Midnight came—and went. “Suddenly we all heard it at once,” Emmens wrote. “There was the unmistakable racing of the motor of a truck as the driver shifted from high into second gear. It was turning the corner onto our street.”
The raiders slipped outside and opened the gate, watching as the truck came to a stop out front. This was it—the moment the airmen had long awaited. The fliers climbed into the back of the truck. A match illuminated Abdul Arram, who wanted his money. York gave him a down payment of $100, but the smuggler demanded all $250.
“More—Mashhad,” York countered. “In Mashhad—more money!”
The smuggler reluctantly agreed and hissed at the airmen to lie down before he climbed into the truck’s cab with the driver. The raiders heard the driver turn the ignition key, but the truck refused to start. “It ground over and over just trying to get started,” Emmens later recalled. “It wouldn’t catch.”
Arram climbed out of the cab and peered over the side of the truck, telling them that the driver had to run into town to get a part. He suggested that two of the raiders wait in the truck and the other three go back inside the adobe house. The minutes dragged until the driver returned as promised with the part. A few minutes later the truck grumbled to life. The raiders climbed into the back, covering up in the tarp. “The bottom of that truck was certainly hard, but it felt like a bed of roses to us,” Emmens wrote. “It was carrying us out of that godforsaken and godless country—we hoped!”
The truck started and set off down the road, turning onto a paved highway and rattling as it picked up speed and headed toward the mountains. “We could tell we were going south,” Emmens recalled. “We took the tarpaulin down. It was night, and nobody could see us. There was no traffic on the road or anything.”
The raiders felt the driver shift into a lower gear as the truck began to climb into the mountains. Another hour passed. The truck slowed down and pulled off the road. The airmen heard a screwdriver on metal as the driver swapped out the license plates. The truck then started off, only to pull over again soon thereafter.
“Out,” someone demanded.
The raiders climbed out just as a man emerged from the bushes, his face obscured in the dark.
“Pssst,” the stranger beckoned. “Come on.”
The airmen set out on foot in a single file, following the mysterious guide up the mountain. After the men had traveled barely a few hundred feet, the truck shifted into gear and pulled back onto the highway. The hike proved tough, because the mountainside consisted mostly of shale and was void of any vegetation. “You would take one step up, and you would slide back two,” Emmens recalled. “We were having a hard time frankly in our physical condition keeping up with the guy.”
The hike soon exhausted York, who vomited in darkness. “I don’t think I can go up this thing any farther,” he said. “Why don’t you guys go ahead?”
The others refused, insisting the guide slow down. The airmen heard a rifle shot in the distance that echoed off the canyon walls followed by a barking dog. The raiders began finally to descend the mountain, which made for a far easier trek. At one point the guide demanded the men drop down and worm forward on their bellies, which the fliers later surmised was likely the actual border crossing. Shortly before daybreak the exhausted raiders, their clothes now ragged and torn from the hike, collapsed in an irrigation ditch alongside a highway. The same truck that had first carried the men into the mountains soon appeared, pulling off the highway. The fliers scrambled into the back. “The guy who had been our guide disappeared,” Emmens recalled. “We never did see him. He was just sort of a mythical character who led us over there.”
The driver slipped the truck into gear and pulled back onto the highway. Even though the airmen were now in Iran, Russian forces still occupied certain areas close to the border. The raiders felt the truck again slow. Emmens peeked out from under the tarp and saw a checkpoint. A wooden arch crossed the highway with a red star in the center and a picture of Stalin. The truck stopped, and Emmens could hear an animated conversation between the driver and the Russian troops. He then heard boots on gravel approaching the rear of the truck. Suddenly someone yanked the tarp down. “I was staring directly into a face a bare twelve inches above mine. There was a growth of stubble on the face, and a fur cap with a red star on it above the face.”
“Oh, my God,” the airman thought. “We have been caught.”
Emmens closed his eyes and froze. The conversation outside the truck continued, and when Emmens opened his eyes the Russian face was gone. He suddenly felt the truck begin to move. “Slowly the guardrail, the arch, Stalin, and the red star passed over our heads and behind us,” he recalled. “I began to breathe again.”
The truck continued down the highway. The sun was now coming up as the airmen surveyed the scene. “It was desolate country; no trees in sight, just shale rock, stretching way ahead,” Emmens recalled. “Way down in the valley ahead of us, there was a glint of a gold dome as the sun was just breaking over that horizon.”
The truck motored on throughout the morning, pulling off onto the shoulder of the highway around noon. Abdul climbed out of the cab and came back.
“Out,” he ordered. ”Money.”
“Mashhad,” the raiders protested.
The smuggler pointed to the town a few miles down the road. “Impossible,” he told the raiders. “Guards—Russians.”
The men climbed out and handed over the remaining $150. The truck turned around and headed back down the highway. The fliers scrambled off the highway and into a nearby bomb crater about a hundred feet away. Tired and hungry, the men tore into the sack of supplies Kolya had given them.
“Well, here we are!” York announced. “A couple of miles out of Mashhad, Persia, sitting in a bomb crater eating black caviar, black bread, and drinking vodka. I wonder how many other Americans have done this.”
“We’re not in Mashhad yet,” Herndon cautioned.
The men decided York and Emmens would sneak into town, find the British consulate, and return with help, while the others remained hidden in the crater. To mark the spot the raiders lined up the vodka bottles on the crater’s rim.
The two pilots set off down the highway. Closer to town other locals appeared on the highway, coming and going. No one seemed to notice the airmen. A bridge led into Mashhad, guarded by a Russian sentry. Each time a cart passed over the bridge, the Russian would stop and search it, a process that took a few minutes but distracted the guard from the foot traffic that continued to flow into the town.
The airmen waited for the perfect time, committing Kolya’s diagram of the city to memory about the time a truck rolled up toward the bridge.
“Now’s our chance!” York announced.
The guard stopped the truck and started to search it, while the raiders blended in with the other foot traffic over the bridge. “It wasn’t more than fifty feet across the thing. The temptation to break into a run was almost irresistible,” Emmens recalled. “We didn’t look back after we had passed, but we did increase the speed of our steps.”
The fliers entered the town, surprised to see stores that sold cigarettes and other commodities unavailable in Russia. Up ahead the raiders spotted a Russian patrol. The airmen hustled across the street and pressed against a storefront, pretending to window-shop while watching in the reflection as the patrol marched past. The fliers hurried the final few blocks to the consulate, turning on the street to see the whitewashed walls and the arched entrance. Several soldiers stood guard. “We took a deep breath,” Emmens recalled. “We sauntered very casually on that side of the street until we got exactly opposite the arch door. We just turned and rushed inside the gates.”
Iranian soldiers poured out of the guardhouse and pinned the raiders against the wall with bayonets.
“American! American!” the raiders shouted. “British consul!
A turbaned officer approached, looking the airmen over. “British consul not here,” he finally said. “Vi
ce consul here.”
“Fine,” the airmen said. “Vice consul.”
Guards led the airmen inside, who marveled at the consulate’s immaculate lawns, flowers, and swimming pool. A tethered gazelle played at the end of a long leash staked in the yard. The paradisiacal scene reminded Emmens of the Garden of Eden.
“Did you ever see anything as beautiful as this?” York asked.
“Never!”
The airmen jotted their names and ranks on a sheet of paper, identifying themselves as members of the U.S. Army Air Forces. The guard vanished, and less than a minute later the door burst open and the vice consul appeared.
“My God,” he announced. “Where in the hell did you guys come from?”
The airmen instructed the British on how to find the other three raiders, and forty-five minutes later the crew was reunited. The exhausted raiders would within days begin the long voyage home through India, North Africa, and South America before finally touching down in Washington, but in the meantime the British showered them with hospitality, beginning that afternoon with the vice consul.
“Would you like a scotch and soda?”
CHAPTER 25
In war as it is fought today only a few rules are left—only a few shreds of law and custom which, it was thought, governed the relations of belligerents to each other.
—ERNEST LINDLEY, COLUMNIST, APRIL 23, 1943
THE SAME DAY THE Japanese executed Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz, guards came for the other five raiders in Kiangwan. Dressed in crisp uniforms and armed with rifles and sabers, the Japanese pulled the aviators out one by one that gray and foggy morning. “Though we were in separate cells and had no chance to talk to each other, we had all come to the same conclusion—if the verdict was execution we were going to try to make a break,” Bobby Hite and Jacob DeShazer would later write. “It was a strange thing, but most of us armed ourselves with toothbrushes. We figured we might jab a guard in the face with a toothbrush to start the break.”
The guards marched the airmen back into the courtroom. The raiders realized with alarm that there were only five of them: Hite, DeShazer, Chase Nielsen, George Barr, and Bob Meder. Hallmark’s one-night stay at Kiangwan was in a different cellblock, so as far as the others knew, the pilot was still at Bridge House, recovering from his battle with dysentery. The Japanese had taken Farrow and Spatz out of their cells the night before, but the airmen never returned. Where were the others? They didn’t have to wonder long. “We lined up before the bench,” Hite and DeShazer recalled, “and looked our judges straight in the eye.”
The Japanese read a short statement and then turned to the interpreter, whose hands trembled, sweat dripping from his face.
“For bombing and strafing school areas you have been sentenced to death,” the interpreter began.
The airmen crouched, ready to make a break for it if the verdict was death. Guards sensed the tensions and clutched their sword hilts.
“But through the gracious majesty of the emperor,” the interpreter continued, “you have been spared to life imprisonment with special treatment.”
With that the sentencing was over. The entire proceeding lasted less than three minutes. The guards marched the raiders back to their cells and solitary confinement. “I could not help feeling a strange sense of joy, even though solitary confinement and a long war awaited any possible chance of freedom,” DeShazer later said. “At the same time it seemed almost hopeless to think of ever being free again, since the most probable thing would be that we would be executed when America did win the war.”
On the floor of cell no. 3, Meder scratched the date, followed by his name, rank, and serial number. He noted that he was in the Army Air Forces and a member of a B-25 detachment. He concluded with a plea for anyone who might one day read his missive: “Notify U.S. Army—Life Imprisonment.”
Other raiders likewise used old fish bones and bits of seashells to carve messages on the floors. To pass the time, Barr scratched a calendar. He marked out the days from the first of October through the twenty-third, before he gave up. He never even wrote out the dates for the rest of October or filled in the squares for the November calendar he started. Four boards in from his cell door, the navigator etched a personal testament that war crimes investigators would later find:
Lt. G. Barr, USAAC—34th Bomb Sqdn.—Columbia, SC., USA—Took off from AC Hornet 4/17/42—Bombed Nagoya Japan—Flew 17 hours to China—No gas. Jumped—Captured 4/18/1942.
The heat and humidity of summer gave way to a long and bitter winter as temperatures dipped below freezing. The airmen struggled in unheated cells with little more than a few blankets to keep themselves warm. In December the Japanese moved the raiders into one large cell. “We were so thrilled and so hungry to be together,” Hite recalled, “that we just visited, visited, and visited for days and days and days.”
The meager diet of rice and turnip or onion soup continued to wear down their health, though the airmen tried to perform calisthenics. DeShazer shimmied up the narrow cells walls by pressing his feet against one wall and his hands against the other. Up high he had a view out the window of the countryside that stretched for miles. Hite set a goal of twenty pushups, only to discover in his weakened state that he could hardly do ten. He pushed himself one time and blacked out and hit his head.
Dysentery soon added to Hite’s troubles. The Japanese moved the other raiders out of the cell, but left Meder to help care for his sick friend. Hite had managed to hang on to a few dollars when captured, which he used to convince some of the guards to buy him extra food to help him recover. He had failed, though, to consider sharing it with his fellow raiders, a fact he later regretted. “These are things that happened to you as a prisoner,” he recalled. “Sometimes things that you discover about yourself are not too pretty.”
The Japanese moved the men out of Kiangwan on April 17, 1943, almost a year to the day since the men had lifted off from the deck of the Hornet. Guards ushered the handcuffed prisoners aboard a plane, tethering them to their seats, but removing their blindfolds. The airmen welcomed the chance to see the landscape far below. “It was flat country dotted with rice paddies,” DeShazer and Hite recalled. “We thought now how fortunate we were not to make a break for liberty. There was no place to hide. We would have been captured easily and probably shot at once.”
The men arrived at the Japanese military prison in Nanking—a new facility constructed of brick and concrete and surrounded by a high wall—which boasted barely a dozen cells; fortunately most proved vermin free. The raiders once again landed in solitary confinement in nine-by-twelve cells, though Nielsen’s and Barr’s were several feet larger. A single window seven feet off the ground let in only limited light. Guards could look in on the prisoners through a screen slot in the wooden door and pass food through a six-inch panel near the bottom. “The furnishings consisted of a grass mat and three very thin cotton blankets,” Hite and DeShazer said. “When we sat we sat on the concrete floor.”
The raiders settled into life in the new prison, where the lone highlight of each day consisted of a half hour of exercise in the prison yard at 10:30 a.m., but only if the weather permitted. “The rest of the time,” the men recalled, “we just sat or trudged around our narrow cells, like caged animals.” Days turned into weeks and then months as the men battled the loneliness and fatigue of hours spent solo in a concrete cell. “Day in and day out it was the same thing—sitting in our cells with nothing to occupy our time,” Hite and DeShazer wrote. “After we got to know our guards better we sometimes kidded them about Japan losing the war. Generally, this infuriated them and often they’d draw their swords and threaten us. Then we’d laugh and beckon them to come into the cells and carry out the threat, but they never did.”
The Japanese found other ways to retaliate, as Barr later testified: “Some guards would torment us by calling us to the little window and then spitting in our faces or have a fellow guard douse our already shivery body with cold water.” Though the
airmen were largely spared the beatings given fellow Chinese prisoners, whose screams at times reverberated through the cellblock, their punishment was more subtle but no less severe: the withholding of food. The guards had the power to control who lived—and who died. It wasn’t wise, the raiders realized, to push them too hard.
One day Nielsen turned over his aluminum drinking cup to discover a message scratched on the bottom: “Connie G. Battles, United States Marines.” The Japanese had captured Battles on Wake in December 1941. This was the first time the airmen surmised there might be other captured Americans in the Nanking prison. Nielsen rubbed out Battles’s name and scratched his own. The cup went from cell to cell until it eventually returned to Battles, who had managed during his time in a Shanghai prison camp to pick up various reports on the war’s progress that he now shared. The men dubbed this primitive communications system the “tincup news service.”
“Russians on German border,” one message read.
The raiders in exchange could offer little more than each of their names, scratched on the bottom with either a nail or an old fish bone. Whoever found a message would rub it off so that Battles knew the information was received. The men would then whisper the news among themselves at exercise time. “That way we learned that the Yanks were making plenty of progress, both in Europe and Asia,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “It was awfully sketchy information, of course, but at least it was good news and it did more to keep us sane and full of hope than any other thing.”
The guards over time figured out the system, forcing the men to adapt. Meder devised a rudimentary way to communicate via Morse code: a rap on the wall equaled a dot and a scratch meant a dash. The creative pilot likewise came up with most of the nicknames the airmen used for the guards, names such as Big Ugly and Little Ugly, the Goon, the Mule, and Frankenstein. “He could see something funny in even the grimmest of our experiences with the Japs,” Hite and DeShazer recalled. “He was certain that he would get out alive and he used to tap out his post-war plans through the cell wall. He wanted to start a men’s furnishing store back in Lakewood, Ohio.”
Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor Page 53