There have been thousands and thousands of sorties in all these wars and what’s different about ours is only that we knew when we took off that we weren’t going to make it.
—DAVY JONES, PILOT OF PLANE NO. 5
DOOLITTLE SETTLED IN FOR the long flight to China, trailed by fourteen other bombers—all but that of York, who had diverted to Russia. The pilots had executed the attacks and returned to sea, vanishing over the same horizon where the B-25s had first appeared, a move designed to confuse the Japanese as to the mission’s true terminus. Once at sea the pilots turned south and paralleled the Japanese coast, buzzing the corner of Kyushu before banking west along the twenty-ninth parallel to cross the East China Sea.
Despite the Nitto Maru’s advance warning, the raid had so far proven a success. The Japanese failed to shoot down a single raider. Richard Joyce’s bomber was the only one of sixteen hit by antiaircraft fire, and his dogged aircrew managed to fend off more fighters than did the rest of the mission combined. All except one of the crews had bombed targets. That so many of the planes got lost en route to the targets helped spread the assault across an even wider front than Doolittle had initially planned, making it harder for Japanese forces to anticipate where to intercept the attackers.
That alone did not excuse Japan’s weak defense. Antiaircraft guns had roared and fighters had peppered the skies, but the flak proved wildly inaccurate and the pilots either blind or timid. Doolittle and his men had flown right underneath many of them, while those pilots who spotted the bombers often refused to engage or did not press home the attacks. “The sky was just purple with anti-aircraft but their aim was awful,” one flier later told the New York Times. “Had our plane been brought down, it would have been because we flew into the fire, not that they hit us.”
Others agreed.
“The most opposition we had was from a group of Japanese kids playing on a beach,” another later quipped. “We passed over them at about twenty feet and they threw stones at us.” Even the veteran aviator Doolittle, in his more sober analysis, confessed his shock at the weak defense entrusted with guarding such an important target as Tokyo. “I was amazed at the small number of enemy fighters,” he later said. “We were opposed by only about one-tenth of the fighter opposition we had anticipated.”
The raid not only exposed Tojo’s poor decision not to employ a more rigorous domestic defense but also the complacency that had developed in the wake of months of lightning successes. “The over-all picture is one of inadequate defense,” noted one American report. “The warning system did not appear to function; interception by fighters was definitely cautious; and anti-aircraft fire, responding slowly, did not reach the intensity one would expect for so important a city as Tokyo.”
On board the bombers that flew on toward China, euphoria over having survived such a perilous mission seized some of the men. “As we paralleled the south coast of Japan, we had lunch and relaxed. It had all seemed a little unreal to me and I don’t think any of us really realized that we had just made our first real bombing run,” Carl Wildner recalled. “It had almost been like a training mission. It was a beautiful day in Japan and I felt like a tourist wanting to land and see the sights on the ground.” A similar scene played out on board Billy Farrow’s bomber. “We sang songs and kidded each other a lot about what daring young men we were,” Robert Hite and Jacob DeShazer later wrote, “because, actually, the bombing wasn’t anything at all.”
Tensions remained high for others.
“Wow!” Dean Davenport exclaimed as the Ruptured Duck rounded the southern coast of Kyushu for the push to China. “What a headache I’ve got.”
Others experienced a similar release, including mission doctor Thomas White. “About this time I sat down and had a good case of the shakes,” he remembered, “a reaction to all the excitement and suspense.”
But the excitement was far from over.
The Hari Kari-er buzzed a Japanese picket boat as the bomber headed out over the East China Sea. Gunner William Birch opened fire with the machine guns, spraying the patrol. “Just as Birch cut loose,” Reddy wrote in his diary, “our right engine began to cough & sputter, throwing flames clear out the front of the nacelle.” Greening and Reddy both hit the mixture control at the same time, which regulated the ratio of fuel and air. “It soon stopped but none too soon to suit any of us,” Reddy wrote. “I’m sure that they would have had no mercy on us if we had gone down there.”
The crew of the Whirling Dervish looked down three hours out of Tokyo and spotted two Japanese cruisers and a battleship. One of the cruisers opened fire, first with antiaircraft guns, then with the main battery. “One of the shells landed so near it sprayed water all over our plane,” gunner Eldred Scott recalled. “There I was, firing back with a .50 caliber machine gun. Might as well have had a cap pistol.”
With the added gas cans and fuel tanks empty, the airmen could smoke cigarettes, which helped ease the tension. Saylor uncapped his bottle of snakebite whiskey and took a long pull, the only time in his career he ever drank on duty. He had earned it—and he wasn’t alone. Lawson, McClure, and Thatcher toasted the mission in the cockpit of the Ruptured Duck.
As the minutes ticked past and the adrenaline wore off, attention turned to the question of fuel: would the bombers have enough to reach China? “Up until now, we had been flying for Uncle Sam, but now we were flying for ourselves,” pilot Edgar McElroy wrote. “We had not had time to think much about our gasoline supply, but the math did not look good. We just didn’t have enough fuel to make it!”
That reality now hit home for many. “My feelings of exhilaration soon evaporated and I once again felt the same stomach knot as when we left the Hornet,” added Jack Sims, Hilger’s copilot. “The odds of reaching the Chinese coast were considerably against us and we didn’t think we were going to survive with hundreds of miles to go over hostile territory, land and sea.”
Airmen furiously computed the distance and fuel consumption, then ran the numbers again, hoping against all odds. “By stretching our calculations to the utmost, we knew our gasoline would run out some 250 miles short of the Chinese mainland,” bombardier Robert Bourgeois wrote. “It seemed certain that we were headed for the end. All we could do was just fly on and hope for a miracle.”
Even Doolittle, the amazing airman who time and again had pushed himself and his aircraft to the limit, faced the same fate as his men when navigator Hank Potter informed him that he expected the bomber to run out of gas 135 miles short of China. “I saw sharks basking in the water below and didn’t think ditching among them would be very appealing,” Doolittle recalled. “Fortunately, the Lord was with us.”
“We’ve got a tail wind,” Potter suddenly announced.
The headwind the bombers had long battled now turned into a twenty-five-mile-per-hour tailwind that pushed the planes toward China, lifting the spirits of the exhausted aircrews. “For the first time since morning we knew that we had a chance of seeing the night out,” Jack Hilger confided in his diary. “We were all pleased and proud of the success of our bombing but now we were like a bunch of kids for we knew we had a chance to live long enough to tell about it.”
As the bombers closed in on China late in the afternoon, the weather began to deteriorate. The beautiful skies turned overcast as fog settled in and raindrops pelted the cockpit windshields. Visibility declined further as night approached. The low fuel light glowed on most instrument panels, rekindling earlier worries. “Chances of reaching land were almost nil,” Sims recalled. “It felt like walking the last mile.”
Doolittle feared he might not make it. “See that the raft is ready,” he ordered bombardier Fred Braemer. “We’re going to keep going until we’re dry.”
Copilot Dick Cole studied the water below. The change in color from blue to brown indicated the presence of mud and sediment, the discharge of a river. The cockpit windshield now framed a sliver of land in the distance.
“There it is,” Paul Leonard yelled. “Damned if I don’t feel like Columbus.”
The charts showed mountains as high as five thousand feet, but Doolittle didn’t trust the maps. Crossing the Chinese coast, he pulled back on the yoke, climbing up to eight thousand feet. He went on instruments and looked down at the occasional twinkle of dim lights far below, unaware that the same tailwind that had rescued him and his men from a watery grave had stymied the desperate efforts to ready the airfields. Doolittle tried to raise Chuchow on 4495 kilocycles, but got no answer. The airfield was nestled precariously in a valley twelve miles long and just two wide. “Without a ground radio station to home in on, there was no way we could find it,” Doolittle wrote. “All we could do was fly a dead-reckoning course in the direction of Chuchow, abandon ship in midair, and hope that we came down in Chinese-held territory.”
“We’ll have to bail out,” Doolittle announced to his crew, ordering Leonard to go first, followed by Braemer, Potter, and then Cole. Doolittle would jump last. “Got it?”
“Got it, Colonel,” Leonard replied.
Doolittle addressed his navigator. “When we get as close as you think we are going to get to the airfield, we will leave the airplane.”
Potter folded up the navigator’s seat and table and yanked open the hatch as Doolittle switched on the bomber’s autopilot.
The time to jump arrived.
“Get going,” Doolittle ordered.
Leonard and Braemer left the plane within seconds of each other at 9:10 p.m., followed two minutes later by Potter.
“Be seeing you in a few minutes, Dick,” Doolittle said to Cole, helping to free his copilot’s parachute from the seat and then patting him on the shoulder.
Cole hovered over the hatch, staring down at the dark void. “I was one scared turkey,” he recalled. “Being in an airplane that was about to run out of fuel and looking down at the black hole that would exit you into a foreign land, in the dark of night, in the middle of bad weather was not exactly what one envisioned when enlisting.”
Cole vanished out the hatch, leaving Doolittle alone in the bomber. He had flown for thirteen hours and traveled 2,250 miles. The legendary pilot had accomplished the impossible: he had bombed the Japanese capital for the first time in that nation’s history. Doolittle thought he had enough fuel for maybe another half hour, but he couldn’t be certain. The decision was made; it was time to go.
He shut off the gas valves and dropped through the forward hatch.
The night swallowed him.
Doolittle’s jump marked the third time he had been forced to bail out of an airplane to save his life. He drifted down through the darkness worried about his ankles, which he had broken fifteen years earlier in Chile. He feared he might snap them again if he landed too hard. Doolittle hit the ground and bent his knees to cushion the blow, only to find that he had landed in a rice paddy filled with night soil, fertilizer made from human waste. He climbed out of the paddy and unhooked his parachute.
Doolittle spotted a light emanating from what appeared to be a small farmhouse. He hiked over and banged on the door, repeating the phrase that Jurika had taught him. “I heard movement inside, then the sound of a bolt sliding into place,” he later wrote. “The light went out and there was dead silence.”
Cold, wet, and filthy, Doolittle wandered on, finding a small warehouse. He went inside and discovered an elongated box perched atop two sawhorses. Peeking inside the box, he discovered a dead Chinese man. He set off again and soon came upon a water mill that offered him shelter from the rain. He spent most of the night performing light calisthenics to keep warm.
Other members of his crew endured similar experiences. Cole yanked his parachute’s rip cord so hard that he hit himself in the face and gave himself a black eye. “First you hear the roar of the airplane and then it’s just like that; it’s quiet,” he recalled. “I tried using my flashlight, but it was like being in fog, and it just reflected back. You couldn’t see anything. I thought I would be able to see the ground, but I couldn’t do it.” Cole drifted down, his chute snagging atop a pine tree. He managed to untangle it and fashioned a hammock to spend the night, grateful he had made it down safely. “I was in all one ‘scared piece,’” Cole wrote, “and I do mean scared.”
Leonard landed on the side of a hill near the top. He rolled up in his parachute and slept until morning. Potter likewise landed on a mountainside and sprained his ankle. He slipped off his parachute and spotted a path in the dark. He started down the mountain until he realized it was futile to walk out at night. The navigator stretched out under a tree, pulling his goggles over his eyes to block the rain. Braemer did the same. “Couldn’t see,” the bombardier wrote in his report. “Crawled about 20 ft. down hill, got no place, went uphill 20 ft. past chute, got no place. Came back to chute, cut some from shroud lines. Rolled up in it, put arm around bamboo tree and went to sleep.”
DEAN HALLMARK ROARED JUST fifty feet above the waves, afraid to fly any higher and risk battling a fierce headwind. The weather had started to deteriorate about a hundred miles from the Chinese coast. He pressed on even as a heavy fog soon slashed visibility to zero. The pilot of the Green Hornet planned to make landfall around Hangchow Bay, a move that would allow him to follow the river south toward Chuchow. He had long since disabled the nagging low-fuel light, hoping that he had a least a few more miles worth of gas. He asked navigator Chase Nielsen how much longer to the coast.
“Three minutes,” Nielsen answered.
Hallmark spotted the coastline through the dark and pulled back on the controls, intending to fly as far inland as possible before the crew bailed out. Bill Dieter remained in the nose, resisting Hallmark’s suggestion to climb out. “No,” the bombardier insisted. “I’d better stay down here because then if I see a building or a tree sticking up or something maybe I can warn you soon enough so you don’t run into it.”
The bomber bore down on the coast just as the left engine cut out. Seconds later the right coughed—then quit.
The Green Hornet fell silent.
“Prepare for crashing landing,” Hallmark yelled.
Nielsen didn’t even have time to buckle his safety belt. “Well,” he thought as the plane plunged. “I won’t have to use this parachute.”
The left wing struck the water first, snapping off. The fuselage then hit and the bomber’s belly split wide open, like a gutted fish. Nielsen heard Dieter scream and saw water rush up over the nose. “All went black momentarily,” the navigator recalled. “When I came to, I was standing in water up to my waist and was bleeding from gashes on my head and arms. My nose hurt and I knew it was broken. The two pilots were gone and so was Dieter from the nose section. Not only was Dean Hallmark gone but so was his seat, which had catapulted right through the windshield.”
Nielsen grabbed the crash ax and smashed out the top window of the navigator’s compartment. He climbed atop the fuselage along with copilot Bob Meder. Hallmark struggled to free himself from his cockpit chair and then joined them. “The gunner was crawling out of the back, and he was bleeding all down his face. He had a big hole in his forehead,” Nielsen recalled of Donald Fitzmaurice. “The bombardier finally came up under the wing, and he was in an awful mess. I don’t think he was using either arm.”
Meder yanked the release to inflate the life raft, but the cable broke off the air cartridge. The aviators scrambled to tie themselves together as waves battered the filleted fuselage, tossing them into the water. Hallmark ordered the men to stay together and swim to shore. The rain poured down and the waves churned. The fliers yelled out in the darkness, hoping to locate one another, but the voices soon fell silent and the men drifted. “I thought about my family,” Nielsen recalled. “I began to worry about whether my navigation had been accurate. Were we only a few miles off the coast of China or a couple hundred? I prayed that I was right but was overcome by doubt.”
Nielsen wasn’t sure where to swim. He fired his .45 automatic to alert the others, but the ammunition was water logged. He unbuckled his gun belt and let it drop. He had studied the tidal timetables on board the Hornet and assumed the seas would eventually deposit him on shore. “I figured there was no use in trying to swim because you don’t know which way you’re swimming. You can’t see the coast. You can’t see anything. And if you swim you might just be swimming toward the open ocean,” he said. “So I floated for awhile, and floated, and finally I ran into some fishing nets that had been hung on some bamboo poles about eight inches in diameter.”
Exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, but Nielsen knew the nets signaled he was close to shore. He thought about waiting for the fishermen to come and retrieve him, but realized the owner of the nets might be Japanese. Nielsen swam on until he heard the sound of breakers. He put his feet down and touched the bottom. Making his way to shore, he discovered his legs wouldn’t work, so he crawled, but the waves would break over him and pull him back toward the water. He refused to give up. “I crawled until I figured I was past the tide line and then I collapsed completely,” he wrote. “I was fagged out. Everything, my mind and body, was numb. All I wanted was sleep.”
THE RUPTURED DUCK CLOSED in on the Chinese coast, skimming just fifty feet above the wave tops. The heavy fog and rain clouded the windshield and forced pilot Ted Lawson to roll back his side window to see out.
“I think we ought to go a little farther south,” navigator Charles McClure said as the bomber cruised past one of the many islands that guarded the coastline. “It must be all occupied along here. I can’t tell much about anything, with this visibility.”
The plane pressed on south as McClure’s frustration mounted. “I don’t think we’ll ever find anything this way.”
Lawson felt he had no choice but to pull up and go on instruments, a move that would allow the crew to bail out. He eased back on the controls and the Ruptured Duck began to climb even as Lawson continued to wrestle with his decision to abandon the bomber. This was not how he had hoped to conclude what had so far been a flawless mission. A break appeared in the clouds, offering the aircrew a glimpse of long white sandy beach below. Lawson estimated that the Ruptured Duck still had about a hundred gallons of fuel. If he could land the bomber on the beach, the crew could wait out bad weather, lift off at dawn, and find the airfield.
Lawson nosed the plane down and twice buzzed the concave beach. He saw no logs that might chew up the bomber, and the rain appeared to have pounded the sand down hard enough to support the Ruptured Duck’s delicate nosewheel. “It was by all means,” he wrote, “the best thing I had seen for twelve hours or more.”
The crew rushed to trade parachutes for life jackets as Lawson lowered the flaps and wheels and aimed up for the beach, whose crescent shape meant the bomber had to come in over the water and then bank to land. He was approaching at 110 miles per hour when both engines coughed, then died, just a quarter mile from shore. Lawson hit the throttles and pulled back on the stick, desperate to keep the nose up.
Just as McClure reached up to grab the aircrew’s pistols, the wheels struck the wave tops, and he heard the horrible sound of metal ripping. “We’re crashing,” the navigator thought with disbelief.
The Ruptured Duck dove, then flipped upside down. The impact threw the bombardier Bob Clever headfirst through the nose of the plane and catapulted Lawson and copilot Dean Davenport out of the cockpit, still strapped in their seats. McClure crashed with his shoulder into the armor plate before he, too, landed in the water.
Lawson came to moments later, still strapped in his seat about fifteen feet underwater, the roar of the engines replaced with total silence. He thought of his wife, Ellen, wishing he had left her money. He remembered his mother as well. “I’m dead,” he thought. “No, I’m just hurt. Hurt bad.”
Lawson unbuckled his safety belt. The crash had broken the dioxide capsule that triggered the pneumatic life belt, so he shot to the surface, the quiet replaced by darkness and driving rain. Lawson felt numb and disoriented, but he knew enough to unfasten his parachute and wade toward shore, the waves lifting him up. He banged into a solid object. He looked down only to realize it was one of the Ruptured Duck’s wings. The crash had torn the engine off. Lawson stared at the tangled wires and cables and felt nauseous as the gravity of the crash hit him. A wave pushed him forward, and he turned to spot the tail rudders rising out of the waves, an image that reminded him of tombstones.
He tried to crawl up on the beach, but the waves kept pulling him back out to sea. Finally a wave pushed him up on shore. Lawson rose and walked in a circle, his legs numb. He cursed himself over the crash only to realize that his voice sounded strange and muffled. Lawson reached up to feel his mouth. “The bottom lip had been cut through and torn down to the cleft of my chin, so that the skin flapped over and down,” he later said. “My upper teeth were bent in. I reached into my mouth with both of my thumbs and put my thumbs behind the teeth and tried to push them out straight again. They bent out straight, then broke off in my hands. I did the same with the bottom teeth and they broke off too, bringing with them pieces of my lower gum.”
Lawson stared down at his handful of teeth and gums before dropping them and trudged up the beach. Davenport appeared in front of him. He grabbed Lawson’s head and examined it.
“Good God!” Davenport exclaimed. “You’re really bashed open. Your whole face is pushed in.”
Lawson asked his copilot whether he, too, was hurt badly.
“I think so,” Davenport said. “I don’t know.”
McClure came to underwater, estimating he was at least ten feet down. “I must go up,” he thought. “But where the hell is up?”
The navigator felt his feet touch the sand, and he kicked toward the surface and immediately popped through the waves in the chest-deep water. He started toward shore. “I reached out with one hand to help the wading with a paddle strike. To my astonishment I couldn’t get the hand above the water. I looked at the hand and arm. Then I decided to reach the other hand over toward the upper arm on the opposite side. That was a no go either,” he recalled. “Gradually I realized that both were broken.”
McClure found Clever in the shallow surf. The bombardier was woozy. “Help me in,” he pleaded with McClure.
“Can’t,” McClure answered. “I think both my arms are broken.”
“You wouldn’t kid me, would you?”
McClure said he wouldn’t.
“Come on, you son of a bitch,” Clever shot back. “Come help me!”
The two airmen shouted at one another in the surf. “He called me fighting names and I gave some back,” McClure wrote. “Then we looked at each other disgustedly and dragged ourselves out of the water to collapse on the beach.”
Dave Thatcher came to his senses in back of the Ruptured Duck. He had hit his head on impact, leaving a small gash on top of his head, one he felt would have been far worse had he not remembered to slip on his flight helmet right before the crash. Water rushed in through the gun turret, which in his disoriented state Thatcher thought was the rear escape hatch. He pulled the string on his life vest then tried to climb through the turret. Only then did he realize the bomber was upside down. He pushed out the escape hatch and climbed up on the belly of the bomber, making his way toward the smashed nose. Thatcher heard McClure call to him from the beach. The gunner stepped off the fuselage and into the waist-deep water, wading toward shore.
After he joined the others, two men appeared atop a nearby embankment. The gunner unholstered his pistol and aimed. “Should I shoot ’em?”
“Hell, no,” McClure answered. “They’re Chinese fishermen.”
“How do you know?”
“Well,” he said. “I’ve read the National Geographic magazine.”
The fishermen climbed down the embankment and approached, dressed in conical hats and straw raincoats. A half dozen others appeared and followed them down. “Chinga,” one of the locals said, pointing to his chest.
The aircrew repeated the phrase Jurika had taught them, and the fishermen nodded. One of the villagers then made a show of counting the airmen. He then pointed to the plane, questioning whether there were any more.
The fishermen helped carry the battered airmen to a nearby hut, a feat that amazed McClure. “Under other circumstances, the man appointed to carry me off the beach would have been the basis for a joke,” the navigator later wrote. “He was a little bit of a squirt, hardly more than four feet tall and weighing not more than 100 pounds, wringing wet. But he backed up manfully and tried to take my arms over his shoulders—my weight was about 205. My pained expression stopped him, and I tried with such sign language as I had to tell him what was wrong. Then he backed up again with his back bent and I mounted piggyback with my hands resting on his shoulders. Somehow he made it to a house that must have been 200 yards away.”
Inside the two-room hut made of mud bricks and with a thatched roof, the fishermen helped Lawson, Davenport, and McClure to bed. Clever passed out on the floor. Thatcher set to work tending his wounded crew by the faint light of a single lamp. The prognosis was bad. Davenport had cut his right leg so bad between the knee and ankle that within a day he would not be able to walk. McClure’s injured shoulders had already begun to swell down to his elbows, making it difficult for him to use his hands. Within days his right arm would turn black. Clever sprained his hips and back so that he was unable to stand up and walk, forcing him to crawl on his hands and knees. Cuts above one eye and below the other caused his eyes to swell shut while his headfirst exit through the bomber’s nose had nearly scalped him. “The top of his head,” Thatcher wrote in his report, “was so badly skinned that half his hair was gone.”
Lawson was the most seriously injured. He had suffered a long deep gash just above his left knee, causing a serious loss of blood. The wound looked so bad that the airmen were convinced his kneecap had been severed. Lawson suffered another short but deep cut between the left knee and ankle through which Thatcher could see the bone. His foot below the ankle was so bruised it would turn black within days, and he suffered another deep gash on his left arm. His face looked as if someone had slashed it with a razor, and by Thatcher’s count he had lost up to nine teeth. “If he’d only had one of these injuries it wouldn’t have been so bad, but with the four serious ones he lost so much blood it made him very weak,” Thatcher wrote. “I was afraid he would die or that gangrene would start in his leg before we reached a hospital.”
Thatcher used the bandage in the first aid packet on his gun belt for the large wound on Lawson’s knee. He then improvised, applying his handkerchief to the cut on Lawson’s arm. He had no choice but resort to dirty rags the fishermen gave him for Lawson’s other wounds as well as those of Davenport and Clever. Thatcher knew he needed more supplies. Later that night with the injured men settled, he took a lantern and returned to the plane, hoping to find the first aid kit stored in the Ruptured Duck’s tail. He reached the beach, only to discover that the tide had come in and submerged the bomber. There was no hope of finding the kit that evening. Thatcher would have to care for the others as best he could in what would prove to be a long night.
The shock of the crash wore off as the hours marched past. “My shoulder pains got worse. I couldn’t lie down and I couldn’t stand. There was no position that I could bear very long,” McClure said. “Thatcher, at my request, would lift my head carefully and leave it up a little while; then he would lower my head and let me rest my hands on my knees. Every movement was excruciating pain.”
The navigator thought he would feel better without his clothes. He ordered Thatcher to cut away his coat and shirt, but Thatcher was afraid to ruin them. McClure lashed out at the young gunner, who finally agreed to split the sleeve and cut across the lapels, allowing him to peel his coat off. Shock soon seized McClure. “I felt that my body was going to leap without my will from the bed. It is no exaggeration to say that I expected to go crazy,” he wrote. “After a little of this I passed out.”
McClure woke at one point in the night to hear Davenport pleading with one of the locals. “Hospital—soon,” he begged. “Get coolies—carry.”
Lawson likewise wrestled with his injuries. With the help of the fishermen, he removed his ripped-up pants, anxious to inspect his wounds. “I had no idea that there would be anything wrong with my left leg except a bruise,” Lawson wrote. “It was cut from my upper thigh to my knee, and cut so deeply that it lay open widely enough so that I looked into it and saw the gristle and muscle and bone. It wasn’t bleeding badly—just oozing. My circulation probably had slowed down because of the shock and the cold. I just stared at it, hypnotized and detached. I had never seen anything like it.”
The door suddenly sprang open and another fisherman appeared. The airmen watched the excited whispers among the Chinese. Through sign language the fishermen made clear to Thatcher that Japanese patrols now searched the island for a downed plane. His only hope was to abandon the four injured aviators and escape. Thatcher looked at the others: Lawson, Davenport, McClure, and Clever, immobile and in pain.
“No,” Thatcher made clear with a headshake.
Lawson looked up at one point to see a Chinese man dressed in heavy shoes, Western-style pants, and a shirt open at the collar enter the hut. The new arrival inspected each of the injured airmen, paying careful attention to uniform buttons and insignia. Lawson wondered whether he planned to sell them to the Japanese.
“Me—Charlie,” the stranger finally announced.
Lawson and the others felt stunned to encounter an English-speaking local, pelting him with questions.
“Me—Charlie,” the man repeated.
Davenport repeated the phrase Jurika had taught them.
“Melican,” Charlie said with a nod.
Through a mixture of pidgin English and sign language the airmen learned that the nearest hospital was several days away; Chungking, even farther. “Many day,” Charlie informed them. “Many.”
The men struggled to communicate as the night waned and dawn approached. Charlie finally left, promising to return soon to help. Lawson ordered Thatcher to return again to the plane to attempt to recover the first aid kit and morphine.
“Yes, sir,” the gunner said.
Thatcher arrived at the beach to find that the tide had washed much of the bomber’s wreckage up on the shore, though the engines remained in the water. The gunner picked through the debris, finding only a few scattered packs of waterlogged cigarettes. He saw no sign of the first aid kit. “The nose was just a mangled mass clear back to the bomb bay,” he later wrote in his report. “It was only by the hand of God that any of us got out of there alive, let alone all of us.”