Dysentery struck Meder in early September about the time the hot and humid summer gave way to cooler fall weather. The meager rations had already so whittled his five-foot-eleven-inch frame that fellow fliers described him as a “toothpick.” Beriberi soon added to his troubles. The pilot grew so weak that by November he stopped leaving his cell each morning for exercise. He could do little more than wallow on his mat. “We begged to go in to nurse him,” Barr recalled. “Kindness was all the medication we had, but it would have helped. We were refused.”
The other raiders persuaded Meder on December 1 to come outside for exercise. His feet were so swollen that all he could do was sit on the steps in the sun. One of the guards harassed him, and Meder rose to the challenge.
“Listen,” he said in a mix of English and Japanese. “Sick as I am I can lick the whole damn bunch of you.”
He took a swing only to miss and fall down. “It was sort of sad, but it was sort of good to see that even in as bad a shape that he was in, that the spirit was still willing,” Hite recalled. “Bob knew that he was in real bad shape. He was just sort of a skeleton.”
Hite asked him whether there was anything he could do for him.
“Just pray,” Meder answered.
The others helped Meder back to his cell afterward. Hite was in the cell next to him. He heard his fellow pilot tell the guard known as Cyclops the address of his parents and ask him, if he died, would he please write them and send them his clothes.
Barr helped distribute dinner that evening for the guards. He slid Meder’s mess kit through the slot but didn’t hear anyone move. The navigator summoned a guard, who unlocked the cell door and found Meder dead.
The Japanese medical report of his death, discovered after the war, painted a heroic, albeit bogus, picture of efforts made to save Meder, from giving him special glucose and vitamin B injections when he first fell sick to the desperate final effort to resuscitate him when he died. “Immediately artificial respiration was tried and 3.0 cc of camphor was injected under the skin and 1.0 cc of adrenaline was injected into the heart,” the report stated, “but the patient failed to recover.”
The sounds of saws and hammers filled the prison the next day. Unaware that his friend had died, DeShazer peered out the window, startled to see guards building a coffin. On December 3 guards marched each of the prisoners into Meder’s cell. The Japanese had stuffed cotton in his mouth. “The body was in a rough box and there were a few chrysanthemums on Bob’s breast,” Hite and DeShazer recalled. “Each of us said a silent prayer, but there were no religious services.”
Meder’s death pained the others; the Japanese seized on it as a means to torment them. “For several days after that, the guards would shout out Bob’s number (it was three) when they passed his cell,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “They’d wait for an answer, which couldn’t come, of course, and then they’d laugh.”
Meder had often said he would rather be dead and his family know it than be alive with no one knowing it. He had left a letter for his parents and sister, sealing it with the message: “To be opened only in the event of my death.”
“I am writing this letter on December 7, 1941—that fateful day when the Japanese started the spark of this conflagration. As it has been the will of God I have answered my country’s call and I pray that whatever efforts I may have exerted have been to some avail,” Meder began his final farewell. “The main purpose of this letter to you is to try at this very last minute to comfort you. During this time of strife for all, those of you that have had to sacrifice loved ones are the real heroes of any struggle. The word hero is truly inadequate. Just remember that the soul of a person is greater than his own physical body; therefore, you have not lost me, my spirit shall ever be with you, watching, and aiding if possible from wherever the ‘Great Beyond’ may be. Be brave, not bitter, be determined, not overcome. That is the job for those of you that I love most dearly. Democracy shall continue. It is our sacrifice for that cause.”
Meder begged of his family one final request. “Please promise to never let anything separate you,” he wrote. “Mend any petty disagreements—continue as a loving family on its way to do its part in this world. Mother and Dad, never let anything become so mistakenly important to cause such a thing as a separation or a divorce. And Doris-Mae, never let your love for Mother and Dad taper off. I ask these things of you in my memory. I know you will not fail me!” Meder reiterated his hope that his parents and sister would not allow his death to overwhelm them. “I bless and love you all very dearly; some day I feel very certain that we shall all be united in a happier life in the life ahead,” he concluded. “God bless and protect you. Keep up your courage!”
After the war Doolittle would deliver a speech in Cleveland on October 18, 1945. Meder’s parents were in attendance. “His mission was accomplished—gloriously,” Doolittle told them and the audience. “He was not only one of the outstanding heroes of the war, but a martyr to the cause of your freedom and mine. Bob was a victim of the barbarism of the Japs who sacrificed him on the altar of hate.”
Meder’s sacrifice meant the others got two extra buns with each meal, but it also taught them a lesson. “Any of us can die at any time,” Hite thought. “We could all die and they could do away with us and nobody would ever know the difference.”
As the months marched past, the raiders grew increasingly withdrawn. The solitude tortured them. “We had to fight ourselves,” Hite and DeShazer said, “to keep from going mad.” The men lived inside their imaginations. Nielsen envisioned the house he would one day build for himself, while Hite planned out a farm back home in Texas. “I would think about the wonderful meals I’d have when I got out. Or I’d plan escapes in minute detail, going over every step in my mind,” Barr remembered. “And then in my mind I’d raise sheep, rabbits, hogs or wheat. I’d go through every step, planting, fertilizing, weeding. I raised chickens in imaginary batteries. Maybe I’d ‘work’ on one occupation for a couple of days, go on to another, and then go back to the first one. It’s amazing what your mind can do under such circumstances.”
The men on occasion still battled with the guards. That happened after exercise one day when the guards tried to make Barr wash his feet in the snow. The navigator refused and started back toward his cell. The guard struck him on the legs with his sword. “I saw red,” Barr later wrote. “I whirled and punched him in the nose. He went down and the other guards ran to help him. I was weak, but the Japs don’t know how to use their fists and I did all right until I was overpowered by sheer numbers.”
Guards dragged Barr back outside into the exercise yard. A couple held him while others slipped on a straitjacket, lacing it up so tight that it squeezed his chest and he gasped for air. “Panic comes quick when you cannot get your breath or move your arms to help yourself. There was no pain at first, only the horrible choking for air. I rolled over on my side because it seemed I could gulp a little more air in that position,” he recalled. “Then the pain began. At the start there is only numbness, but when the blood forces its way through the constricted channels the pain becomes frightful. I could hear myself making animal-like noises as I fought for breath. There was enormous pressure at my eyeballs and in my nostrils. I was almost hysterical with panic and pain.”
The other prisoners, forced back into their cells, listened as Barr suffered. “We could hear him making a sobbing noise,” Hite and DeShazer recalled, “but there was nothing we could do to help.”
A half hour later the guards pulled the laces even tighter. The prison commandant calmly stared at Barr, ticking off the minutes with a stopwatch. “My lungs, heart, liver were all crushed together with the ribs sticking in,” Barr wrote. “The perspiration poured down my face and into my eyes, although it was a cold day.”
Finally after an hour the guards released him. Barr’s brutal punishment angered Misake, one of the few guards who showed compassion to the navigator. “Misake was among the guards standing by watching me groan and s
weat in the snowdrift into which I had been thrown, but he did not laugh,” Barr recalled. “When the order came for my release, he was the first to jump to my rescue.” Misake escorted the exhausted airman back to his cell and in a surprise gesture offered him a cigarette. “He took a frightful chance doing that,” Barr remembered, “and I’ll never forget it or him.”
The men battled the nagging physical pains of starvation, surviving on watery rice and unsweetened tea. “After awhile you get so you do not want to eat, and yet you are ravenously hungry,” Barr recalled. “You eat because instinct tells you that you must eat to live, but I had to force the food down my throat.” The fliers lost so much weight that the concrete floors pained them. Beriberi only compounded the misery. “At times the swelling from beriberi was so intense that we were required to push it back from around our eyes to be able to even open them,” Nielsen later wrote. “Also our feet, hands, arms, and legs would puff up until our hands and feet looked like they were clubbed. Our joints ached continually and at times it was difficult to walk.”
The dark days of hunger and hopelessness forced the men to wrestle with difficult questions. “We began to think a lot about death,” admitted Hite and DeShazer. “During our exercise periods we talked about it and wondered why Meder had to be taken. Our only consolation was that it had to be the will of God.”
“We thought a lot about religion,” added Barr. “When you’re in tough straits God is the only one you can rely on.” Nielsen agreed. “Faith kept me alive,” he said. “Faith in my nation. My religion. My creator.”
Hite wrote to the prison commandant, requesting a Bible. To his surprise, one soon arrived; the King James version, still stamped with a $1.97 price tag. “It was sort of like a man being in the desert and finding a cool pool,” he recalled. “We hadn’t had anything to read. We didn’t have newspapers. We didn’t have radio. We didn’t have books. We didn’t have anything. So this Bible was really a tremendous thing that happened to us.”
The men took turns reading the Bible, passing it from cell to cell as each man pored over it in the dim light. “I lived on hate for the first year and a half. Hatred is a very strong emotion,” Hite recalled. “I think we were able to kind of keep ourselves together living on hate, instead of laying down and giving up.” DeShazer echoed Hite, later writing that his hatred of the Japanese nearly drove him crazy. “The way the Japanese treated me, I had to turn to Christ,” he remembered. “No matter what they did to me, I prayed. I prayed for the strength to live. And I prayed for the strength, somehow, to find forgiveness for what they were doing to me.”
That hostility and anger soon vanished. “We decided that we had no hatred for our guards, vicious as they were. They were ignorant and mean, but perhaps—we thought—there was some good in them. The only way to develop that goodness would be by understanding and education—not by brutally mistreating them as they were doing to us,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “The officers were different. They were educated men. They gave the orders for punishment. They must be punished in return. But the retribution should be just. They would not be beaten as we were. They should be tried in a court of justice and disciplined as we do our own criminals.”
DeShazer was the most affected. “One day in my cell I felt the call as clearly as though a voice were speaking to me,” he said, looking back. “I don’t mean I heard a voice. It was more like a flash of truth. I even tried to think about something else, but I couldn’t.” He decided there in that awful cell in Nanking that if he survived the war he would return to Japan as a missionary. He felt his burden lift. “Hunger, starvation, and a freezing cold prison cell no longer had horrors for me. They would be only a passing moment. Even death could hold no threat when I knew that God had saved me,” he recalled. “There will be no pain, no suffering, no sorrow, no loneliness in heaven.”
The bombardier put his newfound faith to the test. He ignored the hostility of the guards and instead tried to befriend one of them.
“How are you?” he asked each day with a smile.
To his surprise after six days of this the guard presented DeShazer with a sweet potato. “Boy,” he thought. “This really works.”
Hite fell ill around the summer of 1944, right after the Japanese administered a round of vaccinations. The six-foot flier’s weight fell to around eighty-eight pounds, and his body burned for five days with a 105-degree fever. The Japanese moved him to a cell with a screen door, but even then he was too weak to talk. “I was so sick I couldn’t even raise my head,” he said. “I just lay there.”
The pilot heard Nielsen and DeShazer outside his door one day. “Hite won’t be here tomorrow,” Nielsen said. “I don’t think he can make it.”
The news rattled Hite. “I thought I was going to die. I prayed to the Lord, told him I was willing to die if that’s what he wanted, that mother was a widow and she might need me, but that I wasn’t afraid to die and I was trusting in him,” he later said. “It was the most amazing thing. I started getting well right there.”
The weeks slid past as summer turned into fall and 1944 rolled into 1945. Guards came for the raiders finally at 6:30 a.m. on June 12, 1945, armed with hoods and handcuffs. The airmen boarded a train later that morning for the forty-hour journey to Peiping, as Peking was officially named since 1928. Guards removed the hoods, but tied the fliers to the seats. The train transported Japanese officers, so the airmen enjoyed the same meals, which included beef. “It was the best food we’d had in three years. But our guards declined to give us any water. The result was that we had nothing to drink for 48 hours,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “When we got to Peiping we were literally sick with thirst.”
The raiders reached Peiping around noon on June 14. Guards slipped hoods over the airmen’s heads, then drove them to what was known as the North China Prison 1407, on North Hataman road about four miles outside of the city, a place a fellow prisoner of war would describe in an affidavit after the war as “hell.” There raiders landed in cells that measured ten feet by ten feet. Two small windows provided the only light, one on the heavy wooden door that faced an inside passageway. Guards allowed the prisoners to bathe once a week. “We were placed in solitary confinement again, and in Peiping we didn’t even have the half hour exercise period that was part of our Nanking regime,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “Our cells were just as primitive.”
The mood of the guards served as a barometer of the war’s progress. America’s maritime offensive had reached a climax in the summer of 1944 with the capture of the Marianas, the ultimate prize of the Pacific. The volcanic archipelago of Guam, Saipan, and Tinian—just fifteen hundred miles south of Tokyo—provided bases for American B-29 bombers to reach Japan, to reduce its industrial cities to rubble, to continue the fight started by Jimmy Doolittle and his seventy-nine raiders. Japan’s loss of the Marianas led not only to the ouster of Hideki Tojo and his cabinet but to four of the most telling words of the war, uttered by Fleet Admiral Osami Nagano, Hirohito’s supreme naval adviser: “Hell is on us.”
And hell it was.
Day after day, week after week, B-29 Superfortresses darkened the skies over Japan by the hundreds. Engineers had spared nothing in the creation of Boeing’s aeronautical monster, a plane so powerful that even Doolittle said it “staggers the imagination.” The four-engine bomber could not only fly twice the distance of the Tokyo raid but also haul five times as much ordnance as each of Doolittle’s planes. America demonstrated the B-29’s terrifying power in an incendiary raid against Tokyo on March 9–10, 1945, triggering an inferno so intense that pilots en route used the flames to navigate from two hundred miles out while the soot blackened the bombers’ bellies. The attack would prove the war’s single most destructive assault on an urban area, killing 83,793 people, injuring another 40,918, and leaving a million homeless. “I have never seen such a display of destruction,” wrote Boston Globe journalist Martin Sheridan, who flew in one of the B-29s. “I not only saw Tokyo burning furiously in many secti
ons, but I smelled it.”
Bombers pounded Japan’s major cities night after night in raids Doolittle could only have dreamed of years earlier when he throttled up his B-25 that rainy morning on the deck of the Hornet. As workers punched out more bombers, the airborne armadas only grew larger; on some nights more than five hundred Superfortresses thundered in the skies overhead. In the war’s final months B-29s would fly more than 28,500 sorties against Japan, dropping almost 160,000 tons of bombs across sixty-six cities. The results were staggering. America would level some 158 square miles of Japanese cities, including more than 50 square miles of Tokyo, 15 of Osaka, and 11 of Nagoya. According to postwar Japanese records, the raids killed 330,000 people, injured another 475,000, and left 8.5 million homeless. “Japan eventually will be a nation without cities,” Doolittle declared in July when he arrived in the Pacific after Germany’s surrender. “A nomadic people.”
These attacks built up to the muggy morning of August 6 when Colonel Paul Tibbets Jr.’s B-29 roared down the coral runway on the tiny Pacific island of Tinian at two forty-five. His payload consisted of the single atomic bomb “Little Boy,” an ironic nickname considering experts predicted it would take two thousand loaded B-29s to rival the force of this one weapon. Tibbets appeared over Hiroshima and droppd his bomb at 8:15 a.m. Forty-three seconds later, the weapon detonated. Temperatures surpassed 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit, bubbling clay roof tiles and vaporizing human victims. American investigators after the war estimated that the attack, which leveled more than 4 square miles, killed approximately 80,000 men, women, and children and injured another 100,000. Three days later a second B-29 roared down Tinian’s darkened runway, carrying the atomic bomb dubbed “Fat Man.” The attack on Nagasaki flattened another 1.8 square miles and killed approximately 45,000 people and injured as many as 60,000.
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 54
