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.
U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Anthony Nelson
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.
Courtesy of National Museum of the US Air Force
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.
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!
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.
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.