Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor

by Scott, James M.

  Lawson came to moments later, still strapped in his seat about fifteen feet underwater, the roar of the engines replaced with total silence. He thought of his wife, Ellen, wishing he had left her money. He remembered his mother as well. “I’m dead,” he thought. “No, I’m just hurt. Hurt bad.”

  Lawson unbuckled his safety belt. The crash had broken the dioxide capsule that triggered the pneumatic life belt, so he shot to the surface, the quiet replaced by darkness and driving rain. Lawson felt numb and disoriented, but he knew enough to unfasten his parachute and wade toward shore, the waves lifting him up. He banged into a solid object. He looked down only to realize it was one of the Ruptured Duck’s wings. The crash had torn the engine off. Lawson stared at the tangled wires and cables and felt nauseous as the gravity of the crash hit him. A wave pushed him forward, and he turned to spot the tail rudders rising out of the waves, an image that reminded him of tombstones.

  He tried to crawl up on the beach, but the waves kept pulling him back out to sea. Finally a wave pushed him up on shore. Lawson rose and walked in a circle, his legs numb. He cursed himself over the crash only to realize that his voice sounded strange and muffled. Lawson reached up to feel his mouth. “The bottom lip had been cut through and torn down to the cleft of my chin, so that the skin flapped over and down,” he later said. “My upper teeth were bent in. I reached into my mouth with both of my thumbs and put my thumbs behind the teeth and tried to push them out straight again. They bent out straight, then broke off in my hands. I did the same with the bottom teeth and they broke off too, bringing with them pieces of my lower gum.”

  Lawson stared down at his handful of teeth and gums before dropping them and trudged up the beach. Davenport appeared in front of him. He grabbed Lawson’s head and examined it.

  “Good God!” Davenport exclaimed. “You’re really bashed open. Your whole face is pushed in.”

  Lawson asked his copilot whether he, too, was hurt badly.

  “I think so,” Davenport said. “I don’t know.”

  McClure came to underwater, estimating he was at least ten feet down. “I must go up,” he thought. “But where the hell is up?”

  The navigator felt his feet touch the sand, and he kicked toward the surface and immediately popped through the waves in the chest-deep water. He started toward shore. “I reached out with one hand to help the wading with a paddle strike. To my astonishment I couldn’t get the hand above the water. I looked at the hand and arm. Then I decided to reach the other hand over toward the upper arm on the opposite side. That was a no go either,” he recalled. “Gradually I realized that both were broken.”

  McClure found Clever in the shallow surf. The bombardier was woozy. “Help me in,” he pleaded with McClure.

  “Can’t,” McClure answered. “I think both my arms are broken.”

  “You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”

  McClure said he wouldn’t.

  “Come on, you son of a bitch,” Clever shot back. “Come help me!”

  The two airmen shouted at one another in the surf. “He called me fighting names and I gave some back,” McClure wrote. “Then we looked at each other disgustedly and dragged ourselves out of the water to collapse on the beach.”

  Dave Thatcher came to his senses in back of the Ruptured Duck. He had hit his head on impact, leaving a small gash on top of his head, one he felt would have been far worse had he not remembered to slip on his flight helmet right before the crash. Water rushed in through the gun turret, which in his disoriented state Thatcher thought was the rear escape hatch. He pulled the string on his life vest then tried to climb through the turret. Only then did he realize the bomber was upside down. He pushed out the escape hatch and climbed up on the belly of the bomber, making his way toward the smashed nose. Thatcher heard McClure call to him from the beach. The gunner stepped off the fuselage and into the waist-deep water, wading toward shore.

  After he joined the others, two men appeared atop a nearby embankment. The gunner unholstered his pistol and aimed. “Should I shoot ’em?”

  “Hell, no,” McClure answered. “They’re Chinese fishermen.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Well,” he said. “I’ve read the National Geographic magazine.”

  The fishermen climbed down the embankment and approached, dressed in conical hats and straw raincoats. A half dozen others appeared and followed them down. “Chinga,” one of the locals said, pointing to his chest.

  The aircrew repeated the phrase Jurika had taught them, and the fishermen nodded. One of the villagers then made a show of counting the airmen. He then pointed to the plane, questioning whether there were any more.

  The fishermen helped carry the battered airmen to a nearby hut, a feat that amazed McClure. “Under other circumstances, the man appointed to carry me off the beach would have been the basis for a joke,” the navigator later wrote. “He was a little bit of a squirt, hardly more than four feet tall and weighing not more than 100 pounds, wringing wet. But he backed up manfully and tried to take my arms over his shoulders—my weight was about 205. My pained expression stopped him, and I tried with such sign language as I had to tell him what was wrong. Then he backed up again with his back bent and I mounted piggyback with my hands resting on his shoulders. Somehow he made it to a house that must have been 200 yards away.”

  Inside the two-room hut made of mud bricks and with a thatched roof, the fishermen helped Lawson, Davenport, and McClure to bed. Clever passed out on the floor. Thatcher set to work tending his wounded crew by the faint light of a single lamp. The prognosis was bad. Davenport had cut his right leg so bad between the knee and ankle that within a day he would not be able to walk. McClure’s injured shoulders had already begun to swell down to his elbows, making it difficult for him to use his hands. Within days his right arm would turn black. Clever sprained his hips and back so that he was unable to stand up and walk, forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees. Cuts above one eye and below the other caused his eyes to swell shut while his headfirst exit through the bomber’s nose had nearly scalped him. “The top of his head,” Thatcher wrote in his report, “was so badly skinned that half his hair was gone.”

  Lawson was the most seriously injured. He had suffered a long deep gash just above his left knee, causing a serious loss of blood. The wound looked so bad that the airmen were convinced his kneecap had been severed. Lawson suffered another short but deep cut between the left knee and ankle through which Thatcher could see the bone. His foot below the ankle was so bruised it would turn black within days, and he suffered another deep gash on his left arm. His face looked as if someone had slashed it with a razor, and by Thatcher’s count he had lost up to nine teeth. “If he’d only had one of these injuries it wouldn’t have been so bad, but with the four serious ones he lost so much blood it made him very weak,” Thatcher wrote. “I was afraid he would die or that gangrene would start in his leg before we reached a hospital.”

  Thatcher used the bandage in the first aid packet on his gun belt for the large wound on Lawson’s knee. He then improvised, applying his handkerchief to the cut on Lawson’s arm. He had no choice but resort to dirty rags the fishermen gave him for Lawson’s other wounds as well as those of Davenport and Clever. Thatcher knew he needed more supplies. Later that night with the injured men settled, he took a lantern and returned to the plane, hoping to find the first aid kit stored in the Ruptured Duck’s tail. He reached the beach, only to discover that the tide had come in and submerged the bomber. There was no hope of finding the kit that evening. Thatcher would have to care for the others as best he could in what would prove to be a long night.

  The shock of the crash wore off as the hours marched past. “My shoulder pains got worse. I couldn’t lie down and I couldn’t stand. There was no position that I could bear very long,” McClure said. “Thatcher, at my request, would lift my head carefully and leave it up a little while; then he would lower my head and let me rest my hands on my knees. Every movement w
as excruciating pain.”

  The navigator thought he would feel better without his clothes. He ordered Thatcher to cut away his coat and shirt, but Thatcher was afraid to ruin them. McClure lashed out at the young gunner, who finally agreed to split the sleeve and cut across the lapels, allowing him to peel his coat off. Shock soon seized McClure. “I felt that my body was going to leap without my will from the bed. It is no exaggeration to say that I expected to go crazy,” he wrote. “After a little of this I passed out.”

  McClure woke at one point in the night to hear Davenport pleading with one of the locals. “Hospital—soon,” he begged. “Get coolies—carry.”

  Lawson likewise wrestled with his injuries. With the help of the fishermen, he removed his ripped-up pants, anxious to inspect his wounds. “I had no idea that there would be anything wrong with my left leg except a bruise,” Lawson wrote. “It was cut from my upper thigh to my knee, and cut so deeply that it lay open widely enough so that I looked into it and saw the gristle and muscle and bone. It wasn’t bleeding badly—just oozing. My circulation probably had slowed down because of the shock and the cold. I just stared at it, hypnotized and detached. I had never seen anything like it.”

  The door suddenly sprang open and another fisherman appeared. The airmen watched the excited whispers among the Chinese. Through sign language the fishermen made clear to Thatcher that Japanese patrols now searched the island for a downed plane. His only hope was to abandon the four injured aviators and escape. Thatcher looked at the others: Lawson, Davenport, McClure, and Clever, immobile and in pain.

  “No,” Thatcher made clear with a headshake.

  Lawson looked up at one point to see a Chinese man dressed in heavy shoes, Western-style pants, and a shirt open at the collar enter the hut. The new arrival inspected each of the injured airmen, paying careful attention to uniform buttons and insignia. Lawson wondered whether he planned to sell them to the Japanese.

  “Me—Charlie,” the stranger finally announced.

  Lawson and the others felt stunned to encounter an English-speaking local, pelting him with questions.

  “Me—Charlie,” the man repeated.

  Davenport repeated the phrase Jurika had taught them.

  “Melican,” Charlie said with a nod.

  Through a mixture of pidgin English and sign language the airmen learned that the nearest hospital was several days away; Chungking, even farther. “Many day,” Charlie informed them. “Many.”

  The men struggled to communicate as the night waned and dawn approached. Charlie finally left, promising to return soon to help. Lawson ordered Thatcher to return again to the plane to attempt to recover the first aid kit and morphine.

  “Yes, sir,” the gunner said.

  Thatcher arrived at the beach to find that the tide had washed much of the bomber’s wreckage up on the shore, though the engines remained in the water. The gunner picked through the debris, finding only a few scattered packs of waterlogged cigarettes. He saw no sign of the first aid kit. “The nose was just a mangled mass clear back to the bomb bay,” he later wrote in his report. “It was only by the hand of God that any of us got out of there alive, let alone all of us.”

  CHAPTER 15

  We must always give our best, and when we die we want to feel that our life has been lived as fully as we could have lived it.

  —BILLY FARROW, UNDATED LETTER TO HIS MOTHER

  SKI YORK’S BOMBER CLOSED in on Russia after an uneventful flight across the Sea of Japan in which the airmen saw only a single freighter; otherwise the two pilots and navigator feasted on a candy bar split three ways.

  “What do you think we ought to tell these people when we land?” York asked. “Think we ought to tell them who we are and what we’ve done?”

  “Let’s wait till we see if they already know,” Emmens suggested.

  Shortly before 5 p.m. the cockpit windshield framed the distant coastline, where dark mountains climbed up out of the sea, putting an end to the day’s fears of running out of gas over the water. “Lord,” Emmens wrote, “what a welcome sight!”

  Armed with poor maps, the airmen feared making landfall over Japanese-occupied Korea, just fifteen miles south of Vladivostok. Navigator Nolan Herndon studied the coastline and confirmed the bomber had reached Russia. The plane buzzed the rocky coastline, where the airmen felt relieved to spot no antiaircraft guns.

  The bomber passed an airdrome with as many as forty navy planes parked on the tarmac, prompting the pilots to realize that the sooner the bomber was on the ground, the better. “You can’t fly around over the seaboard area of a country at war,” Emmens wrote, “without someone in that country eventually doing something about it.”

  The bomber buzzed a second, smaller field, and the airmen spotted several buildings. A few men stood outside dressed in long black coats. A fighter dove out of the sky overhead just off the bomber’s right side.

  “For Christ’s sake,” Emmens said, “let’s get our wheels down to let him know we’re going to land and he won’t have to shoot us down.”

  The fighter hugged the bomber’s tail until touchdown. Relief washed over the crew, who had flown for more than fourteen hundred miles across hostile territory and open water. “Now, at last, dry, good ground,” Emmens wrote. “It was a wonderful feeling.”

  York taxied over toward a parked plane, hidden under camouflage netting.

  “Leave fifteen degrees of flaps down and let’s take a look at these jokers to see if they’ve got slant eyes,” York said. “If they have, we’ll take off straight ahead!”

  The fliers studied the faces of the men on the ground, which confirmed that the bomber was in Russia and not in Japanese-controlled territory. York and Emmens pulled the flaps up, locked the brakes, and killed the switches, listening as the aircraft fell silent. A dozen Russians, all dressed in long black coats with black leather belts, gathered off the bomber’s wingtips. The fliers relaxed upon seeing the Russians all grinning.

  “You guys stay in the ship and keep me covered—just in case!” York said as he climbed out.

  “We’ve got you covered,” Emmens answered, pulling his pistol out and opening the side window. “By the way, do you know any Russian?”

  “Hell, no.”

  York approached the Russians. Emmens heard laughing and watched as the grins morphed into wide smiles. York looked back and shot his copilot a smile, which the fliers interpreted as a positive sign and climbed out to join him. York kept repeating the need for gasoline, which none of the Russians understood. Three older and obviously higher-ranking Russians approached from a nearby office, prompting the others to scatter. York asked the leader whether he spoke French, but got only a shrug. Emmens then asked whether he spoke German, only to receive a blank stare in return.

  “Americansky,” the Russian asked.

  The raiders confirmed and everyone laughed.

  The Russians ushered the fliers to an unheated office in a rundown building, inviting them to sit in chairs while the leader barked into a phone. The men waited, deciding not to say anything about bombing Japan until the American consul arrived and could advise them. Half an hour later the Russians escorted them across the field to another equally decrepit building. The sun had set and the temperature dropped.

  The Russians led the men into a large office with a desk at one end and a large conference table in the center. Another Russian arrived moments later with a world map that measured roughly four by five feet, tacking it to a wall. The leader pointed to the map. Reluctant to admit having bombed Japan, York pointed to the Aleutians, tracing a route across the Sea of Okhotsk to Vladivostok. “Good-will flight,” he said.

  To the airmen’s relief the Russians appeared to buy it and for the next hour attempted to engage the fliers in small talk, even bringing in a portable gramophone at one point to play music, along with a chess set and decanter of water.

  The door finally swung open, revealing a young officer dressed in a fur-lined cap and jacket. The raiders
immediately recognized him as a pilot, who in all likelihood had just landed. He motioned for York to repeat the story of his flight.

  “This guy’s no dummy,” he said as he rose from his chair.

  York repeated the story of his flight from the Aleutians. The Russian officer listened intently and then shook his head and put his finger on Tokyo. York again traced the fictitious route, this time prompting the Russian to laugh. “Not sneeringly,” Emmens later wrote, “more as if he were enjoying a good joke.”

  “I guess that guy wasn’t fooled,” York said when he finally sat down.

  About 9 p.m. a colonel arrived, accompanied by a civilian translator. The Russian officer shook hands with each of the raiders and welcomed them to Russia. York stuck to his story of flying from the Aleutians, prompting the colonel to congratulate the men on the successful completion of such a long and difficult flight.

  “Colonel, we would like to make our rendezvous with other ships in Chunking,” York said. “Do you have hundred-octane gasoline here?”

  “Yes, such a question will be decided soon,” he answered through the interpreter. “But now you must be hungry and tired.”

  The interpreter told the men that a room had been prepared in the building for them to spend the night. After each raider printed his full name and rank on a piece of paper, the interpreter escorted the fliers upstairs to a large room with five cots. The bathroom was down the hall, equipped with a bar of soap and a single towel. “It was like the Three Bears,” Emmens recalled. “There were five of us. They had five cots, five little tables between the cots, five chairs at the end of the bed, and that’s all.”

  The interpreter returned for the airmen at 9:45 p.m., informing them that dinner was ready. He led the fliers downstairs to a large room set up with two tables, covered with wine and liquor glasses as well as platters of pickled fish, caviar, black bread, and various meats and cheeses. Servers poured clear liquid into each raider’s glass.