoned bandit hideout in the woods. Quinn went so far as to buy guns and to station guards at the foot of the mountains, a move Stein opposed.

  “Bill, what are we to do?” the bishop replied. “We have these children and Sisters to protect should the Japs find us. We must give them a chance to escape. Our duty is to protect them.”

  The group set out to make a camp, constructing huts and digging toilets, a job made all the more difficult by a lack of nails. “Under the tutorage of the local farmers,” Stein recalled, “using crude instruments, we felled the trees, dug holes in the granite soil, bound trees with vines, thatched our seven framed huts with straw, constructed beds of bamboo frames—all this done under the damp heat of summer.” Smith had bought a lot of salt before evacuation, which the missionaries used to trade with local farmers for vegetables and the occasional chicken or duck. “All of us lost much weight,” Stein recalled, “but God helping, we survived.”

  WENDELIN DUNKER WAITED ABOUT ten days before news reached him in the hills that the Japanese had moved through Ihwang. The anxious priest recruited Father Clarence Murphy to return with him to survey the damage and protect mission property from looters. “What a scene of destruction and smells met us as we entered the city!” he later wrote. “There were packs of dogs, whose masters either had fled or had been killed, and who had no one to feed them. Consequently even though many of the cadavers had been covered after a fashion by people who had returned to the town, the dogs usually dug them out to get something to eat. The big maggot-producing flies were almost as thick as snowflakes in a snow storm,” Dunker continued. “They swarmed about you, and you had to keep your mouth closed lest they fly into your mouth.”

  The Japanese came through again days later, forcing Dunker to evacuate once more. This time the Japanese burned most of the town. “They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved. They raped any woman from the ages of 10–65, and before burning the town they thoroughly looted it. When they wanted something to eat they would shoot any hog that they saw, then cut off a few pounds of meat that they wanted at the moment, and then leave the rest of the animal on the ground to rot. There weren’t many cows, but those they saw they did the same to them,” Dunker wrote. “None of the humans shot were buried either, but were left to lay on the ground to rot, along with the hogs and cows. This part of the Japanese army were absolute barbarians. The men of the Roman Legions could not have been more barbaric.”

  Dunker found the mission wrecked, though fortunately not torched like so much else in Ihwang. “Things were dumped out, turned over, broken, burned,” he wrote in a report to Bishop O’Shea. “All things of value were carried off.” The Japanese had gone so far as to smash Dunker’s typewriter and steal his razor, though he managed to salvage two bottles of beer in the basement that the soldiers had somehow missed, which the priest savored. “If you are unfortunate enough to have the Japs come your way, it would be a good thing to give them a wide path. Every town they enter is another Nanking on a small scale,” he warned O’Shea. “Absolutely no one would be able to stop them from dragging off young—and also not so young—women, and maybe when a dozen or more are through with her, to run a knife through her body.”

  The destruction of Ihwang proved typical, even mild compared with the horror the Japanese visited upon some of the villages and towns in the provinces where Doolittle and his men had bailed out. Quinn returned to Yukiang after almost three months in the mountains. “The sight that met our eyes was appalling,” the bishop said. “Part of the town had been burned. As many of the townspeople as the Japs had been able to capture had been killed.” Father Vincent Smith echoed Quinn. “Death came in horrible forms,” he said. “We learned that with our own eyes.” Local villagers related for the priests some of those horrors. “Jap soldiers would stand on bridges being used by refugees streaming into the interior,” Quinn wrote. “As the aged Chinese would pass by, Jap soldiers would push them off the bridge and into the water. Those who could not swim, of course, drowned; those who could swim afforded tragic targets for Jap riflemen.”

  Quinn returned to the mission to find that the three-story residence of thirty-three rooms had been reduced to charred timbers and ashes. Soldiers had looted or smashed all the windows, doors, and furnishings of the mission’s church and three schools, even tearing down the altars. The biggest tragedy involved Father Verdini, who had remained behind with several dozen orphans and elderly unable to travel. “In a pond, in the garden, we found Father Verdini’s body,” Smith recalled. “Nearby were the bones of the orphans and the aged men and women. Few met the merciful death of a bullet.” The Japanese had bayoneted many. Two of the dead had been burned to death, used as “human candles.” The scattered remains of as many as forty others who had sought refuge at the mission littered the garden. “The total number,” a church report stated, “cannot be ascertained for certain, because no one escaped.”

  The walled city of Nancheng would prove one of the worst hit after the Japanese marched in at dawn on the morning of June 11, beginning a reign of terror so horrendous that missionaries would later dub it “the Rape of Nancheng.” Soldiers rounded up eight hundred women and herded them into a storehouse outside the east gate, assaulting them day after day. “For one month the Japanese remained in Nancheng, roaming the rubble-filled streets in loin clothes much of the time, drunk a good part of the time and always on the lookout for women,” wrote the Reverend Frederick McGuire. “The women and children who did not escape from Nancheng will long remember the Japanese—the women and girls because they were raped time after time by Japan’s imperial troops and are now ravaged by venereal disease, the children because they mourn their fathers who were slain in cold blood for the sake of the ‘new order’ in East Asia.”

  At the end of the occupation, Japanese forces systematically destroyed the city of fifty thousand residents, bringing in technical experts in fields ranging from communications to medicine. Teams stripped Nancheng of all radios, while others looted the hospitals of drugs and surgical instruments. Engineers not only wrecked the electrical plant but pulled up the railroad lines, shipping the iron out through the port at Wenchow. The Japanese lastly sent in a special incendiary squad, which started its operation on July 7 in the city’s southern section. “Broken doors and partition boards were placed in the center of every house according to plan and kerosene was poured over,” wrote the Takung Pao newspaper. “A long torch was then applied from the outside. When there was a high brick wall between two houses, torch was applied on the next one. There was a group of soldiers assigned to this task for every street and lane and larger buildings. This planned burning was
carried on for three days and the city of Nancheng became charred earth.”

  The Japanese spared little in this summertime march of ruin, driving what Claire Chennault later described as a “bloody spear two hundred miles through the heart of East China.” Enemy forces looted towns and villages of precious rice, salt, and sugar, even stealing honey and then scattering hives. Soldiers devoured, drove away, or simply slaughtered thousands of oxen, pigs, and other farm animals; some wrecked vital irrigation systems and set crops on fire. At other times troops burned wooden water wheels, plows, and threshers and stole all the iron tools. Along the way the Japanese destroyed bridges, roads, and airfields, reducing some twenty thousand square miles to smoldering ruins. “The thoroughness of the Jap work of destruction is amazing!” wrote one unnamed clergyman. “Beyond Words!” Dunker would later echo that sentiment: “Like a swarm of locusts, they left behind nothing but destruction and chaos.”

  Outside of this punitive destruction came stories of sadistic torture and murder, including the abduction of a thousand boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen whom the Japanese enslaved as orderlies and later shipped to Nancheng to be trained as spies. In Yintang troops smashed headstones and dug up graves, plucking the jade rings off the fingers of the dead; in Linchwan soldiers tossed entire families down wells so that the bloated bodies of the dead would contaminate the village’s drinking water. One woman crawled out and later described how nine members of her family had drowned. Soldiers did the same in Ihwang, murdering several generations of a schoolteacher’s family. “They killed my three sons; they killed my wife, Angsing; they set fire to my school; they burned my books; they drowned my grandchildren in the well,” he recalled. “I crawled out of the well at night, when they were drunk, and killed them with my own hands—one for every member of my family they had slaughtered.”