Thirty thousand rubles a month.
Despite receiving billions of dollars’ worth of Lend-Lease aid, Moscow sent Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau a monthly thirty-thousand-ruble bill for the upkeep of Plane 8’s crew. Any angst over such outrageous behavior, and the bills themselves, was forgotten when Washington received news that Ed York and his crew were safe in Meshed. It was decided to get the crew as close to the Afghan border as possible, and from there to Karachi in northern India, where the American military could take over. The British kept them in Meshed for six days, claiming “we will have to fatten you up a little bit before you can go anyplace,” which was appropriate given their loss of weight; York himself came out of Russia down from his normal 180 pounds to 130 pounds. From there, all five men were sent on to Quetta, which was the headquarters for the British Indian Army’s Baluchistan District, North Western Army.* Their hospitality was superb, and once in Quetta, a brigadier was personally assigned to further “fatten them up” and get them down to Karachi.
After three days of eating and sleeping, the British general arranged for a two-day train ride to take them the 350 miles south to Karachi. Ed York promptly made a phone call to the 10th Air Force Headquarters at Karachi and discovered an old friend, Colonel Ivan McElroy, commanded the 80th Fighter Group. Sent on ahead of the P-40Ns they would employ, McElroy told York he would fly up himself and pick up the crew. He did just that, landing a C-47 at 0900 the following morning in Quetta. The British general smiled and shook his head. “I shouldn’t be surprised. The way you people do things I shouldn’t be surprised.”
From there, things happened fast. Assigned travel Priority 2, just below the White House or diplomatic priority, York’s men began a seven-day westward odyssey that took them over the Gulf of Oman to Arabia, then Aden, followed by Khartoum in the Sudan. Due to the fighting in North Africa, they flew the equatorial route to Nigeria, then fifteen hundred miles into the South Atlantic to Ascension Island. From there, they went to Natal at the far eastern tip of Brazil and eventually north to Puerto Rico. After this they traveled to Miami, where the crew called their families before being taken up the East Coast. On June 29, 1943, a little over fourteen months after flying off the Hornet, Major Ed York and his crew stepped off an American DC-3 at Andrews Field outside Washington, D.C.
They were home.
The final nineteen days and 11,888 miles of their extraordinary mission was over. Next came a week of debriefings at a Virginia safe house, where “they worked on us for a long time,” York recalled. Their firsthand assessment of the inner workings of the Soviet Union, with all the propaganda stripped away, was still quite useful. “The Russians are anything but our allies,” Emmens told the intelligence officers conducting the debriefing. York agreed. “They understand force and resolve … they understand that. You can’t sweet talk them.” Emmens was quite blunt. The Russians were “a nation of slaves ruled by abject fear and terror of what fate will be given them by the ruling few,” and much worse off than they ever had been under the tsarist monarchy.
Jimmy Doolittle, a major general now commanding the Northwest African Strategic Air Force, was thrilled to get five more of his boys back from the raid and into the war. After the debriefings, York’s crew, like the others who returned, was sent in all directions to meet the needs of a military with more than two years of fighting remaining. Thirteen more raiders would perish during the war, and the fate of those still missing from China haunted those who had survived.
However, they could take solace in knowing that their attack on Tokyo was the catalyst for Yamamoto’s Midway operations, and entering that battle in some haste cost the Japanese dearly. Had the threat to the Home Islands not been so glaringly and unmistakably revealed by the raid, then perhaps more time and care would have been exercised. Perhaps Yamamoto would have delayed Operation MI until he had Shōkaku and Zuikaku fully operational, or at least combined his available air groups on the latter, which would have given him five fleet carriers at Midway instead of four. As tantalizing as it is to discuss such possibilities, there is no rewriting historical facts, and those are obvious. Fearful of their vulnerability, the Japanese moved hastily to destroy the threat of the American Navy and to invade the Solomons and were themselves ultimately destroyed by losses, both human and material, they could not replace.
Plane 8’s deviation over Japan, and its subsequent mission to the Soviet Union, was always occluded until now. Even if Plane 8 itself was not overtly successful, Stalin’s actions regarding the crew did reveal his intentions, his priorities, and ultimately the course his Soviet Union would pursue. In refusing to release York and his men, the Russian leader revealed that his ongoing dread of Japan was initially greater than his desire to remain an ally of the United States and Britain—at least until the Japanese defeat at Guadalcanal. Also, the fear that Stalin would initiate a separate peace with Tokyo may have been the principal motivation behind extending aid to Russia, as a Moscow dependent on America was one that could not back out as it had in 1918. This was, in Washington’s calculus, one way to occupy a future enemy while disposing of a current foe.
Awareness of cultural Russian duplicity would, to some degree, be used as a road map during the upcoming forty-five-year Cold War, since Roosevelt, so shrewd in other ways, was proved incorrect in his belief that the dangers of communism could be softened through cooperation and diplomacy. Subsequent American leaders would at least have Russia’s Second World War actions, including the internment of York’s crew, as a template for decisions. Some remembered this and never trusted Soviet leaders, no matter what they professed; some, regrettably, did not.
In the final analysis, the war was won by the Allies, and Japan was defeated by the United States without any involvement from the USSR. Fascist Italy’s and Nazi Germany’s defeat was inevitable, but in fairness certainly would have been longer and bloodier without the Soviet Union. However, Russia could not have won without America and Lend-Lease, as Stalin himself admitted during the November 1943, Tehran Conference: “I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war,” Stalin said. “The most important things in this war are the machines.… The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.”
From October 1, 1941, to May 31, 1945, the United States delivered to the Soviet Union 427,284 trucks; 13,303 combat vehicles; 35,170 motorcycles; 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil), or 57.8 percent of the Red Air Force’s total aviation fuel requirements, which included nearly 90 percent of all high-octane fuel used. Additionally, American factories provided 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs; 1,911 steam locomotives; 66 diesel locomotives; and over 10,000 rail cars. U.S. industry provided almost two-thirds of all the Allied military equipment produced during the Second World War: 297,000 aircraft; 193,000 artillery pieces; 86,000 tanks; and two million utility army trucks. When Washington permitted the Red Army to march first into Berlin, the Russians did so on 10 million pairs of American boots with Chevrolet trucks made in Detroit. It is no exaggeration to say that American production, coupled with the tenacity and vengeful ferociousness of her fighting men, decided the ultimate outcome of the Second World War.
America launched more vessels in 1941 than Japan did during the entire conflict, and her shipyards turned out tonnage so fast that by the autumn of 1943, all Allied shipping sunk since 1939 had been replaced. In 1944 alone, the United States built more aircraft than the Japanese had since 1939, and by the war’s end, more than half of all industrial production in the world took place in the United States. In four years, American industry, already the world’s largest, had doubled in size. As Ed York, Bob Emmens, and Plane 8’s crew returned home, much of this was now evident; one Essex-class fleet carrier was completed every sixty days, and nine Independence-class light carriers would be commissioned by the end of the war.* During the three years following the Battle of Midway, the Japanese constructed six aircraft carriers, while America built fifteen powerful fleet carriers and sixty-four escort carriers during the same period. To be sure, York’s men returned to a much different United States from the one they left, but it was a country contending with hard fights in all corners of the globe and, in the summer of 1943, with much still to do if the world was to be free.
On Christmas Day 1944, strange fighter planes roared over eastern China and attacked the city of Nanjing. The Americans were back. They now intended to bomb both Japan and occupied China in the same sort of ruthless, dedicated campaign used in Europe. Just a month prior, as Operation San Antonio 1 commenced in earnest, U.S. heavy bombers appeared over Tokyo for the first time since Doolittle and his raiders in 1942. Over one hundred B-29 Superfortresses smashed the Nakajima Aircraft Company’s engine factory in Musashino, less than ten miles from the Toyama Military Academy, where Jimmy’s bombs impacted thirty-one months earlier.
Six months later, in June 1945, four filthy, emaciated American fliers were abruptly and inexplicably moved seven hundred miles north from their miserable Shanghai prison to Peking. They had no way of knowing that the Japanese had been inexorably pushed 3,500 miles back across the Pacific. That same June, Okinawa had fallen, placing American military might barely three hundred miles south of Doolittle’s exit point at Yakushima, and less than a thousand miles from the Imperial Palace in Tokyo.
By this time, word had reached Washington about a “Kill All” order circulated among Japanese POW camps during early 1944. Document 2701 stated in Section 2, “The Method,” that “whether they [prisoners of war] are destroyed individually or in groups, or however it is done, with mass bombing, poisonous smoke, poisons, drowning, decapitation, or what, dispose of them as the situation dictates.” To prevent this, American Office of Strategic Services (OSS) agents had been infiltrating occupied China to locate prison camps holding Allied military and civilian personnel. A team had located such a facility in the spring of 1945, at Fengtai, outside Peking, and on August 9, the same day the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, a six-man OSS team parachuted into China.
Taking full advantage of Japanese confusion and indecision, the American commander, Major Ray Nichol, brazenly confronted a nervous imperial general and demanded that all prisoners be released immediately. Through the Swiss consul and two British-educated Japanese intelligence officers, Nichol and his men were quartered in Peking’s Grand Hotel, and the following morning discovered that all POWs had been released with no incident—except four fliers in “special” confinement at a nearby military prison.
Fortunately, these men were known to Commander Winfield Scott Cunningham and Marine Major P. S. Devereaux, prisoners for over four years since Wake Island surrendered. When told, Nichol demanded their presence, and the Japanese, who clearly intended to keep the existence of these men secret until they could be quietly killed for their role in bombing Tokyo, were stunned. In the end, the general ordered their immediate release, and four bearded, starving Americans found themselves blinking in the bright light of the Peking Grand Hotel lobby on August 20, 1945. Using a portable transmitter, Major Nichol sent the following telegram to the stately, white-columned building at 2430 E Street, Northwest, on Washington, D.C.’s Navy Hill, which served as OSS headquarters. The message read:
FOUR DOOLITTLE RAIDERS LOCATED IN MILITARY PRISON PEKING. NAMES ARE LT. GEORGE BARR, LT. ROBERT HITE, LT CHASE NEILSEN, AND CORPORAL JACOB DE SHAZER. BARR IN POOR CONDITON. OTHERS WEAK. WILL EVACUATE THESE MEN FIRST.
Two raiders had drowned off the Chinese coast, and one died during the bailout. Four more succumbed to disease and privation while prisoners of war, and three were executed by the Japanese. After returning to combat in Europe, another four became prisoners of the Germans, while thirteen additional raiders died in other theaters where America was committed. After York’s crew returned, Jimmy Doolittle still waited another two years and four months for any word of the missing fliers, and now his final four boys were coming home. Lieutenant George Barr was the last to return after a series of bizarre incidents, and Doolittle personally made certain he was reunited with his family. He also informed Barr that the raiders never held the long-promised party they’d arranged while aboard the Hornet “because you and the rest of the fellows couldn’t make it.”
But they did make it to the McFadden-Deauville Hotel in Miami on December 14, 1945. Most of the men had not seen each other since that fateful April morning forty-three months and twenty-six days earlier when they struck that first hard blow into the Empire’s black heart. For three days they relaxed, drank, caught up, and drank some more. Two years later they repeated the performance, so much so that the night watchman formally complained to the hotel manager:
The Doolittle boys added some gray hairs to my head. This has been the worst night since I worked here. They were completely out of control.
I let them make a lot of noise, but when about 15 of them went into the pool at 1:00 A.M., including Doolittle, I told them there was no swimming allowed there at night. They were in the pool until 2:30 A.M.
I went up twice more without results. They were running around the halls in their bathing suits and were noisy until 5 A.M. Yes, it was a rough night.
At checkout, the hotel manager showed Doolittle the report, then with a broad smile requested that all the raiders autograph it. He also stated “that as far as he was concerned, we had earned the right to make all the noise we wanted to in his hotel.”
Ed York and the others from Plane 8 were there and would return every year they could, though through the decades both pilots continued their enigmatic evasions whenever asked about the Soviet Union. They had given their word to say nothing, and they would keep it. The crew members all survived the war and would go on to accomplish other things in life. Gunner Dave Pohl was accepted as an aviation cadet, becoming a commissioned officer and pilot on August 4, 1945—just two days before the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. A B-17 pilot, he rose to become an aircraft commander before retiring in 1947 as a first lieutenant. Earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration, he retired in San Diego after working for Shell Oil. Dave Pohl died on February 18, 1999, and his ashes were scattered over the Pacific.
Ted Laban served as a flight engineer on B-29 Superfortresses and B-26 Marauders. Retiring as a master sergeant in 1956, Laban married and received a degree in electrical engineering. Working as a research engineer, Ted passed away on September 16, 1998, in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
Nolan Herndon retired as a major in 1945, married Julia Crouch, and moved to Edgefield, South Carolina, where he became a wholesale grocer. Always convinced that York and Emmens were on a mission beyond bombing Japan, he continued to assert this theory until his death in Columbia, South Carolina, on October 7, 2007.
As it turned out, Nolan Herndon was correct all along.
Bob Emmens came home and met his son Thomas, then went on to command the 494th Bomb Squadron and later became the vice commander of the 334th Bombardment Group. Entering the world of military intelligence, he was appointed military attaché to Romania from 1944 to 1948. With tours at the Pentagon and in Austria, his final full-duty station was, ironically, as air attaché to Japan. Michael Emmens, Bob’s younger son, told the author that “my dad ended up realizing that the people of Japan were not the enemy during World War II, but it was the government.” Retiring in 1964 as a colonel, Bob returned to his birthplace in Medford, Oregon, where he died of cancer on April 2, 1992.
Ed York returned to San Antonio to meet his daughter, Tekla Ann, called Tina, and in 1944 was flying B-17s with the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy. After sixteen combat missions, much to his disgust, Ski was grounded due to a new policy prohibiting internees and escaped prisoners of war from returning to combat. After the war, he also entered military intelligence and was assigned to Poland, then Denmark, as the air attaché. Ski York retired as a colonel in 1968 and passed away in San Antonio during August of 1984, without ever divulging the request made by Hap Arnold or the true purpose of Plane 8’s flight to Russia.
On each anniversary of the day they flew off the Hornet, the raiders tried to gather together over the next seventy-one years, and each time there were fewer men present. Every reunion closed with the toast “Gentlemen, to our good friends who have gone,” which ended the final meeting in April 2013, at Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Remaining from the eighty men who began the journey were three raiders: Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. Cole, Doolittle’s copilot; Lieutenant Colonel Edward Saylor, who was a twenty-two-year-old sergeant and the engineer-gunner on Lieutenant Don Smith’s TNT; and Staff Sergeant David Thatcher of Ted Lawson’s Ruptured Duck. On April 9, 2019, at 103 years of age, the final raider, Dick Cole, joined his brothers who had gone on before and who had been patiently awaiting him for nearly seventy-seven years.
With the story of Plane 8’s recondite mission to the Soviet Union finally explained, the last of the mysteries surrounding the Doolittle Raid have been answered. There was no “last-minute” decision to divert to Russia, and now we know that the mission was orchestrated to provide current intelligence on a particular Soviet airfield within bombing range of Japan. Another purpose was to objectively assess infrastructure and capabilities while subjectively assessing Russian willingness to engage the Japanese. This was accomplished through the addition of Ed York to the raid and through a carefully arranged carburetor swap that created a plausible reason for flying to the Soviet Union instead of China. Obviously, internment was not foreseen, but the details of that are also clear, as are those of the “escape” from Russia, which was clearly arranged by Moscow. As Ski York himself said, “If Uncle Joe [Stalin] didn’t want us to get out of there, we would still be there.”
One facet of this mission still remains elusive: did Plane 8 bomb Niitsu on the coast of the Niigata Prefecture after Nishi Nasuno? Again, no word has ever been written, or any hint ever dropped to confirm this, and both military and aviation logic shun the notion that York held on to his remaining bombs until reaching the coast. That Nolan Herndon, who was not reticent regarding his alternative theories of the mission, never spoke of attacking two geographically separated targets appears highly conclusive. Yet the Japanese reports have been verified, and the Agano River bridge was bombed on the same day of the Doolittle raid. Perhaps the elusive clue to this final mystery is still there waiting to be discovered. Perhaps not.
In the final analysis, Plane 8’s legacy is more complex.
The horrible chances these men took provided valuable, indirect intelligence of Joseph Stalin’s priorities and mind-set, as well as a window into Soviet strategic intentions. This extraordinary mission categorically reveals a tale of personal fortitude and courage and of returning home with honor. This is no literary catchphrase; if one returns from active combat to positive judgments from peers, loved ones, and a grateful nation, then this is enough of an accomplishment for a lifetime. Ed York, Bob Emmens, Nolan Herndon, Ted Laban, and David Pohl did just that.
The others who could make it home from war eventually did so. Those who gave their futures and their lives for our freedom, both during the raid and on other Second World War battlefields, will always remain as they are remembered: young, brave, and full of hope for a better world. They knew the appalling risks and the possible, even likely, consequences, yet they went anyway. Why some lived and others died is the ultimate question, and for that there never has been, nor will there be, an answer. A twitch of the controls, a few more gallons of gas, or a decision to bail out now instead of a minute from now—was it fate or destiny, luck or God? This will never be known. What is known, and occasionally forgotten at our peril, is that a world that creates men like those of Plane 8 is a world that will never surrender to tyranny.
Appendix 1
DEBRIEFING EXCERPTS
1. INTERVIEW WITH B-25 CREW THAT BOMBED TOKYO AND WAS INTERNED BY THE RUSSIANS
