Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (49 page)

THE
JAPANESE
LOADED
Dean Hallmark, Bob Meder, and Chase Nielsen into chairs and carried them several miles over
a mountain trail to the garrison, arriving around 5:30 p.m. “Nobody said anything to us on the trip, but the soldiers kept looking at us, grinning and nodding. I couldn’t think much,” Nielsen later wrote. “I tried to work out a plan, but nothing seemed feasible. I made up my mind I’d do the best I could and if I had to I’d kill some Japs before they killed me.”

At the garrison the Japanese fed the men boiled eggs and vegetable sandwiches before marching them down to a dock and aboard a diesel-powered boat. The airmen changed boats at Ning-po, but otherwise spent the four-day trip handcuffed in a tiny cabin, the only furnishing a grass mat. At night the Japanese even cuffed the airmen’s legs together. Meals consisted of eggs, vegetable soup, and pastries. At about 2:30 p.m. on April 24, the boat reached Shanghai, a fact Nielsen surmised when he spotted signs along the waterfront for the Shanghai Power Company and Shanghai Docks.

The Japanese blindfolded the airmen upon arrival and tethered each one to a guard with a rope around the waist. Guards then placed the fliers in separate cars and drove them to an airport about twenty minutes away, locking them into narrow individual cells. Nielsen hardly had time to settle in before guards pulled him out and led him to an interrogation room. The cramped room was hot and had a single window, the bottom half of which was frosted and blocked his view outside. Six officers sat around a table along with one enlisted man and a civilian interpreter. The Japanese offered Nielsen a cup of tea, which he awkwardly drank with handcuffs.

One of the officers started the interrogation. Where did Nielsen come from and what was he doing in China?

The navigator gave only his name, rank, and serial number.

The interrogators slapped him about the face and head—by his own estimate as many as thirty times—making his ears ring. Others kicked him in the shins hard enough to draw blood. With his hands cuffed behind the chair and his ankles tied to the legs, he was powerless to defend himself.

“We have methods of making
you talk,” the interpreter told him. “You understand, nobody in your country know you alive. If we happen to torture you to death your people think you missing in action. You want to talk now?”

Nielsen again refused. “That crack about my folks never knowing what became of me sort of got me, but I was so tired that my feelings didn’t register,” he recalled. “He was watching me closely and he seemed disappointed at my reaction.”

The officer snapped his finger and issued a guttural order, triggering the door to burst open. Nielsen watched as four husky enlisted men marched inside. “There was absolutely no expression on their faces,” he later wrote. “They seized me, hauled me to my feet and though I tried to resist at first they tossed me on the floor without any trouble. One held my handcuffed arms. Two others held my legs. The fourth put a towel over my face, arranging it in a cup-like fashion over my mouth and nose.”

The guard then poured water over his face. To his horror Nielsen felt the tepid liquid run into his mouth and nostrils. “A man has to breathe,” he recalled. “Every breath I took I sucked water into my lungs.”

Nielsen struggled to fight back. He turned his head and managed to suck in a mouthful of air before the guard forced his head back. He likewise fought without success to move his arms and legs. He started to lose consciousness. “I felt more or less like I was drowning,” he recalled, “just gasping between life and death.”

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 captured 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.”