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

by Scott, James M.

  At Chuchow the Chinese housed the aviators at barracks about ten miles from the airfield, complete with a bomb shelter dug out of rock. Local officers translated newspapers with datelines from London, Berlin, and Tokyo that recounted the raid’s success, and they spoiled the American aviators with long-saved luxuries of condensed milk and tinned beef and even the last of the two-year-old canned butter. The after-action reports and personal diaries of the raiders universally praised the warmth and aid of the Chinese, to many of whom the raiders gave trinkets as small tokens of appreciation, from cigarettes to pocket change. One of the pilots gave his white silk parachute to an engaged missionary couple so that she could use it to fashion a wedding dress. “These people are the most sincere, grateful, and just plain wonderful people I have ever seen,” Jones raved in his diary, “and they have been fighting for 5 years.”

  The celebrations were tempered by the confirmed death of Leland Faktor. The Chinese had stripped the gunner naked—no doubt to salvage his clothes—and carried him out of the wilds lashed to a long pole, much like a slaughtered animal. Rumors circulated that two other bodies had been spotted along the coast and three more discovered in the wreckage of a plane. Reports indicated the Japanese had captured at least a few of the aviators, while others had suffered serious injuries, including Lawson. Many of the fliers saw such injuries firsthand when Charles Ozuk limped into Chuchow, a scene captured by Joseph Manske in his diary: “He had the worst cut in his leg I’d ever seen in my life.” Some of the fliers blamed the losses on the Navy for forcing them to take off early, rechristening the Hornet with the diminutive nickname the Housefly.

  The airmen passed the days playing poker. Davy Jones, whose mustache had grown so long that he earned the nickname Fu Man Jones, lost seven dollars in a single night. Other times the aviators swapped stories of their adventures in China, trying to outdo one another. “When we met up,” Hank Potter recalled, “each had a story of a horrible ordeal and wanted to tell it. But none of us wanted to listen because we all had one of our own.” One such tale that would even find its way into an official report concerned a sergeant, found after two days in the wild by a Chinese couple. The family invited the airman home, fed him, and then put him to bed. Much to the exhausted aviator’s surprise, the couple climbed in with him. “He was so tired that he didn’t even mind when the man took care of his husbandly duties,” the report stated. “If they didn’t mind his presence, he sure as hell didn’t care, just so they didn’t keep him awake.”

  Japanese bombers pummeled Chuchow daily in retaliation for the raid, forcing the aviators to spend long hours crowded inside the shelter. The Chinese had no forces to counter the attacks, and the American fliers felt frustrated to sit idly by as the enemy returned again and again. “We called our home the Chu Chow bombing range,” Ken Reddy wrote in his diary, “for that is all it amounted to—practice for the Japanese.” Bill Bower agreed. “It’s a crime,” he griped in his diary. “No sign of opposition. Just one airplane would be all we need. Too bad one of us couldn’t have landed.” The men emerged each day to see the horrific results of the Japanese assaults, particularly the strafing attacks against civilians. “Frequently, bodies were stacked like cordwood along the roadside until they could be taken away for burial,” Greening later wrote. “It was a depressing sight to us. We hadn’t encountered anything like this before.”

  Under Greening’s command the first group of twenty raiders—each presented with a new white silk shirt—climbed aboard a train the evening of April 25 to begin the first leg of a four-day journey west to Chungking. The aviators crowded inside wooden berthing compartments and were soon asleep in the hard narrow bunks. “The rails don’t click, they jolt,” Bower complained in his diary, “but it’s much better transportation than that of last week.” Chinese trains ran largely at night to avoid Japanese attacks, so at dawn the raiders disembarked at Ying-tan, enjoying a delicious breakfast at the Catholic mission with a Dutch priest and Father Bill Glynn of Chicago; these were some of the same missionaries who had helped Harold Watson and Edgar McElroy. “Ham and eggs,” Bower wrote, “but best of all cornfritters with brown sugar and molasses.”

  The aviators crowded aboard a rickety bus after breakfast and set off on an eleven-hour trip over dirt roads that would cover barely 150 miles, stopping for the night in a nice hotel in the ancient city of Ning Lee. “The courtyard outside is without a doubt the most beautiful sight I’ve seen in China,” Jack Hilger wrote in his diary when he visited a few days later. “There is a small lake with a pavilion and bridge and the entire courtyard is shaded by an immense camphor tree which must have a spread of 200 feet. The full moon shining through completes the effect and makes all of us lonesome.” The raiders enjoyed the newfound luxury even if the hotel still depended on oil lights. “I got my first Chinese shave here,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “If you don’t stop them they shave your ears, nose, forehead, and between your eyes.”

  The raiders set out again early the next morning for another long and tiresome bus ride, passing through miles of uncultivated lands void of even cattle or sheep. The bus stopped in Toho, where the fliers dined with a local commissioner and met the governor, before pressing on to Kian, spending the night of April 27 in a new hostel operated by the American Volunteer Group under Claire Chennault. The journey began again early the next morning in a new bus, which crossed several rivers on ferries before reaching a hotel in Heng-yang near midnight. Chungking planned to dispatch a cargo plane to collect the raiders, giving the airmen time to relax that morning. Bower sunbathed, while Reddy enjoyed the spoils of war, a scene he described in his diary: “I rode a Japanese horse, bareback, as the saddle had not been captured, just to say I had been on one.”

  A C-47 buzzed the hotel the afternoon of April 29, promising an end to the long journey. “When it flew over with our insignia on the side we all shouted with joy,” Reddy wrote. “It was the most beautiful sight we had witnessed in China.” Colonel Clayton Bissell, General Stilwell’s air operations officer, greeted the airmen as they climbed aboard. The plane never shut down its engines, but roared back into the skies, arriving less than three hours later in China’s wartime capital. Perched atop a promontory between the Yangtze and the Chia-ling Rivers, Chungking was a damp and weathered city whose hot and humid climate left the walls coated with a green slime. Mosquitos clouded the air, while armies of rats and cockroaches marched through narrow streets and alleys that reeked of rotting food, urine, and feces. “There was no escape from the stink that attacked our nostrils at every turn,” one American nurse would later write. “A thin fog hovered around the city; the moisture undoubtedly made the smells more pungent.”

  The improvised capital had long been battered by the twin ills of poverty and war. The Time and Life magazine publisher Henry Luce visited in 1941, writing that it was impossible to “distinguish between the great masses of bomb-rubble on the one hand and, on the other, shacks, temporary structures and ordinary homes of the poor.” The Japanese had launched routine raids against Chungking—the world’s first capital to suffer systematic bombings—almost as soon as the Nationalist government arrived, pummeling the city from 1939 to 1941 no fewer than 268 times. The single most savage attack had occurred the afternoon of May 4, 1939, when the Japanese killed 4,400 people and injured another 3,100, an assault witnessed by missionary and author Robert Ekvall. “The city of Chungking boiled in a sudden upheaval of flying wreckage and black dust,” he wrote. “By nightfall the entire horizon was red with fires that threatened to burn the rock of Chungking clean of human life and habitation.”

  The war-torn city—named the most bombed spot on Earth by Life magazine in March 1942—showed those scars, prompting one reporter to colorfully compare the clobbered capital to Pompeii. Bombs and fires had leveled and blackened many of the city’s buildings—some rebuilt up to half a dozen times—while the acrid stench of wet ashes hung heavy in the air. Air-raid sirens screamed daily, forcing the city’s half million res
idents to crowd inside twelve hundred shelters dug deep into the sandstone cliffs, the largest a mile-and-a-half-long tunnel that could accommodate up to twenty thousand people. “Downtown Chungking was all bedlam. The narrow streets crawled with people cawing like flocks of hungry crows,” observed Frank Dorn, one of General Stilwell’s top aides. “The people in the streets, for all their weary smiles and courage, looked whipped and beaten down by the years of struggle that had driven them to this ant hill of a city as a last refuge. Despair was etched deeply in their eyes, profiles, and sagging shoulders.”

  The raid against Tokyo eleven days earlier had given Chungking a brief moment of celebration. Residents had crowded around radios, listening to Japanese broadcasts, while Chinese newspapers quickly sold out of extra editions, the ink barely dry. Movie theaters flashed details up on screens, drawing cheers from the audiences. Firecrackers exploded in the skies, while residents stopped Americans on the street to congratulate them. Government officials even declared the day of the attack a holiday. “The nightmare of the Japanese militarists can be shattered only by bombs,” announced Ho Ying-chin, Chungking’s war minister. “These raids on Japan proper are only the beginning.” Just as Americans had hungered to avenge Pearl Harbor, so, too, did the Chinese desire payback for years of bombing. “We have been waiting almost five years for this day,” one resident told the Associated Press. “We are glad that the Japanese people know at last the din of bombs and the smell of explosives.”

  Doolittle’s men disembarked from the C-47 that afternoon and were escorted to the American military mission, a small outpost located on a terraced hilltop. The aviators dined that night with Brigadier General John Magruder, the outgoing chief of the American military mission to China, who told them to expect some good news in the morning. Around 9 a.m. on April 30 Bissell, Magruder, and his staff gathered with the twenty raiders. Bissell congratulated the airmen for the successful mission and shared the appreciation of the president, General Marshall, and General Arnold. He then announced that each man had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross, a medal first awarded to Charles Lindbergh in honor of his solo flight across the Atlantic.

  “We were all astounded,” Ken Reddy wrote in his diary. “For a minute it was as if someone had belted me one in the stomach,” Bill Bower noted in his. “I couldn’t breathe very well,” recalled Ross Greening. “It was the biggest thrill of my life.”

  The Chungking-based officers invited the raiders to celebrate that night at a house by the river. Engineer George Larkin cut up his parachute and made scarves, giving them out to the party’s hosts. Wartime inflation had driven the price of a bottle of booze up as high as eighty dollars, forcing the officers to cater the party with bathtub gin made by a local ice company, a fact that didn’t dissuade navigator Eugene McGurl, who wrote in his diary, “Started drinking wine (Chinese variety & potent) about 4:00 p.m. & capped off the evening with Chungking Gin—arguably a highly explosive mixture.”

  Chiang Kai-shek invited the raiders to lunch the next day, a scene described by Reddy in his diary: “His home was very lovely inside, having indirect lighting of a Chinese design, soft modernistic chairs, and heavy padded cushions without backs to sit on, individual silver ashtrays, herring bone hardwood floors, and a soft glowing fireplace.” The home’s elegant furnishings contrasted with the battered and bruised raiders. “I’ll bet it was the motliest bunch of men who ever dined with the ruler of any country,” Bower wrote in his diary. “Coveralls, leather jackets, several ties, and everything containing a varied assortment of spots and mud.”

  Madame Chiang Kai-shek welcomed the airmen, stealing all the attention. Born in Shanghai to a wealthy family, May-ling Soong started boarding school at age ten at Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia, the world’s first chartered women’s college. She went on to study at Wellesley College near Boston, majoring in English literature and wowing faculty with what the press later called her “Scarlett O’Hara accent.” The forty-four-year-old had returned to China after graduating in 1917, able to speak English better than her native tongue. Beautiful, slender, and often dressed in tight long gowns, Madame Chiang married the generalissimo in 1927, forming a powerful political partnership. General Joseph Stilwell found her far more impressive than her husband, describing her in his diary as “a clever, brainy woman.” “Direct, forceful, energetic, loves power, eats up publicity and flattery, pretty weak on her history,” he wrote. “Can turn on charm at will. And knows it.”

  The raiders loved her. “The Madame is the most impressive character I have ever had the privilege to meet,” Reddy wrote. “She speaks excellent English, and better still she has control of the American slang; she’s brilliant, witty and beautiful.”

  The airmen feasted on a multicourse lunch that began with a delicious onion soup, followed by potatoes and cold ham and beef. After that came a dish of chicken, green peas, and noodles. For dessert the aviators enjoyed lemon pie and ice cream, the only time the men savored the sweet frozen treat in China. They washed it down with cups of American coffee. “It was,” Reddy wrote, “our best meal in China.”

  The generalissimo arrived midway through lunch. Speaking through an interpreter, he toasted first the airmen and then Roosevelt and victory. Compared with his wife’s, Chiang’s appearance was unremarkable. “He entered the room, apparently harassed and hurried, and made a very short speech,” Greening recalled. “Then he came over, shook hands with me as the ranking representative of our group, and left.”

  After lunch the raiders adjourned to the living room with Madame Chiang. Reddy asked her to sign the map in the front of his diary and his Short Snorter Dollar, but Colonel Bissell intervened to halt the autographs seekers. Bissell presented a pair of American wings to Madame Chiang, who confessed that she would also like to have a flight cap, prompting several of the raiders to hand them over. The airmen soon realized that it would probably be best for Doolittle to send a new one once he returned home. “In order to get the size she tried Capt. Greening’s on, and then mine,” Reddy wrote in his diary. “The latter fit OK.” Greening presented her with a set of Air Forces and Seventeenth Bombardment Group insignia. “I had a bit of an embarrassing time,” he later wrote, “fumbling around trying to find somewhere to pin them on her.”

  The airmen returned to their quarters at the mission that afternoon, only to be summoned again around 9:30 p.m. to the drawing room. They received instructions on how to behave moments before Madame Chiang arrived with an entourage of local officials. Reddy noticed she wore the wings the men had presented her earlier in the day “in a conspicuous place over her heart.” Camera flash bulbs popped and motion picture cameras rolled as she presented the raiders with distinguished service medals. She then posed for pictures with the airmen, standing in front of Reddy.

  “This should make my girl at home jealous,” the pilot mumbled to the aviator next to him.

  “Blonde or brunette?” Madame Chiang asked.

  She also presented each airman with a personal letter, thanking him for the raid. “The entire Chinese people are grateful to you,” she wrote. “May you continue to vindicate freedom and justice so that by your efforts a happier and more unselfish world society will evolve when victory is ours.”

  The raiders were thrilled by her graciousness. “Praise be it. Red Letter day,” Bower wrote in his diary. “We all never expected anything like this and surely know of others who have sacrificed much more often in this war for no recognition.”

  The airmen used the downtime in Chungking to unwind from the adventures of the previous few weeks. Bower explored the chaotic city but got lost, which he noted in his diary was “almost as bad as being lost in the Chinese mountains.” He managed to buy a bottle of vodka and three orange squeezes, which set him back eighty-five dollars. Joseph Manske spent much of his time on his back, recovering from malaria, while Reddy visited a doctor to x-ray his banged-up knee and stitch up the cut on his head.

  The first group of twenty aviators ship
ped out for India on May 3, piling into the same C-47 cargo plane that had just delivered Doolittle, Jack Hilger, and nineteen more raiders to Chungking. The second group of airmen had followed the same course as the previous ones, traveling by train, bus, and plane to the wartime capital. Doolittle had left Davy Jones and Brick Holstrom in Chuchow to await any stragglers and bring them along later. He also sent for John Birch, requesting that the missionary oversee the burial of Leland Faktor.

  Birch held a memorial for Faktor near Chuchow—the same afternoon Doolittle touched down in Chungking—attended by thirteen of the raiders. Birch tried to use the $2,000 in Chinese currency Doolittle left him to buy a burial plot, but the Chinese informed him that international law prohibited the sale, offering instead to lease a plot for free for a hundred years. “Shall accept,” Birch cabled Chungking, “if not otherwise instructed.” The country magistrate at Sheui Chang donated the coffin, though air raids slowed preparation of the grave and stone for two weeks. At 5 p.m. on May 19 near the military headquarters at Wan Tsuen—and with two hundred of the base personnel in attendance—Faktor was buried with military honors provided by the Chinese air force.

  Doolittle meanwhile arrived in Chungking to learn that his earlier fears were unfounded. Arnold had cabled a congratulatory message on April 22. “On your truly wonderful and magnificent flight I wish to congratulate you and all members of your organization in behalf of myself personally and for the entire Army Air Forces,” the general wrote. “Fully realized are the conditions unforeseen which arose to make your task an almost impossible one. Your achievement is made all the more glorious by the fact that you surmounted these unforeseen conditions.”

  A message from General Marshall also awaited him. “The President sends his thanks and congratulations to you and your command for the highly courageous and determined manner in which you carried out your hazardous mission and for the great service you have rendered to the nation and to the Allied cause,” Marshall cabled. “Your nomination as a brigadier general goes to the Senate this morning. To me your leadership has been a great inspiration and fills me with confidence for the future.”