Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (40 page)

Despite the
Nitto Maru
’s advance warning, the raid had so far proven a success. The Japanese failed to shoot down a single raider. Richard Joyce’s bomber was the only one of sixteen hit by antiaircraft fire, and his dogged aircrew managed to fend off more fighters than did the rest of the mission combined. All except one of the crews had bombed targets. That so many of the planes got lost en route to the targets helped spread the assault across an even wider front than Doolittle had initially planned, making it harder for Japanese
forces to anticipate where to intercept the attackers.

That alone did not excuse Japan’s weak defense. Antiaircraft guns had roared and fighters had peppered the skies, but the flak proved wildly inaccurate and the pilots either blind or timid. Doolittle and his men had flown right underneath many of them, while those pilots who spotted the bombers often refused to engage or did not press home the attacks. “The sky was just purple with anti-aircraft but their aim was awful,” one flier later told the
New York Times
. “Had our plane been brought down, it would have been because we flew into the fire, not that they hit us.”

Others agreed.

“The most opposition we had was from a group of Japanese kids playing on a beach,” another later quipped. “We passed over them at about twenty feet and they threw stones at us.” Even the veteran aviator Doolittle, in his more sober analysis, confessed his shock at the weak defense entrusted with guarding such an important target as Tokyo. “I was amazed at the small number of enemy fighters,” he later said. “We were opposed by only about one-tenth of the fighter opposition we had anticipated.”

The raid not only exposed Tojo’s poor decision not to employ a more rigorous domestic defense but also the complacency that had developed in the wake of months of lightning successes. “The over-all picture is one of inadequate defense,” noted one American report. “The warning system did not appear to function; interception by fighters was definitely cautious; and anti-aircraft fire, responding slowly, did not reach the intensity one would expect for so important a city as Tokyo.”

On board the bombers that flew on toward China, euphoria over having survived such a perilous mission seized some of the men. “As we paralleled the south coast of Japan, we had lunch and relaxed. It had all seemed a little unreal to me and I don’t think any of us really realized that we had just made our first real bombing run,” Carl Wildner recalled. “It had almost been like a training mission. It was a beautiful day in Japan and I felt like a tourist wanting to land and see the sights on the ground.” A similar scene played out on board Billy Farrow’s bomber. “We sang songs and kidded each other a lot about what daring young men we were,” Robert Hite and Jacob DeShazer later wrote, “because, actually, the bombing wasn’t anything at all.”

Tensions remained high for others
.

“Wow!” Dean Davenport exclaimed as the
Ruptured Duck
rounded the southern coast of Kyushu for the push to China. “What a headache I’ve got.”

Others experienced a similar release, including mission doctor Thomas White. “About this time I sat down and had a good case of the shakes,” he remembered, “a reaction to all the excitement and suspense.”

But the excitement was far from over.

The
Hari Kari-er
buzzed a Japanese picket boat as the bomber headed out over the East China Sea. Gunner William Birch opened fire with the machine guns, spraying the patrol. “Just as Birch cut loose,” Reddy wrote in his diary, “our right engine began to cough & sputter, throwing flames clear out the front of the nacelle.” Greening and Reddy both hit the mixture control at the same time, which regulated the ratio of fuel and air. “It soon stopped but none too soon to suit any of us,” Reddy wrote. “I’m sure that they would have had no mercy on us if we had gone down there.”

The crew of the
Whirling Dervish
looked down three hours out of Tokyo and spotted two Japanese cruisers and a battleship. One of the cruisers opened fire, first with antiaircraft guns, then with the main battery. “One of the shells landed so near it sprayed water all over our plane,” gunner Eldred Scott recalled. “There I was, firing back with a .50 caliber machine gun. Might as well have had a cap pistol.”

With the added gas cans and fuel tanks empty, the airmen could smoke cigarettes, which helped ease the tension. Saylor uncapped his bottle of snakebite whiskey and took a long pull, the only time in his career he ever drank on duty. He had earned it—and he wasn’t alone. Lawson, McClure, and Thatcher toasted the mission in the cockpit of the
Ruptured Duck
.

As the minutes ticked past and the adrenaline wore off, attention turned to the question of fuel: would the bombers have enough to reach China? “Up until now, we had been flying for Uncle Sam, but now we were flying for ourselves,” pilot Edgar McElroy wrote. “We had not had time to think much about our gasoline supply, but the math did not look good. We just didn’t have enough fuel to make it!”

That reality now hit home for many. “My feelings of exhilaration soon evaporated and I once again felt the same stomach knot as when we left the
Hornet
,”
added Jack Sims, Hilger’s copilot. “The odds of reaching the Chinese coast were considerably against us and we didn’t think we were going to survive with hundreds of miles to go over hostile territory, land
and
sea.”

Airmen furiously computed the distance and fuel consumption, then ran the numbers again, hoping against all odds. “By stretching our calculations to the utmost, we knew our gasoline would run out some 250 miles short of the Chinese mainland,” bombardier Robert Bourgeois wrote. “It seemed certain that we were headed for the end. All we could do was just fly on and hope for a miracle.”

Even Doolittle, the amazing airman who time and again had pushed himself and his aircraft to the limit, faced the same fate as his men when navigator Hank Potter informed him that he expected the bomber to run out of gas 135 miles short of China. “I saw sharks basking in the water below and didn’t think ditching among them would be very appealing,” Doolittle recalled. “Fortunately, the Lord was with us.”

“We’ve got a tail wind,” Potter suddenly announced.

The headwind the bombers had long battled now turned into a twenty-five-mile-per-hour tailwind that pushed the planes toward China, lifting the spirits of the exhausted aircrews. “For the first time since morning we knew that we had a chance of seeing the night out,” Jack Hilger confided in his diary. “We were all pleased and proud of the success of our bombing but now we were like a bunch of kids for we knew we had a chance to live long enough to tell about it.”

As the bombers closed in on China late in the afternoon, the weather began to deteriorate. The beautiful skies turned overcast as fog settled in and raindrops pelted the cockpit windshields. Visibility declined further as night approached. The low fuel light glowed on most instrument panels, rekindling earlier worries. “Chances of reaching land were almost nil,” Sims recalled. “It felt like walking the last mile.”

Doolittle feared he might not make it. “See that the raft is ready,” he ordered bombardier Fred Braemer. “We’re going to keep going until we’re dry.”

Copilot Dick Cole studied the water below. The change in color from blue to brown indicated the presence of mud and sediment, the discharge of a river. The cockpit windshield now framed a sliver of land in the distance.

“There it is,”
Paul Leonard yelled. “Damned if I don’t feel like Columbus.”

The charts showed mountains as high as five thousand feet, but Doolittle didn’t trust the maps. Crossing the Chinese coast, he pulled back on the yoke, climbing up to eight thousand feet. He went on instruments and looked down at the occasional twinkle of dim lights far below, unaware that the same tailwind that had rescued him and his men from a watery grave had stymied the desperate efforts to ready the airfields. Doolittle tried to raise Chuchow on 4495 kilocycles, but got no answer. The airfield was nestled precariously in a valley twelve miles long and just two wide. “Without a ground radio station to home in on, there was no way we could find it,” Doolittle wrote. “All we could do was fly a dead-reckoning course in the direction of Chuchow, abandon ship in midair, and hope that we came down in Chinese-held territory.”

“We’ll have to bail out,” Doolittle announced to his crew, ordering Leonard to go first, followed by Braemer, Potter, and then Cole. Doolittle would jump last. “Got it?”

“Got it, Colonel,” Leonard replied.

Doolittle addressed his navigator. “When we get as close as you think we are going to get to the airfield, we will leave the airplane.”

Potter folded up the navigator’s seat and table and yanked open the hatch as Doolittle switched on the bomber’s autopilot.

The time to jump arrived.

“Get going,” Doolittle ordered.

Leonard and Braemer left the plane within seconds of each other at 9:10 p.m., followed two minutes later by Potter.

“Be seeing you in a few minutes, Dick,” Doolittle said to Cole, helping to free his copilot’s parachute from the seat and then patting him on the shoulder.

Cole hovered over the hatch, staring down at the dark void. “I was one scared turkey,” he recalled. “Being in an airplane that was about to run out of fuel and looking down at the black hole that would exit you into a foreign land, in the dark of night, in the middle of bad weather was not exactly what one envisioned when enlisting.”

Cole vanished out the hatch, leaving Doolittle alone in the bomber. He had flown for thirteen hours and traveled 2,250 miles. The legendary pilot had accomplished the impossible: he had bombed the Japanese capital for the first time in that
nation’s history. Doolittle thought he had enough fuel for maybe another half hour, but he couldn’t be certain. The decision was made; it was time to go.

He shut off the gas valves and dropped through the forward hatch.

The night swallowed him.

Doolittle’s jump marked the third time he had been forced to bail out of an airplane to save his life. He drifted down through the darkness worried about his ankles, which he had broken fifteen years earlier in Chile. He feared he might snap them again if he landed too hard. Doolittle hit the ground and bent his knees to cushion the blow, only to find that he had landed in a rice paddy filled with night soil, fertilizer made from human waste. He climbed out of the paddy and unhooked his parachute.

Doolittle spotted a light emanating from what appeared to be a small farmhouse. He hiked over and banged on the door, repeating the phrase that Jurika had taught him. “I heard movement inside, then the sound of a bolt sliding into place,” he later wrote. “The light went out and there was dead silence.”

Cold, wet, and filthy, Doolittle wandered on, finding a small warehouse. He went inside and discovered an elongated box perched atop two sawhorses. Peeking inside the box, he discovered a dead Chinese man. He set off again and soon came upon a water mill that offered him shelter from the rain. He spent most of the night performing light calisthenics to keep warm.

Other members of his crew endured similar experiences. Cole yanked his parachute’s rip cord so hard that he hit himself in the face and gave himself a black eye. “First you hear the roar of the airplane and then it’s just like that; it’s quiet,” he recalled. “I tried using my flashlight, but it was like being in fog, and it just reflected back. You couldn’t see anything. I thought I would be able to see the ground, but I couldn’t do it.” Cole drifted down, his chute snagging atop a pine tree. He managed to untangle it and fashioned a hammock to spend the night, grateful he had made it down safely. “I was in all one ‘scared piece,’” Cole wrote, “and I do mean scared.”

Leonard landed on the side of a hill near the top. He rolled up in his parachute and slept until morning. Potter likewise landed on a mountainside and sprained his ankle. He slipped off his parachute and spotted a path in the dark. He started down
the mountain until he realized it was futile to walk out at night. The navigator stretched out under a tree, pulling his goggles over his eyes to block the rain. Braemer did the same. “Couldn’t see,” the bombardier wrote in his report. “Crawled about 20 ft. down hill, got no place, went uphill 20 ft. past chute, got no place. Came back to chute, cut some from shroud lines. Rolled up in it, put arm around bamboo tree and went to sleep.”

DEAN
HALLMARK
ROARED
JUST
fifty feet above the waves, afraid to fly any higher and risk battling a fierce headwind. The weather had started to deteriorate about a hundred miles from the Chinese coast. He pressed on even as a heavy fog soon slashed visibility to zero. The pilot of the
Green Hornet
planned to make landfall around Hangchow Bay, a move that would allow him to follow the river south toward Chuchow. He had long since disabled the nagging low-fuel light, hoping that he had a least a few more miles worth of gas. He asked navigator Chase Nielsen how much longer to the coast.

“Three minutes,” Nielsen answered.

Hallmark spotted the coastline through the dark and pulled back on the controls, intending to fly as far inland as possible before the crew bailed out. Bill Dieter remained in the nose, resisting Hallmark’s suggestion to climb out. “No,” the bombardier insisted. “I’d better stay down here because then if I see a building or a tree sticking up or something maybe I can warn you soon enough so you don’t run into it.”

The bomber bore down on the coast just as the left engine cut out. Seconds later the right coughed—then quit.

The
Green Hornet
fell silent.

“Prepare for crashing landing,” Hallmark yelled.

Nielsen didn’t even have time to buckle his safety belt. “Well,” he thought as the plane plunged. “I won’t have to use this parachute.”

The left wing struck the water first, snapping off. The fuselage then hit and the bomber’s belly split wide open, like a gutted fish. Nielsen heard Dieter scream and saw water rush up over the nose. “All went black momentarily,” the navigator recalled. “When I came to, I was standing in water up to my waist and was bleeding from gashes on my head and arms. My nose hurt and I knew it was broken. The two pilots were gone and so was Dieter from the nose section
. Not only was Dean Hallmark gone but so was his seat, which had catapulted right through the windshield.”