When we hit the ground we could just as well have been some place in Arizona for all we knew of the whereabouts.
—FRED BRAEMER, BOMBARDIER ON PLANE NO. 1
DOOLITTLE HAD SUFFERED a long night in the mill, performing calisthenics to fight off the cold while wrestling with the uncertainty of the mission’s outcome and the fates of his seventy-nine men. The fifteen bombers that had flown to China had all reached the mainland or the islands off shore. There amid the blinding fog and rain—and faced with the glow of the low-fuel light—aircrews had wrestled with the same dilemma as their commander. Outside of Ted Lawson and Donald Smith, only pilot Travis Hoover had attempted to land, putting his bomber down on a mud flat that had fileted the fuselage, but miraculously left not a single scratch on any of the fliers. The crew then torched the plane, watching it burn from a trench atop a nearby mountain.
The rest of the aircrews had done just as Doolittle, climbing high above the mountains in preparation to abandon ship. Men had slipped on parachutes and stuffed their pockets with emergency rations, Baby Ruth candy bars, and cigarettes. Others had filled canteens with water, and a few of the navigators sketched out rudimentary maps to pass around. Shorty Manch seized a 40-40 Winchester rifle, two .45 automatics, a .22 automatic, and a German Luger along with an ax and a bowie knife. Last, but not least, he grabbed his phonograph. The men then yanked out the hatches. “It was the blackest hole I’ve ever looked at in my life,” recalled Davy Jones, who urinated on the cockpit controls before he bailed out. “I hated to do that more than anything else.”
Eight of the bombers had gone down in the general vicinity of the eastern airfields, while five others had crashed along the coast near Hangchow. Two had flown deep into the Chinese interior. Not a single plane—with the exception of York’s—had survived the mission. The forced bailout sadly claimed the life of gunner Leland Faktor, whose remains local villagers would find the next morning alongside the wreckage of the bomber. The jump and subsequent hard landings injured several others, including pilot Harold Watson, who broke his right arm after tangling it in his parachute shroud line. Navigator Charles Ozuk smashed into a cliff face, gouging his left shin, while gunner Edwin Bain hit so hard he broke a tooth and cracked another. Shorty Manch realized when he landed that all he had left of his phonograph was the handle.
Other airmen had come down in precarious positions, including gunner Eldred Scott, who landed in a tree. The darkness prompted most of them to forgo the risk of hiking out of the mountains and to curl up instead under parachutes and wait until dawn. Snakebite whiskey and cigarettes helped fend off the weather and fear; the latter may even have saved bombardier Waldo Bither’s life. “I lit a cigarette and remained very quiet,” he wrote in his report, “listening for a signal from some of the crew.” Not hearing any, Bither finished his cigarette and flicked it away, watching the glowing butt plummet into space. “I immediately decided not to try to move until daylight. I wrapped up in my parachute and in spite of rain and cold I was able to sleep very well.”
The aircrews that would awake on mountainsides, in valleys, or along the sandy beaches were spread across more than four hundred miles and several provinces, an area peppered with Japanese forces that within hours would be on alert for downed American aviators, some of whom had already been captured. The scattered crews now faced the challenge of reaching Chuchow and ultimately Chungking as dawn revealed just how primitive the region was, an impression best captured by Jack Hilger in his diary: “I had landed in the China of a thousand years ago.” The subways, buses, and cars that the men were accustomed to back home were here replaced by little more than footpaths, burrows, and sedan chairs. Though the airmen had been warned on board the Hornet, few really grasped just what to expect. “I had the idea that I would reach this road and then walk to a gas station where I could use a phone to call for help,” navigator Hank Potter recalled. “None of us had ever been out of the U.S. or even away from home, for that matter. As far as I was concerned, the rest of the world was like the United States.”
Far from it.
Doolittle set off at daybreak on April 19, hiking down a worn path toward a village. The rain had stopped, but gray clouds crowded the skies. Before long, Doolittle encountered a local farmer who he quickly discovered spoke no English. The veteran aviator improvised, using his notepad to sketch a picture of a train. The farmer nodded and set off with Doolittle in tow, delivering the marooned airman to a nearby military garrison. Doolittle was relieved to meet a major who spoke a little English, though his relief proved short-lived when the Chinese officer demanded he hand over his pistol. Doolittle refused. He explained that he was an American who had parachuted into a rice paddy the night before. The major appeared doubtful, no doubt sizing up the filthy airman still caked in dried night soil. Doolittle worried he might be shot.
“I’ll lead you to where my parachute is,” he finally offered.
The major agreed.
Accompanied by a dozen armed soldiers, Doolittle retraced his steps. He reached the rice paddy, only to discover his parachute was gone. Doolittle felt the tensions rise as the major glared at him. He explained that the farmer he visited the night before could corroborate that he had appeared at his door, but to Doolittle’s shock, the farmer, his wife and even his two children denied ever having seen him.
“They say they heard no noise during the night,” the major told him. “They say they heard no plane. They say they saw no parachute. They say you lie.”
The Chinese officer had had enough. The soldiers approached Doolittle to seize his gun, just as two others emerged from a search of the farmer’s house, holding up his parachute. “The major smiled and extended his hand in friendship,” Doolittle recalled, “and I was thus admitted officially to China.”
Copilot Dick Cole rolled up his parachute at daybreak and with his pocket compass set out west. After a few hours he picked up a trail and followed it until he ran into a Nationalist soldier, who led him to a small compound where Cole noted the Chinese flag fluttered. “He showed me a picture that somebody had drawn with a two-tailed airplane with five parachutes coming out,” he recalled. “I pointed to the next to the last one and that was me.” Chinese soldiers escorted Cole to the military garrison at Tien Mu Shen, where he was reunited with the artist of the sketch—Doolittle.
Hank Potter wandered down a mountain path at dawn until he reached a small village, where the locals welcomed him. One of the village elders sketched out Chinese characters on a sheet of paper that Potter couldn’t read, but the villagers were able to help the navigator pinpoint his location on a map. He looked up a few minutes later to spot bombardier Fred Braemer trotting down the same path. “When I saw him, I must say that my spirits rose,” Potter recalled, “because at least I had a friendly face.”
Potter’s novelty immediately vanished. The presence of two foreign airmen rattled the locals. One grabbed Braemer from behind and yanked his pistol from his shoulder holster as well as his knife. Others disarmed Potter.
“Let’s get out of here,” Braemer announced.
The airmen hurried out of town with five of the locals following them, armed with handguns, knives, and a rifle.
“Well,” Potter thought, “we are in trouble here.”
Half a mile outside the village the locals robbed them again, stripping the airmen of cash and watches. Potter lost both his navigational watch and a Hamilton wristwatch his parents had given him as a Christmas gift in 1940.
The disheartened airmen set off west again, running into a young boy who had been schooled by local missionaries. “Me China boy,” the youth announced, motioning for Potter and Braemer to follow him.
The aviators followed the youth to a house, where local adults soon crowded inside, offering the men tea and eggs. Both felt reluctant to eat, remembering the many warnings on board the Hornet.
“Well,” Braemer finally said, “hot tea can’t hurt you.”
A local guerrilla chief arrived, and the airmen told him that some of the locals had robbed them. The guns, knives, and even Potter’s navigation watch soon reappeared, but the airman decided to press his luck.
“Hey,” he said, “how about my other watch?”
The navigator realized the impoverished locals probably questioned why he needed two watches, but Potter insisted, after all it was a treasured gift.
“We go,” one of the guerrillas finally said.
Paul Leonard had meanwhile set off at daybreak, hiking up a valley in search of his fellow fliers. The crew chief walked an estimated six miles before he turned back, running into four armed men. “One motioned to me to raise my hands while the other three proceeded to cock rifles,” he recalled. “One took aim.”
Leonard pulled out his .45 just as the other man fired. The airman fired two shots then turned and charged up a hill. He could see the men and others gathering below. Leonard decided to remain hidden and escape after dark.
About an hour and a half later, he saw a crowd march down through the valley. To Leonard’s surprise Potter and Braemer led the pack. He reloaded his clip and charged down the hill, only to discover the others were in the hands of friendly guerrillas.
“I didn’t know whether you were amongst the friends or enemies,” he said. “But I wasn’t going to stay up there alone again. I was going to join you.”
The airmen continued the trek, up a hillside, when a villager suddenly appeared next to Potter and handed him his Hamilton watch. The exhausted fliers arrived at the military headquarters that afternoon to find Cole and Doolittle.
The locals had meanwhile found Doolittle’s crashed bomber, which had gone down about seventy miles north of Chuchow. He and Leonard set off that afternoon to investigate the wreckage, hoping to salvage any gear or supplies. “There is no worse sight to an aviator than to see his plane smashed to bits,” Doolittle later wrote. “Ours was spread out over several acres of mountaintop.”
Doolittle combed through the debris, but locals had already picked the bomber’s carcass clean, even plucking the brass buttons off one of his shirts. He dropped down next to one of the wings and surveyed the scene. The B-25 that had carried him and his crew in the skies over Japan had been reduced to little more than tangled metal, twisted cables, and shattered glass. He felt certain the other fifteen bombers had suffered similar fates, all low on gas and battling rain and fog. Doolittle would be lucky if the others had even survived. “This was my first combat mission. I had planned it from the beginning and led it. I was sure it was my last. As far as I was concerned, it was a failure,” Doolittle later wrote. “I had never felt lower in my life.”
Leonard recognized the depth of Doolittle’s despair, writing in his diary that the veteran aviator was “disconsolate.”
“What do you think will happen when you go home, Colonel?” the crew chief dared to ask.
“Well,” Doolittle answered, “I guess they’ll court-martial me and send me to prison at Fort Leavenworth.”
“No, sir,” Leonard fired back. “I’ll tell you what will happen. They’re going to make you a general.”
Doolittle offered a weak smile, recognizing Leonard’s efforts to buoy his spirits.
“And,” the crew chief continued, “they’re going to give you the Congressional Medal of Honor.”
Doolittle did not respond.
“Colonel, I know they’re going to give you another airplane and when they do, I’d like to fly with you as your crew chief.”
Doolittle felt tears in his eyes. “It was the supreme compliment that a mechanic could give a pilot,” he wrote. “It meant he was so sure of the skills of the pilot that he would fly anywhere with him under any circumstances.”
The men started to return, but darkness enveloped them. The Chinese major found a farmhouse where the men could sleep on the floor. The accommodation looked perfect to the exhausted aviators, who within minutes were asleep. Doolittle awoke later to hear strange guttural sounds. He reached out to feel bristles; he had managed to bed down in the spot of the family pig. He shoved the pig away and fell asleep again.
Doolittle arrived back at the governor’s house the morning of April 20 to learn that four other aircrews had been located. He requested that General Ho Yang Ling, director of western Chekiang Province, post lookouts along the coast, from Hang Chow Bay south to Wen Chow Bay. He also wanted all sampans and junks ordered to search for any bombers that went down at sea or along the shore.
Word reached Doolittle that at least some of his airmen had been captured along the coast and others near Lake Poyang, the latter Billy Farrow’s crew. Doolittle had obtained $2,000 in Chinese money prior to leaving the United States and questioned whether that cash could be used to buy the captured airmen along the coast from the local puppet government. He also asked about seizing Farrow’s crew by force, a move the Chinese discouraged, given the high concentration of Japanese forces around Nanchang. Doolittle then drafted a wire to be sent to General Arnold through the embassy in Chungking. “Tokyo successfully bombed,” he wrote. “Due bad weather on China Coast believe all airplanes wrecked. Five crews found safe in China so far.”
The general hosted a banquet for Doolittle and his men, one that featured a large bowl of soup with a dead duck floating in it.
“Now you guys, don’t make any remarks. Eat what you have and don’t cause any problems,” Doolittle warned his men. “You are guests here now.”
The airmen needed to travel from Tien Mu Shen south to Chuchow as soon as possible, where they could hop a flight to Chungking. They climbed aboard the general’s boat, hiding in the cabin as the vessel set off on a winding journey along several rivers that ultimately would deliver them beyond the reach of the Japanese. The aviators peered out as the searchlights of enemy patrol boats pierced the darkness.
Missionary John Birch had fled his church in Hangchow after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when the Japanese rounded up all the Americans in the area and put them into internment camps. The twenty-three-year-old Baptist, born to missionary parents in India and later raised in rural Georgia, had settled in Kiangsi Province, starting a new mission in Shang-jao. Birch had heard the news of the Tokyo raid over the radio just as he planned to set off on a preaching trip through the Ch’ien T’ang River valley. He stopped a few days later in the village of Yien Tung Kuan for lunch at a restaurant overlooking the river. A Chinese officer came inside and spotted the missionary, striking up a conversation in the hope of practicing his English. The officer commented that there were several Americans on the general’s boat tied up below. Birch protested that he must be mistaken, prompting the officer to point out the policeman in a black uniform standing guard on deck. Birch decided he had to check it out for himself.
“Have you any Americans on this boat?” the missionary demanded of the guard.
“No,” the policeman answered in Chinese.
“Are there any Americans in there?” Birch repeated, this time shouting.
Doolittle and his men crouched inside the cabin, listening to the exchange. “Well, Jesus Christ,” Paul Leonard blurted out.
“That’s an awfully good name,” Birch answered. “But I am not he.”
The door sprang open, and Birch spotted several bearded faces inside. “Come in here!” came the chorus.
Birch climbed inside the cabin and came face-to-face with Doolittle and his men. The aviators were thrilled to meet Birch, whose language skills and knowledge of the area would be assets. Doolittle briefed the young missionary on the operation and asked whether he would travel with them and help interpret. “Of course, I was glad to,” Birch later said. “The first time I’d associated with celebrities.”
Birch traveled with Doolittle to Lanchi, relating stories of the Japanese atrocities. The missionary confessed to Doolittle that he wanted to help American forces. Doolittle bade farewell to Birch, assuring him that he would recommend him up the ladder and asking him to remain ready to help other raiders. Doolittle and his crew then pressed on toward Chuchow, a journey that would involve rail, bus, and rickshaws.
The trip across rural China at times proved so exhausting that Doolittle at one point protested to his guide that he couldn’t go any farther.
“I will see if I can find a donkey for you to ride,” the Chinese officer volunteered. “You just wait here.”
The officer returned half an hour later from a nearby village. “Here,” he told Doolittle. “You can ride this donkey.”
Doolittle felt relieved, circling the donkey to inspect the animal. As he passed the animal’s backside, the donkey kicked him in the chest. The veteran aviator tumbled back down the trail, clutching his chest and gasping for air.
The Chinese officer volunteered a few added words of caution.
“He bites too!”
CHASE NIELSEN AWOKE ABOUT 8 a.m. on April 19 on the beach where he had collapsed after the Green Hornet had crashed into the sea the night before. On looking up, he spotted two vultures perched on a rock overhead.
“Good lord,” he thought. “The Jap high command is here already.”
The sun was high, and only a few clouds drifted across an otherwise clear sky, a drastic change from the fog and rain that the aircrew had recently battled. The crew would have had no trouble finding Chuchow in this weather. “Why,” Nielsen wondered, “couldn’t it have been this way yesterday?”
The navigator surveyed his surroundings. He had collapsed the night before on the beach of a small bay. In the distance he spotted docks with a couple of patrol boats tied up. He could see the Rising Sun flags flying off the stern.
“Boy, this is a fine pickle,” he thought. “Here you are 6,500 miles from home, your aircraft carrier is gone, your airplane is sunk, you don’t know where your crew is, you’re in enemy territory and you don’t speak Japanese or Chinese.”
The news worsened.
Down the beach Nielsen spotted two washed-up bodies, both in orange Mae West life vests. He knew the remains had to be men from his crew. He pulled himself up and started toward them, crawling through the bushes that lined the beach. Nielsen parted some bushes and found himself staring at a pair of split-toed canvas-and-rubber shoes. His eyes drifted up to see laced leggings. “The next thing I saw was a rifle pointing right at my head that looked like the bore of a cannon,” he recalled. “It was that big around.”
“Stand up or me shoot!” the man ordered.
Nielsen considered his options. “I might be able to overcome him,” he reasoned, “but all he would have to do would be to squeeze the trigger.” Nielsen decided not to risk it and instead got to his feet.
“You Japanese or you American?” the man continued.
“You Chinese or you Japanese?” Nielsen countered.
“Me China.”
“Me American.”
On his feet Nielsen had a better view of the bodies. He recognized them, bombardier Bill Dieter and gunner Don Fitzmaurice.
The Chinese man noticed Nielsen’s gaze.
“They dead,” he said. “Bury them in hour. You go with me.”
The roar of boat motor interrupted the men, who looked up in time to spot a patrol boat charging around the bend.
“Japanese come,” the guerrilla said. “You run this way. If Japanese catch us they kill us.”
The men set off on a trail through the brush, ducking into a bamboo thicket with a view of the Japanese base, where the boats soon docked. Nielsen asked him where he had learned English, and the guerrilla said he had picked it up as a cabbie in Shanghai.
Nielsen reached the garrison, where he found more than two dozen guerrillas, a ragtag operation. “It was a welcome sight but as a military garrison a far cry from anything I had even seen before,” he recalled. “Facilities were meager but the stench from human waste and rotten fish was outstanding.”
Nielsen was pleased to find Dean Hallmark there. The pilot’s leg was severely banged up from his exit through the Green Hornet’s cockpit windshield. He struggled to walk. Copilot Bob Meder arrived soon afterward.
The men returned to the beach that afternoon to bury Dieter and Fitzmaurice atop a small knoll near where the men washed ashore. The Chinese had fashioned simple wooden caskets, and the aviators laid the two men inside them dressed in their uniforms and packed in wood shavings. The waves crashed in the distance.
“Hallmark, Meder and myself each said a prayer over our beloved friends’ caskets and that was all the services consisted of,” Nielsen would later write to Dieter’s mother. “As then, I have many times since, with tears running down my face, regretted the fact that we could not linger longer and see a better service given, but the Japs were scattered all through that area and delay meant our capture.”
Two of the five airmen were dead.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” the interpreter urged. “Japs come pretty soon. You hurry. Get away.”
The airmen covered the graves and returned to the garrison.
Nielsen and the others felt anxious to escape, but each time the aviators addressed the garrison commander, he stalled them. “Soon,” he promised. “Soon.”
“We felt we had to rely on the Chinese, but the longer we stayed the more certain we became that the Japs would catch up with us,” Nielsen later wrote. “We agreed we’d probably be executed if they caught us, but deep in our hearts we did not believe it. I never gave up hope and I don’t think the others did, either.”
Then another.
By late in the morning of April 21—three days after the crash—Nielsen knew the men had waited too long. A commotion erupted at the front gate.
“Japanese come,” a winded Chinese man announced to Nielsen and the other aviators. “Japanese come.”
The airmen slipped up toward the front gate, spotting what Nielsen estimated to be several hundred Japanese soldiers armed with rifles, bayonets, and hand grenades. “We talked briefly about making a run for it, but we decided we’d be shot down at once,” he recalled. “It was better to take a chance of the Chinese hiding us.”
The men ran back to their quarters, but the effort proved futile. “The Chinese led the Jap captain to us,” Nielsen later wrote. “I can’t blame those Chinese too much. They were out-numbered and out-gunned.”
The captain, who Nielsen noted had a moon-shaped face and a tiny mustache, spoke through an interpreter. “You now Japanese prisoner,” the enemy officer announced. “You no worry. We treat you fine.”
The men would soon learn otherwise.
DAVID THATCHER RETURNED TO the hut around daybreak, soaking wet and clutching nothing but a carton of waterlogged cigarettes and a life belt. “I got to the plane,” the Ruptured Duck’s gunner announced. “But this is all I could find.”
The injured aviators now stirred. It had been a long night, and without morphine the pain throbbed; copilot Dean Davenport could no longer even walk. Charlie returned soon thereafter with an entourage of local Chinese men, who loitered outside the hut in the rain. Lawson noticed that some of the men carried ten-foot bamboo poles, while others hauled ropes and latticework squares. The men set to work, fashioning litters that consisted of a rope seat that dangled from a pole carried on the shoulders of the local laborers. Thatcher paid the fisherman ten dollars for four blankets, and the group set off just as the weather started to clear. McClure sized up his new transportation. “It was no comfortable sedan chair; it was a primeval makeshift,” he later wrote. “We had gone in a few hours from man’s most speedy transportation to his slowest.”
The travel proved arduous as the barefoot Chinese labored under the weight of the injured airmen, particularly the 205-pound McClure. “They slipped in the mud frequently and every slip jolted my torn shoulders,” the navigator later wrote. “We were all disgusted. We kept hollering at each other. Why didn’t we have autos or a plane, or a carriage? Why hadn’t we been fed, and why hadn’t a doctor come? For one, I was too sore to reason about the facts as they were.” The overgrown path soon gave way to rice paddies and then verdant hills. The guerrillas slogged on, one step at a time as the minutes soon turned into hours. “As we rose to still higher ground, the men climbed mossy rocks as if they were steps,” Lawson recalled. “Their toes gripped the rocks like fingers. I hung on as I swung between them like a butchered hog.”
They stopped at a large house in a meadow with grazing cattle. A motley band of guerrillas loitered outside, armed with a mix of guns from all over the world, each decorated with bright colored tassels. Lawson wondered how these impoverished fighters could resist the temptation to sell the injured Americans to the Japanese. “One of the toughest-looking men in the bunch now got up and advanced on me as I lay there, too exhausted from the trip over the hill to care what he would do to me,” he recalled. “He reached down quickly toward my mouth and when he pulled his hand away I felt a lighted cigarette between that part of my lips which still met. I tried to smile back at him, but I felt more like crying. Maybe from relief. Maybe shock. I don’t know. Anyway, I closed my eyes now and I thought that wherever I was I was among good men—men who were fighting for about the same thing I was fighting for.”
The injured men were sipping boiled water when one of the guerrillas charged up the path, warning that the Japanese were advancing. The guerrillas picked up the airmen and set off, this time at a trot escorted by half a dozen armed guards. The group passed through a village and then boarded a flat-bottomed boat, which McClure estimated was twelve feet long and five feet wide. A single man propelled the boat with a pole down a canal. “It was hard not to moan incessantly now, even though the warm sun felt good,” Lawson recalled. “We passed slowly down the canal for a couple of hours, the only sound being the thump of the pole against the back of the boat and the occasional jumble of conversation from the guerrillas. Sometimes the canal became so narrow that we could have reached out and touched the sides. Sometimes the limbs of overgrowing trees made the silent boatman bend low. I just lay there, hurting, and wondering what lay at the end of this ride and how I’d ever be able to walk when the ride did end.”
The group disembarked later that afternoon, and the guerrillas carried the injured aviators through rice paddies. McClure spotted others perched on higher ground, serving as scouts. The men reached a ridge, overlooking a bay where a Chinese junk sailed toward the beach. Only then did Lawson realize the men had crashed on an island. As the guerrillas carried the men toward the junk, a Japanese gunboat charged around the promontory, prompting them to drop the injured aviators in a ditch. The men peered over the embankment at the gunboat. “With sick, mingled fears I watched it come up briskly to the side of the junk. I could hear the Japanese questioning the men on the junk,” Lawson recalled. “It was torture to lie there in the ditch, waiting. Physical and mental torture. The Japanese must have spotted us, I reasoned. They must be wild to catch us, for certainly they had been informed of the raid and our route to China. They surely had found the plane by now. They would make one of the men on the junk tell.”
Moments later, to Lawson’s surprise, the gunboat backed up and charged off. The guerrillas waited until the boat vanished, then darted across the beach, sloshing through the shallow surf to the waiting junk. Lawson and the others tumbled over the side, coming to rest in a mix of sawdust and bilge water. The guerrillas climbed in after them. Chinese sailors rolled down the lattice blinds over the side as the boat set off around 6 p.m. The pain and the spring heat—coupled with weak winds—made the voyage unbearable. “We moved along like a snail,” Lawson recalled. “We groaned and began begging for water. Any water. When it seemed as if there wasn’t another breath of air to gulp in that darkening hole, it began to rain. The guerrillas understood about the water, then. They picked up bowls they found on the junk and set them out in the rain. They’d reach them in to us and we’d gulp the cool rain water and hand them back for more.”
As he had done the night before, Thatcher moved among the injured fliers, helping make each as comfortable as possible. The dried blood that caked Bob Clever’s scalped head blinded the bombardier, but Thatcher felt reluctant to wash his wounds and risk exposing him to infection. Clever’s headfirst exit through the bomber’s nose had so jarred his back that he could not sit up. “Only after getting tired of laying in one position for awhile would he ask me to help him move into a different position,” Thatcher later wrote. “For instance if he was laying on his back he would want me to help him move over on one side. His being able to sleep and get some rest helped a lot.” McClure, whose right arm had begun to turn black, suffered the opposite. “With this injury of his shoulders he was unable to lay down; had to be sitting up all the time,” Thatcher wrote. “He could not get any sleep either.”
Lawson likewise continued to battle his injuries. His left thigh and ankle oozed blood and grew increasingly numb. “He tried to sleep but it was almost impossible,” Thatcher observed. “He was in such intense pain all the time.”
Exhaustion finally overtook him.
“Don’t let them cut my leg off,” Lawson mumbled.
Davenport shook him awake. “You were having a nightmare.”
Lawson made Davenport promise that if he passed out he would not let any doctor cut his leg off.
The junk reached a guerrilla hideout about midnight, scraping against a dock as the boat came to rest. A couple of the guerrillas hopped off the boat, pointing at their mouths to communicate the intent to collect food. Thatcher followed them up to a house, retrieving a bowl of noodles topped with egg slices. “I was pretty darned hungry,” he wrote, “but couldn’t eat very much of the stuff.” The guerrillas gave him a bowl for each of the others, as well as spoons, sparing the injured aviators the use of chopsticks. To wash it down the men provided a jug of rice wine. McClure refused to eat, but Lawson managed to gum down a few egg slices. Much as he wanted the wine to numb his pain, the battered aviator couldn’t drink it. “It was like raw, uncut alcohol,” he recalled. “It burned my busted mouth and torn gums like lye.”
The junk set out again after only about twenty minutes, sailing on into what McClure would later describe as “the blackest night” he had ever known. Thatcher once again resumed his nursing duty. The twenty-year-old gunner had been awake now for fully thirty-six hours, bandaging wounds and helping to feed and comfort his injured mates. The exhausted corporal once again set out his cup and a few saucers to try to collect rainwater; the demand for his services remained constant. “Lawson was wanting water all the time because his throat was dry from the blood in his mouth where his teeth had been knocked out. I didn’t think that terrible night would ever end,” he later wrote. “The most disheartening part of the trip was that we understood the guerrillas to say it would only take two hours but it took two days.”
The boat tacked west through the night. Clever was the only one of the four who was able to sleep. The others hovered in various states of semiconsciousness, never far from their pain. Lawson lifted the lattice blinds around daybreak and saw that the junk had reached the Chinese mainland and now headed up a wide river. The boat sailed on as morning turned into afternoon, finally docking late in the day at a settlement. Thatcher set off to find a telegraph office, eventually wiring word of the crew’s fate to Chungking. New porters helped offload the injured aviators—this time on more standard stretchers—and hauled them to the magistrate’s headquarters, arriving close to dark. “I was carried on a flat board,” McClure recalled. “The pain of the shoulders was at its height and with lack of food I certainly was not a genial person to be near.”
The guerrillas set the injured men down on a patio, where Lawson noted that China Relief posters plastered the walls. From inside he heard someone speaking accented English. A bespectacled Chinese man walked out and extended his hand. “Anything we got is yours,” he said to Lawson. “We know what you have done.”
Lawson told him that the men needed a doctor, anesthetic, and sedatives—demands that elicited an unfortunate sigh from his host. “They had nothing at this station, except bandage and a little food and water,” Lawson recalled. “Not even a sleeping pill, not even an aspirin tablet or any kind of antiseptic. No doctor, of course.”
The locals fed the men boiled rice and water and helped bathe the aviators. All modesty had long since vanished. “Sitting in one of the anterooms,” McClure recalled, “a Chinese girl, whom I suspected was a nurse, helped me out of my clothes and I stood in the wooden bucket while she gave me a complete bath.”
Nurses washed the caked blood from Clever’s face, allowing him to see for the first time since the crash. Others cleansed McClure’s infected right ankle, which he found now under attack by a “man-eating bug.” Nurses removed the belt and necktie tourniquets from Lawson’s left leg and then carefully cleaned the pilot, discarding the filthy quilt he had clung to since they were in the fisherman’s hut. Attendants gave the men heavy blankets, but sleep remained elusive, despite the exhaustion of battling pain without the aid of morphine for two days. “I didn’t get much rest,” McClure recalled. “I still had to sit most of the time with my hands on my knees and I seemed to be forever developing new pains.” Lawson suffered the same. “I tried to go to sleep,” the pilot later wrote. “But I just lay there full of pain, everything on me wanting care.”
Dr. Chen Shenyan arrived at the magistrate’s headquarters at about 3:30 a.m., after a grueling twelve-hour journey on foot. The graduate of Ting-nan Medical College, a private institution in Shanghai, had received a phone message at 3 p.m. the preceding day, requesting he come right away to help care for five injured American aviators. Chen and his father owned the En-Tse Hospital, about forty miles up the road in Linghai, a former missionary clinic the family had purchased from the Episcopalian church a decade earlier. Chen had heard the air-raid alarm on the afternoon of April 18, but had not thought much more about it until he received the message the afternoon of April 20. The doctor quickly packed a small surgical kit, grabbed a colleague, and departed just thirty minutes later for the half-day trip.
Chen surveyed the airmen’s injuries. He found McClure sitting up, unable to lie down because the severity of his pain made it difficult for him to breathe. Both of the navigator’s arms were severely swollen and numb, and he could barely move them. Davenport had cut up his right leg and left hand and lost considerable blood. So had Clever. Lawson clearly had suffered the worst. He had shattered his left knee joint and lacerated wounds covered his face and lower jaw. “There was a compound fracture of the mandible with the loss of 8 teeth,” Chen noted, “all on the right side.” The crash was so violent that Lawson had not only lost his canines and incisors but also his upper and lower molars. “He also had multiple wounds of the left leg and foot,” Chen observed, “and was unconscious for a considerable length of time.”
Chen needed to move the men to his hospital. He dressed the wounds as best he could and then phoned four missionary friends in Linghai. He was going to require help.
A lot of help.
The group set off at 8 a.m. on April 21 to cover the forty-mile return trip, with Lawson on a stretcher and the others in sedan chairs. “We were given a royal send-off,” Thatcher wrote, “with a band and everything.” A company of Chinese troops, standing at attention, lined the path out of the village, saluting as each airman passed. “It brought a lump to a fellow’s throat,” Lawson recalled. “Those of us who could, returned the salute. I wondered if there was ever a more grisly parade.”
The journey once again proved arduous as the porters climbed the steep and rugged terrain. “At the top of a ridge we halted for tea and were offered—of all things!—cookies,” McClure later wrote. “This homelike touch was another morale builder as well as a hunger killer.” The morning gave way to afternoon as the injured airmen continued to suffer. “There were times when I thought I could not stand one more jolting bounce,” Lawson recalled. “When I felt I’d have to cry out and ask them to leave me behind, I’d suck on the bitter oranges and try to concentrate on the way the juice burned my mouth, the number of seeds the oranges had, and other things, so I wouldn’t think about the leg and arm and hands. I couldn’t pass out.”
Night soon fell. The porters trekked onward, navigating through rice paddies before arriving late that evening at Chen’s hospital.
“You’re safe here,” George Parker, an English missionary, told the men.
Lawson asked about medical supplies.
“You’ll get more care than anything,” Parker answered. “We have an antiseptic fluid, a little chloroform and bandage. Nothing else.”
To the injured airmen that was relief. “It was a hospital now—a real hospital and real medical care at last!” McClure wrote. “It had iron beds with real springs. Best of all it was sanitary. What a pleasure it was to dare to drink cold water.”
Thatcher was exhausted. For days he had cared for the Ruptured Duck’s injured crew, helping the men escape to safety. He shunned any credit, pointing instead at what his injured mates had endured. “It was forty miles and took us twelve hours,” he wrote in his final report. “I can’t see how Lawson was ever able to stand it.”