Eighty Army Airmen formed the sixteen crews known as the Doolittle Raiders who bombed the Japanese homeland in April of 1942. Many consider this operation to be a turning point in WWII because it boosted the morale of the allies and humbled the Japanese at a time when they had seemed invincible.
After bombing Japan, three of the Raiders died during crash landings and bailouts in China, eight were captured by the Japanese (three were put to death and one died of starvation), five landed in the Soviet Union and were interned until they escaped through the Middle East one year later, and the rest were assisted inland by the Chinese.
So what happened to these airmen after their infamous raid and escape from China?
Pilot Ted Lawson who was severally injured during the crash landing of the Ruptured Duck survived after Doc White of Plane 15 amputated his leg at a remote missionary hospital in China. The Chinese escorted White and Lawson and his other injured crew members to safety, often just ahead of the Japanese pursuing them. Lawson was flown to the United States where surgeons at Walter Reed rebuilt his jaw and performed additional surgery on his leg.
One year later Lawson published Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a book about the Doolittle Raid and his experiences in China. A Hollywood movie by the same name was produced and released by MGM in 1944. The black-and-white movie was a hit and won an Oscar and is still available for purchase today. Lawson died at the age of 75.
The Ruptured Duck Logo
When MGM needed a stunt pilot for the movie A Guy Named Joe, the army sent former co-pilot Col. Dean Davenport. Davenport also served as technical adviser during the filming of Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. He completed his WWII service in Alaska and lived to the age of 81.
Lt.Charles McClure convalesced with Ted Lawson at Walter Reed Hospital and was hospitalized until June of 1943. He became a navigator instructor but retired with a physical disability in June of 1945. He lived to be 82.
Lt. Bob Clever recovered from his head and face injuries from the Ruptured Duck’s crash landing, but was killed on November 20, 1942, the day his flight group departed from Fort Wayne, Indiana. His “airplane spun out climbing up through the clouds.” He was 28.
Sgt. David Thatcher, only 20-years old when he served as gunner on the Ruptured Duck, was the only crew member able to walk after the crash landing. He kept his fellow crewmates alive by tending to their injuries and collecting and giving them rainwater. He was the only Doolittle enlisted man to receive the Silver Star for his gallantry and courage. Thatcher was sent to North Africa and Europe and survived 26 bombing mission. He contracted hepatitis and malaria with ended his military career. He died in 2016 at the age of 94.
Sgt. David Thatcher
Crew Members of the Hari Kari-er
The crew members of the Hari Kari-er bailed out in Japanese controlled territory eighty miles from the coast. Thanks to the help of the Chinese, they each made it safely out of China.
In early June of 1942, Pilot Ross Greening flew back to the states on the same plane with the
Ruptured Duck wounded airmen. Along with many other Raiders he was sent to North Africa later that year, and he was based in Marrakech, Morocco. By July of 1943 he had completed 125 hours of combat, and on July 17th, he took part in a five-hundred-craft run on the Naples, Italy, shipyards.
Greening’s plane was hit by anti-aircraft fire, the cockpit crashed open, and pieces of the plane fell off. The fuselage ripped apart, the plane burst into flames and the men ran to the bomb bay to bail out. The plane was thrown sideways by another burst, and the men were tossed out. Greening floated into the line of fire and “yanked his cords in every direction to” get away. He landed in the smoking crater of Mount Vesuvius and was knocked unconscious. He woke up with his hip out of joint, and the Nazis popped it back in place before carrying him out of the volcano piggyback. Despite his many injuries, he was forced to crawl from a truck to the inside of a jail while an Italian mob spat and threw stones at him.
After Italy surrendered on September 8, 1943, the Wehrmacht loaded the POWs from Greening’s prison on a northbound train. The Allies attacked the train and Greening “was blown out of the carriage by a direct hit, and in the chaos he took off.” He wandered in the mountains for a few days and then hid on a train until he reached Verona. An Italian family who had lived in the U.S. for many years aided him until it became too dangerous.
Greening hid in a cave near Venice with two escaped POWs from New Zealand until a German patrol searching for partisans found them by accident. He spent the rest of the war at Stalag Luft I, 125 miles north of Berlin where 9000 POW aviators were held. Greening “gave the prisoners art lessons and taught them to make their own supplies.” He became commanding officer, and “when the Red Army finally liberated the camp in 1945, the Nazi prison chief surrendered to Greening to spare himself the Soviets’ known brutality.”
Greening’s former co-pilotKen Reddy died in an airplane accident near Little Rock, Arkansas on September 3, 1942, at the age of 22. The three other Hari Kari-er crew members were assigned to the China-India-Burma Theater.
Lt. Kappeler and Sergeant Gardner were sent on a mission from India to bomb Burma and then land in Kunming, China. After they dropped their bombs, “they were immediately attacked by Japanese planes and ducked into the clouds to evade but weren’t familiar with the area’s mountainous terrain.” They tried to cross the hump (the Himalayas) at too low an altitude, and only Lt. Kappeler’s plane, out of the six, made it to China. Sgt. Gardner was killed in action on June 3, 1942 at the age of 22.
Lt. Kappeler survived to fly fifty-three combat missions out of England, France, and Belgium and died in 2010 at the age of 96. After the Doolittle Raid, Bombardier
Second Lt. Bill Birch was sent state-side and participated in War-Bond-selling drives and completed flight training in Texas. As a result of an airplane accident, he spent almost two years in a hospital and didn’t have an opportunity to fly again before the war ended.
After dropping their bombs, all the crews made it safely out of Japan but encountered numerous difficulties later.
3 Raiders died in crash landings and bailouts over China
8 Raiders were captured by the Japanese – 3 went before a firing squad and 1 starved to death
5 Raiders landed in the Soviet Union and were interned – they escaped through the Middle East one year later
64 Raiders were assisted to safety in Free China by Chinese soldiers and civilians
So what happened to the Raiders after they escaped from China?
Plane #1 – Piloted by Jimmy Doolittle
Doolittle Before WWII Public Domain
After spending the summer of 1942 traveling the U.S. on war bond drives, Jimmy Doolittle was appointed commanding general over the 12th Air Force in North Africa under General Eisenhower. In March 1943, Doolittle became commanding general of the North African Strategic Air Forces. On the one-year anniversary of the Tokyo Raid, Doolittle and the other Raiders also serving in North Africa held the first Doolittle Raider reunion.
First Doolittle Raider Reunion – North Africa – 1943
The Japanese notified the U.S. that the eight captured Raiders had been sentenced to death, but some lives had been spared. They refused give names. When the American military released this information, Jimmy Doolittle replied from North Africa that he and his Raiders were ready to go back to Japan and finish the job they had started. The Japanese responded in a radio address from Tokyo. They stated that “Doolittle, commander of the raid on Japan one year ago, failed to do anything, so we have the pleasure of offering him the title of “Did-little'” (The First Heroes).
After pushing the Germans out of Africa, Doolittle went on to command the 15th Air Force in the Mediterranean Theater and the 8th Air Force in Europe and the Pacific. He ended the war as a lieutenant general and reverted to inactive reserve status in May of 1946. He returned to Shell Oil and served as vice president and later director. In 1985, the U.S. Congress promoted Doolittle to full general on the Air Force retired list, and he became the first four-star general in Air Force Reserve history.
Doolittle was married to Josephine, “Joe,” for seventy years, and he lived to the age of 96.
Plane #1 on a Mountain in China – Courtesy of the Smithsonian
After Doolittle’s crew members bailed out over China and located each other on the ground, Doolittle and his gunner, Paul Leonard, visited their destroyed plane at its crash site on a mountainside. Doolittle sat beside his plane and wondered about the fate of the other 75 men and their aircraft. He “felt lower than a frog’s posterior.” This was his first combat mission, and he was sure it would be his last. He told Leonard he expected to be court-martialed and imprisoned at Fort Leavenworth. At the very least, he “would sit out the war flying a desk.” Leonard disagreed and predicted that Doolittle would be promoted to general, be given a new plane, and receive the Medal of Honor. Leonard was correct on all three counts (The First Heroes).
Leonard was so impressed with Doolittle that he asked to fly as Doolittle’s crew chief on his next mission. Doolittle agreed, and Leonard went with him to North Africa. When Doolittle was called away from the airfield for a meeting with the ground commanders at Youks-les-Bains, Algeria, he left Leonard to look after their airplane. The Germans bombed the airfield that night, and Leonard manned the top turret machine gun until the batteries ran out. He then took refuge in a nearby bomb crater, but a bomb meant for the plane landed in the bomb crater. When Doolittle returned to the field, he only found Leonard’s left hand with his wristwatch still in place. Doolittle stated that losing Leonard was his greatest personal tragedy of the war.
Dick Cole, Doolittle’s co-pilot, served in the China-Burma-India Theater and then became a test pilot with the Douglas Aircraft Plant for the remainder of the war. He served in the military for twenty-six years, rated as a command pilot, and retired as a colonel. Cole was the last living Doolittle Raider. He died on April 9, 2019, at 103 years of age.
Hank Potter, Doolittle’s navigator, served stateside after the Tokyo Raid and later in Germany in the 1950’s. He earned the rank of colonel and lived to be 83.
Fred Braemer, Doolittle’s bombardier, served in the China-Burma-India Theater and then attended bombardier, radar, and observer training schools and was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant. He served in Korea, retired in 1969 and died at the age of 71.
Former Plane #5 pilot Davey Jones participated in the invasion of North Africa.Leading a dozen P-38 fighters in a B-26, he landed at the airfield in Oran, Algeria, during fighting. They had to land from every direction, straddling bomb craters and avoiding wrecked airplanes. Two or three hundred planes parked there, and the men lived by their airplanes and built fires for cooking. After a few days they all moved to Algiers. From there they ran bombing raids without ground crews. They refueled with five-gallon tins and loaded their 250-pound bombs by sheer muscle.
In November of 1942, Eisenhower started the offensive against Tunis, which was defended by thirty thousand German troops. Davey Jones led a raid on the port of Bizerte, twenty miles north of Tunis. They were forced to bomb at twelve hundred feet because they didn’t have any bomb sights. Jones’ plane was hit and the left engine knocked out. He also lost the trim and engine instruments and was forced to land along the coast between two little sand mounds which took their wings off.
North Africa Campaign – Courtesy of Naval-History.net and the Late Gordon Smith
The crew set off walking and ran into a line of German skirmishers. Jones pointed at his pistol and one of the Germans pulled it out. He said, “‘For you, the war is over.'” He and another guy were taken to the command post where the blond, Aryan-type commander who spoke reasonable English gave him a deck chair, cheese, and wine and asked him not to run away that night.
Jones was sent to Sicily and on to Rome for interrogation where he was in solitary for two weeks. From there he traveled by train in a group to Stalag Luft III, 125 miles southeast of Berlin. He arrived on his birthday. The camp was run by the Luftwaffe instead of the Gestapo or SS and grew to hold around 10,000 captive Allied aviators. In camp, Davey Jones was given the moniker “Tokyo” Jones because of his Raider experience.
The POWs put each other to work “‘building things, hiding things or ‘working to escape’-type things.'” In the spring of 1943, Davey and others moved to the north camp where they built the big tunnel featured in the book and movie, The Great Escape. The dug the tunnel thirty feet down through sand, using their hands or a small trowel and shored up the tunnel with bed boards. They used a little tin with margarine for a lamp but had to keep sending it up to be relit before they realized there wasn’t enough oxygen to support it. They had “a guy word a pump to bring air into the tunnel with beg bellows, and eventually they ran electric lights.”
The Nazi’s built more prisons to accommodate the rising number of captured Allied airmen. The Americans were moved out of Stalag Luft III, so they didn’t participate in the actual escape. Being moved likely saved Jones’s life because many of those who escaped were recaptured and executed. Jones stayed in the service after the war ended and later had the opportunity to test fly the Mach-2 supersonic bomber in 1955. He lived to be 95.
After the capture of Davey Jones and Ross Greening, U.S. Army officials worried that the Germans would hand over any captured Raiders to the Japanese, so they stopped most of the Raiders from flying and sent them home. Plane #14 navigator/bombardier Herb Macia from Tombstone, Arizona, missed the recall and crewed more than seventy sorties all the way to April 1945. He amassed more WWII combat missions than any other Raider. He lived to 93.
Former Plane 2 pilot Lt.Travis Hoover was assigned to train crews for a new squadron of B-25s. Before they were combat ready, they were sent to North Africa to bomb the tank forces under Rommel. Hoover flew missions over Sicily and Italy and then volunteered to fly B-24’s, “doing runs on Romania’s Ploesti oil fields, which were the major source of fuel for the Nazis.” Instead of being sent home after flying about fifty missions, Hoover received permission from Doolittle to stay on as a fighter pilot. He survived the war and lived to the age of 86.
During World War II, the Doolittle Raiders were the first to launch fully loaded B-25‘s off an aircraft carrier. In 1942, these airmen did the impossible and lifted off from the Enterprise aircraft carrier and bombed Japan by total surprise. The pilots were ordered to drop their bombs and fly directly to airfields in free China, but all the men knew if the Japanese didn’t shoot them down they faced the likelihood of running out of fuel before reaching China.
Pilot Ski York and copilot Robert Emmens of Plane #8 had both missed out on the training the other pilots had participated in at Eglin Air Force Base. Yet their plane safely leaped into the air as the deck of the USS Enterprise disappeared beneath them. The crew breathed a sigh of relief.
York piloted his plane to Japan and bombed a large factory installation. After strafing an airfield and not encountering any opposition, the men of Plane #8 made their getaway, flying just above the treetops. Navigator/bombardier Nolan Herndon calculated they would run out of gas over the ocean, three hundred miles from free China.
York made the decision to fly to the Soviet Union which was much closer. By that time, the U.S.S.R. had joined the Allies. York directly disobeyed his commander, Jimmy Doolittle, who had ordered the Raiders not to land in the Soviet Union under any circumstances.
The Raiders of Plane #8 reached the Soviet coastline and turned inland. They sighted a small airport thirty miles from the city of Vladivostok and made a perfect landing. The Russians greeting the airmen didn’t speak English, but they correctly identified the airmen as “Americanski.” They communicated through sign language and provided the Raiders with food and vodka.
The airmen asked for gasoline and an opportunity to contact the American Embassy, but their requests were put off. The next morning the Raiders were informed that their plane was ready, but, when they emerged from their quarters, they discovered a DC-3 waiting for them.
The crew of Plane #8 was taken to Khabarovsk, Siberia, and interrogated by a Russian general who informed them they would be interned in the Soviet Union. The airmen were taken outside the city to an army dacha by the Amur River, across from Manchuria.“ The Soviets provided beds, three meals a day, and a guard for each of the men. The Raiders were convinced they would only be interned for a week or two.
Amur River Basin – Note the Cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk on the Right Courtesy of Wikimedia By Kmusser – Own work using Digital Chart of the World and GTOPO data
Ten days later the Soviets locked the Raiders and their guards in a third-class sleeper car attached to a freight train. The men traveled for twenty-one days to the village of Okhuna, three hundred miles south of Moscow. The U.S.S.R. billed the United States thirty thousand rubles a month to provide for the interned soldiers.
As time passed, the Raiders’ worries grew. They learned that the Wehrmacht (German Army) was approaching Moscow. They studied a map and realized that Okhuna was only a few days’ march from the front lines of the war. After seven weeks, American officials from Moscow arrived to check on the Raiders, and the airmen asked about the rest of the boys on the Tokyo raid. The officials had no information about the other members of the Doolittle gang, but the attaché brought a telegram from the U.S. for copilot Bob Emmens. He was now the father of a red-headed baby boy!
Courtesy of the Library of Congress
War-time shortages caught up with the airmen, and they went without meat or vegetables and sometimes both for days. For weeks they survived on cabbage, rice, black bread, tea, and red caviar. Next the Soviets sent the men by train and then on a flat-bottomed paddle wheeler into the foothills of the Urals, on the western edge of Siberia. The inhabitants in that area were very poor, dirty, and malnourished.
The American ambassador visited the Raiders but could provide them with very little. The men ate boiled, fried, and baked cereal, and pure, uncooked pork fat, sliced about an inch thick. The temperature hovered at thirty-five to forty degrees below zero and for one three-day period at fifty below. The airmen remained in Okhansk for seven months, and their physical condition rapidly deteriorated.
In early January of 1943, the Raiders wrote a letter to Stalin. They praised the progress of the Soviet Army against the Germans, and they made three requests. Their reply came close to the end of March with the arrival of two Russian officers sent by the High Command of the Red Army in Moscow. They couldn’t grant the airmen’s request to be released from the Soviet Union, but they could move them to a warmer climate and allow them to work.
The Raiders traveled by car for twelve hours to the city of Molotov, flew south to Chkalov, and then traveled by train for eight days to Ashkhabad, the capital of Soviet Turkmenistan. On the trip, Ski York shared a compartment with a young Russian named Kolya. Kolya had brought a large store of various food items and shared his bounty with Ski for every meal during the trip.
Courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin
In Ashkhabad, the airmen lived in a two-room mud house and slept on bare wooden beds with one blanket each. They worked in a factory, overhauling small trainer biplanes. A Soviet officer showed up to count heads each night. Kolya visited and also took the Raiders to his own home, but always after dark. The airmen begged him to help them escape to Persia (present day Iran), only fifteen miles south of their current location.
One evening Kolya escorted York to the downtown square and directed him to a Persian man, Abdul Arram. After bargaining with York, Abdul agreed to take the airmen across the border for two hundred and fifty U.S. dollars.
In the middle of the night on May 26, 1943, after more than a year of internment in the Soviet Union, the Raiders of Plane #8 hiked over a mountain into Soviet-occupied Persia. After managing to avoid Russian sentries manning the bridge into the city of Meshed, the airmen found refuge at the British Embassy. From there they flew to India and on to the United States.
Source:
Nelson, Craig. The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory. Viking, 2002.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the American people longed to strike Japan where it would hurt – in their homeland. But four months after the United States entered World War II, the Japanese continued to conquer territory in Asia and defeat the allies at every turn.
The Japanese Empire in 1942 – Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
In January 1942, top commanders in the American military began planning a sneak air attack on Japan, targeting military sites and industrial facilities supporting the war effort. Dubbed “Special Aviation Project #1,” the planned bombing was kept so secret that the volunteer army pilots selected to participate didn’t know their target until after they’d sailed out of San Francisco aboard the USS Hornet aircraft carrier.
One hundred forty Army Air Corps volunteers from the Seventeenth Bombardment Group trained for this mission at Eglin Air Force Base near Pensacola, Florida. Everything about the mission was peculiar from the start. Their B-25’s had been altered en route to Florida, and the men had to quickly adjust to the changes. A navy pilot arrived to train the soldiers and select who would go on the mission. The pilots trained to taxi for no more than five hundred feet and lift off at fifty miles per hour. This had never been done in a B-25. Then the crews practiced flying at extremely low levels and pulling up to accurately drop practice bombs.
Jimmy Doolittle – Pre-WWII. Courtesy of U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia
Shortly after their training began, the airmen met their mission commander—Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle. Doolittle was a legend and many considered him to be America’s greatest aviator. Doolittle warned his men of the project’s danger and gave them the opportunity to drop out without repercussions. He said that “some of them would come home as heroes, and others, as angels,” but none of the men took Doolittle up on his offer to quit.
Three weeks later the airmen who’d been selected were roused from sleep, ordered to load up their gear, and immediately fly to McClellan Field near Sacramento. Those not chosen for the mission were heartbroken. Ordered to practice their “hedgehopping” on the way to California, the airmen enjoyed flying under power lines, racing dust clouds in the desert, banking through an open drawbridge, and frightening cattle in the fields. One twenty-two-year-old pilot landed on a Texas highway and went to say goodbye to his mom and dad.
At McClellan, the B-25’s were tuned-up and further modified. Unfortunately, the civilian mechanics who couldn’t be told of the operation, made unauthorized adjustments, undoing previous changes unique to the mission. There wasn’t time to undo the damage.
On April 1st, the army airmen flew their planes to Alameda Naval Air Station, outside San Francisco. The first sixteen B-25’s to arrive and not have anything wrong with them were loaded on the aircraft carrier, Hornet. This was the first joint mission coordinated by the army and navy since the Civil War, and the navy men and marines did their best to put the army men in their place.
B-25’s Aboard the USS Hornet En Route to Japan Courtesy National Museum of the U.S. Air Force via English Wikipedia
But all the rudeness and snubs evaporated two days out to sea. The Hornet’s captain announced over the loudspeakers that the mission’s target was Tokyo, the army was going to bomb Japan, and the navy would get them as close to the enemy as possible. Cheers and screams broke out, and the navy men couldn’t do enough to accommodate the army airmen for the rest of their journey aboard the Hornet. They realized the danger of the mission and wanted to honor the volunteer airmen for their bravery.
Doolittle had already briefed his men about their mission and informed them that their chances of making it back were slim. The goal was to sail within 450 miles of Japan, bomb the islands at night, and fly to unoccupied landing fields in eastern China. The airmen knew that if their B-25 bombers successfully lifted off the aircraft carrier, they could not return to the ship because the landing strip would be too short. They also knew the likely probability of running out of gas before reaching safe landing strips in China. Again, Doolittle gave his men the opportunity to stay behind, but none did.
Doolittle Raiders Aboard the USS Hornet. Courtesy of the U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
On April 10th, the Hornet’s fleet rendezvoused with the fleet of the aircraft carrier Enterprise, and they proceeded west under radio silence. The Japanese had intercepted an earlier transmission between the two fleets and knew where they were headed. The Japanese made plans to hit the American ships when they were six hundred miles from Tokyo. The weather grew bad, but the terrible squalls rendered the fleets invisible to the enemy.
On April 18th, the American ships encountered and sank a seventy-ton Japanese fishing boat, picketed about six hundred miles from Japan. The Enterprise picked up radio traffic indicating that the Japanese fleet had changed course, and the Americans knew they’d been discovered.
Sinking of the Japanese Fishing Boat Nitto Maru. Courtesy of U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
The American commanders realized the B-25’s wouldn’t have enough fuel to reach Japan and the Allied airfields in China, but the fleets couldn’t sail closer and put themselves in range of bombers flying out of Japan. And so, Admiral Halsey, the task force leader, sent a message: “LAUNCH PLANES. TO COL. DOOLITTLE AND GALLANT COMMAND: GOOD LUCK AND GOD BLESS YOU.” The army airmen were either waiting for breakfast or just getting up when the order came over the ship’s loudspeakers for them to man their planes.
Jimmy Doolittle and the Crew of Plane #1 – Courtesy of the U.S. Air Force via Wikipedia
Doolittle was the first pilot to ever fly a B-25 loaded with bombs, extra fuel, and a crew of five from an aircraft carrier. The skies poured rain, and the sea churned in thirty-foot swells, but the ship’s turbulence contributed to the successful launch of all sixteen bombers. The navy flagman timed each take-off so that the planes started down the runway when the ship’s bow started down and then the planes launched as the ship’s deck came up. After the last plane was in the air, the carrier fleets immediately reversed course and safely reached Hawaii.
The Doolittle Raiders bombed Japan in the middle of the day, and despite heavy anti-aircraft fire and attacks from Japanese fighter planes, each B-25 dropped its payload on various targets and left Japanese airspace safely. Radio Japan announced the attack on Tokyo, and the American papers picked up the news.
On April 21st, President Roosevelt held a press conference and confirmed “that the United States Army Air Corps planes had very successfully attacked ‘from our new base in Shangri-La'” (a fictitious place because Roosevelt didn’t want to give away the mission’s launch site.)
The mission accomplished its purpose—it was the first victory for the Allies in World War II and greatly boosted the morale of Allied civilians and soldiers.
B-25 Taking Off from the USS Hornet during the Doolittle Raid Courtesy of U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)
Stories of the Individual Doolittle Crews
Jimmy Doolittle, commander of the Raiders, piloted the first B-25 to take off from the deck of the USS Hornet. A terrible storm bucked the ship with tremendous waves, but all eyes focused on the lead plane. If the “Old Man” didn’t succeed, none of them would.
Doolittle’s Plane Launching from the USS Hornet Courtesy of the U.S. Navy via Wikipedia
Plane #1 lifted off with yards to spare, and the sailors across the whole convoy cheered. Each of the sixteen planes lifted off four minutes apart and spread out over a field fifty miles wide and one hundred fifty miles long.
The pilots flew low over the water, and their crews watched for surface ships and other aircraft. The B-25’s cleared the storm front two hundred miles before reaching Japan and encountered clear skies all the way to their targets. After reaching land, Doolittle flew close to treetop level. He spotted a squadron of Japanese fighters ahead, so he dropped lower and the aircraft’s olive drab paint caused the plane to “disappear” over a rice paddy and lose the pursing fighters.
Doolittle flew over Tokyo at thirty feet, but nearing the target, ascended to 1,200 feet, and bombardier Fred Braemer dropped all four bombs consecutively. After diving to a low altitude for their getaway, Doolittle and his crew encountered antiaircraft fire. Although copilot Dick Cole counted eighty enemy planes during the course of their #1’s flight over Japan, the only sustained minor damage—some holes in the tail from flak.
Doolittle headed to the East China Sea. His navigator, Hank Potter, estimated they would run out of gas one hundred and thirty-five miles short of the Chinese coast. This was a frightening prospect since the crew spotted sharks basking in the sea below. Fifteen of the sixteen planes followed this same route, and after leaving Japanese territory, a miracle developed.
The prevailing winds which usually blew from west to east reversed direction, and the fifteen planes rode on a thirty-mile-an-hour tailwind. This gifted them with an extra two hundred and fity miles of flying time before running out of gas. The tailwind lasted for five to six hours, allowing all fifteen planes to reach mainland China.
As the planes neared land, the tailwind gave out, night descended, and the Raiders hit a coastal storm. Doolittle headed for a landing field at Chuchow, then in the hands of Free China, but couldn’t locate it in the storm and darkness. Through a serious of missteps the authorities in Chuchow didn’t receive word about the imminent arrival of the allied planes or of the signal the Doolittle crews would use to contact them.
Instead, upon hearing the noise of approaching aircraft and assuming the Japanese were conducting a night raid, the officials in Chuchow ordered a complete blackout. At the last possible moment, Doolittle instructed his crew members to bail out. He was the only member of the Raiders who had previously jumped from a plane, and he was afraid he’d repeat an earlier experience and break both ankles.
Gunner Paul Leonard landed in the rain and dark on the side of a very steep embankment. After crawling twenty feet up and down and getting nowhere, he rolled up in his shoot, wrapped his arm around a bamboo tree, and went to sleep.
Copilot, Dick Cole, landed in a thirty-foot pine tree. He climbed to the top, untangled his chute, then climbed down and inspected his surroundings. He was on the top of a very steep mountain, so he made a hammock and stayed in the tree for the night.
Colonel Doolittle landed in a recently fertilized rice paddy. After extricating himself from the mess, he spent the night inside a water mill doing light calisthenics to fend off the cold.
Doolittle, Flight Crew, & Chinese Officials in China after Raid on Japan Courtesy of U.S. Army Air Forces via Wikimedia Commons
In the morning, a Chinese peasant took Doolittle to the local headquarters of the Chinese army, and Dick Cole arrived shortly after. A band of renegade guerrilla fighters brought Leonard, Potter, and Braemer in later.
Leonard and Doolittle climbed to the site where their plane had crashed. The debris was spread over several acres. Doolittle said he “‘felt lower than a frog’s posterior.’” This was his first combat mission, and he considered it a failure. He expected to be court-martialed or relegated to sitting out the war behind a desk.
Japanese soldiers in the area could have captured Doolittle and his crew, but the Free Chinese found the airmen first and smuggled them many miles to safety. At the time, American missionary John Birch was travelling by river and arrived at the same location where the crew was hiding in the cabin of a boat. A Chinaman led Birch to the door of the crews’ hiding place, but when they heard his voice they were afraid Birch was a Japanese impersonator. His Southern drawl convinced Leonard to open the door. Birch joined the airmen, translating for them, and facilitating their trip to Chuchow.
The Japanese conducted regular air raids on Chuchow, forcing the American airmen to retreat to a handmade cave in the hills outside the city. They remained at an army post near the cave until a United States C-47 landed on April 29th and flew them to Chungking, the capital of Free China. At the American Embassy in Chungking, Doolittle learned that seventy-five of his eighty Raiders had landed in enemy-controlled territory. Twenty were rescued and brought to Chungking at the same time.
President Roosevelt, General Marshall, and General Arnold sent personal congratulations to the Raiders, and Doolittle was promoted to brigadier general. He left Chungking on May 9thon a two-week puddle-jumping trip west to Washington D.C. where he was immediately ushered to the White House and met with President Roosevelt.
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The Crew of Plane #7, the Ruptured Duck: McClure, Lawson, Clever, Davenport, Thatcher. Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Shortly before the Ruptured Duck launched from the Enterprise, Pilot Ted Lawson levered the plane’s flaps down, the correct position for lift-off. But fearing the strong gale would tear the flaps off and disable the plane, he pulled the flaps back up. The navy flagman signaled Lawson to rev his engines and, after thirty seconds, gave the okay to release the brakes and head down the short flight deck.
The wind grabbed at the Ruptured Duck’s wings and sent it close to the edge of the ship, but Ted braked and steered the B-25 back to the white navigation line he needed to follow for take-off. The deck disappeared beneath the plane, and it skimmed the top of the waves before climbing away from the ship. Ted reached down to pull up the flaps and realized that he’d taken off without using them. Those on deck had noticed, and it had given them quite a scare.
To save fuel on the trip to Japan, Lawson maintained an altitude of twenty feet above the ocean. Gunner Dave Thatcher tested the turret, but it failed to engage. If the plane was attacked, Thatcher wouldn’t be able to move the .50 caliber rear guns which were currently pointing straight back. Switching on the emergency juice didn’t help.
In the meantime, an empty five-gallon gas can thrown out by one of the crews ahead flew past the Ruptured Duck’s left wing. If it had hit a prop, the plane would have crashed. Ted called bombardier Robert Clever in the plane’s snout and asked him to engage the automatic pilot. The plane moved dangerously to the left, forcing Lawson to quickly grab the controls. The automatic pilot didn’t work either.
The Ruptured Duck arrived at Tokyo Bay, and gunner Dave Thatcher, watching from his immovable turret, observed six Japanese fighter planes flying above. One dove but then flew away. Lawson hedgehopped fast and low to avoid the “ack-ack” attacks (anti-aircraft fire).
Yokosuka Japanese Naval Base Taken from a B-25 Bomber during the Doolittle Raid Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
The crew located its targets, and Lawson safely guided the Ruptured Duck up to 1500 feet, allowing Bombardier Robert Clever to drop the payload. Clouds of flak appeared in front of them and flew past at the right altitude but at the wrong time to damage their aircraft. Lawson put the plane into a screaming dive and outran the flak at three hundred and fifty miles per hour, then headed for China.
After crossing the China Sea, Lawson piloted the Ruptured Duck over numerous islands near the Chinese coast and located a beach that appeared adequate for landing, which he preferred to bailing out. The plane’s fuel level was dangerously low, and, before reaching the beach, both engines coughed and lost power. The bomber lost altitude, and a quarter of a mile from shore the back landing wheels hit a wave, slamming the Duck to a complete stop.
The pilot, co-pilot and navigator flew through the bomber’s windshield, and the bombardier pitched through the nose. Thatcher, the gunner, regained consciousness inside the rapidly sinking plane. When he tried to escape, he realized the Ruptured Duck was upside down, so he reversed course and crawled through the hatch above him.
Four of the five crew members on the Ruptured Duck were seriously injured. Pilot Ted Lawson landed underwater, but upright in the sand, still buckled into his pilot’s seat. He didn’t feel trapped and didn’t fight for air but thought about his wife and mother and wished he’d left them money. He was able to unbuckle his seat belt and float to the surface but was temporarily paralyzed and couldn’t swim.
The waves carried Lawson one hundred feet to the shore where he discovered the extent of his injuries. His teeth were bent in, and when he tried to straighten them, they broke off. His lower lip was torn down to the cleft of his chin, and his left arm was destroyed. His whole left leg was sliced wide open, exposing the bone.
The impact had pulled both of Navigator Mac McClure’s arms out of their sockets and left them swollen from his shoulders to his wrists. He was unable to use his arms to swim but kicked and hurled his body to shore and crawled onto the beach.
Blood poured from bombardier Bob Clever’s head and face from a serious gash and deep cuts. Half of his hair had been stripped away, and he could only crawl on his hands and knees because of back and hip sprains. Co-pilot Dean Davenport had deep cuts on his lower right leg and was unable to walk.
Gunner Dave Thatcher spotted two Chinese fishermen on a ridge above the beach but thought they were Japanese soldiers. Mac McClure stopped Thatcher from shooting the men, and once he put his gun away, eight of the fisherman came down to the beach and led the fliers to a shack about a half mile away.
Clever crawled the whole distance. The men shivered in their wet clothes, so the Chinese peasants gave them quilts to wrap up in and mud-encrusted bamboo mats to rest on. The airmen tried to communicate with their benefactors, but the language barrier proved difficult.
A Chinaman who appeared to hold power over the others arrived at the shack and studied the airmen’s insignia. He turned to Captain Lawson and introduced himself as “Charlie.” His English was extremely limited, but he pointed at them and said “Melican.” He promised to come back for them and repeatedly said, “Boat.”
Dave Thacker returned to the beach the next morning and dove around the plane, seeking more of their medical kits but couldn’t locate them. He heard a motor and spotted a Japanese patrol boat in the distance. The enemy had discovered the presence of the Doolittle Raiders.
Chinese Junks by Lai Afong. Courtesy Wikipedia. Public Domain
Charlie returned to the shack the next morning with a dozen helpers who constructed litters and carried the wounded airmen to a Chinese guerrilla camp. Armed guerrillas carried the men through villages, across fields, onto a flat-bottomed boat, and down a muddy canal. Another group of peasants met the boat and carried the wounded men straight up a winding hillside trail and down toward the shore where a Chinese junk waited to take them to the mainland.
However, before reaching the junk, the litter bearers heard a Japanese gunboat approaching and dumped the Raiders in a ditch. The boat appeared, and the Japanese soldiers questioned the men on the junk. The Americans were very impressed that the Chinese never gave them up to the enemy.
Chinese Carry Doolittle’s Raiders to Safety Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain.
After arriving on the mainland, the Raiders were taken to a China Relief station where Young Doctor Chen and his helpers awaited the airmen. They’d spent the night running twenty-six miles from their hospital in Linhai and brought sedan chairs to immediately carry the Americans back to the safety of Linhai. The local Chinese soldiers, Boy Scouts, and Girl Scouts stood at attention and saluted the wounded Raiders as they were carried out of town.
Doctor Chen’s father, as well as an English missionary couple, a young Australian nurse, and other volunteer nurses manned the hospital at Linhai. The facility only had a little chloroform, antiseptic fluid, and bandages left. The airmen were badly injured, their wounds had become infected, and Lawson could only eat and drink through a slit in his mouth. His leg had turned a horrible color and was swollen from the ankles to the groin.
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Plane #15 – No Nickname
When the time came for Plane #15 to take off from the Enterprise, she refused to budge. Pilot Don Smith feared he and his crew would be scrubbed from the mission. A deckhand realized they’d failed to remove the chocks in front of the B-25’s wheels and remedied the problem.
The Crew of Plane #15: Sessler, Smith, White, Williams, Saylor Courtesy of the National Museum of the US Air Force
Smith maneuvered #15 down the flight deck, but a rogue wave caused the Hornet’s bow to dip just as the plane reached the end of the deck. Pointing down toward the water, #15 faced an imminent catastrophe, but the plane’s speed, and the strong winds enabled her to lift off safely.
Plane #15 and her crew headed for targets in the city of Kobe, but a 2,500-foot mountain stood in the middle of their flight path. The mountain was not on their charts. While adjusting their route, they listened to a Tokyo radio station until a shrieking alarm, a voice shouting in Japanese, and complete silence interrupted the broadcast.
Due to the radio warning, the crew expected trouble in Kobe, but none materialized. They successfully dropped their bombs on an aircraft factory, dockyards, a steel works, and the machinery works. They only observed a little flak that didn’t come close to them.
Plane #15 reached the coast of China, and Smith and co-pilot “Griff” Williams decided to land in the ocean rather than travel inland and risk running out of gas. They located a soft spot on the water a half mile from shore and landed the craft so smoothly that no one was injured.
The crew had to evacuate quickly before the heavy bomber sank, so the men grabbed their supplies and prepared their raft. Gunner Thomas White, a medical doctor, salvaged his surgical instruments and medical kit and climbed from the plane seconds before it sank under the waves.
The life raft was too small to accommodate all the crew and their supplies. When one person moved too quickly, another crewman was knocked into the water. Waves pulled men overboard, and they made no progress with their rowing. A rogue wave forced the raft against a sharp edge of the sunken plane, and the raft began to collapse. Another wave flipped the whole raft over, and the crew lost everything, including Doc White’s bandages and medicines.
The airmen of Plane #15 abandoned their useless raft and swam through the crashing waves to the shore. They climbed cliffs surrounding the beach, spotted a light in the distance, and came upon a small house and a covered goat pen. The light was extinguished, and no one answered the door. The Raiders attempted to settle in the goat pen for the night, but the owner finally emerged from the house, brought the men inside, and fed them. The airmen were two feet taller than their host.
Local Chinese peasants came to the house, but no one was able to communicate until some children brought a book with pictures and English translations. The men learned they were on the only island in the vicinity that didn’t have its own Japanese patrol. Friends of the Chinese family sailed the crew to a nearby island and handed them over to the guerrilla band led by Charlie.
On April 25th, seven days after “The Ruptured Duck’s” crash landing, the crew members of Plane #15 arrived at the hospital in Linhai. The plane’s gunner, Doc White, was the only medical doctor among the eighty Doolittle Raiders, and he carried two tubes of morphine with him. White was also a surgeon and amputated Lawson’s infected leg, saving the captain’s life. All of the crew members on both bombers eventually made it to Chungking and out of China safely.
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Due to a faulty setting on its stabilizer, Plane #2 launched too sharply from the Enterprise “lost its air and seemed to collapse in flight.” A strong gust of wind came to the rescue and the plane avoided a collision with the ship’s hull which would have sliced it in two.
Travis Hoover, pilot of Plane #2, followed Doolittle’s plane until they reached Japan, but the army intelligence photos they’d brought with them didn’t match what the airmen now viewed. His navigator eventually gave Hoover a new course, but they didn’t spot their primary target, a powder works. They picked a new target but were unable to rise above 900 feet. When their bombs struck, the concussion jolted the plane and smoke rose all around them. If they’d struck the powder works, they wouldn’t have survived.
Trav Hoover followed General Doolittle to the coast of China, where they ran into a storm. The navigator checked his charts and determined they were in Japanese territory. They headed southwest and discovered mountains which were missing from their maps. They attempted to climb to a higher elevation, but each time they did, the left engine died. Now “they were too low on gas to climb, and too low in altitude to jump.”
Trav had no choice but to find a place to land. He brought the plane down in a rice paddy, and the airmen set it on fire so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the enemy. The airmen knew the Japanese forces were very close, so they headed west through the mountains, guided by their dime store compasses.
Not knowing whom they could trust, the Raiders avoided contact with the locals, and all five men managed to survive on “one canteen of water, one ration, and a few candy bars” for three days. They made their way through the mountains but ran out of food and turned to the Chinese for help. They discovered that the Japanese had just moved out of their area the week before.
Chinese guerrilla soldiers took the airmen in, but they were unable to communicate with each other until a young man who spoke a little English asked them how he could help. Tung-Sheng Liu, a former university student from Beijing, was just traveling through the area, using the back roads to avoid the Japanese and had stopped overnight at a small hotel. He stayed with the airman and directed them away from areas where they would have been captured by the enemy.
The Crew of Plane #2 with Tung-Sheng Liu (in white coat) Courtesy of the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force via Wikimedia Commons
Tung-Sheng Liu and the Chinese guerillas led the five Raiders to Chuhsien, one hundred miles away. They traveled over trails through the mountains at night, covering ten to fifteen miles a day. Housing was arranged by the local guerrillas, and Chinese bearers carried the men in sedan chairs. After a week in Chuhsien, two buses arrived and took the airmen to Hengyang where they stayed for another week until an American C-47 landed and took them to Chungking and the American consulate. Tung-Sheng Liu immigrated to the U.S. and was named an honorary Doolittle Raider.
Davey Jones, pilot of Plane #5, discovered that one of his tanks was short by thirty gallons, but the hose had been turned off “and he could either have his plane pushed overboard or get in line and join the mission.” He joined the mission. Plane #5 crossed Tokyo Bay “and headed for their assignment on the far side of the city.” They encountered machine-gun fire and ack-ack. Hundreds of tracers followed their plane, so Davey Jones pulled up to 1200 feet, and they chose a new target—an oil storage facility and a power plant—and they were successful. Antiaircraft fire was intense, but they made it out of the city.
Using dead reckoning, Plane #5 arrived at the coast of China. Davey Jones determined they were close “to land because the color of the water changed.” He pulled the plane up to 5000 feet. They dropped a parachute flare and spotted a river and discovered they were over mountains. They had no choice but to bail out, which none of them had done before. Because of the bad weather and zero visibility, Gunner Joe Manske didn’t think he was falling. He thought he was just suspended. Davey was the last airman out the hatch and was blown against the fuselage. He hung on with his arms stretched out and then pulled the ripcord.
Davey Jones and his co-pilot, Hoss Wilder, ran into each other at a railroad station house, and the Chinese took them up to the town of Yushan in a railroad boxcar. Jones and Wilder were greeted by the mayor, thousands of people and huge banners that said, “Welcome brave heroes! You’ve struck a blow for us.” All five crewman made it out of China safely.
Plane 3, the Whiskey Pete, successfully launched from the deck of the USS Hornet during a squall but arrived over Tokyo on a clear, sunny day. The Whiskey Pete encountered strong anti-aircraft fire, forcing pilot Bob Gray and co-pilot Shorty Manch to pull up to 1450 feet. They passed over the Temple of Heaven, the residence of the Japanese emperor, but Commander Jimmy Doolittle had expressly forbidden the Raiders from attacking the emperor’s palace. Instead, bombardier Aden Jones dropped Pete’s bombs on the assigned steel, gas, and chemical plants nearby. Dozens of fighters and enemy warships fired at Pete, but she and her crew made a successfully getaway and headed to China.
The Whiskey Pete reached the coast of China as night was approaching and continued inland for one hour. Expecting their fuel to run out at any moment, the airmen dropped chute flares for illumination but didn’t detect any flat land. With no other choice available, the crew bailed out into the unknown. The navigator and bombardier left through the forward hatch.
Co-pilot Shorty Manch used his flashlight to check if gunner Leland Faktor had departed through the rear hatch. When he was satisfied, Shorty jumped. Unfortunately, his 24-foot parachute was too small for his weight, so when he pulled the D-ring, the impact of the chute’s opening jerked his bowie knife, ax, canteen, and all of his private arsenal away, except for a gun in his holster. The Baby Ruth bars he’d stuffed in his jacket flew off, leaving behind their empty wrappers.
Navigator Chuck Ozuk’s parachute tangled with a pine tree, causing Ozuk to be thrown against a ledge of rock, which cut his left leg wide open. He was unable to cut himself out of the lines or harness in the darkness. When daylight came, Ozuk gazed upon his surroundings in awe. All alone, high up in the mountains, with a beautiful sun above him, he almost thought he’d arrived in heaven. He freed himself, made a crutch from a tree limb, and headed west for two days without help.
Shorty Manch
Manch’s Chinese rescuer communicated with him by drawing with a stick in the dirt. First the Chinaman drew a Japanese flag, and Manch responded by holding his nose and waving the picture away. Then the man pulled out a clipping of an old British Blenheim plane and pointed at the insignia. Shorty shook his head again. Next, the Chinaman pulled out a four-year-old copy of the Saturday Evening Post with a picture of President Roosevelt on the cover.
Shorty grinned and pointed to Roosevelt and then to himself. Everybody present laughed and shook hands with the American. Manch slept in the man’s home that night and was escorted to another village the next morning. He spotted pieces of wreckage from Whiskey Pete along the way. “In the village, they showed him the American clothes they had found, some pieces of equipment from the navigator’s deck, and the body of twenty-one-year-old Leland Faktor.”
Faktor was the first Raider to die, but the cause of death was unclear because of conflicting reports from the eyewitnesses. Doolittle concluded that Faktor “landed on extremely rough terrain and was killed in the secondary fall.”
The Chinese whisked the remaining four members of the Whiskey Pete crew to safety, and the crewmen were reunited. A short time later, Pilot Bob Gray was assigned to fly transports over the Himalayas between India and China. Two days after he was promoted to the rank of captain, Gray’s plane crashed, and he and two other former Raiders were killed.
Co-pilot Shorty Manch was also assigned to the China-India-Burma Theater but was transferred Stateside in 1943. He served in the Korean War and later trained young officers to fly jets at Nellis AFB in Nevada. On one of his training missions, his T-33 burst into flames over Las Vegas. Manch ordered his students to bailout, while he guided the plane away from a residential neighborhood and an elementary school. By the time Manch ejected, his parachute couldn’t fully open, and he died when he hit the ground. He was 39.
Bombardier Aden Jones also served in the China-India-Burma Theater until 1943 and then was transferred Stateside. After the war, he served briefly in Japan and was discharged in 1948. He died at the age of 62. Navigator Chuck Ozuk was sent to North Africa in 1942 and was relieved from active duty in 1945. He died in 2010 at the age of 94.
Sources:
The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory by Craig Nelson (Viking, 2002)
