The Aviators

by Winston Groom

  The raid over Tokyo was over in a little more than an hour and achieved nearly complete surprise. In the other Japanese target cities it was the same. It had been four months and eleven days since the attack on Pearl Harbor. At one point during the action, the Japanese prime minister General Hideki Tojo was riding in a small official plane that was trying to land at the Mito aviation school on the far western side of Tokyo, where Tojo intended to conduct an inspection. As his plane descended to the runway, one of Doolittle’s B-25s “roared up on its right side and flashed by without firing a shot.” Tojo’s secretary, an army colonel, reported that the plane was “queer looking.”10

  A good deal of damage was done but it was minimal with respect to the size of Japan’s immense military power. Nevertheless, the psychological damage would prove to be devastating to the Japanese. By early afternoon the raiders were in open waters headed for China—and, in the case of one plane, Russia. None of the B-25s had been shot down although some had been hit and one in particular sustained considerable antiaircraft damage. The gunners of Whirling Dervish shot down an enemy fighter, and Hari Kari-er claimed two. Thus far the raid was a success, but there remained a long, nightmarish passage into the setting sun, where the weather ahead was worsening and the gas gauges falling ominously.

  Aboard Hornet, which was racing back toward Pearl Harbor, all ears were tuned to the Japanese radio stations. Commander Jurika had been stationed by Captain Mitscher at the ship’s radio to translate any news, but nothing abnormal was coming in, even though the bombers should have made their attack by then. Instead, the infamous Tokyo Rose, an American woman of Japanese descent who regularly made propaganda broadcasts for the Japanese, was at that moment reassuring Japanese listeners that they had nothing to fear from enemy bombers. At last at 1:45 a station interrupted its programing with a special bulletin.

  “A large fleet of enemy bombers appeared over Tokyo this afternoon and much danger to nonmilitary objectives and some damage to factories,” it said. “The death toll is between three thousand and four thousand so far. No planes were reported shot down over Tokyo.” Another radio station referred to numerous fires set by the bombing and requested the people to pray for rain. The cheering broke out immediately aboard Hornet as Jurika translated the broadcast, and on Enterprise and the other ships soon thereafter. They had done it! After months of helpless frustration America had hit back.11

  As the hours wore on, and the censors took hold of the information, the reports from the Japanese radio stations became less hysterical. The raid was described as “cowardly,” and was said to have deliberately targeted hospitals and schools. In the days to come the damage was greatly played down and civilian casualties increasingly played up. Words such as “fiendish,” “inhuman,” and “indiscriminate” were applied to the raiders. But many Japanese were shaken after being told for so long that the islands were invulnerable to enemy attack, and they naturally expected and feared a repeat performance at any time. The raid induced an unsettling attitude among the Japanese population, which had been given to believe that the U.S. fleet had been destroyed at Pearl Harbor and there was no danger from the Americans. Now this!

  The raid had immediate and serious repercussions for the military as well, particularly the Japanese navy, which was responsible for safeguarding the home islands. The Japanese quickly concluded that the planes must have come from aircraft carriers and after sending out every plane and warship in its fleet the navy returned empty-handed. Halsey was long gone—a highly embarrassing, if not humiliating, development. The reaction of the imperial navy was to recall as many modern warplanes as possible—mostly the famed Zeros—from areas in the South Pacific and Indochina. This of course interfered with other operations, most notably in New Guinea, control of which was the final stepping-stone to the conquest of Australia and New Zealand, which in turn would have been devastating to the American war effort in the Pacific. And there were even greater repercussions from the raid further along.

  Meantime, Jimmy Doolittle’s raiders were flying into a very tight fix. With fuel running low and huge storms closing in, each plane carried a small hand-cranked radio to pick up the homing signal—the simple ID number 57—that would guide them in the darkness to the airfields of Chuchow that the Chinese army was supposed to have arranged for them with lighting and refueling trucks. But they listened in vain; no signal was broadcast. In fact, no homing beacons had been installed, nor were the fields prepared with illumination. It was one of the worst failures of communication in the history of the war.

  General Chiang Kai-shek, it seemed, had thwarted the landing plans out of fear of reprisal within the Japanese-held parts of China. Since Washington didn’t trust Chiang enough to inform him of the true nature of the mission for which the fields were to be prepared, Chiang did not share the sense of urgency and importance of getting the job done. So the general stalled and said he first wanted to bring the areas where the landing fields lay under his army’s control. The problem might have been solved if Hap Arnold or U.S. Army Chief of Staff George Marshall had thought to send a man of high rank to coordinate plans on the China end, but this was not done.

  Doolittle, of course, knew none of this. He had expected to be able to follow a beacon to a secure, illuminated airfield. Instead he found himself flying into the worst sort of situation. The weather was abominable. Pilots could barely see their wingtips for the storm clouds; a layer of fog completely shrouded the ground. The Chuchow airfield was located in a steep valley ringed by the vast mountain chain that lay along the China coast. Worse, the pilots knew that the altitudes given on their maps for the mountains were faulty: on one map the altitude given for a peak would be 5,000 feet and on another the same peak would be measured at 10,000 feet. They all were running low on fuel.

  By eight-thirty Doolittle spotted the first islands along the Chinese coast. They had been in the air a full twelve hours. Their choice for survival lay between going down on the deck, ditching in the sea and hoping their life rafts would carry them to shore, or flying high on instruments and chancing to find some landing spot beyond the jagged peaks before their gas ran out.

  Some took the first option, including Ted Lawson, but most, including Doolittle, took the second. Bob Emmens had somehow burned so much gas he was forced to land in Vladivostok, in the Soviet Union, despite what Stalin had said.

  Lawson was about to take the high route when a hole in the fog revealed a long sandy beach on an island below. Lawson thought he’d take the chance it was not occupied by the Japanese and spiraled down on the deck to come in just feet above the water. As he skimmed along, however, suddenly both engines quit and the landing gear hit the water. It was like hitting a brick wall. Lawson, his copilot, and the navigator were catapulted through the Plexiglas windshield into the water. The bombardier was likewise thrown through the Plexiglas bubble in the nose. The gunner remained in the plane, which was upside down. Miraculously, because the tide was coming in, all five made it to the beach about a hundred yards away, though all were terribly injured. One man had both shoulders broken; another’s head was deeply gashed. It was pouring rain.

  Lawson was mangled the worst. His leg had been nearly cut in two and his biceps was slashed off. He put his hand to his mouth and realized his lip had been cut clear through to his chin. His upper teeth were bent in and, when he put his thumbs into his mouth to push them out, “they broke off in my hands,” as did his bottom teeth. His navigator, Dean Davenport, came staggering down the beach, took a look, and said, “God damn! You’re really bashed open! You’re whole face is pushed in.” And for Lawson that wasn’t the worst of it.12

  Doolittle had tried to fly as close to the landing field at Chuchow as possible using instruments and dead reckoning. When the gas gauges showed empty Doolittle put the plane on automatic pilot, gave the order in which the men would jump, and prayed they would land in Chinese territory. Nobody but Doolittle had jumped from an airplane before. When the fourth man had gone out the hat
ch, Doolittle shut off the gas valves and bailed out himself, earning his third star in the Caterpillar Club. On the way down he suddenly became concerned about breaking his ankles again, as he had done in Chile in 1926, but needn’t have worried. In the pitch dark he plunged waist-deep into a soggy paddy field that had been fertilized in the typical Chinese fashion with “night soil,” or human excrement. Doolittle waded out and presented himself at the door of a farmhouse shouting Lushu hoo metwa fugi! as he had been taught aboard the Hornet. But it failed to produce the results indicated by Commander Jurika. There was some rustling inside the house, Doolittle said, and then “the sound of a bolt sliding into place. The light went out and there was dead silence.” He was on his own.

  McElroy, flying behind Doolittle, experienced the same angst as his fuel gauge began blinking red. He told the crew to crawl forward. “I put her on auto-pilot and we all gathered in the navigator’s compartment around the hatch in the floor. We checked each other’s parachute harness. Everyone was scared. None of us had ever done this before.” McElroy gave the order to bail out and said, “Go fast, two seconds apart! Then count three seconds off and pull your rip cord.”

  McElroy “kicked open the hatch and [we] gathered around the hole, looking down into the blackness. It did not look very inviting. Then I looked up at Williams and gave the order.” When they had gone McElroy himself plunged into the hole. “I was jerked back up with a terrific shock,” he said. “At first I thought I was caught on the plane, but then I realized I was free and drifting down … The silence was so eerie after thirteen hours inside the plane. Then I heard a loud crash and explosion. My plane!”

  Like Doolittle, McElroy had landed in a rice paddy; he was lucky enough that his crew members were also nearby. At daybreak they assembled to find a way through the disputed territory to friendly lines.13

  After being rebuffed at the Chinese farmhouse, Doolittle hiked on down the road in his stinking uniform and the pouring rain. A bitterly chill wind began to blow. He came to a warehouse of some kind. Inside, a large wooden box rested on two sawhorses. He removed the top to crawl inside, only to discover that “a very dead Chinese gentleman” already occupied it. He was in a morgue. He trudged on through the storm until he found a water mill, which got him out of the rain but the chill was so overwhelming that he spent the night doing calisthenics to stay warm.

  At daylight he followed a path to a village where he met a Chinese man in the street. After Lushu hoo metwa fugi again elicited no reaction, he drew a picture of a train, whereupon the man “smiled, nodded, and trotted off.” Doolittle followed him to a military headquarters where a Chinese officer attempted to take his .45 pistol. Doolittle refused to hand it over. The officer spoke a little English but seemed not to believe Doolittle’s story, so Doolittle offered to show him his parachute in the paddy field of night soil.

  With a dozen armed soldiers as “escort,” Doolittle led them to the field, but the parachute had vanished. He told the officer that the people in the house must have heard the plane and maybe had the parachute. The occupants of the house, however, denied everything. “They say you lie,” the officer informed Doolittle, and then told the soldiers to disarm him. Doolittle was backing away in what was suddenly “not a comfortable situation” when two soldiers emerged from the house carrying the white silk parachute. At this, the officer smiled, shook hands with Doolittle, and everything was hunky-dory.

  Doolittle was taken back to headquarters and given a hot meal and a bath. He washed and dried his uniform but to his chagrin he could not get the odor of the night soil out of it. To his immense relief, the Chinese officer’s men soon rounded up the rest of Doolittle’s crew, who were in good shape except for a sprained ankle.

  That afternoon Doolittle was taken to the site of his crashed plane, which was spread out on a mountaintop in pieces of debris covering about three acres. Scavengers had already picked the wreckage clean. It was a sorry sight. A photograph exists of Doolittle sitting forlornly on a piece of wing surveying the rubble and ruminating over the consequences. He had lost all of his planes and at that point heaven only knew what had become of all of his men; he felt the mission a total failure. Since he’d planned the raid, he told his crew chief Sergeant Paul J. Leonard, of Denver, Colorado, who had come along, “I guess they’ll court-martial me and send me to prison at Fort Leavenworth.” In fact, Doolittle believed his army career was over, but Leonard replied, “No sir, Colonel. I will tell you what will happen. They’re going to make you a general.” Doolittle gave a weak smile and Leonard continued. “And,” he said, “they’re going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor.” But this did not assuage Doolittle, who had “never felt lower” in his life.

  MEN FROM THE FIFTEEN OTHER planes were having their own hard experiences. One man landed in a tree and was caught. Before freeing himself and climbing down he lit a cigarette, and when he tossed the butt he watched its orange glow descend into an unfathomable chasm. Luckily he decided to stay put in his tree, because dawn revealed he had landed on the edge of an enormous rock cliff. If he had cut himself free that night he would have plunged to his death. Here may be history’s only example of a cigarette saving someone’s life.14

  Ted Lawson and his crew had a harrowing, weeks-long escape from Japanese-held territory into American hands.b Gangrene set in on Lawson’s leg and it had to be amputated under the most trying conditions.

  Farmers and peasants all over the province had been startled to hear the violent crashes of the Doolittle planes against their mountains and into their rice fields. Most of the five-man crews were united with one another next day, but Lushu hoo metwa fugi seemed to make absolutely no impression on any of the Chinese. Many of the men were injured and, miraculously, only three were killed—two drowned after ditching in the sea and one died in the parachute jump.c A few were robbed by Chinese bandits.

  Japanese troops captured eight of the crew members and three of these were executed on the basis of a document invented by the Japanese army after the raid, entitled “Japanese Regulations for Punishment of Enemy Air Crews.” Five of the prisoners were sentenced to death but for no particular reason their sentences were commuted to life in prison. The unlucky three, Lieutenant William G. Farrow and Sergeant Harold A. Spatz of Bat Out of Hell and Lieutenant Dean E. Hallmark of Green Hornet, were ceremoniously marched to a Japanese cemetery, made to kneel while they were tied to three white wooden crosses, and shot in the back of the head. The others were horribly tortured and phony “confessions” were beaten out of them by the Kempeitai, the Japanese version of the Gestapo, in which the Americans attested to deliberately machine-gunning children and so forth. Then they were thrown into inhumane prisoner of war compounds where one of them, Robert J. Meder, died of starvation and neglect.

  Upon receiving the announcement of the executions from Tokyo, Roosevelt began that evening’s “fireside chat” with the words, “It is with the deepest horror …” The unremorseful Japanese responded by threatening in their own radio broadcast: “Don’t forget, America, you can be sure that every flier that comes here has a special pass to hell. Rest assured that it’s strictly a one-way ticket.”15

  The crew that landed their B-25 in Russia endured a bizarre odyssey. At first they were greeted with open arms by the Soviet military, and even conducted tours of their plane for Russian aviators. But this attitude changed quickly as they were shifted to higher and higher levels of authority in that strange and brutal country. At first they were given vodka and borscht and shown American movies—apparently “to keep them at all times as drunk as possible”—but soon the Americans were locked in a car on the Trans-Siberian Railway for a twenty-one-day journey to a remote guarded compound where they nearly froze to death. Attempts to contact the American consulate were futile, and the diet was so poor that their gums bled and several became ill. Out of desperation their commander, Captain Edward J. “Ski” York, of San Antonio, Texas, wrote a letter directly to Stalin himself, asking that they be sent
to a warmer climate. To everyone’s surprise it worked, and eventually they escaped to British-held Iran through the strange distant provinces of the Soviet Union.16

  When he reached Chuchow on April 28, Doolittle learned that he had been promoted to brigadier general by Hap Arnold, just as Sergeant Leonard had predicted. Clayton Bissell, air operations officer to General Claire Chennault, pinned a pair of stars on him and gave him a swig of his high-priced scotch to celebrate, then castigated him for taking too big a swallow. By some act of providence the rest of Doolittle’s people—sixty-seven pilots and crewmen—managed to find their way into the hands of friendly Chinese and were carried by practically every means of locomotion—junks, steamboats, sedan chairs, oxcarts, trains, rickshaws, donkeys, and buses—across the mountains, often through Japanese-held territory, to Chungking, a thousand miles distant in the interior of China.

  There, arrangements were made for getting the raiders out of China, and Doolittle received orders to proceed to Washington quickly and by any means possible. Not, however, before he and the others were taken to the palace of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Madame Chiang, where they were presented medals.d Madame Chiang spoke English and Doolittle broke protocol by beseeching her to have the Chinese do everything possible to return his airmen from Japanese captivity before they were harmed. Madame Chiang replied that she would see what she could do.

  In the United States reaction to the raid was at first muted. On Saturday, April 18 (April 19 in Tokyo), the New York Times carried a story based on what was intercepted from Japanese radio broadcasts. It said U.S. warplanes had bombed Tokyo, Yokohama, and other cities, inflicting damage on schools, orphanages, hospitals, etc., and that nine of the bombers were shot down. Military authorities in Washington refused to confirm or deny the story. They were waiting for better information.