“Have you any Americans on this boat?” the missionary demanded of the guard.
“No,” the policeman answered in Chinese.
“Are there any Americans in there?” Birch repeated, this time shouting.
Doolittle and his men crouched inside the cabin, listening to the exchange. “Well, Jesus Christ,” Paul Leonard blurted out.
“That’s an awfully good name,” Birch answered. “But I am not he.”
The door sprang open, and Birch spotted several bearded faces inside. “Come in here!” came the chorus.
Birch climbed inside the cabin and came face-to-face with Doolittle and his men. The aviators were thrilled to meet Birch, whose language skills and knowledge of the area would be assets. Doolittle briefed the young missionary on the operation and asked whether he would travel with them and help interpret. “Of course, I was glad to,” Birch later said. “The first time I’d associated with celebrities.”
Birch traveled with Doolittle to Lanchi, relating stories of the Japanese atrocities. The missionary confessed to Doolittle that he wanted to help American forces. Doolittle bade farewell to Birch, assuring him that he would recommend him up the ladder and asking him to remain ready to help other raiders. Doolittle and his crew then pressed on toward Chuchow, a journey that would involve rail, bus, and rickshaws.
The trip across rural China at times proved so exhausting that Doolittle at one point protested to his guide that he couldn’t go any farther.
“I will see if I can find a donkey for you to ride,” the Chinese officer volunteered. “You just wait here.”
The officer returned half an hour later from a nearby village. “Here,” he told Doolittle. “You can ride this donkey.”
Doolittle felt relieved, circling the donkey to inspect the animal. As he passed the animal’s backside, the donkey kicked him in the chest. The veteran aviator tumbled back down the trail, clutching his chest and gasping for air.
The Chinese officer volunteered a few added words of caution.
“He bites too!”
CHASE NIELSEN AWOKE ABOUT 8 a.m. on April 19 on the beach where he had collapsed after the Green Hornet had crashed into the sea the night before. On looking up, he spotted two vultures perched on a rock overhead.
“Good lord,” he thought. “The Jap high command is here already.”
The sun was high, and only a few clouds drifted across an otherwise clear sky, a drastic change from the fog and rain that the aircrew had recently battled. The crew would have had no trouble finding Chuchow in this weather. “Why,” Nielsen wondered, “couldn’t it have been this way yesterday?”
The navigator surveyed his surroundings. He had collapsed the night before on the beach of a small bay. In the distance he spotted docks with a couple of patrol boats tied up. He could see the Rising Sun flags flying off the stern.
“Boy, this is a fine pickle,” he thought. “Here you are 6,500 miles from home, your aircraft carrier is gone, your airplane is sunk, you don’t know where your crew is, you’re in enemy territory and you don’t speak Japanese or Chinese.”
The news worsened.
Down the beach Nielsen spotted two washed-up bodies, both in orange Mae West life vests. He knew the remains had to be men from his crew. He pulled himself up and started toward them, crawling through the bushes that lined the beach. Nielsen parted some bushes and found himself staring at a pair of split-toed canvas-and-rubber shoes. His eyes drifted up to see laced leggings. “The next thing I saw was a rifle pointing right at my head that looked like the bore of a cannon,” he recalled. “It was that big around.”
“Stand up or me shoot!” the man ordered.
Nielsen considered his options. “I might be able to overcome him,” he reasoned, “but all he would have to do would be to squeeze the trigger.” Nielsen decided not to risk it and instead got to his feet.
“You Japanese or you American?” the man continued.
“You Chinese or you Japanese?” Nielsen countered.
“Me China.”
“Me American.”
On his feet Nielsen had a better view of the bodies. He recognized them, bombardier Bill Dieter and gunner Don Fitzmaurice.
The Chinese man noticed Nielsen’s gaze.
“They dead,” he said. “Bury them in hour. You go with me.”
The roar of boat motor interrupted the men, who looked up in time to spot a patrol boat charging around the bend.
“Japanese come,” the guerrilla said. “You run this way. If Japanese catch us they kill us.”
The men set off on a trail through the brush, ducking into a bamboo thicket with a view of the Japanese base, where the boats soon docked. Nielsen asked him where he had learned English, and the guerrilla said he had picked it up as a cabbie in Shanghai.
Nielsen reached the garrison, where he found more than two dozen guerrillas, a ragtag operation. “It was a welcome sight but as a military garrison a far cry from anything I had even seen before,” he recalled. “Facilities were meager but the stench from human waste and rotten fish was outstanding.”
Nielsen was pleased to find Dean Hallmark there. The pilot’s leg was severely banged up from his exit through the Green Hornet’s cockpit windshield. He struggled to walk. Copilot Bob Meder arrived soon afterward.
The men returned to the beach that afternoon to bury Dieter and Fitzmaurice atop a small knoll near where the men washed ashore. The Chinese had fashioned simple wooden caskets, and the aviators laid the two men inside them dressed in their uniforms and packed in wood shavings. The waves crashed in the distance.
“Hallmark, Meder and myself each said a prayer over our beloved friends’ caskets and that was all the services consisted of,” Nielsen would later write to Dieter’s mother. “As then, I have many times since, with tears running down my face, regretted the fact that we could not linger longer and see a better service given, but the Japs were scattered all through that area and delay meant our capture.”
Two of the five airmen were dead.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the interpreter urged. “Japs come pretty soon. You hurry. Get away.”
The airmen covered the graves and returned to the garrison.
Nielsen and the others felt anxious to escape, but each time the aviators addressed the garrison commander, he stalled them. “Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”
“We felt we had to rely on the Chinese, but the longer we stayed the more certain we became that the Japs would catch up with us,” Nielsen later wrote. “We agreed we’d probably be executed if they caught us, but deep in our hearts we did not believe it. I never gave up hope and I don’t think the others did, either.”
One day passed.
Then another.
By late in the morning of April 21—three days after the crash—Nielsen knew the men had waited too long. A commotion erupted at the front gate.
“Japanese come,” a winded Chinese man announced to Nielsen and the other aviators. “Japanese come.”
The airmen slipped up toward the front gate, spotting what Nielsen estimated to be several hundred Japanese soldiers armed with rifles, bayonets, and hand grenades. “We talked briefly about making a run for it, but we decided we’d be shot down at once,” he recalled. “It was better to take a chance of the Chinese hiding us.”
The men ran back to their quarters, but the effort proved futile. “The Chinese led the Jap captain to us,” Nielsen later wrote. “I can’t blame those Chinese too much. They were out-numbered and out-gunned.”
The captain, who Nielsen noted had a moon-shaped face and a tiny mustache, spoke through an interpreter. “You now Japanese prisoner,” the enemy officer announced. “You no worry. We treat you fine.”
The men would soon learn otherwise.
DAVID THATCHER RETURNED TO the hut around daybreak, soaking wet and clutching nothing but a carton of waterlogged cigarettes and a life belt. “I got to the plane,” the Ruptured Duck’s gunner announced. “But this is all I could find.”
The injured aviators now stirred. It had been a long night, and without morphine the pain throbbed; copilot Dean Davenport could no longer even walk. Charlie returned soon thereafter with an entourage of local Chinese men, who loitered outside the hut in the rain. Lawson noticed that some of the men carried ten-foot bamboo poles, while others hauled ropes and latticework squares. The men set to work, fashioning litters that consisted of a rope seat that dangled from a pole carried on the shoulders of the local laborers. Thatcher paid the fisherman ten dollars for four blankets, and the group set off just as the weather started to clear. McClure sized up his new transportation. “It was no comfortable sedan chair; it was a primeval makeshift,” he later wrote. “We had gone in a few hours from man’s most speedy transportation to his slowest.”
The travel proved arduous as the barefoot Chinese labored under the weight of the injured airmen, particularly the 205-pound McClure. “They slipped in the mud frequently and every slip jolted my torn shoulders,” the navigator later wrote. “We were all disgusted. We kept hollering at each other. Why didn’t we have autos or a plane, or a carriage? Why hadn’t we been fed, and why hadn’t a doctor come? For one, I was too sore to reason about the facts as they were.” The overgrown path soon gave way to rice paddies and then verdant hills. The guerrillas slogged on, one step at a time as the minutes soon turned into hours. “As we rose to still higher ground, the men climbed mossy rocks as if they were steps,” Lawson recalled. “Their toes gripped the rocks like fingers. I hung on as I swung between them like a butchered hog.”
They stopped at a large house in a meadow with grazing cattle. A motley band of guerrillas loitered outside, armed with a mix of guns from all over the world, each decorated with bright colored tassels. Lawson wondered how these impoverished fighters could resist the temptation to sell the injured Americans to the Japanese. “One of the toughest-looking men in the bunch now got up and advanced on me as I lay there, too exhausted from the trip over the hill to care what he would do to me,” he recalled. “He reached down quickly toward my mouth and when he pulled his hand away I felt a lighted cigarette between that part of my lips which still met. I tried to smile back at him, but I felt more like crying. Maybe from relief. Maybe shock. I don’t know. Anyway, I closed my eyes now and I thought that wherever I was I was among good men—men who were fighting for about the same thing I was fighting for.”
The injured men were sipping boiled water when one of the guerrillas charged up the path, warning that the Japanese were advancing. The guerrillas picked up the airmen and set off, this time at a trot escorted by half a dozen armed guards. The group passed through a village and then boarded a flat-bottomed boat, which McClure estimated was twelve feet long and five feet wide. A single man propelled the boat with a pole down a canal. “It was hard not to moan incessantly now, even though the warm sun felt good,” Lawson recalled. “We passed slowly down the canal for a couple of hours, the only sound being the thump of the pole against the back of the boat and the occasional jumble of conversation from the guerrillas. Sometimes the canal became so narrow that we could have reached out and touched the sides. Sometimes the limbs of overgrowing trees made the silent boatman bend low. I just lay there, hurting, and wondering what lay at the end of this ride and how I’d ever be able to walk when the ride did end.”
The group disembarked later that afternoon, and the guerrillas carried the injured aviators through rice paddies. McClure spotted others perched on higher ground, serving as scouts. The men reached a ridge, overlooking a bay where a Chinese junk sailed toward the beach. Only then did Lawson realize the men had crashed on an island. As the guerrillas carried the men toward the junk, a Japanese gunboat charged around the promontory, prompting them to drop the injured aviators in a ditch. The men peered over the embankment at the gunboat. “With sick, mingled fears I watched it come up briskly to the side of the junk. I could hear the Japanese questioning the men on the junk,” Lawson recalled. “It was torture to lie there in the ditch, waiting. Physical and mental torture. The Japanese must have spotted us, I reasoned. They must be wild to catch us, for certainly they had been informed of the raid and our route to China. They surely had found the plane by now. They would make one of the men on the junk tell.”
Moments later, to Lawson’s surprise, the gunboat backed up and charged off. The guerrillas waited until the boat vanished, then darted across the beach, sloshing through the shallow surf to the waiting junk. Lawson and the others tumbled over the side, coming to rest in a mix of sawdust and bilge water. The guerrillas climbed in after them. Chinese sailors rolled down the lattice blinds over the side as the boat set off around 6 p.m. The pain and the spring heat—coupled with weak winds—made the voyage unbearable. “We moved along like a snail,” Lawson recalled. “We groaned and began begging for water. Any water. When it seemed as if there wasn’t another breath of air to gulp in that darkening hole, it began to rain. The guerrillas understood about the water, then. They picked up bowls they found on the junk and set them out in the rain. They’d reach them in to us and we’d gulp the cool rain water and hand them back for more.”
As he had done the night before, Thatcher moved among the injured fliers, helping make each as comfortable as possible. The dried blood that caked Bob Clever’s scalped head blinded the bombardier, but Thatcher felt reluctant to wash his wounds and risk exposing him to infection. Clever’s headfirst exit through the bomber’s nose had so jarred his back that he could not sit up. “Only after getting tired of laying in one position for awhile would he ask me to help him move into a different position,” Thatcher later wrote. “For instance if he was laying on his back he would want me to help him move over on one side. His being able to sleep and get some rest helped a lot.” McClure, whose right arm had begun to turn black, suffered the opposite. “With this injury of his shoulders he was unable to lay down; had to be sitting up all the time,” Thatcher wrote. “He could not get any sleep either.”
Lawson likewise continued to battle his injuries. His left thigh and ankle oozed blood and grew increasingly numb. “He tried to sleep but it was almost impossible,” Thatcher observed. “He was in such intense pain all the time.”
Exhaustion finally overtook him.
“Don’t let them cut my leg off,” Lawson mumbled.
Davenport shook him awake. “You were having a nightmare.”
Lawson made Davenport promise that if he passed out he would not let any doctor cut his leg off.
The junk reached a guerrilla hideout about midnight, scraping against a dock as the boat came to rest. A couple of the guerrillas hopped off the boat, pointing at their mouths to communicate the intent to collect food. Thatcher followed them up to a house, retrieving a bowl of noodles topped with egg slices. “I was pretty darned hungry,” he wrote, “but couldn’t eat very much of the stuff.” The guerrillas gave him a bowl for each of the others, as well as spoons, sparing the injured aviators the use of chopsticks. To wash it down the men provided a jug of rice wine. McClure refused to eat, but Lawson managed to gum down a few egg slices. Much as he wanted the wine to numb his pain, the battered aviator couldn’t drink it. “It was like raw, uncut alcohol,” he recalled. “It burned my busted mouth and torn gums like lye.”
The junk set out again after only about twenty minutes, sailing on into what McClure would later describe as “the blackest night” he had ever known. Thatcher once again resumed his nursing duty. The twenty-year-old gunner had been awake now for fully thirty-six hours, bandaging wounds and helping to feed and comfort his injured mates. The exhausted corporal once again set out his cup and a few saucers to try to collect rainwater; the demand for his services remained constant. “Lawson was wanting water all the time because his throat was dry from the blood in his mouth where his teeth had been knocked out. I didn’t think that terrible night would ever end,” he later wrote. “The most disheartening part of the trip was that we understood the guerrillas to say it would only take two hours but it took two da
ys.”
The boat tacked west through the night. Clever was the only one of the four who was able to sleep. The others hovered in various states of semiconsciousness, never far from their pain. Lawson lifted the lattice blinds around daybreak and saw that the junk had reached the Chinese mainland and now headed up a wide river. The boat sailed on as morning turned into afternoon, finally docking late in the day at a settlement. Thatcher set off to find a telegraph office, eventually wiring word of the crew’s fate to Chungking. New porters helped offload the injured aviators—this time on more standard stretchers—and hauled them to the magistrate’s headquarters, arriving close to dark. “I was carried on a flat board,” McClure recalled. “The pain of the shoulders was at its height and with lack of food I certainly was not a genial person to be near.”
The guerrillas set the injured men down on a patio, where Lawson noted that China Relief posters plastered the walls. From inside he heard someone speaking accented English. A bespectacled Chinese man walked out and extended his hand. “Anything we got is yours,” he said to Lawson. “We know what you have done.”
Lawson told him that the men needed a doctor, anesthetic, and sedatives—demands that elicited an unfortunate sigh from his host. “They had nothing at this station, except bandage and a little food and water,” Lawson recalled. “Not even a sleeping pill, not even an aspirin tablet or any kind of antiseptic. No doctor, of course.”
The locals fed the men boiled rice and water and helped bathe the aviators. All modesty had long since vanished. “Sitting in one of the anterooms,” McClure recalled, “a Chinese girl, whom I suspected was a nurse, helped me out of my clothes and I stood in the wooden bucket while she gave me a complete bath.”
Nurses washed the caked blood from Clever’s face, allowing him to see for the first time since the crash. Others cleansed McClure’s infected right ankle, which he found now under attack by a “man-eating bug.” Nurses removed the belt and necktie tourniquets from Lawson’s left leg and then carefully cleaned the pilot, discarding the filthy quilt he had clung to since they were in the fisherman’s hut. Attendants gave the men heavy blankets, but sleep remained elusive, despite the exhaustion of battling pain without the aid of morphine for two days. “I didn’t get much rest,” McClure recalled. “I still had to sit most of the time with my hands on my knees and I seemed to be forever developing new pains.” Lawson suffered the same. “I tried to go to sleep,” the pilot later wrote. “But I just lay there full of pain, everything on me wanting care.”
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 34