York intended to report to Hap Arnold that if the Soviets agreed to basing, a wing of medium bombers—or better yet, heavy bombers—operating from the Maritime Territory would be a tactical and strategic nightmare for the Japanese. Such attacks on the Home Islands would be politically untenable, and militarily utterly unacceptable, so Tokyo would have to alter its balance of power in China or the South Pacific to deal with such a threat. It would also blunt the momentum that had swept imperial forces to victory so far in this war, and that, Ski knew, was crucial. The appearance of enemy combat aircraft at Japan’s back door would force Tokyo to react to America’s actions rather than driving the fight as they were at the moment. The Japanese liked a plan, their own plan, and nothing he had heard about them indicated much skill at adaptation, at least not without time to fully flesh out details. On the other hand, York knew that Americans operated exceptionally well without much structure. In fact, many, himself included, preferred it that way. But the entire discussion was academic unless the Soviets agreed to a basing proposal, and assessing that possibility was the second objective of this mission.
When the telephone rang, it was harsh and startling. The officer picked it up and once again spoke curtly. As the door opened, he replaced the receiver, stood, and straightened his uniform. Nodding toward the door, he shrugged into his greatcoat and motioned for everyone to follow. A steady cold breeze was now blowing, and the sun was completely down behind the mountains, though the relatively flat north-south ridgeline was starkly visible against the darkening sky. “Flanked and rear guarded,” Emmens wrote, “we headed across the field toward a larger building.” The Mitchell was exactly where they’d left it, and York saw there was no guard posted.
The half-mile walk took about fifteen minutes, and though much bigger, this structure was similarly run-down, and the concrete corners were crumbling. Four pillars extended across the front, and a “wide, red banner, sagging in the middle” was strung up above them. The writing was Cyrillic and meant nothing to them, but the meaning was clear. This was some sort of headquarters building, likely for the entire air base. Several women, shabbily dressed, hunched over and carrying pails, never looked up, though a few men near the entrance saluted the Russian officers and ran their eyes over the Americans. Passing through a large, barren, and unheated lobby, they were led to an office dominated by another huge desk where several Soviet officers waited. Behind the desk was “an obviously higher-ranking individual,” who stood, smiled, and waved a hand toward the chairs.
York tried his greetings, but was again met with blank faces. Giving up, the Russians talked among themselves, and both pilots did the same, quietly agreeing to withhold details of the Tokyo raid. If they were permitted to leave, then it didn’t matter; and if they weren’t, York decided to speak with the American consul first before disclosing any information. There was supposedly a consul at Vladivostok, so if they had to remain a few days, he would insist upon seeing this individual. It would also be good to have someone beyond this base know that the crew of 42-2242 was in the Soviet Union. A pang of uneasiness shot through his stomach at that thought. Hap Arnold and Jimmy Doolittle knew Plane 8’s objective, but the bomber’s vanishing act over Honshu ensured no one knew for certain they had even made it out of Japan, much less to Russia.
At that moment the door opened, and another officer stepped in carrying a huge map. Spread out on the table it was nearly five feet long and was intended to be a map of the world, but as he leaned over, York stifled a laugh. All the Soviet areas were bright red and extended far into the northern hemisphere, while rest of the earth’s surface was colored in drab pastels. Not only that, the “red area [was] completely out of proportion to the rest of the world.” The senior officer pointed at the map, and began talking very excitedly. He plainly wanted to know from where they had come.
“Well, here goes,” Ski muttered, and got up. “Either we make asses of ourselves, in which case they won’t believe anything we say from now on, or we make an ass of this guy, who apparently isn’t a pilot.”
The Russian clapped and smiled. York leaned over the map, took a breath, and “pointed generally in the direction of Alaska.” The Russians clustered around, intensely interested, and several nodded as if this made perfect sense. Ski smiled broadly at the ranking officer, who seemed to be buying the explanation, and ran his finger across the Aleutians then down the Kamchatka Peninsula to Petropavlovsk. Still smiling, York met Emmens’s eyes.
“If they believe this, they’ll believe anything,” he said cheerfully, knowing the Russians did not understand English. His finger traced a route across the Sea of Okhotsk past Sakhalin Island to the Maritime Territory and tapped the area around Cape Povorotnyy. Straightening up, he looked at the officer with an expectant “take that” expression, which no one saw but Emmens. The Soviets were nodding, pointing, and jabbering amongst themselves. “I think they believed it all,” Bob recorded.
It was patently absurd. The distance York indicated was over three thousand miles, and quite beyond the range of a medium bomber, but only another pilot would know that. A portable gramophone was brought in, and Russian records were loudly played at too high of a RPM setting. Nevertheless, York nodded and smiled after each song. A chess set appeared, and while the Soviets played the three American officers went over their story, which had morphed into a goodwill tour from Alaska, to be followed by a rendezvous with other Army bombers in China. Ski was thinking they might just get away with this when the door suddenly swung open and “in stalked a young, healthy-looking Russian officer.” His athleticism, fur cap, and fur-lined jacket marked him as a pilot. In fact, he was quite likely the fighter pilot who had followed them in.
This was trouble.
Smiling and nodding politely to the Americans, he spoke rather brusquely to the other officers, then waved a hand toward Ski and map. Muttering “this guy’s no dummy,” York bent over the map again, and reenacted the imaginary route from Alaska to Russia. Still smiling slightly, the Soviet officer waited until Ski was finished and, eyes twinkling, he shook his head slowly. Then, very deliberately, put his finger on Tokyo. Trying to keep a straight face, York again traced the preposterous goodwill-tour route, but this time the other pilot laughed out loud “as if he were enjoying a good joke,” and tapped Tokyo. Nodding politely to Ski, he said a few things to the other officers, then turned and left.
Sighing, Ski sat down. “I guess that guy wasn’t fooled any.”
The Russians didn’t seem to mind, however, and continued to smile as if they, too, appreciated the attempt. Obviously, the Russians, at least the air force, had heard about the Tokyo raid and knew exactly where Plane 8 had been earlier in the day. The waiting went on until 2100, when a “rather short and stocky officer in a dark blue uniform” entered with a man dressed in a civilian suit. Everyone appeared friendly enough, and to York’s surprise the civilian said in slow, precise English, “May I present Colonel Gubanov, commanding officer of the Vladivostok garrison.”
The colonel shook hands with each man, then through the interpreter welcomed them to the Soviet Union and asked if they were tired from the long flight. Passing around American cigarettes, Ski took the opportunity to explain that he and his crew were expected in Chungking, and asked whether 100-octane fuel could be obtained so they could be on their way. The colonel’s answer was that “such a question will be decided soon.” Then he asked how long it had been since the crew had eaten, and all the Americans enthusiastically accepted that invitation. The Russians liked the cigarettes very much, and the colonel began barking orders, which made everyone else scurry from the office.
“A room has been prepared in this building where you will sleep tonight,” the interpreter said. “It will take a little time to prepare a meal, but first you must write your full name and rank on a piece of paper.”
The room to which they were shown was large enough, with three beds against one wall and two on the other. A bust of Stalin rested on a shelf, and there was a bathroom down the hall, where York and his crew washed up. It was nearly 2200 before the dinner was ready, and now that the adrenaline had worn off, both pilots were at that limp, drained phase after a physically and emotionally exhausting day. Beyond tired, and York’s stomach felt like an empty balloon that had shrunk into a tight little ball deep in his gut. They were guided to a central hall downstairs, with two long tables and five waiting Russian officers, including the colonel.
Sitting squarely in the center of the tables were platters of fish, mostly pickled, surrounded by plates covered with heavy black bread, lumps of butter, and red caviar. At each place was a plate of meat, roasted potatoes, and some sort of sliced sausage or bologna. Smaller platters of sardines and cheese were scattered about, and there was lots of alcohol. Wine glasses and decanters, colored liquor bottles, and vodka. Vodka everywhere. Several homely Russian girls poured a half glass of vodka for each man, then moved off to bring more food. At the head of the table, the colonel spoke and the interpreter translated: “A Russian always begins and ends his meal with vodka!” York looked dubiously at the glass. Clear liquor, in his experience, was always the strongest. “Each drink is always to the bottom.” The interpreter continued for the colonel. “I toast two great countries, the United States, and the USSR … fighting side by side for a great common goal!”
They all raised their glasses to each other, and drank. York, no stranger to strong Polish vodka, was fine for the first two swallows, but the third made his eyes water. “I could have sworn someone had drawn a hot barbed wire across my tonsils,” Emmens remembered. The secret seemed to be having a thick piece of black bread ready, and to take a big bite of it before exhaling. Having not eaten all day, the vodka went straight to their heads, but the food helped, and there was lots of it. The wine tasted like kerosene, so Bob stuck to the vodka. Toast after toast rang out: to America and Russia, Stalin and Roosevelt, and death to Germany and Italy.
No one mentioned Japan.
York finally leaned over and whispered to Emmens, “I think we should tell this guy the true story. I’ll get him and the interpreter and we’ll go upstairs, so don’t wonder what’s going on if we leave after dinner.” Minutes later the three of them quietly left, and Bob was concerned about the Russian’s reaction. After drinking and speaking with the colonel, Ski obviously believed if he knew the truth about the raid, he might be more helpful about refueling the bomber and letting them go. Fifteen minutes later, the three men returned and they were all smiling. Calling for more vodka, the colonel was beaming. “On behalf of my government, I congratulate you for the great service you have rendered your country. You are heroes in the eyes of your people.” Everyone drank and refilled. Through the interpreter, the colonel continued, “To your magnificent flight today and to the victorious ending of the war for both our great nations!”
As the party broke up, the Americans staggered back to their room. It was cold, but there was a heavy wool blanket on each little bed, and to stretch out, relatively safe and relatively warm, was paradise. What a day. To begin far out to sea on the Hornet, bomb Japan, then end it here in a Russian field headquarters full of vodka and caviar was a bit surreal. They still had no answer about the American consul or getting gas, but Bob was literally limp with fatigue and couldn’t worry about it now. York was similarly drained, as only responsibility for other lives and combat can do. He’d gotten his bomber and his crew 700 miles over the North Pacific to the Japanese coast, another 170 miles over enemy territory, and the final 530 miles here to Russia. Whatever he could not do now he would take care of in the morning. Falling asleep thinking of his wife, Justine, and his upcoming baby, York’s last conscious thought before sleep overwhelmed him was of the other fifteen bombers.
Had they survived Japan and landed safely in China?
In fact, they had not.
Egressing from Japan began well enough. No one was shot down, and with the exception of Brick Holstrom’s in the fourth Mitchell, all the bombloads were dropped on mainland targets. The headwind they’d been fighting all the way down Japan turned into a thirty-mile-per-hour tailwind once the bombers cleared Kyushu and turned west for China. This was unexpected and very, very welcome as it extended their range by at least one hundred miles. “We picked up this tailwind for a good five, six hours,” Davey Jones recalled, “and that’s the only reason we all made it to the Chinese mainland.
China was a problem.
From Manchuria, past the Korean peninsula, and south beyond Shanghai was territory occupied by a million Japanese soldiers, and this included the major cities, railroads, and seaports. Along the most direct route the raiders had to fly to reach Nationalist Chinese, or Kuomintang, airfields, the Japanese held the Yangtze westward to Lake Poyang, some three hundred fifty miles inland from the coast. Additionally, the tenuous alliance formed between Mao Tse-tung’s communists and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists to fight the Japanese had fallen apart, and both sides were again fighting each other. Then there were innumerable local warlords and bandits scattered throughout the interior who would likely kill anyone not connected with their bands, even more so white-skinned foreigners. However, there was no other alternative. The bombers could not land on an aircraft carrier, and with Stalin’s official refusal to use the Soviet Union, that left China.
Several Kuomintang airfields were supposedly supplied with thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel, oil, and ammunition flown in from American bases in India. Doolittle had been told that if they could make it west of the Yangtze into the Anhui or Hubei Provinces, then all would be well. The bombers could either be flown on to India or remain in China as part of a new American bomber wing. Radio homing equipment was to be installed at these airfields, and using the code 57, Doolittle and his raiders would be able to find a place to land.
None of this was true.
Several of the airfields had been bombed by the Japanese, and the supplies brought in from India vanished into Nationalist hands for use after the war. Bad weather prevented the aircraft carrying the radio frequency homing equipment to land, so this was never put in place. Even if the B-25s had landed, those arranging the post-mission logistics were planning from the wrong date. Everything on their end in China was calculated based on an April 19 raid followed by a landing, and a continuation to Chungking the following day. They either didn’t realize the launch would occur on the western side of the International Date Line, or they assumed those planning the mission in America did not know a day would be lost in transit. In fact, Davey Jones and his team did know that, and April 18 meant April 18 on the west side of the line. In any event, the supplies that did arrive had already been stolen as corruption and thievery were rampant in China. One estimate stated that for every fourteen thousand tons of Lend-Lease aid sent along the Burma Road into China, only a third of it actually arrived intact.
Approaching the Chinese coast, the American pilots’ luck began running out. The weather, so helpful earlier, turned on them, and Doolittle hit a wall of clouds and rain that totally obscured the ground. As darkness fell, he climbed up to eight thousand feet to avoid mountains he could not see and continued west toward the Nationalist airfield at Chuchow. Running out of fuel and now blind except for his instruments, the colonel repeatedly tried to raise the tower but never did. “No answer,” he wrote. “This meant that the chance of any of our crews getting to the destination safely was just about nil.” Without a homing beacon, he wasn’t about to descend on instruments through the mountains, and as his fuel needles sagged toward zero, he decided that bailing out was the only hope for his crew.
Telling the gunner, Sergeant Paul Leonard, to remove the camera film and hold on to it, Doolittle ordered the jump; Sergeant Fred Braemer, the bombardier, would lead off, followed by Lieutenant Hank Potter, Leonard, and Lieutenant Dick Cole, the copilot. Switching on the autopilot, Jimmy then shut off the main fuel valves and, legs aching from sitting for thirteen hours and 2,250 miles, pulled himself to the open hatch and dropped into the wet darkness over China. Lucky to come down in a rice paddy, Doolittle’s relief quickly turned to revulsion when he realized he was sitting in human excrement used to fertilize the soil. “I stood up, unhurt and thoroughly disgusted with my situation,” he recounted. The next morning, a peasant took him to a Chinese Army outpost, and after a few misunderstandings, the major in charge gave him a warm meal and a bath. Doolittle’s crew was rounded up unharmed, and the soldiers helped find what remained of B-25 #40-2344 scattered about on a mountaintop.
“I sat down beside a wing and looked around at the thousands of pieces of shattered metal that had once been a beautiful airplane,” Doolittle recalled, describing his utter despondency. “This was my first combat mission.… I was sure it was my last. As far as I was concerned, it was a failure, and I felt there could be no future for me in uniform now.”
The other fourteen crews that hit Tokyo, Nagoya, and Kobe made similar individual decisions. Bailing out over China hadn’t been discussed since the original plan was to arrive over friendly territory during the day, then land at Kuomintang airfields, preferably Chuchow. Trav Hoover, who had followed Doolittle out of Japan and across to China, lost the colonel in the clouds over the coast below Ningbo. Well aware they were over Japanese terrain, Hoover angled off to the southwest toward a line of low mountains to avoid the populated areas, then as he added power and climbed, the left-hand engine coughed.* Almost nothing gets a pilot’s attention quicker than an engine sputtering—especially at night, in bad weather, and over enemy territory.
Turning back toward the coast, Hoover ran through his checklist and figured the boost pump had failed. Trying three times to clear the hills, with sixty gallons remaining, he “started to look for a place to land along the coast,” Hoover remembered. Circling over a wide, flat rice paddy, he brought the bomber in on a shallow final, left the gear up, and switched off the engines. Splashing down perfectly on the paddy, no one was hurt, and they managed to finally start a fire that ignited the fuel tanks and destroyed the Mitchell. After evading the Japanese, Hoover and his crew were fortunate enough to run across Chinese guerrillas, who had an English-speaking former aeronautical engineering student named Tung Sheng Liu with them who guided the Americans to Chuhsien. After that, they made it to Hengyang, where an American C-47 transport ferried them to Chungking. Lieutenant Bob Gray’s crew bailed out successfully but came down in the mountains, and Corporal Leland Faktor was found dead, probably from a secondary fall in the rough terrain. Similarly, Brick Holstrom’s crew all made it out and to safety, as did Davey Jones and the crew of the fifth bomber, who were actually the first to arrive at Chuchow.
Dean Hallmark and the Green Hornet were not so fortunate.
Out of fuel, both engines quit four miles off the coast south of Ningbo, yet Hallmark managed to ditch, at night, in heavy seas. His seat broke loose on impact, and the pilot was catapulted through the windscreen. Swimming ashore, at dawn on the beach he rejoined his copilot, Lieutenant Bob Meder, and navigator Lieutenant Chase Nielson. They discovered the bodies of Sergeant William Dieter and Corporal Donald Fitzmaurice washed up on the sand and buried them above the waterline. Local Chinese aided them, and the three officers attempted to move inland out of the occupied zone but were captured several days later near the village of Shiputzen, fifty miles south of Ningbo. Taken to the infamous Bridge House in Shanghai, the three officers would spend the next six months in the hands of the Kempeitai, the Imperial Army’s brutal secret police.
Also out of fuel at the coast, Ted Lawson attempted a tricky nighttime beach landing between Taizhou and Ningbo. The four officers were badly injured, and only the gunner, Sergeant David Thatcher, was unharmed. Local villagers from Haiyou hid them from the Japanese, but their injuries were so severe they were moved forty miles inland to the Linhai Enze Medical Bureau, where the battered fliers were attended to by Doctor Chen Shenyan. Eventually, Lieutenant Thomas White, a Harvard-educated flight surgeon serving as a gunner on the fifteenth bomber, was brought to Linhai, where he had to amputate Lawson’s mangled and badly infected left leg.
Lieutenants Harold Watson and Richard Joyce, flying Mitchells 9 and 10 respectively, made it off the Hornet and into Tokyo Bay. Watson was to bomb the Tokyo Gas and Electric Company, but instead dropped on the Mazda Electrical Bulb Plant located between the Takioji and Yamanaka residential areas in Shinagawa, just south of downtown Tokyo. Joyce intended to bomb the Japan Special Steel Factory but hit the nearby Toa Seisakusyo factory. His last bomb and the incendiary struck the Japanese Government Railroad Clothing Factory in the center of an immense rail yard and industrial complex.
The eleventh bomber off the carrier was Captain Ross Greening’s Hari Kari-er, which was headed for Yokohama. Making landfall north of Cape Inubo, Greening recognized this and flew southwest toward Tokyo. “We approached an airfield full of training planes,” Greening later wrote. “We looked down and saw the Japanese students and instructors going to their aircraft. Some of them waved to us, completely unaware that we were the enemy.”
It was, in fact, the Imperial Japanese Army flying academy, and Hari Kari-er flew right over the top of it. Greening wrote of “four Japanese fighters” intercepting them, and that Sergeant Melvin Gardner shot two down and damaged another while the bomber roared south toward Chiba, east of Tokyo Bay. Japanese records do not verify this, and many aircraft have been badly damaged and on fire yet still able to land. Combat is confusing, and if Gardner shot the fighters down, this would not likely be acknowledged by the Japanese in the wake of the embarrassing attack. What is known for certain was that a prototype Ki-61 “Hien” taking off on a test flight from the academy field did intercept the Mitchell and put “a line of ten or fifteen hits on our plane, from the trailing edge of our fight wing up to the prop,” according to Greening. The Hein, called a Tony by the Allies, caused a great deal of confusion since it greatly resembled the German Me 109 fighter, and Greening, along with others, believed Nazi pilots were fighting with the Japanese.*
