Just four months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, eighty U.S. Airmen, known as the Doolittle Raiders, pulled off a daring attack on Japan. Caught by surprise, the Japanese were unprepared for enemy bombers to strike their homeland, especially in broad daylight. Greater than the damage inflicted, the raid had a psychological impact on the Japanese and their leaders. The military pulled troops and equipment back from the war zones to protect Japan. The raid boosted the morale of the Allies and instilled hope that the enemy was not invincible.
Doolittle Painting from the Official Site of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders. Used by Permission.
After the Doolittle Raiders bombed Japan, fifteen of the sixteen crews flew to China and either crash landed or bailed out of their planes. By way of a centuries-old communication system, news of the bombing in Japan spread quickly across the Chinese countryside.
The Japanese had brutally occupied parts of China for many years, and the Chinese rejoiced over the news that their enemy’s homeland had finally been attacked. When the “giant” Americans floated down or crashed into their world, the Chinese eagerly escorted the Raiders away from the occupying Japanese forces and to safety far from the coast.
Doolittle Raiders Bombing Japan. Used by Permission.
The Japanese quickly figured out the areas where the Raiders had landed and sought to capture them. Although most of the crews were spirited away to safety, the survivors from two crews were caught and imprisoned. Their stories can be found here and here.
Because the Chinese aided in the escape of most of the Raiders, the Japanese retaliated with a vengeance. The first order of business was to capture and occupy for one month the areas in China from which air raids could be launched against the Japanese homeland. Japanese Emperor Hirohito ordered his army in China to totally destroy military installations, air fields, and important lines of communication in these places. But the Japanese did so much more. They spent three months wreaking havoc in the Chekiang and Kiangsi Provinces where the Raiders had landed.
The Chinese Escorting Doolittle Raiders to Safety Courtesy of the Official Site of the Doolittle Tokyo Raiders
Japanese soldiers forced four thousand Chinese to dig eight-foot wide, three-foot-deep trenches on the runways of the airfields that were the most threat to Japan. This forced the U.S. to cancel planned follow-ups to the Doolittle Raid. One hundred thousand Japanese troops “attacked every town with a link to Doolittle’s crew.” The Raiders had given gifts and trinkets to those who helped them, but the Japanese used this evidence to single out the helpers for the harshest torture before killing them. One farmer who had helped a Raider was wrapped in a kerosene-soaked blanket and his wife was forced to set him on fire. In addition, the Japanese soldiers—
Drowned children
Beheaded women and babies
Looted and burned towns and villages
Raped any woman between the ages of 10 and 65
Bayoneted or burned to death many orphans and the aged
Wrecked electrical plants and pulled up railroad lines
Slew thousands of pigs, oxen, and other farm animals
Set crops on fire
Destroyed bridges and roads
Shot anyone or anything that moved
Threw dead bodies into wells, contaminating village drinking water
Chalked “Christ is defeated” on the wall of one torched church
Conducted over 600 bombing runs
Destroyed everything in their path
Spread destruction over some twenty thousand square miles
Slaughtered at least 250,000 Chinese
Eventually the Japanese soldiers spread their vengeance much farther inland, stopping only a few days’ march from Chunking, the capital of free China.
Many years before, the Japanese had built a three-square mile complex in Manchuria to develop bacteriological warfare. They conducted their experiments on humans they had taken prisoner, including Americans. This clandestine outfit was secretly known as “Unit 731” and employed 3000 scientists, doctors, and technicians. Before the arrival of the Doolittle Raiders, the Japanese had already “turned loose its specially bred fleas and rats to spread bubonic plague among the people of Changde and Ningbo in central China” (Nelson) and had dropped anthrax-bacillus bombs on the town of Anta.
Building from the Unit 731 complex which now houses the Unit 731 Museum By 松岡明芳 Courtesy of Creative Commons from Wikimedia Commons
In retaliation for the Doolittle Raid, the Japanese “sprayed cholera, typhoid, plague, and dysentery across southeastern China” in June and July of 1942 (Nelson). During one operation, the wind changed at the last minute and seventeen hundred Japanese soldiers contracted and died from disease, and ten thousand more were injured.
It was later learned that the Japanese had planned to spray the Allied forces in the Philippines with a 1000 kilograms of bubonic-plague-infected fleas, but the Allies surrendered first. The Japanese had also planned to attack the U.S. soldiers at Saipan with their “full arsenal of bacteriological weaponry,” but the U.S. won the battle quickly and thwarted the Japanese.
At the end of the war, the United States captured Unit 731 and continued the research into biological warfare. The Japanese unit chiefs shared “their research findings in exchange for release from prosecution” (Nelson). The U.S. Army built millions of bombs which contained several deadly toxins, but in 1972, “seventy-one nations jointly agreed to outlaw biological warfare, and President Richard Nixon ordered the weapons destroyed” (Nelson).
Japan also launched attacks on the U.S. mainland in retaliation for the Doolittle Raid.
Sources:
The First Heroes: The Extraordinary Story of the Doolittle Raid—America’s First World War II Victory by Craig Nelson (Viking, 2002)
Target Tokyo: Doolittle and the Raid That Avenged Pearl Harbor by James M. Scott (W. W. Norton & Co., 2015)
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)
