The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh (56 page)

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.

M
EN 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.
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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.
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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.

Hap Arnold learned that most of his air crews were safe before Doolittle reached Chuchow. On April 19 the following telegraph cable was routed through various wire services:

MISSION TO BOMB TOKYO HAS BEEN ACCOMPLISHED
.
ON ENTERING CHINA WE RAN INTO BAD WEATHER AND IT IS FEARED THAT ALL PLANES CRASHED
.
UP TO PRESENT ALREADY FIVE FLIERS ARE SAFE
.
DOOLITTLE
.

This was, of course, distressing news—all sixteen planes lost and possibly most of their crews as well? That wasn’t something either Arnold or Marshall wanted to tell Roosevelt, let alone the public. Arnold soft-pedaled it to the president for the moment, saying more solid information was needed.

Meanwhile, Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the time deputy chief of staff for the Pacific and Far East, reported that his experts believed it would be imperative for Japan to retaliate against the United States in a major way and suggested the possibility of an attack on the Panama Canal, even on Washington, D.C.
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At this, the army seemed to panic. California radio stations were ordered off the air so Japanese planes couldn’t use their broadcast signals to home in on as they had at Pearl Harbor. In San Francisco the bridges, including the Golden Gate, were temporarily closed down. Hundreds of thousands of gas masks were shipped to the West Coast.

During the next few days, as more of Doolittle’s crews were found, the picture became brighter, but the military and the White House continued to drape a cloak of secrecy over the incident. One reason was fear of reprisals in China, as well as an odd notion that American authorities could somehow disguise the method in which the attack was carried out.

When reporters continued to demand answers about how the planes came to reach the Japanese mainland, Roosevelt told them mysteriously, while flipping his famous cigarette holder Groucho Marx–style, “They came from Shangri-la.”
^e

As more information about the attack was revealed in the press, Americans became delighted. General George Marshall wrote Doolittle a felicitous message: “The president sends his thanks and congratulations to you and your command for the highly courageous manner,” and so forth. Hap Arnold cabled that he was awarding the Distinguished Flying Cross to all the raiders. Halsey sent Doolittle a glowing letter, which began “The takeoff was splendid!” and went on in that vein employing the adjective “gallant” several times, before closing with a typical Halsey flourish, “Keep on knocking over those yellow bastards.”

In time, as more details emerged, the press people began to celebrate the Doolittle raid nearly on a par with Lindbergh’s landing in Paris and so were clamoring for his return to the United States. The story was fodder for newsreels and radio and rated banner headlines in all the newspapers. Doolittle was soon featured on the covers of popular magazines such as
Life
and
Look
. As a high-ranking army officer Doolittle, who shared Lindbergh’s mistrust of the press, was spared the sort of mobbing and stalking that Slim and Anne had endured.

The raid at last produced the morale boost for the American people that Roosevelt and Hap Arnold had envisioned, and it proved, unfortunately for the Japanese, a promise of things to come.

In China, meanwhile, the enraged Japanese took out their wrath on the civilian population. Emperor Hirohito himself approved orders for a punitive bloodbath against all Chinese—men, women, and children—in the areas where the Doolittle raiders had come down and were helped to safety. In a three-month carnival of boiling vengeance that is almost beyond comprehension, a hundred thousand Japanese soldiers marched into the region and slaughtered an estimated quarter of a million Chinese. They ordered Chinese laborers to ditch up all the landing fields, then gunned them down while they rested on their shovels. They burned entire towns because they didn’t like the “attitude of the population.” Their barbarism seemed to know no bounds. An old man, for instance, a schoolteacher, who had given some of the Americans food, told two Catholic priests how the Japanese had “killed my three sons; they killed my wife, Ansing; they set fire to my school; they burned my books; they killed my grandchildren and threw them in the well.” The schoolteacher himself escaped death only by hiding in the well with his slain grandchildren. Another man was immolated by being wrapped in a kerosene-drenched blanket that laughing Japanese soldiers then ordered his wife at gunpoint to set afire.
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