Not yet over Tokyo Bay yet but seeing a “concentration of buildings ahead,” Ross decided to drop on what he believed to be a refinery, pipelines, and storage tanks. Pulling up to seven hundred feet, he released all three bombs and the incendiary, which resulted in a huge explosion followed by a concussion so bad that he and copilot Kenneth Reddy hit the cockpit ceiling. Dumping the nose, Greening accelerated to three hundred miles per hour and left most of the fighters behind. What he actually hit was a fuel dump on Katori Airfield, under construction for the Imperial Navy, and the damage delayed its completion until 1943.† Zipping over the mouth of Tokyo Bay, Hari-Kari-er strafed three patrol boats, then headed down the east coast of Japan. Encountering the same bad weather over the Chinese coast, Greening tried to climb up through the clouds to get a celestial fix but ran into ice. With the fuel gages reading zero, he ordered a bailout and, like all the others, found himself drifting down through the rainy blackness onto China.
After a cold, wet, miserable night on the hillside, Greening followed a stream downhill through a canyon and, to his delight, found Lieutenant Ken Reddy. They made their way farther down to a small village, and the postmaster agreed to guide them deeper into the interior. By nightfall, they reached a small town called Wei Chou Fu and were put up in a hotel. Passing out from exhaustion, the two pilots were greeted the next morning by the other three members of Hari-Kari-er’s crew. Given a Chinese version of an “American” breakfast consisting of fried snake, eggs, and beer, they were loaded into a twenty-year-old Dodge truck and taken on to Chuchow. There they were greeted by Davey Jones, who was wearing Chinese clothing and sporting a Fu Manchu mustache.
Lieutenant William Bower, pilot of the twelfth bomber, Fickle Finger of Fate, was there with his crew. Targeted against the Ogura Refinery at Yokohama targets, Bower actually dropped on the Nippon Pipe Factory and Showa Fertilizer Company in the Kawasaki Industrial Area, very close to Dean Hallmark’s targets. Bower’s bombardier, Sergeant Waldo Bither, amused them with his story of opening his parachute while still inside the Fickle Finger and repacking it while the bomber was going down so he could bail out. Later that evening Major Jack Hilger and his crew of the fourteenth Mitchell were safely brought in. Hilger’s targets were in Nagoya, some one hundred seventy miles southwest of Tokyo on Ise Bay, and he hit them all. With Nagoya Castle as an unmistakable landmark, Hilger dropped on the Imperial Army 3rd Division barracks and the nearby garrison hospital. He also hit the Sasashima Freight Yard, followed by the Mitsubishi aircraft plant in the downtown port area.
Lieutenant Don Smith in TNT was fifteenth off the Hornet and flew in formation with Jack Hilger until the latter peeled away for the castle. Smith’s targets were in Kobe, one hundred miles farther southwest past Nagoya, and he dropped all four incendiaries on what he believed to be an aircraft factory, though TNT actually hit the Mitsubishi Dockyards and the Central Food Market before scooting southwest for China. Making it to the coast and out of fuel, Smith ditched the bomber offshore south of Ningbo, and his crew made it out safely before TNT sank beneath the waves. Sheltered and aided by the Chinese, Smith heard about Ted Lawson’s injuries and met up with Ruptured Duck’s crew so Lieutenant Thomas White could treat him.
By April 25, seven days after the raid, Lieutenant Bob Gray’s Whiskey Pete survivors showed up at Chuchow, along with Brick Holstrom’s bunch and the crew of Lieutenant Edgar McElroy’s The Avenger. McElroy, like Hilger and Smith, was able to find his primary target in the Yokosuka Naval Base at the mouth of Tokyo Bay. Crossing Chiba at treetop level, McElroy dashed across the water to drop his payload on the drydock along Yokosuka’s western edge. One five-hundred-pounder struck the forward area of the light aircraft carrier Ryūhō in Drydock Number 4, killing seven of her crew and delaying her commissioning until November 1942.
On a rainy Sunday, April 26, twenty of the surviving raiders left by train from Chuchow to Kweilin, then the following day by bus to Kiang. From there to Hengyang, where an American C-47 landed. Without the aircraft even shutting down, the ragged, dirty fliers piled aboard and were flown on to Chungking. “When it flew over with our insignia on the side, we all shouted with joy,” Lieutenant Ken Reddy recalled. “It was the most beautiful sight we had witnessed in China.”
Courtesy of helpful Chinese guerrillas, Doolittle and his crew finally made it into Chuchow shortly after the first group of twenty departed. They had come down farther north than the others, due west of Shanghai along the Zhejiang and Anhui provincial border near Haotianguan. Eventually reunited, the Americans were taken to the provincial governor’s house, where Doolittle learned four other crews had been located and escorted to Chuchow. The colonel then sent a telegram to the U.S. embassy in Chungking, which was to be forwarded to Hap Arnold in Washington:
TOKYO SUCCESSFULLY BOMBED. DUE BAD WEATHER ON CHINA COAST BELIEVE ALL AIRPLANES WRECKED. FIVE CREWS FOUND SAFE IN CHINA SO FAR.
By riverboat out of Japanese occupied territory, then by rail, bus, and rickshaw, Doolittle’s crew made their way west to Chuchow. It was here, on April 28, that Doolittle was informed that Arnold had promoted him directly to brigadier general, skipping the rank of full colonel entirely. “Since I had been promoted,” he wrote, “I tried to see to it that every man on the raid was also promoted.” It was here that Doolittle also learned of the beginning of savage Japanese reprisals against the Chinese for aiding the Americans. Tokyo, embarrassed and enraged, commenced Operation Sei-go, eventually a three-month campaign penetrating some two hundred miles inland from the coast. Fifty-three infantry battalions of the Thirteenth Army, elements of the Eleventh Army, and the North China Area Army were to destroy the airfields in the Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces the Americans planned to use. A carte blanche order was given to ravage the countryside: “Airfields, military installations, and important lines of communication will be totally destroyed.”
Lieutenant Harold Watson of the Whirling Dervish had been cared for by a man named Ma Eng-lin in the village of Ihwang. Upon hearing of this, Japanese soldiers tied Ma Eng-lin to a chair, soaked the terrified man in kerosene, and forced his wife to set him afire. Father Wendelin Dunker, a Catholic priest in the village of Ihwang, witnessed the unrestrained brutality firsthand. “They shot any man, woman, child, cow, hog, or just about anything that moved,” Dunker recorded. “The big maggot-producing flies were almost as thick as snowflakes in a snow storm. They raped any woman from the ages of 10–65.”
Chuchow was especially hard hit. Over a thousand sorties were flown against the town, which killed 10,246 people, and Japanese soldiers burned 62,146 homes, leaving 27,456 Chinese civilians homeless and destitute. Worse still, the Manshu Detachment, also known as Unit 731, was given a free hand to use the current area of operations as a field laboratory for its bacteriological and biological warfare experiments. Headed by Lieutenant General (Doctor) Shiro Ishii, a vehement nationalist, Unit 731 had operated in Manchukuo since the mid-1930s with the full approval of the Imperial General Staff and the cooperation of the Kwantung Army.
Aside from vivisections performed on pregnant women and pressure experiments on living humans, Unit 731 was particularly focused on bacteriological warfare. Rolls and bread were impregnated with typhoid, then distributed to starving Chinese prisoners who were released to inadvertently spread the disease. Wells and other water sources were contaminated with plague, cholera, and anthrax. Typhoid-infected cookies were left by withdrawing Japanese troops, knowing the hungry Chinese would eat anything they found. In total, some 225,000 to 250,000 Chinese were killed or perished from starvation and sickness in retribution for their resistance to Japanese occupation and for the aid provided to the raiders. Doolittle was appalled, and Chiang Kai-shek cabled Franklin Roosevelt directly: “These Japanese troops slaughtered every man, woman and child in those areas.”
Arriving in Chungking on May 3, 1942, Doolittle was summoned to Washington immediately and departed China two days later on a DC-3 flown by Captain Moon Chin—a Chinese American born in Baltimore. From Myitkyina, in the country then called Burma, Doolittle landed in Calcutta, India, where he replaced his ragged uniform with the only outfit he could acquire: an English bush jacket, shorts with silly knee-length socks, and a pith helmet. He “looked ridiculous” but did not want to arrive in torn, oil-stained khakis. Now on a BOAC (British Overseas Airways Company) transport with stops in Persia, Egypt, and Senegal, Doolittle steadily headed west to Brazil, then north to Puerto Rico, and finally, on May 18, 1942, one month after flying off the carrier and bombing Tokyo, he landed in Washington.
Meeting Hap Arnold in his office, they chatted, then met with Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall. Afterward Arnold, with his customary grin, suggested the pilot visit the officers’ uniform clothing store so he’d look more like a general, then go home to his apartment off Rock Creek and wait. Hap called later, then showed up in a staff car with Marshall in the back and, with a twinkle in his eye, told Doolittle, “Jim, we’re going to the White House.” Surprised and a bit confused, Jimmy thought about that moment and asked, “I’m not a very smart fellow and I don’t want to embarrass anyone … what are we going to do there?”
“The President is going to give you the Medal of Honor,” Marshall replied.
Doolittle blinked, shocked. Without thinking, he blurted out, “General, that award should be reserved for those who risk their lives trying to save someone else. Every man on our mission took the same risk I did. I don’t think I’m entitled to the Medal of Honor.”
Jimmy knew immediately he had said the wrong thing, because both generals flushed, then Marshall growled, “I happen to think you do.”
Still desperate to locate his missing crews, Doolittle knew that without Chinese assistance finding them would be next to impossible. Of his seventy-nine fellow raiders, he was aware Ted Lawson had survived but without his left leg, and from Lieutenant Bob Gray he learned that Leland Faktor died while bailing out. Doolittle was aware of York’s mission to the Soviet Union, but nothing had been seen or heard from the bomber since the carrier launch. They were to have refueled in Russia, then come on to Chungking, or at least Chuchow. That should have happened within days of the raid, and the fact that Plane 8 never arrived in China did not bode well.
Also completely unknown at this point were the fates of Lieutenant Dean Hallmark’s Green Hornet and Lieutenant Bill Farrow’s crew of Bat out of Hell. Combat pilots are notoriously superstitious, and beginning with the Hornet’s flight deck, Farrow’s mission was under an ominous cloud. Sixteenth and last in line, Bat out of Hell was so far aft that her fuselage largely hung over the carrier’s stern and the gunner, Sergeant Harold Spatz, had to wait for Farrow to taxi forward in order to access the rear hatch. Bat was unchocked and ready to move when TNT, the fifteenth bomber, ran up her engines for takeoff, and the prop wash sent Farrow’s Mitchell tilting backward, twin tails pointing at the churning sea below. As the nearby sailors scrambled to save the plane, Machinist Mate Bob Wall slipped and tumbled into Bat’s left propeller.*
Bombardier Jake DeShazer recalled, “I turned around, and here that sailor was, laying right under where the propeller turned. His arm was laying out separate from the rest.… [It] had been cut off.” When he did finally crawl into the nose compartment, he discovered there was a twelve-inch-wide hole in the glass that meant he’d have to deal with a 160 mile-per-hour draft all the way to Japan and then to China. Farrow launched, and like all the others got his heading from the carrier, then turned west for Japan.
Following Hilger south of Tokyo, per the original plan Farrow was supposed to turn off for Osaka when Smith headed for Kobe—but he did not. Following Hilger over Nagoya, Bat dropped all its incendiaries in one pass before heading across Ise Bay to Yokkaichi on the western shore. Japanese documents, primarily police reports, show that Farrow hit the Toho Gas and Chemical Factory, the Imperial Armory, and the Toho Chemical Plant; all lay along a north-south line from Nagoya Castle to the port area. A combat report from the Yokosuka Land Defense Force, dated April 22, 1942, confirms that at “1427 (Tokyo Time) an aircraft flying extremely low, bearing 225 deg. had approached” Yokkaichi, and “Strafing by enemy” occurred over the rail line leading south out of town. The aircraft then vanished in the direction of Kameyama, to the southwest, then out of Japan and across to China. Encountering the same foul weather, darkness, and low fuel, somewhere east of Nanchang the crew successfully bailed out.
One version of the story states that Farrow and DeShazer found each other and spent the night in a graveyard near a small village. In the morning, they approached the elderly headman, who eventually fed them and agreed to have the pair taken to Chungking. Some word must have reached the village about approaching imperial troops, because the headman hid the Americans in a small hut, which he barred from the outside. A group of soldiers did appear and their officer questioned the old Chinese gentleman, obviously about foreigners who had suddenly appeared, but the man repeatedly shook his head.
Losing patience, the officer resorted to a favorite Japanese punishment and had the old man wrapped in a blanket soaked with kerosene. When Bill Farrow saw this, he knew what was going to happen, and could not let the man die for their sake. Yelling and pounding on the door, he and DeShazer tried to make themselves heard, but to no avail. The officer lit a small stick and thrust it toward the headman’s wife, who refused to immolate her husband. Grabbing the woman’s small son by the throat, the officer began to strangle the boy with one hand while holding the burning stick in the other. Confronted with such an agonizing choice, the woman moaned and threw the stick on her kerosene-soaked husband, who began screaming as he burned. Laughing and cheering, the soldiers then smashed the man’s head in with their rifle butts, and as the noise died down, they heard Farrow yelling from the hut.
Quickly disarmed, bound, blindfolded, and dragged from the village, the two Americans heard rifle shots as the soldiers killed the remaining Chinese. This sounds suspiciously like Wendelin Dunker’s eyewitness account in Ihwang, and is not mentioned at all in Sergeant Jake DeShazer’s oral history. Forty-seven years later, now a retired reverend and missionary, he recounts spending the night alone in a graveyard and, the next morning, observing a military camp across the road and “a couple of fellows in uniform playing with some children.” Joining them, DeShazer told the soldiers he was an American, and one who spoke English said they were Chinese. The men fed him a “mashed up bean” paste with sugar that they called yōkan then surrounded him and said “we think you better let us have your gun.”* Faced with rifles and bayonets, he handed it over, and the soldier calmly stated, “You are in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army.”
However it happened, all five of Bat’s crew had been captured immediately and were reunited that very afternoon in the Japanese camp. Taken to Nanchang, they were tossed into a cell with Bat out of Hell’s other three crew members, who had been captured the night before. Flown to Shanghai, the men were beaten and interrogated, yet all five men refused to give any information, though copilot Lieutenant Bob Hite recalled the officer who questioned him already had a list of all eighty Doolittle raiders, knew Doolittle was the commander, and knew that they’d flown off the aircraft carrier Hornet. On April 20, Farrow’s crew was flown to Tokyo and handed over to the Kempeitai. Five days later, they were joined by Lieutenants Dean Hallmark, Bob Meder, and Chase Nielson.
For these eight young Americans, the next few months were a nightmare. Subjected to waterboarding, shin kicking, and the “pipe” treatment, each of them firmly resisted and refused to disclose any information other than their names, ranks, and serial numbers.* In the end, it was torture for the sake of torture, as the Japanese had recovered maps, charts, and papers from several of the crashed Mitchells and knew everything about the raid. On May 22, the men were forced to sign papers written in Japanese, which were fictitious confessions about intentionally strafing schools, children, and bombing nonmilitary targets. Fed a few ounces of maggoty rice, “soup” made from water used to wash vegetables, and a half cup of water per day, each man steadily lost weight and grew weaker. By June they had been taken by boat back to Shanghai and again lodged in the Bridge House, where they would remain for seventy days.
July 1942 saw the issuance of Secret Order 2190, which stated, in part, “An enemy warplane crew who did not violate wartime international law shall be treated as prisoners of war, and one who acted against the said law shall be punished as a wartime capital crime.”
This was laying the legal groundwork, Imperial Japanese style, for Military Order Number 4, issued on August 13, 1942, later known as the “Enemy Airmen’s Act.” The order read:
Article I: This law shall apply to all enemy airmen who raid the Japanese homeland, Manchukuo, and the Japanese zones of military operations, and who come within the areas under the jurisdiction of the China Expeditionary Force.
Article II: Any individual who commits any or all of the following shall be subject to military punishment:
Section 1. The bombing, strafing, and otherwise attacking of civilians with the objective of cowing, intimidating, killing, or maiming them.
Section 2. The bombing, strafing or otherwise attacking of private properties, whatsoever, with the objectives of destroying or damaging same.
Section 3. The bombing, strafing or otherwise attacking of objectives, other than those of military nature, except in those cases where such an act is unavoidable.
Section 4. In addition to those acts covered in the preceding three sections, all other acts violating the provisions of International Law governing warfare.
Article III: Military punishment shall be the death penalty [or] life imprisonment, or a term of imprisonment for not less than ten years.
Most damning for the captured raiders was the last line, which stated “This military law shall be applicable to all acts committed prior to the date of its approval.”
It was, in fact, a retroactive death sentence.
On August 28, the eight men were transferred to Kiangwan Miliary Prison near Shanghai and subjected to an Imperial Army “trial” by the 7330 Noburo Unit Military Tribunal for their alleged crimes. All eight were sentenced to death by firing squad, with an execution date set for October 15, 1942. General Sadamu Shimomura, commander of the Thirteenth Army in China, commuted five of the sentences to life imprisonment with “special treatment,” meaning that even in the event of future prisoner of war exchanges, these five Americans were war criminals and were not eligible for repatriation. On the evening of October 14, Lieutenant Dean Hallmark, Lieutenant Bill Farrow, and Sergeant Harold Spatz were told they would be shot the next day, and Sergeant (later captain) Sotojio Tatsuta gave each man several pieces of paper for letters to their families.
Bill Farrow, just twenty-three years old, wrote to his widowed mother in South Carolina: “Don’t let this get you down. Just remember that God will make everything right, and that I will see you again it the hereafter.” He also wrote to his fiancée and thanked her “for bringing to my life a deep, rich love for a fine girl.” Twenty-eight-year-old Dean Hallmark, the former collegiate football star, was so weak from dysentery and beriberi that he couldn’t stand, but told his family in Dallas “try to stand up under this and pray.” Kansan Harold Spatz, who turned twenty-one in the Bridge House, wrote to his widowed father: “Dad, I want you to know that I love you and may God bless you. I died fighting for my country like a soldier.”
Led out to Public Cemetery Number One at 1630 on October 15, the three fliers were made to kneel before wooden crosses constructed a day earlier by a Japanese carpenter. Sotojio Tatsuta told the Americans, “We have been living together under the same roof and on this day you are going to be executed … but I feel sorry for you. My sympathies are with you. Men must die sooner or later. Your lives were very short, but your names will remain.”
