Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (74 page)

News of the rescue of the Doolittle raiders ran on the front pages of newspapers across the nation, including the
New York Times
. Reporters now anxiously awaited the chance to interview the fliers, who sat for a press conference in Chungking soon after arriving in a small room at the headquarters that overlooked the sluggish Chia-ling River. “The three men were so weak from malnutrition that they staggered when they walked down the gangplank of the C-47 transport that brought them here,” wrote a reporter for United Press. “They were assisted to the ground.”

“They looked at first glance,” noted an Associated Press reporter, “as if they had never smiled nor ever would smile again—but they did.”

The raiders recalled details of the attacks on Tokyo and Nagoya, which now seemed like old news in a war that was finally over. Hite nervously fingered his throat, his voice so low reporters struggled to hear him.

“It’s good to get some GI food into your belly after that hollow feeling,” DeShazer told reporters.

“I feel that I’m an American again,” added Nielsen, who found a message waiting for him in Chungking from his wife, Thora. “He was a different man,” one reporter noted, “after he read it.”

General Wedemeyer fired off a telegram to Doolittle with the news of the rescue. “Three members of your Tokyo raid have been recovered. They are Lt. Nielsen, Lt. Hite and Sgt. DeShazer. Are now in Chungking leaving tomorrow for Kunming and then home,” Wedemeyer wrote. “They wish to be remembered to you.”

Hite, Nielsen, and DeShazer returned to the United States at 12:45 a.m. on September 4 and checked into Walter
Reed General Hospital for an exam. The emaciated airmen had gained on average one pound a day since their rescue. There were other issues as well. After forty months without a toothbrush, Nielsen had to endure nineteen fillings. The raiders drew years of back pay, which totaled $8,832.91 for Nielsen, $7,547.80 for Hite, and $5,571.16 for DeShazer. The War Department put out a press release two days later, condensing three years of horror into just three pages. The raiders then sat for another press conference. “Their gaunt and prematurely aged faces,” wrote a
New York Times
reporter, “bore silent witness to the suffering and privation they endured.”

As the three men improved, Barr continued to unravel, believing his rescue was really just a ruse. “I was convinced that the whole thing was a Jap trick,” he later wrote. “That this was some new form of torture.” When he recovered physically, the Army flew him to Kunming on September 12, but Barr’s suspicions followed. “I was a bed patient in the hospital; I saw no one I knew,” he wrote. “A voice kept telling me this was a trick and to be careful. Even the hospital seemed like a prison.”

Barr suffered a breakdown a few days after his arrival, described in a nurse’s report. “Awoke suddenly at 2 a.m. Jumped out of bed screaming,” the report stated. “Restrained by three men. Gritted teeth and uttered animal-like sounds with occasional threats to his ‘torturers.’” The outburst landed Barr in the hospital’s psychiatric ward. “All my past suspicions and doubts were now confirmed,” he later said. “The barren room, the bars on the window, the occasional face at a slot in the locked door, and the solitary confinement spelled prison as far as I was concerned. I lay there a long time thinking things over and decided that I would pretend to go along with anything my captors were trying to make me do—but I would try to escape when the opportunity arose.”

Barr saw his chance when a medical corpsman escorted him across the tarmac to a waiting C-47 for the flight out in October. He could see the distant mountains unobscured by towering fences and walls that for more than three years had defined his life and caged him like an animal. Barr felt his adrenaline soar; his freedom finally at hand. He broke free of the corpsman and ran, his feet carrying him toward the horizon.

An unseen blow knocked him unconscious. Barr awoke in a straitjacket in the back of a transport plane. His suspicions only deepened when he reached the Calcutta hospital
. “I was regaining some strength,” he later wrote, “but I still had those horrible nightmares and with them the persistent notion that the Japs had concocted some fiendish trick which would be made clear eventually.”

Barr had spent his captivity with Hite, Nielsen, and DeShazer, all of whom were now gone. He scanned the faces of the doctors, nurses, and other patients, looking for anyone familiar. “Why don’t I see someone I know,” he asked himself.

“This is a trick, another Jap trick,” an inner voice warned him. “Pretty soon you’ll see you are still a prisoner.”

Barr arrived at San Francisco’s Letterman General Hospital on October 12. He carried no medical records or even identification and struggled to answer the admittance clerk’s basic questions. The frustrated clerk finally summoned an orderly.

“Show the lieutenant to a room and get him some pajamas.”

The orderly escorted Barr to a room with two beds, a nightstand, and a chair. “Take your clothes off,” the orderly told him. “Put these pajamas on.”

Barr did as told, and the orderly left him alone. The navigator’s earlier fears now returned. This was no hospital, he believed, but another prison. Mentally and physically exhausted, Barr could no longer take it. He spied a pocketknife on the nightstand and picked it up, flicking open the blade. Barr plunged the knife into his chest. To his shock he felt no pain nor did he bleed much. He looked out his second-floor window, contemplating jumping, but realized he was not high enough. Barr found a heating lamp and ripped off the cord, fashioning a noose. He slid a chair under the overhead light fixture and climbed up. Barr tied the noose to the light and slipped it around his neck, careful to tighten it up. He kicked the chair out from under him.

Barr felt his head snap, and then he crashed to the floor as glass, metal, and sparks rained down on him. A report five days later noted that the Air Transport Service had failed to classify Barr as a disturbed mental patient. “The administrative failure,” the report stated, “almost meant this individual’s life.” Doctors ordered Barr transferred to Schick General Hospital in Clinton, Iowa, a three-day train ride he made in a straitjacket. “He will require maximum care en route,” his doctor’s report noted. “Unless this is observed he can
be counted upon to injure himself.”

Orphaned at a young age, Barr had been cared for in part by a social worker, Eleanor Towns, who had spent the weeks since the war’s end working the phones trying to find him. She finally located Barr in Iowa and alerted his sister, Grace Maas, who visited him along with her husband, Bill, and close friend Betty Alexander. The familiar faces of his friends and family proved the healing tonic he so desperately needed. “I knew then it was true,” Barr wrote. “I knew I was free. I knew that the horror was over.”

Eleanor Towns had likewise reached out to Doolittle during her frantic search. Once she located Barr, she relayed the information to the general, who promptly visited. On a walk across the hospital grounds, Barr recounted the horrors of his forty months in prison to the man who had led him over Japan. “He tried to tell me everything he could. He was hesitant at first, but then the tears flowed and the words began to pour out,” Doolittle recalled. “Catharsis was obviously what was needed.”

Barr’s problems persisted. He told Doolittle he had not seen a doctor since his arrival. He likewise had no uniforms or money, even though he was entitled to years of back pay. Doolittle was shocked—then outraged. “The last of my Tokyo Raiders to come home needed help,” he later wrote, “and I was going to see that he got it.”

Doolittle marched to the hospital commander’s office. “I unloaded Doolittle’s worst verbal fury on his head. I won’t repeat what I said because it would burn a hole in this page,” he later wrote. “I will say that George was quickly outfitted in a new uniform, complete with the ribbons he didn’t know he had earned, and was given a check for over $7,000 in back pay, and orders promoting him to first lieutenant. Best of all, he was seen immediately by a psychiatrist and began the slow road back to recovery.”

Doolittle’s fury reverberated at the highest levels of the Army Air Forces, which soon transferred Barr to Pawling Air Force Convalescent Center, on Long Island. Brigadier General Malcolm Grow, the air surgeon, promised to personally update Doolittle. “I have instructed our facility at Pawling to inform me as soon as Captain Barr arrives so that I can in turn inform you,” Grow wrote in a letter to Doolittle. “I plan to keep myself informed of
Captain Barr’s condition and progress so that we can be sure that everything possible is being done to promote his recovery.”

Before he left Schick General Hospital that afternoon Doolittle asked Barr whether he remembered his promise aboard the
Hornet
to throw a party for all the raiders.

“Yes, sir,” Barr answered, “I do.”

“Well, George, we never had that party because you and the rest of the fellows couldn’t make it. But I’m going to keep that promise. The whole gang is invited to be my guests in Miami on my birthday,” Doolittle told Barr. “I want you to come. I’ll send an airplane for you.”

CHAPTER 27

I don’t want revenge. I want peace.

—GEORGE BARR, MAY 13, 1946

RECOVERY WOULD PROVE DIFFICULT
for the four former prisoners of war, who struggled after years of solitary confinement to readjust to life in civilization. The men often found themselves agitated and plagued by nightmares. “Lord, I was nervous and I kind of wanted to be alone. I think I was just sort of frightened of people,” Hite recalled. “We had been in that solitary confinement so long that I don’t know whether we wanted to see anybody or not. It had almost grown on us. Our people, at the time, didn’t know what to do with us, really. I think they tried to push us and treat us like everybody else, which was probably a good thing in a lot of ways. But they didn’t know the state of our minds or our psyche.” In an article published a few months after their release, Hite and DeShazer described their struggle to readjust. “We have memories we can express only to each other,” the men wrote. “They will be with us always.”

The raiders not only wrestled with their own adjustment to freedom after forty months in horrific prisons but also battled the guilt of having survived when their friends had not. Despite his own struggles Hite felt he owed the families of his fellow raiders the courtesy of telling them what he could. In an October letter
to Dean Hallmark’s family in Dallas, Hite described the sham trial that had condemned his friends to death. “We never saw our buddies again,” he wrote of the sentencing in October 1942. “The Japs took us to the room in which our clothes were stored; there we found Dean’s clothing also the clothing of Spatz and Farrow. We were confused and struck by the indication, but nevertheless held to the theory that they had only been separated to another prison. Ourselves doomed to life in prisonment in solitary confinement it was hard to keep up our morale as we were entirely alone.”

Hite confessed that his grief, upon his release from prison and receiving the confirmation of the execution of his friends, had delayed his writing. He tried to remain upbeat in his five-page letter written on U.S. Army Air Forces stationery, noting that Hallmark and the others were heroes to a grateful nation. “Dean was a splendid example of American youth and courage, hoping until the very end and then his hopes justified in his faith in the God of us all. It is a matter of deep concern to me that your son, loved by millions, is gone. He was noble, courageous and an uplift to all of us in our moments of despair, knowing not what the Japs were going to do with us.” Hite concluded with a promise to come visit. “Neither Dean nor Meder or Farrow and Spatz are really gone,” he wrote. “I know they are justified in the sight of our God. I can see them now and they are there indelibly inscribed on the hearts of all our American people.”

Hite followed through with his plans to visit, sitting down with Hallmark’s parents in their home at 808 Wayne Avenue in Dallas, an address he would never forget. The conversation proved difficult.

“Why are you here and not my son?” Ollie Hallmark asked. Hite struggled to respond. “Those were answers,” he said, “that were sort of hard to come by.”

Hite likewise wrote a letter to Harold Spatz’s family in Lebo, Kansas. “I want to extend to you my deep felt sympathy and love for Harold,” he began. “I know that the uncertainty has been hard on you as it has been on my mother, as she did think that I was executed. I cannot understand why three members of our flight were executed except that it was the treacherous act of the bloody Japanese. We were all kept blind as to what the Japs intended to do with us. Sometimes the Japs would say we were all going to be executed and again that we would be kept alive but not allowed to return to our country; the pressure has been trying and the disappearance of Harold, Hallmark
and Farrow a grief to us all.” Hite concluded by telling Spatz’s mother that her son had remained strong until the end. “I know they are now happy and at rest,” he wrote, “though it grieves us to know they are physically gone, they still live with us in spirit.”