Seconds before he blacked out, guards jerked him upright. He coughed and sputtered as the interpreter pressed him to talk.
Nielsen again refused.
A snap of the fingers once again started the horror. “With the water trickling steadily into my mouth and nose I began to go out—quicker this time,” he later wrote. “I was too weak to struggle. Just as a black cloud seemed to be settling over me I was jerked to my feet, slugged in the jaw and shoved into the chair.”
“Talk,” the interpreter barked.
Exhausted and half drowned, Nielsen shook his head no. He couldn’t help noticing the smile that crept across the faces of the guards, one of whom retrieved a large bamboo pole about three inches in diameter. Nielsen thought the men might beat him with it, but instead the Japanese slid it behind the back of his knees and then twisted his handcuffed arms backward until he kneeled. Pain pierced his legs. The officers grinned at Nielsen, now in such pain he felt himself begin to panic.
“I can’t stand this too long,” he thought.
Noises echoed down the hall and Nielsen suspected Hallmark and Meder suffered the same. “The sweat was pouring down my face and into my eyes,” he wrote. “I felt dizzy and weak. I could see the sun shining through the upper part of the window and I thought if I could just get outside I might have a chance to make a break for it.”
One of the officers slipped off his shoes. He then brought the heel of his foot down on Nielsen’s knees. “With each blow it felt as though my kneecap was actually coming loose, but the pain wasn’t so great now because my legs had grown numb,” Nielsen later recalled. “It was something like the sensation you feel when a dentist pulls a tooth he has first deadened with novocaine.”
The torture dragged on for ten minutes before the guards jerked Nielsen to his feet. He collapsed as soon as the Japanese released him, his legs unable to support him. The officers laughed at him as he struggled to pull himself up.
Guards reached down and picked Nielsen up, dumping him back in his chair. Though exhausted and battered, Nielsen now fumed. The officers stared at him and he glared back. The interpreter asked if he wanted to talk.
“I’ve given you all the information I have,” he replied.
The Japanese then slid a pencil-sized rod between his forefinger and middle finger, then squeezed his fingers together while another guard slid the rod back and forth. “I could feel the edges of the pencil slowing cutting the membrane and the sides of my fingers,” he later wrote. “I could feel when the blood started. It was a nasty pain, quite different from the bamboo rod torture. It got to your nerves more.”
Nielsen refused to surrender.
“Well,” the interpreter told him, “this is the start of your treatment and you might be interested to know that we have a lot more splendid devices like this. We’ll get the information we want if we have to torture you to death.”
“We’ll see about that,” Nielsen thought.
Some of the officers left the interrogation room, but one returned moments later, bragging that Nielsen’s friends had confessed. Why should Nielsen continue to suffer since the Japanese now knew all the details of the raid?
“Tell it to me and I’ll see if you got it right,” Nielsen said.
“Oh, no,” the officer said, chuckling. “You tell it to us.”
Nielsen again refused.
Guards twisted the navigator’s arms until he dropped to his knees. Others slapped his face and kicked him in the shins.
“How do you like that?” the interpreter would occasionally interject. “Do you want to say anything now?”
The abuse dragged on until the guards appeared to tire. “If you insist on not telling us anything we might as well finish the job right away,” the interpreter told him. “You will face the firing squad for execution immediately.”
Guards slipped a blindfold over Nielsen’s eyes and led him outside. He felt the sun on his face and gravel under his feet. The guards pushed him along, holding tight to his arms. He always knew that, if he was captured, the Japanese might execute him, but he never truly believed it—until now. “My mind was in a whirl and I couldn’t think straight,” he recalled. “It’s awfully hard to understand that you are about to die, especially when you are not conscious of having done anything wrong. I didn’t feel fear then; just a numbness in my body and an empty feeling in my stomach.”
Nielsen heard men marching behind him and thought it must be the firing squad. His throat went dry and his heart stopped. Guards had marched him about a thousand feet down the path when he heard a guttural command. The soldiers stopped, and he heard rifle butts hit the gravel. Guards pushed Nielsen a few feet farther down the path and then turned him. “The sweat was pouring down my face and neck now,” he recalled. “I wanted desperately to wipe my face, but my hands were cuffed.”
He heard another command and the sound of what he suspected were rifles being raised and aimed. No one held on to him now. He thought he might run for it, but he knew it would be futile with his blindfold and handcuffs. “My whole life flashed in front of my mind’s eye,” he later wrote. “I remembered how my dad and I used to go hunting and fishing back in Utah when I was a boy. I thought of my wife, Thora. I realized suddenly that my folks might never know what had become of me and that thought was agonizing. Somehow a man feels a little better if he is certain that those he loves know what happened to him. I began to feel weak. I thought my heart was actually going to stop. It would pound and jump and there seemed to be long pauses between the beats.”
“Well, well, well,” the interpreter said. “We are all Knights of the Bushido of the Rising Sun and we don’t execute men at sundown. It is now sundown, so your execution will take place in the morning. We will shoot you then unless you decide to talk in the meantime.”
Nielsen felt his heartbeat finally slow as his rage increased. “If you boys don’t shoot me now,” he thought, “you won’t shoot me in the morning.”
Guards dragged him back to his cell. He heard Hallmark’s voice down the hall as the Japanese likewise locked up the Green Hornet’s pilot after an afternoon of similar treatment. Several guards arrived at Nielsen’s cell around 6 p.m., hanging him by his handcuffs on a wooden peg high up on the wall. His toes barely touched the floor. He realized he was helpless; any movement only hurt his wrists more. “Panic seized me then. I didn’t think I could stand that punishment very long,” he later wrote. “In a few minutes the pain in my wrists was so intense that I was almost sick to my stomach. Then stabs of pain began to shoot through my chest and shoulders.”
He shouted for help, but no one came. The minutes ticked past. An hour turned to two and then three. He finally passed out. “There were periods of consciousness,” he recalled, “but the entire night is like a horrible dream in my memory.”
Nielsen woke the next morning at daybreak as the guards pulled him down off the wall. “When I let my arms down I thought they were both going to drop off,” he said. “My arms were numb, my shoulders were numb, I was numb clear to the waist.”
Guards blindfolded him and led him out of his cell. When the Japanese removed his blindfold, he spotted Hallmark and Meder. The men looked haggard, but exchanged the thumbs-up sign. Guards blindfolded the fliers, drove them to the airport, and loaded them aboard a transport plane, tying each of the handcuffed aviators to his seat. The plane roared down the runway. “I could see a little bit out of my blindfold and we seemed to be flying toward the sun,” Nielsen recalled. “I figured Tokyo was the goal.”
CHAPTER 18
Far from winning the war, we have just begun to fight. But we have begun.
—PITTSBURGH PRESS, APRIL 20, 1942
JAPAN’S LEADERS FUMED OVER the attack on Tokyo. Almost more humiliating than the assault was the fact that it literally followed an air-raid drill. Shouldn’t Japanese forces have been on alert? The raid not only made a mockery of the earlier exercise but also exposed the flawed assumptions of Japan’s senior leaders, a sentiment capt
ured best in the diary of Captain Yoshitake Miwa. “As the enemy position was 700 miles east of Tokyo, it was thought that an enemy air raid would be made early tomorrow morning. Therefore, when a telephone call came in from Tokyo saying that Tokyo and Yokohama area was bombed, it seemed entirely unbelievable,” Miwa wrote. “We cursed ourselves for this, but there is no other way to do. We only thanked God for our not being inflicted much damage, especially no damage sustained to the Imperial Palace.”
The lack of widespread damage did little to comfort Yamamoto, who was physically sickened by the news of the attack. The veteran admiral who once had two fingers blown off in the Russo-Japanese War retreated to his stateroom aboard the battleship Yamato, refusing to come out. His chief steward, Heijiro Omi, had never seen the admiral so depressed. Yamamoto battled the shame of having failed not only the emperor and the people of Tokyo but even his own mistress, Chiyoko Kawai, who was in bed with pleurisy at the time of the raid, a scene she captured in her diary. “Helped in my hard-labored breathing and got up in spite of myself. Abandoned by doctors, there is no other way but to leave myself in the hand of destiny,” she wrote. “Sad indeed.”
Yamamoto’s incapacitation left Rear Admiral Matome Ugaki to handle the attack’s fallout. Early reports showed that the raiders had used twin-engine bombers—Ugaki incorrectly speculated about possible B-26s—and had targeted at least nine spots in Tokyo, plus others in Yokohama, Yokosuka, Nagoya, Wakayama, and Kobe. Ugaki learned that one of the bombers had hit the bow of the submarine tender Taigei—undergoing conversion to an aircraft carrier—while reports claimed another targeted Niitsu’s oil wells in Niigata Prefecture. Early casualty figures revealed that the attacks had killed twelve and wounded more than a hundred. The raiders had burned fifty houses and left another fifty partly or completely destroyed. Ugaki could not figure out how the bombers had escaped. Did the planes return to carriers or fly on to Russia or China?
The Japanese bombers and fighters that had sortied shortly before 1 p.m. had flown as far out as seven hundred miles without locating the enemy task force. By 5 p.m.—and with no sign of the attackers—Ugaki could do little more than vent. “We have missed him again and again. This is more than regrettable, because this shattered my firm determination never to let the enemy attack Tokyo or the mainland,” he wrote in his diary. “If the enemy carried out attacks from such a long distance, which is about the same as an expected one-way attack, we shall have to revise our countermeasures fundamentally, studying their type planes. In any case, this is one up to the enemy today. As we have no information whether he’ll attack again tomorrow, going north toward Hokkaido or south heading for Marcus and Wake, we shall have to let it up to him.”
Erroneous reports of new attacks kept Japanese leaders on edge. At 2:02 a.m. on April 19 observation posts at Sawara, Kagoshima, and Togane all reported hearing large explosions and issued an aircraft alert. Two flying boats took off at 2:45 a.m. to search the waters east of Tokyo, but found nothing. The Japanese lifted the alarm half an hour later, but as a precaution kept fighters in the air and dozens more on a fifteen-minute standby alert. A 12:15 p.m. telephone call from the central military district claimed enemy planes had been sighted over Osaka and the suburb of Sakae. More than two dozen fighter and scout planes again roared into the skies, only to learn that several Japanese bombers had triggered the false alarm. These measures coincided with a search of the waters out to seven hundred miles by eighteen land-based bombers.
Reports indicated the enemy task force might head north, creating fear of a raid on Hokkaido. No one had heard from the doomed Nitto Maru or the Nagato Maru, though Ugaki learned that the Americans had damaged at least three other picket boats. Twenty-four hours after the raid the casualty count climbed to as many as 363 killed and injured. “The reason,” Ugaki wrote in his diary, “for the comparatively large number of casualties versus the number of bombs might be splinters from our own antiaircraft fire.” News that at least one American bomber had crashed in China initially added to the confusion. “What relation there was between the powerful enemy task force sighted in the east sea of Japan yesterday and the movement of this Army air force is still beyond our judgment,” Miwa wrote in his diary. “Did they take off from carriers? Did they operate separately, or, did they intend a simultaneous attack?”
Ugaki did soon catch a break. The Japanese captured five raiders, though the initial interrogation reports out of China proved a muddled mess, thanks to the wild and conflicting stories made by members of the Bat out of Hell’s crew. Harold Spatz had told interrogators that the aviators took off from a fictitious island west of Midway, while Bobby Hite claimed the men flew from the Aleutians. One check of the charts revealed to veteran sailor Ugaki that it was all bogus. “They never told the truth,” he griped in his diary. “It couldn’t be helped, as the interrogators must have been some army officers of lower rank with little knowledge of foreign languages and the sea. We must investigate further promptly so that we can take proper measures for the future.”
Even through the blatant falsehoods the Japanese gleaned some valuable details, deducing that at least thirteen North American B-25s—each with a five-man crew—all headed for China. Based on that, Ugaki pieced together the plan. “What the enemy intended in this attack, I suppose, was to launch long-distance planes from converted carriers after closing in our homeland supported by carriers, heavy cruisers, and destroyers. After flying over our homeland, the bombers were to go to the mainland of China, where they would use bases for carrying out raids on our country. In view of this recent success, undoubtedly the enemy will repeat this kind of operation while attempting raids from China. Therefore, we must take steps to watch far to the east and, at the same time, always keep a sharp lookout on the threat from the west.”
By the following evening—and after the Americans failed to attack Hokkaido—Japan suspended Tactical Method No. 3 against the U.S. Fleet, the nation’s plan for the defense of the homeland. Even forty-eight hours after the raid, Ugaki clearly was still irritated. “The enemy, already withdrawn far to the east, through radio must have observed our confusion with contempt,” he wrote. “Thus, our homeland has been air raided and we missed the enemy without firing a shot at him. This is exceedingly regrettable.” Yamamoto had since recovered and shared the outrage. “One has the embarrassing feeling of having been caught napping just when one was feeling confident and in charge of things. Even though there wasn’t much damage, it’s a disgrace that the skies over the imperial capital should have been defiled without a single enemy plane being shot down. It provides a regrettably graphic illustration of the saying that a bungling attack is better than the most skillful defense.”
The Japanese had transferred the crew of the Bat out of Hell to Nanking, where after waterboarding and other tortures the airmen had talked. Ugaki knew by April 21 that the Hornet, loaded with sixteen bombers, had left San Francisco around the first of the month accompanied by two cruisers, four destroyers, and a tanker, joining up at sea with another carrier plus more cruisers and destroyers. He knew that detection by the Japanese had prompted the early takeoff and that the bombers had flown due west across the Boso Peninsula to targets. Ugaki not only knew that all the fliers were volunteers, but he knew the approximate wind speed across the carrier’s deck at takeoff. Ugaki’s frustration over the raid appeared tempered only by his professional curiosity and even admiration for the plan’s ingenuity. “How the sixteen planes were accommodated remained unsolved,” he wrote. “Work harder to solve the riddle!”
A final tally revealed that the attack obliterated no fewer than 112 buildings—containing 180 units—and damaged another 53 buildings, with 106 units. In Tokyo, raiders had torched more than 50 buildings around the Asahi Electrical Manufacturing Corporation’s Oku factory, another 13 around the National Hemp Dressing Corporation along with the Communication Ministry’s transformer station. In nearby Kanagawa Prefecture, they targeted the foundries, factories, and warehouses of the Japan
ese Steel Corporation and Showa Electric. They had blasted the Yokosuka naval station and experimental laboratory and wrecked the Japan Diesel Corporation manufacturing in Saitama Prefecture. The attacks on Nagoya had completely burned one of Toho Gas Company’s massive storage tanks as well as damaged the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries aircraft factory. Six wards of the army hospital had gone up in flames, along with a food storage warehouse and army arsenal.
Civilians were not immune. The attack burned homes in places ranging from Tokyo to Kobe. A postwar analysis would count 87 men, women, and children killed in the raid and another 151 seriously injured, including a woman shellfishing near Nagoya who was shot through the left cheek and thigh. More than 311 others suffered minor injuries. Most of the deaths had occurred in just a few of the attacks— namely, those led by the pilots Hoover, Gray, Jones, and Joyce, which accounted for 75 of the mission’s total fatalities. The deaths of children in the attacks by Doolittle, Hallmark, Joyce, and Gray would become a flashpoint as newspapers in the weeks ahead begged parents of those killed to share their views on how Japan should treat the captured raiders. “One father wrote to a leading daily telling of the killing of his child in the bombing of the primary school,” stated the interrogation report of one Japanese prisoner of war. “He deplored the dastardly act and avowed his intention of avenging the child’s death by joining the army and dying a glorious death.”
While Ugaki and others in the Navy struggled to decipher the details of the raid, the Army and government likewise wrestled with the question of how to handle publicly the news of the attack, given the longstanding claim that such a raid was an impossibility. Japanese leaders juggled several goals, including informing the public and minimizing blame as well as covering up the abysmal fact that the defense forces failed to intercept or shoot down any of the bombers. On a larger level Japanese leaders wanted to paint themselves as victims in the inevitable propaganda war with the Americans. The official communiqués issued throughout the afternoon reflected those goals and differed greatly from the frantic broadcasts intercepted by radiomen on the Hornet. That was evident by the first bulletin issued by Eastern District Army headquarters at 2 p.m.:
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 37