We must always give our best, and when we die we want to feel that our life has been lived as fully as we could have lived it.
—BILLY FARROW, UNDATED LETTER TO HIS MOTHER
SKI YORK’S BOMBER CLOSED in on Russia after an uneventful flight across the Sea of Japan in which the airmen saw only a single freighter; otherwise the two pilots and navigator feasted on a candy bar split three ways.
“What do you think we ought to tell these people when we land?” York asked. “Think we ought to tell them who we are and what we’ve done?”
“Let’s wait till we see if they already know,” Emmens suggested.
Shortly before 5 p.m. the cockpit windshield framed the distant coastline, where dark mountains climbed up out of the sea, putting an end to the day’s fears of running out of gas over the water. “Lord,” Emmens wrote, “what a welcome sight!”
Armed with poor maps, the airmen feared making landfall over Japanese-occupied Korea, just fifteen miles south of Vladivostok. Navigator Nolan Herndon studied the coastline and confirmed the bomber had reached Russia. The plane buzzed the rocky coastline, where the airmen felt relieved to spot no antiaircraft guns.
The bomber passed an airdrome with as many as forty navy planes parked on the tarmac, prompting the pilots to realize that the sooner the bomber was on the ground, the better. “You can’t fly around over the seaboard area of a country at war,” Emmens wrote, “without someone in that country eventually doing something about it.”
The bomber buzzed a second, smaller field, and the airmen spotted several buildings. A few men stood outside dressed in long black coats. A fighter dove out of the sky overhead just off the bomber’s right side.
“For Christ’s sake,” Emmens said, “let’s get our wheels down to let him know we’re going to land and he won’t have to shoot us down.”
The fighter hugged the bomber’s tail until touchdown. Relief washed over the crew, who had flown for more than fourteen hundred miles across hostile territory and open water. “Now, at last, dry, good ground,” Emmens wrote. “It was a wonderful feeling.”
York taxied over toward a parked plane, hidden under camouflage netting.
“Leave fifteen degrees of flaps down and let’s take a look at these jokers to see if they’ve got slant eyes,” York said. “If they have, we’ll take off straight ahead!”
The fliers studied the faces of the men on the ground, which confirmed that the bomber was in Russia and not in Japanese-controlled territory. York and Emmens pulled the flaps up, locked the brakes, and killed the switches, listening as the aircraft fell silent. A dozen Russians, all dressed in long black coats with black leather belts, gathered off the bomber’s wingtips. The fliers relaxed upon seeing the Russians all grinning.
“You guys stay in the ship and keep me covered—just in case!” York said as he climbed out.
“We’ve got you covered,” Emmens answered, pulling his pistol out and opening the side window. “By the way, do you know any Russian?”
“Hell, no.”
York approached the Russians. Emmens heard laughing and watched as the grins morphed into wide smiles. York looked back and shot his copilot a smile, which the fliers interpreted as a positive sign and climbed out to join him. York kept repeating the need for gasoline, which none of the Russians understood. Three older and obviously higher-ranking Russians approached from a nearby office, prompting the others to scatter. York asked the leader whether he spoke French, but got only a shrug. Emmens then asked whether he spoke German, only to receive a blank stare in return.
“Americansky,” the Russian asked.
The raiders confirmed and everyone laughed.
The Russians ushered the fliers to an unheated office in a rundown building, inviting them to sit in chairs while the leader barked into a phone. The men waited, deciding not to say anything about bombing Japan until the American consul arrived and could advise them. Half an hour later the Russians escorted them across the field to another equally decrepit building. The sun had set and the temperature dropped.
The Russians led the men into a large office with a desk at one end and a large conference table in the center. Another Russian arrived moments later with a world map that measured roughly four by five feet, tacking it to a wall. The leader pointed to the map. Reluctant to admit having bombed Japan, York pointed to the Aleutians, tracing a route across the Sea of Okhotsk to Vladivostok. “Good-will flight,” he said.
To the airmen’s relief the Russians appeared to buy it and for the next hour attempted to engage the fliers in small talk, even bringing in a portable gramophone at one point to play music, along with a chess set and decanter of water.
The door finally swung open, revealing a young officer dressed in a fur-lined cap and jacket. The raiders immediately recognized him as a pilot, who in all likelihood had just landed. He motioned for York to repeat the story of his flight.
“This guy’s no dummy,” he said as he rose from his chair.
York repeated the story of his flight from the Aleutians. The Russian officer listened intently and then shook his head and put his finger on Tokyo. York again traced the fictitious route, this time prompting the Russian to laugh. “Not sneeringly,” Emmens later wrote, “more as if he were enjoying a good joke.”
“I guess that guy wasn’t fooled,” York said when he finally sat down.
About 9 p.m. a colonel arrived, accompanied by a civilian translator. The Russian officer shook hands with each of the raiders and welcomed them to Russia. York stuck to his story of flying from the Aleutians, prompting the colonel to congratulate the men on the successful completion of such a long and difficult flight.
“Colonel, we would like to make our rendezvous with other ships in Chunking,” York said. “Do you have hundred-octane gasoline here?”
“Yes, such a question will be decided soon,” he answered through the interpreter. “But now you must be hungry and tired.”
The interpreter told the men that a room had been prepared in the building for them to spend the night. After each raider printed his full name and rank on a piece of paper, the interpreter escorted the fliers upstairs to a large room with five cots. The bathroom was down the hall, equipped with a bar of soap and a single towel. “It was like the Three Bears,” Emmens recalled. “There were five of us. They had five cots, five little tables between the cots, five chairs at the end of the bed, and that’s all.”
The interpreter returned for the airmen at 9:45 p.m., informing them that dinner was ready. He led the fliers downstairs to a large room set up with two tables, covered with wine and liquor glasses as well as platters of pickled fish, caviar, black bread, and various meats and cheeses. Servers poured clear liquid into each raider’s glass.
“A Russian always begins and ends his meal with vodka,” the colonel said through the interpreter. “I toast two great countries, the U.S. and the USSR, fighting side by side for a great common cause.”
The fliers downed the vodka, which Emmens noted by the third sip felt as though “someone had drawn a hot barbed wire across my tonsils.” The dinner was foreign to the airmen, but delicious after the long day.
Each time the fliers asked about fuel, the Russians brushed them off. York leaned over to Emmens toward the end of the meal. “I think we should tell this guy the true story,” he said. “I’ll get him and the interpreter and we’ll go upstairs.”
Emmens watched soon thereafter as York asked the interpreter whether he might speak alone with the colonel. The three left, returning fifteen minutes later.
“In behalf of my government, I congratulate you for the great service you have rendered your country,” the colonel announced. “You are heroes in the eyes of your people.” The colonel raised a glass of vodka to toast the raiders. “To your magnificent flight today and to the victorious ending of the war for both our great nations!”
The men returned to their room after dinner, bellies full and heads swimming with vodka. “When we went to bed that night,” York would later tell investigators, “we were fully confident we were going to leave the next morning.”
One of the men began snoring in two minutes. “I thought about home and my wife and wondered how I could let her know we were all right,” Emmens recalled. “I wondered how the other fifteen planes had fared. Had they all met as little opposition as we? Had they all proceeded to their destination, and were they all together somewhere in China, celebrating, that night? All but us? Had we actually bombed Japan that day and were we really in Russia? Or was all this a dream?”
PILOT DONALD SMITH HIT the Chinese coast twenty-five minutes earlier than he expected and barely ten miles north of his planned landfall. Fog and rain slashed visibility to zero with a ceiling of barely three hundred feet. The approach of nightfall only made his challenge worse. Smith spotted the outline of a mountain climbing up out of the sea dead ahead and banked right, increasing his throttles so that he could climb and head back out to sea. Smith estimated that he had two hundred gallons of fuel—enough to fly for another two hours—but he found that his engine gave him little power. The left started to cough. He knew the TNT would not remain in the air much longer.
“Brace yourselves,” Smith announced over the bomber’s interphone. “I’m going to set her down in the water!”
The airmen hustled to trade out parachutes for Mae West life vests, as Smith buzzed the coast of an island about four hundred yards from shore. He rolled back his side window, noting that the water appeared calm with no whitecaps. Engineer Ed Saylor in the rear of the plane slipped his winter coat on over his life vest, sat with his back against the turret tank, and wrapped his arms around the footrest. Bombardier Howard Sessler climbed atop the navigator’s table, bracing his feet against the steps leading into the cockpit while holding on with his arms to the bars overhead.
Smith planned to make a wheels-up landing. He cut back on the throttles and ordered the flaps down at 110 miles per hour, slowing to 85. As the plane skimmed the wave tops, copilot Griffith Williams killed the switches.
The bomber glided down tail first in the water, giving the crew only a slight jolt. A second later the nose came down with barely any more impact than the tail. The plane sliced through the swells like a ship, making a gradual swing to the right before it finally came to a stop. The landing smashed the fragile Plexiglas nose, and cold seawater now poured inside, flooding the cockpit up to the seat level, but the wings rested atop the waves, giving the crew precious minutes to escape.
Smith, Williams, and Sessler climbed out the top hatch. Smith went back to retrieve the life raft, then kicked out the glass in the navigator’s compartment, fishing out the crew’s gun belts and rations. Saylor tried to squeeze out the rear escape hatch, but realized he couldn’t fit with his thick jacket. He had no choice but to shed the cumbersome coat and then dive through the muddy water, swimming out from under the plane. Doctor Thomas White remained inside the sinking bomber despite calls from the others to escape. White tuned out such demands and instead hurriedly salvaged his gun and emergency medical kit, passing them out one of the side windows.
The plane settled rapidly in the water until the wings were awash and the tail began to climb skyward as the bomber prepared for its final dive. The inflated raft sloshed about the left wing inboard of the engine nacelle, as the airmen raced to load the rubber boat with guns, rations, parachutes, and extra clothing. A wave crashed against the plane and forced the raft against the sharp metal edge of the flap, tearing a small hole through which air now slowly leaked out. The flooded nose began to pull the bomber down, forcing the airmen at last to climb aboard the punctured raft and shove off. The men had barely cleared the port rudder when the bomber, its landing lights still ablaze, slipped beneath the dark waves, just eight minutes after touchdown.
The fliers paddled toward shore, bucking the wind and current, aiming for a break in the cliffs that White suspected might offer a beach. Two men rode atop the raft armed with oars, while the others clung to the sides, swimming and pushing. Sessler realized that the damaged raft couldn’t support all of them, so he struck out for shore on his own, hoping to lighten the load for the others. The men watched as he soon disappeared beyond voice range. “The sea was so rough you couldn’t swim very much,” recalled Saylor. “We were just being splashed under by the waves, and then brought back up on top by our life vests, spit out the salt water and look around and see where everybody else was and point toward the island again.”
As the air seeped out, the raft increasingly listed. The men hunted for the leak but could not find it in the darkness. A wave capsized the boat, tossing all the gear the men had worked to salvage into the dark waters, with the exception of a single bag of rations that Smith rescued. The men climbed aboard only to capsize again—and again. “Turned over three times,” White would later write in his diary. “The last time I was too tired to climb back on, so popped my life vest and swam, towing the raft.” The exhausted aviators finally stopped fighting the sea and drifted. “Current nearly swept us past the point but finally we made it,” White wrote in his diary. “Tried to save the raft but too tired—cold and dark and the raft was waterlogged, so I tied it to a rock.”
Sessler had beaten the others to shore, climbing up a rocky embankment about twenty feet above the surf. The TNT’s exhausted navigator lay down and passed out. The others emerged after a two-hour battle in the surf only to face an eighty-foot ascent up a steep rock wall, collapsing at the top. “There was a cold rain falling and a keen wind blowing which cut through our wet clothing like a knife,” White wrote. “We tried huddling together in a small depression to get a little rest and mutual warmth, but soon found that it wasn’t enough of a windbreak.” The men needed to find real shelter, but did not know who controlled the island. A quick tally of the gear proved disheartening. “We had one waterlogged flashlight which gave a weak glow,” White wrote, “and our total armament consisted of a sheath-knife Sgt. Saylor had on and my pocketknife!”
The airmen spotted a dim light across a valley and set off, reaching a fisherman’s hut with mud walls and a thatched roof. The fliers banged on the door, shouting the Chinese phrase Jurika had taught them. No one answered. “We decided to curl up in the goatpen which was dirty, but dry and protected,” White later wrote. “It looked like the Ritz to us!” The airmen had just bedded down when the fisherman came out of his house, armed with a lantern. He ushered the aviators inside, building a fire with straw on the floor. White noted there was no chimney and that the smoke filtered through the thatched roof. The fisherman roused his wife and mother, who fired up a small stove and prepared tea and dinner. “We warmed our chilled bodies,” White wrote. “Soon we had some hot tea and rice and some dried shrimp to eat. Then I became the object of envy of the whole crew since I could eat with chop-sticks while they had to use their fingers.”
The tea and food revived the exhausted aviators, who tried to communicate as a stream of villagers crowded inside the room. “For most of these people it was the first time they had ever seen a white man and their curiosity knew no bounds,” White recalled. “We weren’t too sure of the political affiliations of our friends, but their hospitality could not be doubted.” The airmen drew pictures of flags in the dirt, but made little progress communicating their nationality. White switched gears, holding up four fingers then pointing to the other airmen. The doctor then held up a fifth finger, indicating a lone man. The villagers understood and locals soon departed to search for Sessler. One of the villagers then produced an almanac that had four English words across the top of each page along with the Chinese and Japanese equivalent. Leafing through the book White communicated that the airmen were Americans. “We told them that we had just come from bombing Tokyo, at which news their joy knew no bounds,” he later wrote. “They literally gave us the clothes off their backs to wear while ours dried.”
The villagers explained that the airmen had landed on Tan Do San, the only island in the area not in Japanese control. There were two nearby lighthouses, one still in Chinese control. White explained that the aviators needed to reach Free China and then head to Chungking. The villagers said a motor launch could be arranged the following evening. The warmth of the hut coupled with the long day soon took its toll. The host ushered the other villagers from the hut and pointed the Americans to the family bed that consisted of a primitive raised platform covered with a single quilt. “No springs, no mattress, no pillow. We lay down two each way and in spite of the hardness of the bed were soon asleep,” White later wrote. “The last thing I remember that night was ‘Grif’ saying sleepily that he was going to come back after the war and make his fortune selling the Chinese innerspring mattresses!”
THE WEATHER WAS SO BAD as the sixteenth bomber roared over the Chinese coastline that copilot Bobby Hite spotted waterspouts, reminding him of the dust whirlwinds he knew back home in Texas.
Navigator George Barr worked frantically, trying to pinpoint the Bat out of Hell’s precise location, while the pilots scanned the airwaves, hoping for the promised homing beacon, which never came. “The weather was bad and foggy,” Barr recalled. “Visibility was zero. It was raining hard, we couldn’t see the ground.”
The bomber reached the area around Chuchow and circled. Barr suggested the men fly west for fifteen minutes then turn south, a course he felt certain would deliver them safely to Chinese territory, but pilot Billy Farrow objected. The South Carolina native wanted to save the plane and chose instead to fly farther west, hoping for a break in the weather that would allow him to make a forced landing, even though such a course would take them closer to Nanchang, an area occupied by the Japanese.
The bomber flew west as the gasoline ran low. The men spotted a break in the clouds—and lights on the ground below—just as the low-fuel light glowed.
“We’re out of gas,” Farrow announced. “We’ll have to jump.”
“Are we in Free China or in occupied China?” bombardier Jacob DeShazer asked.
“I don’t know,” Farrow replied.
But Barr did. The constellation of lights that twinkled far below only confirmed Barr’s navigation—and his worst fears. “That’s Nanchang.”
It was too late for the men to divert; the Bat out of Hell was out of gas. The airmen would have to jump and hope to avoid capture.
Gunner Harold Spatz would bail out of the rear, while the bombardier, navigator, and two pilots would go out the forward escape hatch.
“Jake, you’re first,” Hite announced.
DeShazer, who had reluctantly volunteered for the mission, now found himself first in line to bail out over Japanese-held territory. “Boy,” DeShazer thought, “I’d like to see somebody else go.”
The bombardier followed orders, sitting down and dangling his feet out the hatch. The wind hit his legs and blew them back against the fuselage. DeShazer pushed himself out the hatch and then counted to ten, yanking his rip cord. The chute unfurled and he drifted down, crashing into a dirt mound with enough force that he fractured several ribs. He surveyed the scene and realized that he had landed on a grave in a cemetery. Despite his injuries DeShazer felt so relieved to have survived the jump that he hugged the grave. He fired his pistol in the air several times, hoping to signal the others, but heard no response. DeShazer then whipped out his knife and sliced up his silk parachute, fashioning a cover for his head to protect against the rain.
“I’ll go towards the west,” the bombardier thought. “If I ever can figure out which way is west.”
DeShazer trudged through the muddy rice paddies until he stumbled across a small brick enclosure that housed a shrine, complete with irons used for burning incense. Cold, wet, and exhausted, DeShazer pushed aside the irons and crawled inside, sheltered from the wind and rain. He closed his eyes and soon passed out.
George Barr stuffed cigarettes and candy bars in his coveralls and then pulled on his flight hat and jumped. “As soon as I went through the hatch the hat blew away,” he recalled. “It’s funny but my first thoughts were about losing that hat.”
The Bat out of Hell’s navigator landed in a rice paddy, sinking up to his waist in water. He jolted his back and scraped his ankle, but otherwise was fine. Barr saw the flames in the distance from the bomber’s crash; the last plane off the Hornet was down. He shed his chute and climbed out of the rice paddy, wandering around through a maze of connected fields. He hiked on until he came across a small bamboo bridge that had been dug out for fortification. He had no option but to wander through it. Just as he passed through, a sentry shoved a rifle in his back. “My heart stood still,” he recalled. “Was he Japanese or Chinese? Was he going to shoot me in the back or what?”
The guard prodded Barr to proceed to a nearby dugout in the embankment, where he roused several other soldiers. The guards searched Barr, then bound him, his hands in front of him, elbows behind his back. The men marched him down the road toward Nanchang, about a mile or two away. “I was still hoping they were Chinese just doing their duty but when we got to the town I was brought into a room where there were about 10 or 15 Japanese officers in full military dress, sitting around a table overloaded with a variety of wines, whiskies, cigarettes and delicacies,” Barr recalled. “They were delighted with their captive. I was a rare prize.”
Bobby Hite’s gun belt had two .45s, one with a loaded clip and the other without. The Bat out of Hell’s copilot could not fit the belt on under his parachute, so he hung on to it with his left hand and jumped, tugging the rip cord seconds later. The jerk yanked the gun belt out of his left hand. Hite instinctively shot his right hand out and managed to grab the .45 by the grip, his finger even sliding through the trigger area. The only problem—he saved the gun without a clip.
Hite drifted down into a rice paddy, sinking, like others, waist deep in the water, mud, and slime. The Texan pulled himself out, shed his parachute, and climbed atop a dike. He could hear the tinkling of running water. “I was standing there and I was thinking of a little song that I had heard as a boy, 10,000 miles away from home and sitting in the rain,” he recalled. “It was kind of a lonely, eerie feeling.” Hite pressed on, wandering along the dikes until he found a cemetery. Unsure of where to go in the dark, he lay down on the leeward side of the graves, hoping to keep out of the rain.
DeShazer awoke around daybreak and set off west, passing several villagers, none of whom paid him much attention. He felt his spirits rise; maybe he was not in Japanese-occupied territory. His feeling of good fortune was soon replaced by the shock at the poverty he saw in the villages he passed. “I could see inside their mud houses,” DeShazer recalled. “Chickens, pigs, and children were wading around together in filthy mud inside the house. The people had heads about the size of a four-year-old child in America. The skin on their faces was wrinkled and old looking.”
DeShazer tried several times to question the villagers he passed but without any luck. He continued down the road until he spotted a camp with soldiers outside, rinsing uniforms in a ditch. Unable to tell whether the troops were Chinese or Japanese, he backtracked until he came across a house riddled with bullet holes. He spotted a couple of young men in uniform, who DeShazer estimated couldn’t be older than fifteen, playing with children in a yard. He decided to approach.
“China?” the bombardier asked. “Japan?”
“China,” one of the young men replied.
“America,” DeShazer answered.
One of the young soldiers disappeared, which spooked DeShazer. He started to leave, but the other motioned for him to stay. “China,” he repeated. “China.”
DeShazer offered him a cigarette, hoping to gain some information, but he soon realized it was futile. Just then ten more soldiers arrived, armed with rifles and bayonets. DeShazer raised his pistol and cocked the hammer. “China?” he asked. “Japan?”
“China,” several of the soldiers assured him.
The soldiers made a show of shaking hands and patting DeShazer on the back before motioning for him to follow them. The men set off down the road toward the camp DeShazer had seen earlier. The bombardier felt nervous.
“We think you better let us have your gun,” one of the soldiers said.
DeShazer stopped and turned around. The soldiers fanned out around him with rifles drawn. His spirits sank. “Their guns were all pointed right at me,” he recalled. “There wasn’t anything I could do. I let him take my gun.”
The soldiers ushered him down the road to the camp, offering him yokan, mashed beans with sugar. DeShazer hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours.
“How did you get here?” one of the soldiers pressed.
DeShazer refused to answer, repeating his earlier questions to his captors. “Are you Chinese or Japanese?”
“Chinese,” the soldiers insisted.
The bombardier spotted photos of high-ranking officers on the walls, asking the interpreter who the men were, hoping it might confirm whether the forces were Japanese. The solider rattled off the names, which meant nothing to DeShazer.
“You’re in the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army,” the interpreter announced.
DeShazer felt terrible.
“Aren’t you afraid?” the interpreter asked.
“What should I be afraid of?”
Roosters rallied Bobby Hite in the cemetery shortly before daybreak. The copilot of the Bat out of Hell had suffered a miserable night, trying to duck the rain while occasionally running in place to keep warm. He set off to find a friendly local. Barking dogs drove him away from the first few houses he encountered. Hite pressed on until he found a home without a dog. The family invited him inside. “I had a pocketful of Lucky Strike cigarettes and Mounds candy bars and about $5 in silver,” Hite recalled. “I was prepared to offer anything that I had for help.”
As the family feasted on his candy and the wife chain-smoked his cigarettes, Hite repeated the phrase that Jurika had taught them. The husband then slipped on a shawl, a large hat, and wooden shoes before motioning for Hite to follow him. The aviator followed his host for twenty minutes through the rice paddies until he found a Chinese soldier. To Hite’s relief, the soldier spoke English. Hite paid the farmer his silver and watched as he set off to return home. He told the Chinese solider that he was an American and had come to help Chiang Kai-shek.
“Well,” the solider told him, “let’s get something to eat.”
The men started toward a cluster of homes just as fifteen Japanese soldiers charged out and surrounded him with bayoneted rifles. The soldiers searched Hite and confiscated his .45 and then with bayonets motioned him into the back of 1938 Ford truck, which galled him, and drove him half a mile to Nanchang.
Private First Class Tatsuo Kumano, who served in Japan’s Eighteenth Army in China, worked in the military’s press bureau in Nanchang. Kumano had turned in the night of April 18, only to have a fellow soldier later shake him awake, instructing him to report to the Nanchang Military Police Headquarters. The graduate of Saint Francis Xavier College in Shanghai, who spoke English, arrived to find Harold Spatz seated in a room barely eight feet by six feet with an intelligence officer. Kumano was instructed to sit and serve as the interpreter. The intelligence officer asked Spatz his name and rank and then pressed him for details of the mission, but the gunner rattled off a bogus story of flying off a mysterious island in the Pacific. Spatz chatted with the interpreter alone, telling him of his growing up in Kansas. Kumano told him of studying English.
Kumano’s work had only begun. Over the course of that night and the following morning, Japanese soldiers had rounded up all five of the airmen from the Bat out of Hell, each one now marched through the interrogation room.
After Spatz, officers brought in navigator George Barr, who refused to cooperate. “I am not saying anything.”
Then came Hite, but he, too, declined to talk.
So did DeShazer.
Billy Farrow came last, giving only his name and rank. “I am under oath,” he said, “not to reveal any military secrets.”