Target Tokyo: Jimmy Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor (71 page)

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.”

Dysentery struck Meder in early September about the time the hot and humid summer gave way to cooler fall weather. The meager rations had already so whittled his five-foot-eleven-inch frame that fellow fliers described him as a “toothpick.” Beriberi soon added to his troubles. The pilot grew so weak that by November he stopped leaving his cell each morning for exercise. He could do little more than wallow on his mat. “We begged to go in to nurse him,” Barr recalled. “Kindness was all the medication we had, but it would have helped. We were refused.”

The other raiders persuaded Meder on December 1 to come outside for exercise. His feet were so swollen that all he could do was sit on the steps in the sun. One of the guards harassed him, and Meder rose to the challenge.

“Listen,” he said in a mix of English and Japanese. “Sick as I am I can lick the whole damn bunch of you.”

He took a swing only to miss and fall down. “It was sort of sad, but it was sort of good to see that even in as bad a shape that he was in, that the spirit was still willing,” Hite recalled. “Bob knew that he was in real bad shape. He was just sort of a skeleton.”

Hite asked him whether there was anything he could do for him.

“Just pray,” Meder answered.

The others helped Meder back to his cell afterward. Hite was in the cell next to him. He heard his fellow pilot
tell the guard known as Cyclops the address of his parents and ask him, if he died, would he please write them and send them his clothes.

Barr helped distribute dinner that evening for the guards. He slid Meder’s mess kit through the slot but didn’t hear anyone move. The navigator summoned a guard, who unlocked the cell door and found Meder dead.

The Japanese medical report of his death, discovered after the war, painted a heroic, albeit bogus, picture of efforts made to save Meder, from giving him special glucose and vitamin B injections when he first fell sick to the desperate final effort to resuscitate him when he died. “Immediately artificial respiration was tried and 3.0 cc of camphor was injected under the skin and 1.0 cc of adrenaline was injected into the heart,” the report stated, “but the patient failed to recover.”

The sounds of saws and hammers filled the prison the next day. Unaware that his friend had died, DeShazer peered out the window, startled to see guards building a coffin. On December 3 guards marched each of the prisoners into Meder’s cell. The Japanese had stuffed cotton in his mouth. “The body was in a rough box and there were a few chrysanthemums on Bob’s breast,” Hite and DeShazer recalled. “Each of us said a silent prayer, but there were no religious services.”

Meder’s death pained the others; the Japanese seized on it as a means to torment them. “For several days after that, the guards would shout out Bob’s number (it was three) when they passed his cell,” Hite and DeShazer later wrote. “They’d wait for an answer, which couldn’t come, of course, and then they’d laugh.”

Meder had often said he would rather be dead and his family know it than be alive with no one knowing it. He had left a letter for his parents and sister, sealing it with the message: “To be opened only in the event of my death.”

“I am writing this letter on December 7, 1941—that fateful day when the Japanese started the spark of this conflagration. As it has been the will of God I have answered my country’s call and I pray that whatever efforts I may have exerted have been to some avail,” Meder began his final farewell. “The main purpose of this letter to you is to try at this very last minute to comfort you. During this time of strife for all, those of you that have had to sacrifice loved ones are the real heroes of any struggle. The word hero is truly inadequate
. Just remember that the soul of a person is greater than his own physical body; therefore, you have not lost me, my spirit shall ever be with you, watching, and aiding if possible from wherever the ‘Great Beyond’ may be. Be brave, not bitter, be determined, not overcome. That is the job for those of you that I love most dearly. Democracy shall continue. It is our sacrifice for that cause.”

Meder begged of his family one final request. “Please promise to never let anything separate you,” he wrote. “Mend any petty disagreements—continue as a loving family on its way to do its part in this world. Mother and Dad, never let anything become so mistakenly important to cause such a thing as a separation or a divorce. And Doris-Mae, never let your love for Mother and Dad taper off. I ask these things of you in my memory. I know you will not fail me!” Meder reiterated his hope that his parents and sister would not allow his death to overwhelm them. “I bless and love you all very dearly; some day I feel very certain that we shall all be united in a happier life in the life ahead,” he concluded. “God bless and protect you. Keep up your courage!”

After the war Doolittle would deliver a speech in Cleveland on October 18, 1945. Meder’s parents were in attendance. “His mission was accomplished—gloriously,” Doolittle told them and the audience. “He was not only one of the outstanding heroes of the war, but a martyr to the cause of your freedom and mine. Bob was a victim of the barbarism of the Japs who sacrificed him on the altar of hate.”

Meder’s sacrifice meant the others got two extra buns with each meal, but it also taught them a lesson. “Any of us can die at any time,” Hite thought. “We could all die and they could do away with us and nobody would ever know the difference.”

As the months marched past, the raiders grew increasingly withdrawn. The solitude tortured them. “We had to fight ourselves,” Hite and DeShazer said, “to keep from going mad.” The men lived inside their imaginations. Nielsen envisioned the house he would one day build for himself, while Hite planned out a farm back home in Texas. “I would think about the wonderful meals I’d have when I got out. Or I’d plan escapes in minute detail, going over every step in my mind,” Barr remembered. “And then in my mind I’d raise sheep, rabbits, hogs or wheat. I’d go through every step, planting, fertilizing, weeding. I raised chickens in imaginary batteries. Maybe I’d ‘work’ on one occupation for a couple of days, go on to another, and then go back
to the first one. It’s amazing what your mind can do under such circumstances.”