Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (66 page)

Farrow also penned a letter to his beloved aunt, Margaret Stem, whom he knew simply as Marge. “Well, here we’ve come to the parting of our ways for the present. But you have helped give me faith to go forward with steadfast heart—I’ve built my house upon a rock. That we will meet again, I am sure,” he wrote. “All will be right in the end.” In another letter Farrow asked his best friend, Ivan Ferguson, to cherish the good times the young men shared. “Do you remember Spokane and Glacier Park, and what we said about a place full of so much that is good and beautiful—what it’s worth to us? And Crater Lake, Oregon Caves, the giant Sequoias, the Golden Gate—how splendid they were? And the thrill of flying—that we experienced together too—it was the most wonderful part of my career. So—keep ’em flying, Fergie, and remember me to all the guys in the squadron.” He closed by asking his friend to do him a final favor and reach out and help comfort his mother. “She will need your sympathy.”

Farrow addressed his final letter to his red-haired, green-eyed girlfriend of two years, Elizabeth “Lib” Sims, whom he had once described in a note to his sister as so “full of pep.” “You are to me the only girl that would have meant the condition of my life. I have realized the kind of life being married to you would have meant to me and to both of us, and I know we would have found complete happiness. It is a pity we were born in this day and age. At least we had part of that happiness,” he wrote. “I go over each time we were with each other, the lovely nights at your home before the fireplace; the never-to-be-forgotten weekend spent at Caroline’s; your balalaika played so many times; the flights we took at Columbia and at Augusta where you no doubt learned to love flying; the meals we had together; the walks in the woods, enjoying the fresh air and the smell of growing things; all these times
were the greatest pleasure to me.” Farrow closed with what was no doubt a painful yet unselfish final wish that she move on with her life. “Find yourself the good man you deserve, Lib, because you have so much to give the right one,” Farrow wrote. “Goodbye and may God be with you.”

Farrow entrusted Remedios with the few personal belongings he had managed to hold on to since he jumped from the
Bat out of Hell
, including his Social Security and American Red Cross cards and eleven signed Bank of America travelers checks, in ten-dollar denominations. Lastly, he slipped him the photograph of a girl.

AROUND 10 A.M. ON
October 15 Tatsuta visited Public Cemetery no. 1 accompanied by several guards to prepare the grounds for the afternoon’s execution. Shigeji Mayama cut the grass while Yoneya Tomoichi planted the three crosses made from fresh lumber in front of the ruins of a Chinese temple. Tatsuta instructed the workers to erect a stand to hold incense burners and flowers.

Guards came for Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz that afternoon, ordering them to leave their personal belongings behind. The Japanese ushered the exhausted and emaciated fliers from the prison to several waiting trucks, transporting them the few miles to the cemetery, which overlooked a fairway golf course and stood opposite the race track. Four staff cars sat parked outside the gate.

The record of the execution included four official witnesses: chief prosecutor Colonel Akinobu Ito, clerk Chosei Fujita, medical officer Lieutenant Maruo Masutani, and interpreter Yasutoshio Miura. In addition, Ito invited more than half a dozen spectators, including a few officers with the Shanghai Military Police and several medical officers and corpsmen. Associate Judge Yusei Wako, who had sentenced the raiders, also showed up to watch. Several guards patrolled the cemetery grounds as security.

The medical officer pronounced the three raiders fit for execution, including Hallmark, who was still so weak he needed help to go to the bathroom. Major Itsuro Hata, the prosecutor, informed the fliers through an interpreter he was there to carry out the order of execution and told them to die like brave soldiers. He then bowed.

“I do not know what relation I had with
you in the previous life but we have been living together under the same roof,” Tatsuta told them. “On this day you are going to be executed, but I feel sorry for you. My sympathies are with you. Men must die sooner or later. Your lives were very short but your names will remain everlasting.”

“Please tell the folks at home that we died very bravely,” Tatsuta recalled Farrow requesting.

The warden informed the airmen that in a moment guards would bind them to the three crosses in preparation for execution. “Christ was born and died on the cross and you on your part must die on the cross,” Tatsuta added, “but when you are executed—when you die on the cross you will be honored as Gods.”

Tatsuta concluded by asking the raiders to pray as he made the sign of the cross. He asked whether the men had any final words.

None did.

Guards escorted the raiders to the crosses and forced them to turn around and kneel. The Japanese tied each flier’s forearm and upper arm with new white cloths to keep them from falling over once shot. Tatsuta helped secure Spatz to the cross on the left while others tied Hallmark to the center cross and Farrow to the one on the right. The Japanese then placed a white cloth around the airmen’s heads, each with a black dot drawn to mark the center of the forehead just above the nose.

First Lieutenant Goyo Tashima commanded the firing squad, which consisted of one noncommissioned officer and nine enlisted men. Six of the soldiers were designated as riflemen with two assigned to each raider—one a primary shooter, the other secondary. The other three enlisted men served as security guards.

“Attention,” Tashima demanded. “Face to the target.”

The rifleman turned toward the fliers just twenty meters away.

“Prepare.”

Tashima watched as the firing squad members kneeled and took aim. He raised his arm and then dropped it as he shouted his final order.

“Fire!”

All three guns roared.

Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz slumped forward.

“The men who fired were all expert marksmen,” Tatsuta testified, “and only fired one shot each.”

Tashima ordered the firing squad to cease
fire and about face. He directed them to march forward, stop, and remove the spent cartridges.

The medical examiner checked each raider to make sure he was dead, later telling Tatsuta that he detected a slight pulse, though only briefly before each expired. The doctor certified the deaths and bandaged the wounds before guards laid the bodies in the caskets side by side in front of the dais. The Japanese saluted them.

Tatsuta ordered the bodies of the dead airmen taken to the Japanese Residents Association Crematorium. He planned to hang on to Hallmark’s leather flying jacket, ordering Remedios to have his name removed from the coat and to find a tailor in Shanghai who could cut it down to fit him.

FOUR DAYS AFTER THE
execution of Hallmark, Farrow, and Spatz, Radio Tokyo announced the “capture, trial, and severe punishment” of an unspecified number of raiders, claiming the airmen had intentionally attacked nonmilitary targets and civilians. The Japanese listed the names of only four of the captured airmen—Hallmark, Farrow, Spatz, and DeShazer—though it reported that all had confessed to bombing hospitals and shooting children. “I saw school kids playing around a building which looked like a grammar school,” the broadcast quoted Farrow as having said. “I felt I might as well give the Jap kids a taste of bullets while I was at it. So I dived down toward them and machine-gunned them. I felt sorry for them, but hell, ain’t they enemy kids?”

News that any of the raiders had been captured—much less punished—shocked the American press and the nation. Though Doolittle had informed the families of the captured airmen, he had requested in each of his May letters that the news remain a secret. Rumors that at least a few of the raiders had been captured had circulated among reporters, but the nation at large had assumed that all the airmen had safely escaped. The Japanese looked to exploit America’s secrecy, using the fate of the raiders as a wedge to drive between the government and the people. “The American public has a right to know the extent to which they are being treated in the official announcement,” Tokyo broadcast. “Two facts are laid before the public. One is that the United States War Department on October 20 flatly denied that any of their airmen had been made prisoners in Japan. The other is that
the United States War Department, in a cablegram dated August 19, inquired of the International Red Cross headquarters in Yokohama requesting that they send the name of the eight missing men. Let the public judge.”

Japan in another particularly cruel broadcast urged any doubters to seek out the families of two of the captured raiders. “For those who are skeptical, these observers suggested that they enquire as to the present whereabouts of 21-year-old Robert Hite and Lieutenant William G. Farrow,” the English-language broadcast announced. “Next of kin of these men, who are but part of the captured crew, should make all efforts to obtain a satisfactory reply from the United States War Department.”

The press initially questioned whether such broadcasts were bogus, but American leaders knew the ruse was up. At an October 22 press conference War Secretary Henry Stimson confirmed that the four names Tokyo broadcast were raiders, but made no mention of any other captive airmen, an omission Japan exploited days later when it dribbled out the names of the others in what the United Press described as a “sly propaganda campaign.” The government’s decision to withhold the fact that Japan had captured some of the raiders drew a sharp rebuke from some in the media, including syndicated columnist Raymond Clapper. “The news is released just now, after Tokyo breaks it,” he wrote. “There was no news in that to be withheld from the enemy. It was withheld only from the American people, who have been as much interested in the Tokio raid as in any one thing we have done in this war. Some of our officials call this a people’s war. It would help if we also considered this an American people’s war.”

Reporters hungered for information about the captured fliers, a void Washington columnist David Lawrence soon filled by offering up a personal testimony from Billy Farrow. One of the pilot’s close friends had held on to a memo Farrow wrote to himself in 1940 when he decided to go into aviation, titled simply “My Future.” The South Carolinian, who had once meticulously logged instructions on the front flap of his algebra notebook, had likewise taken stock of his life. “The time has come to decide what rules I am going to set myself for daily conduct,” Farrow wrote. “First I must enumerate my weaknesses and seek to eliminate them. Then I must seek to develop the qualities I need for this type of work. It’s going to be hard, but
it’s the only way. Work with a purpose is the only practical means of achieving an end.”

Farrow unflinchingly charted his flaws, ranging from a lack of curiosity and sober thought to lapses in self-confidence. He then outlined strengths he hoped to build upon, from his health to his faith. “Stay close to God—do His will and commandments. He is my friend and protector,” he wrote. “Fear nothing—be it insanity, sickness, failure—always be upright—look the world in the eye.” Lawrence’s column listing each of Farrow’s twenty-one bullet points ran in newspapers nationwide just seven days after the Japanese forced him to kneel, tied him to a cross, and shot him in the forehead. The young flier from the tiny town of Darlington represented any one of the millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines who over the course of the war would fight in every corner of the globe, from the deserts of North Africa to the jungles of Guadalcanal. “He was neither poet nor scholar,” Lawrence wrote, “but just a lieutenant in the U.S. Air Corps.”

Letters of support arrived at Farrow’s mother’s home from as far away as New York, Georgia, and Ohio. Churches across the country seized on the young airman’s inspirational message, publishing it in Sunday bulletins, while businesses such as Minnesota’s Northwestern National Life Insurance Company churned out patriotic pamphlets with headlines like “An American’s Creed for Victory.” Students at Henry Snyder High School in Jersey City gazed up at posters plastered on classroom walls that carried Farrow’s message, and the University of South Carolina’s president, J. Rion McKissick, turned the creed into a speech for the 1943 graduating class at the raider’s alma mater. “No matter what has happened to my boy, I know he has served a wonderful purpose in the war,” Jessie Farrow told reporters. “My son is an average American willing to face life fearlessly and die for ideals of right and freedom.”

The United States meanwhile scrambled to determine what punishments the Japanese had meted out, only to learn the unfortunate news in a note passed through the Swiss on February 23, 1943, accusing the airmen of purposely bombing schools, hospitals, and crowds of civilians. “What may be more stigmatized,” the note stated, “is the fact that they wounded and killed little innocent school children who played in the grounds of their school by machine gunning, deliberately mowing them down although recognizing them
as such.” Because the airmen had allegedly confessed to intentionally targeting civilians, the Japanese refused them the protections traditionally afforded to prisoners of war. “The American Government will understand that such persons are unpardonable as enemies of humanity,” the Japanese wrote. “The guilt of such persons having been established by court inquiry, the death penalty was pronounced according to martial law. However, following commutation [of] punishment granted as special measure to larger part condemned, sentence of death was applied only to certain of accused.”

Roosevelt refused to inform the public even as the State Department struggled to decide how best to handle the crisis, a job that initially fell to Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, who drafted a detailed memo of America’s options: “The full texts of the Japanese note concerning the execution of some of the Doolittle fliers now having been received and studied leaves no room for the doubt I hoped would exist that it was not a definite and positive statement that they had been executed.” The first option on Long’s list: “proceed immediately to retaliate by executing a comparable number of Japanese officer prisoners of war in our custody.” He went on to rule out the scenario, doubting it would have any effect on the Japanese government other than to spur it to retaliate, a dangerous proposition since the fall of the Philippines had led to the capture of many Americans. “I am not unmindful of the fact that the Japanese hold 18,000 of our prisoners and we a few handfuls of theirs,” he wrote, though the number of American military and civilian prisoners was actually much higher. “It is true we hold many of their civilians but I am differentiating between civilians and prisoners of war.”